I'm Not Bruce

Importing PDF files into Final Cut Pro

2012-01-19T00:46:00.002-05:00

Today I was handed a 100+ page PDF to use in a FCP project. The problem is that FCP doesn't really like .PDF's all that much and if you drag a multi-page PDF into FCP you'll get a short clip that will essentially have each page as a frame. Not terribly useful unless that's what you'd like to see when you hit play.

Here are a few ways to get decent results without too much trouble using stuff you likely already have.

METHOD #01

(Save As... in Preview, better for high-quality requirements like text)

01. Open the PDF in Preview.
02. Hit Shift + Command + D to see the sidebar if it's not already open.
03. Hit Option + Command + 2 to see a long list of Thumbnails. Scroll down to the page you want to use in FCP.

Alternatively, if you know the page number of the page you want hit Option + Command + G to bring down the Go To Page text entry box, enter the page number and hit OK. The reason this may not be the best way is that some PDFs numbering schemes are off by a number or two, at least in the few that I've been given to use in FCP: ie.. Page 43 in the thumbnails is actually Page 42 as shown on the PDF.

04. Hit Command + Shift + S for Save As...
05. When the Save As sheet drops down select JPEG for the Format Pull-Down (you can also choose TIFF if you'd like to).
06. Set the Quality Slider to "Best"
07. For Resolution it will likely default to 150 pixels/inch. This should be okay for most situations, but you can bump it up higher if you'd like. I didn't notice too much of a difference between 150 and 300.
08. Tell it where you want to save the file and hit Save.
09. Import the file you just made into FCP.
10. Bring the .jpg or .tiff into the Timeline and Scale it if needed then render.

I've have acceptable results for corporate junk using this method. It's not the best quality but good enough for company work.

METHOD #02

(Dragging out a separate .PDF page)

01. Open the PDF in Preview.

02. Hit Shift + Command + D to see the sidebar if it's not already open.

03. Hit Option + Command + 2 to see a long list of Thumbnails. Scroll down to the page you want to use in FCP.

04. Find the page you want and then drag the thumbnail in the sidebar to the Desktop or folder where you want it to go.

This will create a new PDF of just that single page.

05. Import the file you just made into FCP.

06. Bring the .pdf into the Timeline and Scale it if needed then render.

The results won't be perfect but good enough for some projects.

METHOD #03

(Making each page a separate image file. Read the Warning about this!)

If you need each page in the PDF as a separate image file here's one quick and dirty way:

01. Open the PDF in Preview.

02. Hit Command + P for Print...

03. After the Print sheet drops down hit the PDF button at the bottom left.

04. Select either "Save PDF to Folder as JPEG" or Save PDF to Folder as TIFF"

WARNING!

Be aware though that when I do this there is no sheet asking where to save the files. For me, and maybe this is some kind of bizarre bug or me doing something wrong, it saved the individual pages as images files in my "-Tmp-" folder, which is inside an invisible folder (not meaning Lion's crazy invisible user folder madness).

How to convert a single audio file to separate ones with a .cue file

2012-01-11T01:10:00.001-05:00

A client sent me a link to their FTP server of a VO for a project I'm cutting. It turns out that whatever place they used to record the VO, I guess, just left their equipment recording while the VO talent read the script.

Meaning, it's one giant 400 MB .Flac file.

A, why they sent it as a .Flac file is beyond me.

B, why it's one large file is equally beyond me other than they literally never hit pause during the entire recording session, which is exactly what it sounds like they did.

Hearing the client "direct" the professional voice over talent is priceless btw…

But, at least they provided a .cue file.

Seriously. I know.

So my task was to either complain and loose my job and sanity -imagine trying to explain .flac, .mp3 and .cue files to a client- or just find a way to break them up myself.

One solution would be to dump the audio into Final Cut and just Control + V at all the gaps or actually listen to it all and copy paste into new timelines or make subclips or something else equally archaic. Another way was to use an app to cut the audio when it encounters silence but that would likely lead to it cutting at pauses in long sentences.

It turns out it's easier than I had thought. First off Toast won't due it easily (if at all) which was my first thought and attempt. I didn't make much progress with it -it seems the more Toast is updated the more confused it becomes as to what it's main function is- but I did remember a cool little free app called Max that I had used a long time ago so I did what I usually do when awakening an old app…look for any updates first.

Looking at some software sites I saw that Max hadn't been updated in a while but as a "related" search item I saw the FREE app XLD which is an acronym for "X Lossless Decoder" which I knew of but never had much use for outside of the odd conversion.

Now, while Max would likely work I decided to try XLD because it was more recently updated, by a lot.

What you need to do to break up a single file into separate audio files using a provided .cue file (technically you could make your own) is this:

1. Drag your .cue file onto XLD. It'll launch.

2. After XLD's window appears look at the left column. There you'll see the main recording. Make sure it's highlighted and active and you'll see the list of individual tracks on the right in the main window.

3. Hit Command + Comma for XLD's preferences.

4. In the Preferences window select the Output Format you want (double check the Options button if you need precise control of the output format, say for like a TV station or something), then set the Output Directory to where ever you'd like it. You can also set things like the format of the file name and the Maximum number of Threads here. Close the Preferences window.

