Something I Noticed After My Purchase... Help for Video Editors

Envato Authors AudioJungle
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The Long:

I have just delivered a video project to a client. Usually I would make a music track for it, but I was pushed for time, so I looked in the Jungle.

I selected the track I wanted and imported the preview into Final Cut. I spent a while trimming, copy-pasting and key-framing volume changes to fit with the dialogue etc…

The client was happy with it, so I went ahead and bought the licence for it and had an interesting time trying to replace the preview track with the purchased one…

There were two issues. One was to do with the format, and the other was to do with track length… To explain a bit further - those who don’t play much with video editors will have to bear with me a bit - All I wanted to do was to swap out the old preview file with my new un-watermarked version, re-link it and thus avoid having to re-do all my audio edits…

And so I hit my first hurdle. It has to be said at this point that FCPX is not the friendliest video editing software in the world if you actually want to, you know… edit a video… but hey, it’s what we’ve got.
So I re-link the wav/16/44.1 file, but FCPX was looking for an mp3! First problem solved… re-encode the wav as an mp3 file. Done :white_check_mark:

I figured I was plain sailing at this point, but FCPX still moaned at me. “the re-linked audio must be as long as the original track” it said. (Or more overly complex words to that effect anyway…)

The issue here was that the original preview track had 4 different versions which made it 2 minutes longer than the actual track. I bunged on 2 minutes of silence in sound forge and finally FCPX was mollified. Worked a treat.

I did think to my self after though, I could save my FCPX video editor customers a mild migraine by including what they need in the upload zip.

Let me know if you know whether or not this issue is the same in Adobe Premiere. I’m considering switching over as FCPX angers me even more than Sibelius used to.

The Short:

It is a really big help for video editors if you include a watermark-free, high quality mp3 of the exact same audio as your preview in the uploaded zip file.

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Hi @criskcracker. I’m also a video editor. I never do my final audio work inside the video editing app. I do a few things roughly just for timing, but ultimately edit & mix audio in Pro Tools or Logic. It’s much easier to swap out the watermarked track in that way, and easier to match previous edits if you have to.

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Thanks for the tip @promosapien. I remember trying to export the audio from FCPX for a project and having a really hard time with it. I ended up having to export an XML and use some 3rd party software to build the AAF from the XML data because FCPX doesn’t support the industry standard format! (no OMFs either!) Definitely time to change software I think. Even FCP7 supported OMFs! What video editing software do you use? I have a fair bit of experience with Premiere, but not much with Avid. I’ve heard some great things about Davinci Resolve too.

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I’ve also heard great things about DaVinci Resolve. I still use FCP 7, but planning to switch to FCP X or Premiere.

What is your opinion of them? I have heard FCP X is fast and stable because it’s optimized for Macs. I have heard Premiere is great for collaboration (multiple editors working on same project).

My workflow is to export tracks from FCP and import into Pro Tools. I clean up dialog, eq, compress or whatever is needed, add music & sfx and add a little master bus processing.

Then I bounce a stereo WAV and import back into FCP before exporting the final video.

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Yep. That’s the old problem. But submission rules doesn’t allow to do that and it looks like there is no one who would listen to our requests and change it. I have been asked for a non-watermarked preview version so many times…

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To be honest, I don’t think FCPX is really an upgrade from FCP7, it’s just a completely different way of working. I can’t really recommend it because it drives me crazy with all the simple things that I want to do, which it struggles with. Straight-forward editing of key-frames for example. Pulled much of my remaining hair out last month trying to get some text to move linearly. The magnetic timeline is a real drag sometimes too, in the sense that you can’t leave any gaps for pending material. My wife uses Premiere to make promos for The History Channel and she loves it. She says it’s streaks ahead of Final Cut and it feels rock solid (as opposed to FCPX which crashes at least once a day), but the last time I used Premiere was back in 2012 and I think there have been a lot of improvements since then.
I think I might give Davinci Resolve a try when I have some spare time. There is a free version available which is great.

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Wow! Really? They reject submissions for that? Aww, that’s such a shame. :frowning:

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Hey, thanks for the info. I appreciate it.

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Hey @promosapien, just an update about Davinci Resolve. I went through and watched all of the tutorials on this page: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/training
I found it really useful, and I’m impressed with the power of the software. I think it could actually be a one-stop-shop! (apart from maybe photoshop / illustrator.) There were definitely some useful features and short-cuts in the editing tutorial which I’d never seen before that impressed me.

Worth a look at least if you are still considering an upgrade.

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Thank you @criskcracker. I will take a look at the link.