60 HOUR Movie! Can Final Cut Pro Handle My Movie??

What video format are you going to work in?

Jerry

Work with smaller sequences and projects. RAM will get clogged up with sequences that have a lot of cuts in them, or projects that have a lot of media in them.

When you are done editing your shorter sequences export individual movies and combine them together for best results.

Now 60 hours is a long time, not sure what that entails for FCP, but the above tips will work best for longer shows. Longer being a couple of hours:) Good luck with 60 hours. I'm not going to watch your though movie, a bit long for me!

Isn't it a violation of the Geneva Convention to force someone to watch a 60 hour movie? And editing a 60 hour movie is a crime against humanity. 😉

Quote:
My assumption is that I'll have to get an enormous external hard drive to store all the files + playback.

You aren't going to need an enormous external hard drive as in one - you are going to need several external hard drives. If you work with just about anything over DV you will need plenty of space.

FYI, we edit classes captured over the course of the semester. It is 40-50 hours of video captured in DV-NTSC format. It requires around 400-500GB of storage space per class. If you work in any format larger than DV-NTSC you will need much more storage space.

As per your question, Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 timelines only go up to 12 hours of video (or 6 hours for sequences with high audio rates). There isn't generally much of a need for anything more than that.

Like it was suggested before, you will need to work in smaller segments otherwise your RAM wont be able to handle it. How many HDs does your Powermac have? You're going to need at least three HDs. I work with an iMac and HDV format and I use two 500GB drives to produce one two hour movie.

The video for 60 hours would be ~ 1,600 gb.

After you have acquired and edited the raw footage on ~2tb of drives, export the sequences as self contained files to another 2tb raid for playback. (3 750gb drives in a MacPro should work if raided into 1 virtual drive).

Then, using Quicktime Pro, combine (concat) two movies into one. Repeat until all sections are combined into one big movie.

I have no idea if this would actually work - but theoretically it should.

x

There's no limit to length in FCP 5.x.. I suggest that you need to send it out the firewire though and on thru a box like an ADVC-110 so you send analog video to the monitor/projector... Using the S port will present some interlacing problems possibly.

You'll want a beefy external hard drive to handle the media... DV is 4.7 minutes per gig about... figure 4 minutes/gig when specing your external drive for the job.

Might consider eSata, which would then leave your FW bus for the export (releaving it of double duty). You'll want a 250 gig drive at least. Don't want to fill it up becuase it will slow it down. eSata really will make this work better I think. There are adapters for this that you connect to your PC card slot or express slot.

Jerry

There is a length limit in FCP. Your sequence cannot exceed 12 hours because that is its maximum duration. As a test try to make a 13 hour slug - it will automatically default to 11;59;00;00 because it cannot exceed 12 hours. Drop it on your timeline and try adding any other media to the timeline it will come back with a sequence error stating that you have reached the max length for the sequence.


Ryan

Thanks for the correction!

OP still is OK though.

Jerry

Why on earth would you want a longer than 12 hour sequence? Are you trying to out do Andy Warhol's film about a man sleeping? 8 hours of...a man sleeping.

Shane

Bad math. used wrong data rate. Dv=3.6mb/sec=13gb/hr


13 x 60 = 780 gb. Should be able to do this off a 1 tb firewire 400 drive.

do 2 12 hr segments and link using QT Pro.

x

edit - trying to do math while watching the chase scene in the matrix 3 ... corrected the post - yikes - math is usually a strong point - sigh.

David;
It'a an "art" film!! 60 hours is childs play! I just hope the starter of this thread will post back and let us know when and where and what the web site is for this thing... I wanna know more. Though I don't think I want to watch it.

13 x 60 = 78 gb. Should be able to do this off a simple 250gb firewire 400 drive.

Studio, now we know that math is your kryptonite. 13 x 60 = 780

rh