5. Back in the main window hit the Transcode button and away you go.

Magisto

2012-01-10T11:47:00.006-05:00

So I've been terribly busy lately but I noticed something at CES this year.

Magisto.

What's that?

"Magisto automatically turns plain videos to beautifully edited and produced Movies, perfect for sharing."

Automatically!

Wait…Editing AND Producing? Wow.

Check out their FAQs for some interesting tid-bits like:

6. The clip I got was very short... What happened?
Part of what Magisto does with your videos is take out the parts that are less interesting. By doing this, the clip you will get will be significantly shorter than the original videos that you uploaded. In such cases we advise you to upload more videos or longer ones.

Why not clips that are more "interesting"? That is to say by whatever defines interesting. Isn't "interesting" subjective? Or are they just counting delta-frames or something?

How's all this magic work?

2. How do I create a Magisto clip?
Simple! Creating a Magisto video is a 3-step process so all you need to do is:
• Upload your video (you can upload more than one if you'd like)
• Create a title for your clip, which will appear in the beginning of your video (or not. It's not a mandatory step)
• Select a soundtrack from a variety of music genres and VOILA, you're done!

You're done!

Oh, and it's free.

It's a bit like iMovie's automatic trailer making mode-thing with face-recognition and title slots and what not.

Although with Magisto in my head I can clearly imagine all your footage being uploaded (ie..outsourced) to some third-world country and row after row of chained-to-their-desks slave-editors in front of Windows Movie Maker slapping something together as footage comes in, then only being allowed sips of water from the communal ladle only after they upload it back to you.

What my imagination shows me when I think about how Magisto works.

And this app is for iOS devices.

An iPhone that shoots 1080 and an app that edits it for you. (it's not free to have it edit 1080 footage, only 720 apparently).

I haven't played around with it too much but it's certainly interesting. I've already seen so very many corporate videos shots on Flip cameras or iPhones, iPads and other tablets that are "good enough for what we need" that I'm beginning to think that outsourced video production companies are going to loose a lot of their low-end work in the long run. I've already started to see it dry up for some of my work and even more so for some of my associates.

On the other hand it's fascinating watching a...wait for it...paradigm shift like this taking place in real time.

So there you have it, you can no shoot HD video on your phone and then almost literally hit one button to "edit" it.

And it's free, unlike iMovie for iOS. I believe that everything has a trade-off somewhere, somehow and placing this in the Project Triangle, this being easy and free, means it's not good.

Give it a whirl though and see what you think. Keep in mind that this app requires you to log in via a Facebook account. Not really the best idea if you ask me. I see it as potentially more of a way to collect user data for advertising in the future.

We're done.

Apple Updates Final Cut Pro X to 10.0.2

2011-11-16T19:23:00.000-05:00

Apple has updated FCPX to 10.0.2 with:

"What’s new in version 10.0.2:

Fixes an issue in which a title may revert to the default font after restarting Final Cut Pro X
Resolves an issue that could cause files recorded with certain third-party mobile devices to play back incorrectly
Addresses a stability issue caused by changing the start time on a Compound Clip"

Helpful stuff unless you've already moved on to Premiere.

The weird thing is that a place I freelance at switched to Premiere recently jumping (after evaluating) over FCPX entirely which means either I learn Premiere or I don't freelance there anymore occasionally. They've abandoned Final Cut Pro entirely; all 10 edit stations.

Adapter - Another FREE transcoder

2011-11-14T11:01:00.002-05:00

I've been busy lately, and part of the reason I've been so busy is clients like to revive long dead projects so they can play them on the latest and greatest outdated video servers at TV stations.

When A client asked for a project that has been planted firmly in the video graveyard several years ago to be converted to "an mpeg two" I eventually got around to it.

Looking around I ran across a transcoder that I hadn't heard of before called Adapter. It's FREE and isn't all that bad for transcoding stuff. Here's the list they provide when they say "Convert anything to anything"

"3g2, 3gp, 4xm, RoQ, ac3, alaw, asf, asf_stream, au, audio_dice, avi, crc, daud, dc1394, s, dv, dv1394, dvd, ea, ffm, film_cpk, flic, flv, gif, h261, h263, h264, idcin, image, image2, image2pipe, imagepipe, ipmovie, m4v, matroska, mjpeg, mmf, mov, mov, mp4, m4a, 3gp, 3g2, mp2, mp3, mp4, mpeg, mpeg1video, mpeg2video, mpegts, mpegvideo, mpjpeg, mulaw, nsv, null, nut, ogg, psp, psxstr, rawvideo, redir, rm, rtp, rtsp, s16be, s16le, s8, sdp, shn, sol, svcd, swf, u16be, u16le, u8, vcd, video4linux, vmd, vob, wav, wc3movie, wsaud, wsvqa, yuv4mpegpipe"

As always, your milage may vary, but it's handy to know about and since it's free it's worth a shot.

8mm Distress Kit goes HD

2011-10-18T15:15:00.000-04:00

Back in 2009 (remember 2009? Your iPhone wasn't quite 3 years old yet and Slovakia just adopted the Euro) I reviewed a pretty spiffy piece of kit called the 8mm Distress Kit. Back then in the before-time™ it was in SD.

But, now, in the future world of today when your iPhone 4S shoots 1080HD footage the kit's gone Hi-Def, and only for a modest increase in price. What was then in then dollars was $35, is today, in today's dollars only $59.

