This is interesting . . .

Question

Hi all you FCPro experts - hope maybe someone has been here before!
We produce various shows, usually about 5 minutes long. We shoot mostly with Canon XL-2's of course on mini DV. Most of our capture folders are about 20 - 30 gig per show - and when we're finished, we use Media Manager to delete unused media.
Many many people coplain about MM - and we have some funny results too - but we've found a pattern! About 70% of the time, delete unused media (COPY, of course!) works well - ending up with about 1 gig or 2 or 3 for our 5 miute shows. But sometimes . . . it "reduces" the media from 30 gig (in the capture folder) to 20 gig! Or 19 gig!
Well . . . it certainly should be reducing the media to much less than that. (We typically burn the "delete unused media" onto a DVD - so if the client ever calls back, it's easy to open things to where we left off.)
WE FOUND THIS! A pattern! Although most of our "captures" are from the mini DV's we shoot (and capture through our DVCPRO deck) - sometimes a client gives us Betacam or other formats to work with. Not a problem to capture (using "non-controllable source in capture window) - we go thru a patch bay so capturing from Beta, or M2 is easy. But if we capture say 10 minutes of a clip on Beta - then use only 10 seconds of it - media manager still wants to save the ENTIRE 10 minute capture. It won't handle that part correctly. It WILL handle all footage shot on the mini DV's. (Usually!)
So . . . how do we capture the Beta source - and have media manager "understand" to only "copy" the parts of the Beta tape we use . . . and not the entire clip?
Can FCPro 5.1 do this?? Or is this one of the BIG BUG areas of it? Oh, we've had this probloem way back to version 4.5 I believe. Oh, our lab computer is an older duel G5 2.8 gig processor (or close, I forget.) We've not actually tried it with version 5.1 which we do have on a Macbook - but not in this application. Sorry to be long winded!
Thanks very much,
Larry

Answer 1

Hello Brian,
Very good question! I see you've done this before! Yes, you are quite correct. We set our DVCPro deck (AJD-250) to "line" and bring in the Beta material thru the DVCPro deck. Again, we set the tab at the top of CAPTURE SETTINGS to "non-controllable device" - which might be causing our problem! But we must set it to "non-controllable" - I think - because the T/C from Betacam isn't compatible with FCPro? Actually, I forget why we set it to "non-controllable" - we're certaily NOT interested in batch capturing Beta! (Actually, we hate Betacam, but it's a fact of life for us!) I think you have hit the heart of the matter (but I don't know or have experience - much - with this!)
Perhaps one work around - now that I'm thinking of it - would be to FIRST, copy the Betacam SP to DVCPro tape. Then capture the DVCPro ito FCPro as we normally would. This would take twice as long as we have to "copy/capture" twice - but upon thinking about it, might solve the problem?
Anyway . . . in the lab we have the Dual 2.7 gig G5 MAC - latest upgrades of everything. I'm now installing FCPro 5.1 onto this machine (we bought it for our new Macbook Pro 17 - do you think 5.1 might solve this Media Manager (delete unused media) quandry?
We just hate to have to backup and burn 15 gig when our project only lasts 5 minutes (because we might have an hour of Beta raw footage in the capture folder)! We then have to use "backUp" (from our .MAC account) - but it sure makes a lot more work! What do you think, Brian, is there a workaround to this?
Thanks very much,
Larry