Dead All Along || Ceri Frost from Giles Timms on Vimeo.

Sadly, I never had the money to submit Dead All Along to festivals, but I recently received a small grant to submit my animated films to festivals. So I’ve edited Dead All Along and have been submitting the film to festivals.

Of course I ran into a few challenges with the re-edit and re-render process. Originally I edited Dead All Along with FCP 7, but have been using FCP X and with the big change in FCP X I was unable to access the original FCP files. So, after some research, I bought 7toX which allows you to export the original FCP 7 file as an xml file which can be imported into FCP X. 7toX works really well, for the most part, and I recommend it if you have FCP 7 files that you want to access in FCP X. You do have to install FCP 7 though. I guess the best method would be to install the legacy version of FCP 7 to a different machine, but I installed FCP on the same machine as FCP X and just followed the directions below, that I found online. So far no problems running both on the same machine (fingers crossed)

1. Create a folder called FCP X Apps, and placed FCP X and Compressor within folder

2. Install FCP 7, and after installation move FCP 7 and legacy Compressor to a folder in Applications called Legacy-Apps

3. Finally move FCP X and Compressor out of the FCP X Apps folder and back to the root level of the Application folder, and delete the FCP X Apps folder

After getting FCP 7 installed and running, 7toX wasn’t able to export all the transitions/effects that I had in the original edit, so I ended up rendering the original FCP 7 file and imported the .mov into FCP X. However, I could not get the legacy version of compressor to work and the render output from FCP 7 was…not good. The colors were all washed out. I tried and tried to get fiddle with the codec settings and installed x264, but no matter what I tried I could not get the colors right. I’m sure no one else would notice, but I couldn’t live with it.

After more research I discovered JES-Deinterlace and was able to easily re-render my original Dead All Along file with the correct gamma settings so that I could get the color just right. Oh joy :) JES-Deinterlace is a great tool. Below are the settings I used.

Input Settings

Project Settings

Color Settings

Output Settings

Animation Codec Settings