In the virtual box you'll get 2 files which contain 28 clips sized at 1440x1080 running at 29.97 or 25fps if you swing that way.

The crazy thing is that this comes at the perfect time for me for a documentary that I've been working on for the past 86 years (well, it feels like 86 but if you want to get down to brass tacks, it's technically closer to 85) which involves super-8 footage and I wanted something to help me obtain some visual interest with some bland-talking-head interviews I've been handed which run the gamut from HD all the way down to SD DV tapes to even some (hold on to something) Flip footage. *gasp*

I think Mediapreview.net's HD 8mm Distress Kit is not only going to help make the documentary look like it cost more but I'll be able to invoice for more since it looks like it costs more which will make it cost more so it's all honest that way.

Check it out, give it a spin; there are some samples to play around with, a nifty little tutorial and more on their site. And with film going away, but people still having an intense interest in it's qualities (look at Instagram, lomography, me taking well over 11,000 photos with my nearly 8 year old cell phone just because they look "lo-fi" and cool), and the feature film Super-8, it looks like the super-8 look as well as the clean-slate innocence of that bygone time which accompanies it won't be forgotten soon.

It's funny; my assistant has never shot or touched film, never placed a needle on a phonograph record and has only seen 8-tracks on tv. He's never used a pay-phone or adjusted rabbit-ear antennas, either.

But there is something that speaks to us visually through the ages with film; there's a strange personal investment -or perhaps connection is a better word- in it when we see something shot on film, especially older formats like 8mm, super-8 and 9.5mm (look it up). There's some manner of ephemeral hypotactic permanence with it that digital just can't obtain. Sure digital is beautiful, the future and in many many ways better than film but the tangible hic et nunc of it is difficult for our minds to grasp; you have a pocketful of little digital cards or "files" tucked away in the dark recesses of a hard drive, unlike film where you can simultaneously see and hold history and memories and movement literally right in your hands...without needing any batteries.

Maybe it's the analog simplicity of it that encourages us to capture (and indeed slow down and notice) the simple things in life, and for that matter life itself. But then again, I'm old and have an 8 year old cell phone.

Give the kit a whirl and see how it changes the flavor of your footage, not just stylistically, but perceptually. To me it gifts digital footage with an import that it otherwise doesn't have. That's the language of film at work; that's why tilt-shifted footage looks miniature and in my mind and for my money, adding effects like what's in the distress kit makes footage as large as life.

box.net and 50 GBs FREE storage

2011-10-14T15:15:00.001-04:00

If you're anything like me clients are forever loosing the projects you hand then on DVD, Data-DVD, CD, Flash Drives, copy to their hard drive, hand them hard drives, upload to their FTP server, can't figure out file hosting sites CAPTCHAs, etc... ad infinitum.

SO...it just happens that box.net, a competitor to DropBox is offering for a limited time a full 50 GBs of storage FREE just for signing up.

You see where I'm going with this; while box.net doesn't have the Finder integration that DropBox does (and face reality, the client likely can't figure out anyway) it does have oodles of storage and an easy to use web interface and iOS compatibility (meaning your iPhone and iPad and iPod Touch).

You can upload a completed project to a box.net account, send (email) the client a URL to the file for them to download and then wait for the inevitable codec incompatibility calls to come in as per the usual.

But, at least they'll have the file and an email (which they'll lose) with a link to the file. Just make sure you Subject the email with the project name and the word "download" and yeah, I just used subject as a verb.

Better yet, create a box.bet account FOR THEM using their company so later on you can blame it all on them.

Update: To get the free space you may need to sign up with an iOS device like an iPhone or iPad, if you don't have one try it on a friends or run into an Apple store and set up the account.

I'm like that :)

Video Inspection Tools

2011-09-26T00:51:00.000-04:00

If you get lots of strange formats and weird incompatibilities you've likely used a video inspector app before, maybe VideoSpec or Media Inspector.

A friend tipped me off to another one that's also FREE called iMediaHUD which is current and pretty spiffy. It even does folders of video clips.

I mention this because I had two clips allegedly from the same camera and one would become out of sync in the Timeline while the other wouldn't. Comparing the two with iMediaHUD showed some differences and I was able to sort it out.

It's free. Give it a whirl if you like to see some interesting specs on your video clips.

ProApps Update

2011-09-21T15:28:00.000-04:00

Apple is forging ahead bringing the new FCPX up to closer match the features and capabilities of the old FCP. Today there's a codec update here.

Final Cut Pro X Update (and free trial)

2011-09-20T12:32:00.000-04:00

Yep, Apple had decided to actually update FCPX (the big thing is XML import from FCP7 as well as export XML, no word yet on how FCP7 handles FCPX's XML) and a free 30 day trial.

Good news or not? I have no idea. I suspect that the divide of love vs hate will remain about the same but the numbers on each side will increase. That is, depending on how well FCPX imports FCP7's XMLs I guess.

Final Cut Pro Freaks Out

2011-09-11T23:23:00.000-04:00

Here's a fun Final Cut Pro Viewer glitch:

Apparently it has something to do with waking a Mac from sleep while a hard drive was spun down and some planets were aligned, or something.

A relaunch of FCP fixed it.

