Quick & Dirty Film Look for Final Cut

So you shot some footage that's clearly not looking anything like film but you want to make it look like film on the cheap and easy. Ok.

In the timeline:

01) Select the footage you want to have a pseudo-film look. If you want to apply this look to the entire sequence it's easier to Nest the timeline by selecting all and then tapping Option + C.

Then double up that footage above itself by making copy of it. The easiest way to do this is to click on the Nest or highlighted footage and hold down Shift + Option (shift makes it move straight up while option makes it copy) and drag it straight up. Let go of it and you'll have a copy above the original footage.

02) Bring down the Opacity of the upper track to 50%. You can either do this by highlighting the footage and loading it into the Viewer (if it's a nest, don't double click it to load it into the Viewer, just hightlight it and tap the Enter (not Return) key then in the Motion tab bring the Opacity slider to 50% or with the timeline window the frontmost one, tap Option + W to bring up the rubber bands on your clips/nest. Then drag the nests rubber band (in the video track) down until it's 50%.

03) Now, you have two video tracks of the same footage one atop the other with the upper one's opacity set to 50%. So head over to your effects window (Command + 5) and dig out the De-interlace filter. Drag it onto both nests/highlighted footage.

04) Load the upper video track into the Viewer and head to it's Filters tab. Set the De-Interlace filter to "Upper".

05) Load the lower video track into the Viewer and head to it's Filter's tab. Set it's De-interlace filter to "Lower".

06) This is optional depending on your footage but if you want you can toss a Gaussian Blur filter on the upper track and blur it ever so slightly. Try it and see if it makes it better or worse for your particular project.

07) Adjust any levels or contrast if you feel the need.

08) Render it out which may take a while depending on your system and quality of footage.

Learning Final Cut Pro's Video Scopes

If you've never taken the time to learn how Final Cut's Video Scopes work or how to read them you should really take the time. They're not that hard to understand and they're essential for color correction.

Here's a video explaining how they work and how to read them. It's well worth your time.

Final Cut's Corrupted Preferences

A client called me in a panic the other day telling me that there was no way to create a new project. The Key command didn't work and there was no choice to create one in the menu. After bantering back and forth for a while to make sure we were talking about the same thing I had them send me a screenshot of their File Menu and this is what I saw.



Running FCPRescue (trashing it's prefs) fixed it, but this is just another example of the weirdness that can happen with corrupted FCP prefs.

BitTime Time Code Plug-In Updated

BigTime is a floating timecode display for Final Cut Pro. An indispensible tool for client viewings (and ex-Avid editors), BigTime shows the sequence or source clip timecode on a resizable window. No more squinting required!

BigTime can be freely resized and moved anywhere on screen. The text and background colours can be customised to suit your personal taste and the frames display can be shown or hidden as required.

I've never had the need for it but I know several editors that love it. Anyways, it was updated today.

Search Folders

If you're reconnecting a lot of media in your projects or have Media Managed a lot of them it helps to tell FCP where to search first. In FCP hit Shift + Q to bring up the System Settings and then click on the second tab marked Search Folders.

Tap the Set... button and select the folders and drives where your media is. It may help a bit it may not, try it and see how it does for you.

Re-Arranging Tabs

If you want to re-arrange the tabs in a window, for example you have your Effects Tab and your Project Tab both in the Browser and right now it's in the order of Effects and then Project Name but you'd rather have them in the opposite order, just drag the one you want 1st out and then drag it back in and they should be in the order you want.

Usually the one you drag out and then drag back in is listed first. Lame tip I know, but it helped one of the editors here today while he was getting organized.

When Hard Drives Die

If you've never seen the heart-warming attempts of Disk Utility trying to fix a very sick hard drive here's your chance. Disk utility can fix most things but when a hard drive has a serious hardware failure then there isn't much it can do but it will give it it's best shot:

Verify and Repair disk “Storage 500G”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid node structure
Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.
Invalid node structure
Invalid record count
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid record count
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Invalid record count
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Missing thread record (id = 3869)
Missing thread record (id = 3954)
Missing thread record (id = 4298)
Incorrect number of thread records
Incorrect number of thread records
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Missing thread record (id = 3869)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 50 instead of 51)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 10 instead of 20)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 7 instead of 18)
Missing thread record (id = 4409)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 0 instead of 19)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 3 instead of 20)
Missing thread record (id = 3990)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 0 instead of 34)
Missing thread record (id = 4096)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 0 instead of 4)
Invalid directory item count
(It should be 1056 instead of 1084)
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 26628 instead of 26949)
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Volume Bit Map needs minor repair
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume free block count
(It should be 49256844 instead of 49244276)
Repairing volume.
Missing directory record (id = 4298)
Missing directory record (id = 3954)
Look for missing items in lost+found directory.
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Missing thread record (id = 4353)
Missing thread record (id = 4665)
Missing thread record (id = 4736)
Missing thread record (id = 4811)
Incorrect number of thread records
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 26714 instead of 26949)
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Repairing volume.
Missing directory record (id = 4811)
Missing directory record (id = 4736)
Missing directory record (id = 4665)
Missing directory record (id = 4353)
Look for missing items in lost+found directory.
Rechecking volume.
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume file count
(It should be 26949 instead of 26714)
The volume Storage 500G could not be repaired after 3 attempts.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
Repair attempted on 1 volume
1 volume could not be repaired

Spotlight - Turn It Off

Aside from the acerbic debate on whether you should Journal your Scratch/Render/Capture disks you should at least stop Spotlight from indexing them. I'll say that having spotlight index your capture drive is debatable but I never have Spotlight index my render/scratch disks. Why? Speed. Spotlight can eat up a few CPU cycles here and there and it can slow down a drive's performance considerably.