Apple's Help Library Search

2011-09-06T21:07:00.002-04:00

I get random questions fairly often about some tricky or hard to find or downright hidden, annoying or absent stuff regarding Final Cut Studio.

Often times a simple Google or Bing search will find the answer as one of my adages is "If you have the problem, chances are someone else has and has solved it." I tend to used "licked" rather than solved in certain company however.

Another great resource other than this blog and further down the line big box search engines is Apple's very own humble Help Library Search which resides here.

This spiffy thing is that you can essentially search the manuals for all of Apple's stuff simultaneously, drill down to just a few app's manuals or get crazy and just search one.

The results are kinda-sorta real-time when you click the checkboxes even and how cool is that?

Bookmark it for later; you'll need it.

And you can finally find out what that Hue Direction Control really does.

Final Cut Studio is Resurrected

2011-09-01T20:43:00.003-04:00

Macrumors.com has this to say:

"We confirmed with an Apple telesales representative at 800-MY-APPLE that Final Cut Studio, part number MB642Z/A, is again available for $999 (and $899 for educational customers). The product is only available through the 800-number and is not available in Apple Retail Stores or on the Apple Online Store."

Complete article is here.

I'm no fan of FCPX at this point so I'm glad to see Final Cut Studio return even though I think it's nuts to continue to charge $999 for it at this point given the reception FCPX has received; it should be $499 or $599 at most but then that makes FCPX at $299.99 look overpriced. (I think it is)

Final Cut Pro X has, as of this post, 1961 ratings for an average of 3 out of 5 stars. Yikes.

Buy a copy if you can and let Apple know that Final Cut Studio (if you agree, that is) still out features FCPX by a long shot.

UPDATE:

The Loop says:

"As we’ve done before with many end-of-life software products, we have a limited quantity of Final Cut Studio still available through Apple telesales to customers who need them for ongoing projects,” an Apple spokesperson told The Loop."

Official VisualHub Update for Lion

2011-08-23T00:48:00.001-04:00

Really.

It's here.

It's official.

It's free.

There have been a few (pretty complicated) ways to update VisualHub to get it to run under Lion and Kagi did somethings that maybe weren't really thought out well (and charged for it) but now there's a real-deal update that's free.

Unfortunately, it's likely the last update ever.

DVCHDPROAudio.plugin Console Error

2011-08-08T15:20:00.000-04:00

I'm sure you've seen it if you've ever launched your Console and looked at All Messages. Something like:

8/8/11 12:50:03 AM Mail[212] Error loading /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/DVCPROHDAudio.plugin/Contents/MacOS/DVCPROHDAudio: dlopen(/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/DVCPROHDAudio.plugin/Contents/MacOS/DVCPROHDAudio, 262): no suitable image found. Did find:
/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/DVCPROHDAudio.plugin/Contents/MacOS/DVCPROHDAudio: no matching architecture in universal wrapper

You'll see it for VLC, Mail, loginwindow, SustemUIServer, UserEventAgent and a bunch of other stuff.

You don't need it. Or at the very least, it's highly unlikely you'll need it.

So what to do? Since Apple has never really clarified what's going on here and it's a LONG STANDING bug/error/incompatibility and older versions can't even load on Intel machines (there is a universal version from 2007 of the plugin) I went to where it was, zipped it, trashed the original and left the zip file sitting there.

It's located in /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL

What is this thing anyway, you ask?

I think it's a USB driver for 1:1 audio connections that apps like Reason, Audacity, Cubase and Logic use; or at least used to.

If you want to poke around the file you can take a look at it in the Terminal: copy and paste in:

ls -IR /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/DVCPROHDAudio.plugin

and you'll see some helpful-ish information:

drwxrwxr-x 6 root admin 204 Apr 20 2007 Contents

/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/DVCPROHDAudio.plugin/Contents:
total 24
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 1258 Mar 30 2007 Info.plist
drwxrwxr-x 3 root admin 102 Apr 20 2007 MacOS
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 9 Mar 30 2007 PkgInfo
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root admin 514 Apr 20 2007 version.plist

/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/DVCPROHDAudio.plugin/Contents/MacOS:
total 2456
-rwxrwxr-x 1 root admin 1254748 Mar 30 2007 DVCPROHDAudio

So it's not a permission's issue.

Then you can try: (again, copy and paste into the Terminal)

file /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/DVCPROHDAudio.plugin/Contents/MacOS/DVCPROHDAudio

and you'll see some slightly more helpful things like:

/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/DVCPROHDAudio.plugin/Contents/MacOS/DVCPROHDAudio: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures

/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/DVCPROHDAudio.plugin/Contents/MacOS/DVCPROHDAudio (for architecture ppc): Mach-O bundle ppc

/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL/DVCPROHDAudio.plugin/Contents/MacOS/DVCPROHDAudio (for architecture i386): Mach-O bundle i386

So, hey, at least the version you may or may not have is Universal.

And you can even right-click on it and Show Package Contents and dig around. You can open the DVCPROHDAudio file in Contents/MacOS with something like Hex Fiend and confirm that it's an audio driver for some obscure and some fairly outdated stuff.

Bottom line is you'll know if you need it. If you don't know, then you don't need it and likely never will. For my system it seems okay to zip the original package in the HAL folder and trash the original plug-in. This way it won't load (because it's not a .plugin file) and should the occasion arise when you do need it, just double click it to unzip it right where it needs to be.

ffmpegx updated for Lion

2011-08-06T11:44:00.000-04:00

I'm still not on the Lion train (officially) but some friends mentioned that ffmpegx has received an update so it's compatible with Lion, right here.

MakeMKV Updated

2011-08-06T11:33:00.000-04:00

I love MKV and I have hopes that one day in the distant future people will standardize on it since it's such a great container format and an open standard.

I've been pushing mkv on clients for a while now and some who play things I do for them in lobbies on big tvs or on video boxes like WD TV Live or something don't care because it just works. Which is what I tell them, "Yup, .mkv just works," I'll say subtly pushing it into the recesses of their brains so they hopefully end up parroting it later to others.

Anyways, MakeMKV was just updated. Yayz! (and it's currently FREE)

Converting .MOD files for Final Cut Pro and Multiclip

2011-08-05T13:24:00.002-04:00

I've been handed a few SD cards with .MOD files that eventually need to be edited as a multiclip sequence.

Joy.

I've talked about these problematic files before here and here but never really got into the meat of the best way to transcode them for use in Final Cut Pro. Silly me thought I'd never have to deal with them again.

Here's something to keep in mind about .MOD files (from the wiki page):

"Standard definition video can be recorded in 4:3 and 16:9 formats. Some video decoders do not interpret the aspect ratio information in the media file header correctly, so 16:9 video may appear squeezed horizontally when viewed.^[4] Software that is shipped with camcorders is capable of processing the aspect ratio information correctly, aided perhaps by the metadata stored in MOI files. There are also third-party tools for modifying the wide-screen aspect ratio information in the media file header so that it satisfies decoders which would otherwise fail to interpret this information correctly in an unmodified MOD file.^[5]^[6]^[7] Some tools such as MediaInfo can correctly report the aspect ratio of widescreen MOD files, but media players may or may not display them correctly depending on the capabilities of the video decoder that they are utilizing at the time."

Sure are a lot of May, May Not & Somes in those paragraphs; there's even a perhaps!

These are some weird file types.

In order to nail down the workflow for transcoding these things (which, btw are Standard Definition in this particular case) I've been running some tests using MPEG Streamclip to transcode them and here's what I've discovered: (you'll likely need the MPEG-2 Component for Quicktime in addition to MPEG Streamclip)

A: Renaming the .MOD to .MPG or .mpeg and then transcoding with MSC (MPEG Streamclip) doesn't make any difference.

B: The top listing of the two ProRes exports in MSC is a HQ variety. (You may or may not see doubled up listings in your MSC exports listing depending on your setup/system etc…)

I transcoded a sample .MOD file (of about 24 seconds) to various formats, with various settings and then set up a 3 camera multiclip sequence and tested how well it played and if it was the correct aspect ratio.

What I found -after MANY MANY transcodes then importing those into FCP, setting up a multiclip sequence, then exporting and opening with Quicktime Player 7- was that what worked best for me for these files is to transcode them into:

DV25
16:9
De-interlaced

Then setup and edit your Multiclip project and export to Quicktime Movie…

Then open up your export in Quicktime Player 7 and hit Command + J for "Show Movie Properties" and hit the Presentation button and tick "Conform aperture to: Clean".

See the transcodes from MSC will have this option ticked, but after you export the multiclip from Final Cut Pro this little checkbox will no longer be ticked but will still work. In my tests this checkbox has no effect on .MOD files transcoded to ProRes which would have been nice.

Now with an edited export at the correct aspect ratio you can transcode it to H.264 or whatever you need and it should retain the aspect ratio.

Why DV25? Well the original files are MPG2 in a .MOD wrapper and taking data per pixel, data rates and all that there's not a whole heck of a lot of quality loss (a couple of percentage points?) going to DV25. I suppose DVCPRO25 would work just as well.

Now, keep in mind this is what works for me right now, with .MOD files with this setup that I'm sitting in front of at the moment. The resulting file will be high quality and at the correct aspect ratio.

Burning Multiple Discs in DVD Studio Pro

2011-08-03T18:59:00.000-04:00

Today I was burning off a handful of copies of a DVD for a client when someone asked what I was doing since they "hadn't seen that before" in DVD Studio pro.

There are two basic ways to burn multiple copies of a DVD project in DVD Studio Pro.

1. If you only need to burn off a few copies, say less than 10, I usually get everything ready to burn and then hit Shift + Command + F to Burn a disc, test it then proceed if nothing goes wrong.

See, once you Burn off a test disc you've "Built" it, now all you need to do is "Format" it which really means burn off the Built project to a disc. There's no need to hit Burn again because that just rebuilds the disc and wastes time. So...after the initial test Build-n-Burn…

Hit Command + F for Format.

Pop in a blank disk.

Hit Return.

It's quicker than building each time and if there are only a handful of discs to burn - like I said, less than 10 it's not a bad way to go.

2. If you need to burn off many copies (but less than what a dedicated disc copier would be needed for) in DVD Studio Pro hit Command + F (this is after your test burn) and at the bottom of the Build/Format window change Output Device to Hard Drive and tell it where you'd like a disc image of your project saved.

Hit Okay.

After a bit you'll have a disc image of your project.

Launch Disk Utility or Toast and set it to multiple copies and that's about it.