Plus, you shouldn't really need to perform a Spotlight search on scratch disks if all you have on them are temp files, render files, etc...

Launch System Preferences from your Dock or hit Command + Shift + A to open your Applications folder (do this while in the Finder), Type "sys" to highlight System Prefs and tap Command + O to open it.

(If you want to avoid the mouse entirely when system prefs is open type "Spotlight" to highlight it then tap Return to open it.)

Click on Privacy and add your scratch disk to the list there and close it. Spotlight will now ignore that disk and you'll never have that hard drive bogged down by Spotlight indexing it for -sometimes- hours.

Check Your RAIDs

If you have a software mirrored RAID set up be sure to check it every once in a while. Since the data is mirrored you won't always know when one of your drives is sick or dying fast (if there's no noise, that is).

Hit Command + Shift + U to open the Utilities folder and tap D to highlight Disk Utility (you may need to Down Arrow to highlight it) then Command + O to open it.

Once it's open, highlight your RAID then click on the RAID button on the right and hope you don't see this:



If you do I recommend trying a few things first:

Reboot and check it again.
Unmount the RAID, Remount it then Check again.

If it still shows a failure, copy the good drive's data to another good drive and toss out the iffy one. There's no reason to try and "fix" it. You can never fully trust it again and this is the very reason you set up a RAID to begin with anyway - that if a disk fails you still have your data. So get another good drive, add it to the RAID and hit rebuild.



Just keep in mind that when you rebuild a RAID it takes a LOT longer than if you just copy the data over using the Finder. Plus if you rip the HD apart you can yank out the cool neodymium magnets inside and marvel at the technology.

Fakin' It

Lets say you have finished the project but you still want to sit around and get paid for a few more hours.

Great.

Download BusyBee, set it up with some complicated text actions and take a snooze in their chair on their dime :)

Wouldn't it be great if you could somehow make it look like your computer was busy, so that you could loaf around, and not get caught? Well that's what I thought. BusyBee is a program that will help slackers at heart practice their trade. Simply enter in the options, and talk to friends, take extended coffee breaks, talk on the phone, or anything else you may think of.

Even More Free Plug-Ins

You can find some fun and handy free plug-ins here.

Two Strip Technicolor
Three Strip Technicolor
Three Strip Extreme
Richer
Convolve Toy
Captain's Blowout Fixer
Luma Toy

Stib's Free Plug-Ins

I'm sure you know about these free plug-ins but just in case you don't here's the link.

Effects:

colour engine
glow
zoom blur

Transitions:

smear
stib's better push
zoom blur cross

Generators:

arrows
better text
stars
spiral thing

Tidy Up! & Save HD Space

Recently, I had to migrate a client's projects from one of their RAIDs to another. Now, you could tempt fate and use FCP's Media Manager to copy or move files but overall Media Manager is a laughable mess and I avoid it whenever I can.

In the process of pre-organizing all their files before the big copy/move I noticed that while launching and looking at random projects they were working on that many of them used the same media, but they were pulling the media from different places on the same RAID. Meaning, they had multiple copies of some of their media which was taking up a lot of room that otherwise could have been freed up. Since I'm a bit of an organizational freak and didn't want to spend more time than was necessary in copying about 4TBs of stuff around I decided to pair down their RAID by removing redundant files.

Now, there are ways to do this with the terminal and some arcane Unix commands which worked at first but scared the owner of the business when he walked in and saw me typing away furiously into the terminal. So, I showed him a more friendly way and explained what I was doing.

I had them buy a license to Tidy Up! which is a shareware app that basically does what a handful of terminal commands do but with a pretty interface.

It'll rummage through a drive or series of HD's or just folders and spit out a list of duplicate files. You can preview them, move them and trash them right from the app. I ran it a bunch of times, made some notes, tossed out a whole mess of files and then moved the remaining files to nicely organized folders then reconnected them in FCP, tested it by opening all their save files and taa daa, saved just over terabyte of space on their RAID. Yes, it was that bad.

So ,if you have a pile of HD's or aren't that organized you may want to give it a try just to see how much space you can save and how many redundant files you have. Go slow, take notes and don't empty the trash until you're sure. The cool thing about Tidy Up! is that right up until you empty the trash you can Restore every file to it's original location in case you make a mistake.

Then, I trashed all their render files to save even more room and time. Then, I sent them a huge invoice.