You can apparently install Quicktime 7 on 10.7 Lion

2011-07-26T11:53:00.001-04:00

Hardmac is reporting that it is possible to install Quicktime 7 (7.6.9) on a Lion system.

Hopefully this is true (I haven't side-graded to Lion yet and likely won't on business editing machines for some time) because Quicktime 7 is immensely useful compared to the debacle that is Quicktime X.

UPDATE: Apple just made it official.

Rendering High-Precision Requires A Graphics Card with More Capabilities

2011-07-26T00:24:00.000-04:00

Have you ever seen that?

Without getting into great detail, with that Final Cut is telling you that it can't render what visual effect you want (have applied to a clip or nest) in high-precision because of one of two things (or both).

1. Your graphics card simply can't handle it. You'll need to upgrade.

2. If you're lucky you can adjust a setting and render in slightly less than "high-precision" with some caveats.

A: Highlight the sequence that has the troublesome clip & effect in it in the Browser and hit Command + 0 for Sequence Settings. Fortunately, in here, changes you make DO apply to the current sequence.

B: Click on the Video Processing tab and you'll see something like this:

See the four radio buttons on the left? Try setting your sequence settings to something other than it currently is. RGB is usually good for this problem.

But read the two paragraphs of text to the right there. Rendering with different Video Processing settings can cause colors to go all wonky.

C: Hit OK and test, test and test some more.

The Telephone Voice Effect

2011-07-25T23:40:00.000-04:00

I needed to do a quickie telephone effect to someone's voice in FCP and found this way was quick, simple and contained within FCP:

1. Apply the AUHipass filter to the audio clip. It's in Audio Filters > Apple
2. Set the cutoff frequency to between 1900 to 2000 and the resonance to about 18.

Keep in mind that these numbers are what worked for me. Your audio may need drastically different numbers.

Rescuing Dark Footage

2011-07-15T00:58:00.001-04:00

Sometimes you'll get footage that you absolutely have to use but it's far too dark as is.

One quick way to possibly rescue the footage is to double it up.

1. Place your dark footage on one track.

2. Color correct and brighten it as best you can (using some filter like Color Corrector 3 Way). Don't worry if it's not perfect, and don't forget to bump up the saturation if you bump up the mid levels a fair amount. The brighter something is the less saturated it tends to be.

3. Option-Click on the clip in the Timeline. (Option-Clicking will just select the Video portion of a clip with linked Audio) then while keeping Option held down, add Shift. Drag the video clip straight up to the track above it and let go of the mouse. You've duplicated the video portion of the clip atop itself.

4. Right-Click on the top video clip.

5. Select "Composite Mode" then "Add". If your clip now seems WAY too bright don't worry. Next step:

6. Bring the opacity down to about 50%. I like to hit Option+W in the Timeline for Toggle Clip Overlays then drag the line over the clip to around 50%. (If you want to get it exactly at 50% using this method hold down Command while you drag the Opacity Overlay Line down and you'll be able to adjust it in single digit increments, cool huh?)

7. Double-Click (or hit Enter with it highlighted) the top clip in the Timeline to load it into the Viewer. Goto the Color Corrector tab and start adjusting the Mids slider to the left (less bright) until the image in the Canvas is more to your liking.

None of this is set it in stone, so feel free to monkey with the method here all you want. It's the general idea of overlaying a clip atop itself, compositing it, lowering it's opacity and then adjusting it's levels that's important.

Around here, since so much of the footage we've received is incompetently underexposed, we've started to call this restoration method "bottom up pattern telegraphing" just to confuse the clients and not hurt their feelings too badly.

Toggle Range Check and Canvas Gamma and Brightness

2011-07-15T00:40:00.000-04:00

You may notice that when you turn on Toggle Range Check (Control + Z) the gamma of your canvas will change, generally becoming darker with Toggle Range Check on. Why?

It has to do with FCP 6/7's insistence that it pretend it's a studio monitor. You'll see the same kind of shift when you go into System Settings… (Shift + Q) and click on the "Playback Control" and toggle Gamma Correction from "Approximate" to "Accurate".

FCP's Toggle Range Check is in effect emulating a Broadcast Monitor when Toggle Range Check is on, that's the main reason you'll see a gamma shift.

If you set Gamma Correction to Accurate, FCP will shift the gamma of the canvas to emulate a broadcast monitor and you'll see no change in gamma when toggling Toggle Range Check because it's already in "emulation" mode, as I like to call it.

Accurate is pseudo-emulation mode.
Approximate is semi-WYSIWYG.

Toggle Range Check is pseudo-emulation mode.

Btw, strange as it may sound, if you're not using a TV or studio monitor setting this option to Approximate is more accurate. You may see your footage look a bit less contrasty but that's likely more accurate in most cases. FCP won't apply a bit of gamma juju and jump from 1.8 to 2.2 because it won't assume everything is 1.8.

I like to keep this setting to Approximate because in my case, with my setup, it's more accurate to what's been actually loaded into FCP and more closely matches the raw footage. Exporting to Quicktime is another matter entirely.

None of this holds a candle to a real broadcast monitor or decent TV though for gamma/color grading/correction.

Smart Converter

2011-07-12T06:51:00.000-04:00

SmartConverter [app store link] is a FREE transcoder that outputs to many popular formats.

It has some good reviews and could be handy for quickie conversions.

It'll transcode (sometimes just re-wrap which is really fast) to:

Apple TV
Google TV
iPod
iPhone
iPad
PSP
Playstation 3
Sony Barvia TV
Xbox 360
Windows
Android Tablet
Android Phone
Music (just audio)

It's super simple and you can click on the thumbnail to get some info about the video you want to convert.

It'll tell you what it thinks the transcoding speed will be in terms of Slowest > Fastest (if no transcoding is needed, just a re-wrap).

I didn't try to see what happens if you drag less common formats into it without Perian installed but with it installed it seemed to like an .avi (mpeg4 with mp3 audio), an .mkv (H.264), and a random .flv. It even accepted a .FLAC file.

After converting it automatically "sent" the audio file to iTunes but displays a "Show File" button which is handy because it kind of buried the transcoded audio file in ~Movies/SmartConverter/ which I probably wouldn't have found right away on my own.

VisualHub and Lion (OS 10.7)

2011-07-12T01:43:00.004-04:00

A friend just sent me an interesting email about VisualHub.

Although Universal, VisualHub doesn't work in OS 10.7 Lion.

"VisualHub:

   Version: 1.34.1
   Last Modified: 8/6/08 1:53 PM
   Kind: Universal
   64-Bit (Intel): No
   Location: /Applications/VisualHub.app"

Btw, to see what apps you have that are PowerPC (which will not run under Lion) paste the following into the Terminal and then open up the resultant "MyFileTypes.txt" on your desktop.

system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType >~/Desktop/MyFileTypes.txt

It may take a moment to write out the file. Look for the "Kind" section to see if an app is PowerPC or not.

Anyways, it is possible to run VisualHub under Lion by modifying VisualHub's package a bit.

Specifically, three files need to be modified:

buttons.scpt
main.scpt
snippets.scpt

Once modified (check around on Google for more info because I'm not sure of the legality of all this and you do so at your own risk) it'll patch into ffmpeg 0.6.4 and should be good to go until some Lion update breaks it.

One note of caution however; my friend tells me that the .scpt files are locked and "run-only" so you can't easily see what they are or do.

Or you could just try (again, at your own risk) an updated, patched and faster version of ffmpeg. More info here.

Or you could just use iFFmpeg or ReduxEncoder. Neither are free and ReduxEncoder seems a little unstable in my testing but iFFmpeg isn't a bad alternative to VisualHub.

Honestly, it's easier to compile your own FFmpeg binary and use it alone or with iFFmpeg, in my opinion.

MakeMKV gets an update

2011-07-11T15:07:00.000-04:00

The FREE MakeMKV was just updated. I tend to use it for client videos where they show the video via some hardware box like WesternDigital Live or PS3 or something.

MakeMKV is a simple and FREE transcoder to transcode vids into MKV. Give it a whirl if you get the chance.

"WHAT'S NEW

Version 1.6.12:

MKV engine fixes:
- Some MKV files produced from h.264 AVC blu-ray discs were not seekable
- Subtitles were displayed too short on some players
- Occasional errors on titles with forced subtitles
- Improved compatibility of produced MKV files
Added workarounds for new DVD protections
Miscellaneous stability and UI improvements

Fixing Quicktime's Gamma Export Problem with H.264

2011-07-09T12:23:00.000-04:00

For a LONG time now Quicktime has had an issue exporting to H.264 where it'll bump up the gamma and make your exports look brighter than it did originally. It's a long-standing bug that I'm fairly shocked hasn't been addressed yet.

A simple-ish fix is to install x264encoder from here. It's FREE.

After installing it, re-launch your export software and select "x264Encoder" from the export options and before anything else, hit the Options… in the lower left.

From there hit "Tagging".

At the top left checkmark "Add gamma 2.2 (SD/HD content)".

This will dramatically fix or at least help the gamma H.264 shifting problem.

x264encoder seems complicated but since there are some really great presets you can get amazing results, small files sizes with only a few clicks. Exports will take longer to encode though sometimes so be aware.

A great article on this is here which goes into much more detail.

For curiosity a deprecated method (in case you don't have x264 installed or have don't a connection on location) is here. x264encoder is something you should have on that flash drive in your pocket, btw.

Thanks to IK for reminding me I never posted this after mentioning it ages ago.

FCP 7 is mostly dead

2011-07-08T00:52:00.004-04:00

AppleInsider has some interesting news here about how Apple is still considering selling FCP7 to enterprise clients.

Some of the more interesting bits:

"The Cupertino, Calif., company did confirm at the meeting that Final Cut Studio 3 has been discontinued. Wiggins noted that Color and all the other apps have been "killed off." AppleInsider exclusively reported last month that Final Cut Express, Server and Studio had been marked "end of life" by Apple."

Which means Final Cut Studio is the dead. But as for Final Cut Pro X:

"During the briefing, Apple promised a range of updates in coming months, with XSAN support arriving in "the next few weeks." Some of the updates will cost money, while others will be free. The addition of multicam support will reportedly be a free upgrade, though Wiggins noted that Apple's employee may have said it "accidentally."

Accidentally? Its' been mentioned before from Apple. Could it mean however that multicam may not be a free update? It can be interpreted both ways, at least to me.

Which means that Final Cut Pro X, after it's all said and done and matches FCP6/7 features will not be "only" $299. As we pay for features to bring it up to par with FCP6/7 it builds upon the initial $299 price Apple wants us to pay. Users shouldn't have to pay for each feature that is standard now. Apparently Apple is going to nickel & dime us about this.

Then there's this:

"Attendees at the private briefing, which took place on Wednesday, reported that Apple is looking into the legal ramifications of reopening enterprise licenses of Final Cut Pro 7."

Apple realizes (and I suspect we'll hear more about this soon enough) that Final Cut Pro X is seen as a bit of a joke in the pro industry and has to do something once FCP7 can't run on OS X dot whatever in the future, or can't run on whatever new hardware is out, to prevent many many FCP7 users from jumping ship to Premiere or Avid.

A few people I know are already hedging their bets and have bought and begun to learn Avid and Premiere in preparation for that day since Final Cut Studio is their current bread and butter.

Final Cut On iPad Rumors Begin

2011-07-07T19:56:00.000-04:00

Running some kind of version of Final Cut on a near-future iPad are already starting to appear.

My hunch is that a future iPad will have an SD slot or something like a redesigned Camera Connection kit and allow import and editing of DSLR H.264 footage.

Hopefully it'll output to the card as well.

ProRes Plays Back Brighter in Viewer and Darker When Paused

2011-07-01T11:33:00.002-04:00

Have you noticed this?

Load a ProRes clip into the Viewer in Final Cut Pro and it looks a little dark. Hit play and it brightens (gamma) until you pause, then it goes a little dark again.

I'm not sure why this happens but I see it regularly with ProRes clips. Some say it's the data rate being lowered for slower drives, others say it's the type of compression the timeline is using (highlight the sequence in the Browser, hit Command + 0 (zero) then look at QuickTime Video Settings in the lower left).

There's a brief discussion of it here on the Apple boards.

For me the difference in a clip that does it seems to be the size.

A ProRes clip which is 854 x 480 does have the brightness playback issue.

A ProRes clip which is 720 x 408 does not have the brightness playback issue. (Inconsistent though; some clips have the issue while others do not)

A ProRes clip which is 720 x 480 does not have the brightness playback issue.

That's the only difference I can determine between the two clips.

Playing the clips in QuickTime Player does not show a gamma shift.

Gamma while Playing in Viewer

Gamma while Paused in Viewer

I don't know a solution to this and really, it's just an annoyance overall; but it's good to be aware of it.

The Soap Opera Look (and how to avoid it)

2011-06-30T23:29:00.000-04:00

I had a client call the other day complaining that the HD final edit they were sent looked like "it was shot on video" when they showed it in their lobby. After many phone calls and questions I found out that the problem was their giant plasma tv itself.

It turns out that it had a non-user controlled "look" to it to interpolate frames between frames which makes the footage look (in effect) like it has more frames than it does, hence the video look…like a soap opera.

There's an interesting little discussion here about it which is well worth a read. The salient point is this:

"Most film is recorded at 24 frames per second, but your LCD TV probably either displays at 60 fps or 120 hz (hertz is just a measurement of frequency per second). There are three main ways to cope with this.

First is to simply display each frame longer, this is the oldest technique in LCD tech. However, its undesirable side effects include the possibility of motion blur, or of judder. Judder is an artifact of adjusting the framerate and it looks like a sort of stutter in movement that would otherwise be smooth (a slow pan, for instance).

The second technique is one used on Plasmas and CRT TVs. Instead of showing a bright image the whole time, they display the frame, then a short frame of either darkness or a very dimmed picture. This alleviates much of the issue with judder and motion blur as it allows your brain to fill in the gap faster than you can consciously notice. It is also an old technique, and is used in theaters. It provides the traditional cinema feel.

The most recent and advanced technique is motion interpolation. Motion interpolation is a process by which your TV analyzes the current frame, and the next frame, then creates an average. It inserts these averaged frames in between. The result is extremely smooth motion with no motion blur and judder becomes almost non-existent. There are a few technical issues with this, including the possibility of ghosting or artifacts in rare cases. Also the smooth movement this creates is slightly disconcerting."

Which is taken from this page (also worth reading).

Final Cut Pro X - How To Hide Events in the Event Library

2011-06-29T20:29:00.000-04:00

Apple has decided with Final Cut Pro X that you should see all projects all the time in the interface. Some people don't like that. Say for example you edit training videos for two rival companies. It's okay for you so see the proprietary stuff but it's not really the best idea to let one company know you're working for their rival as well.

So, Apple has revealed how to "hide" (remove) a project (event) in Final Cut Pro X. They posted a document about just this one issue here.

Basically you move a project's media (event) from the folder Final Cut Pro X looks in to find events to another folder so Final Cut Pro X just doesn't see it. It's like hiding your car keys in the sun visor.

How hard would it be to add a Visibility Toggle or something within Final Cut Pro X? I mean really.

Apple Posts FAQ About Final Cut Pro X

2011-06-29T09:03:00.002-04:00

Apple is slowly responding to all the hullaballo over Final Cut Pro X and it's debacle of a debut. They've posted a FAQ about Final Cut Pro X here.

The good news is that Apple itself says FCP 7 will work with Lion.

In my opinion the Media Management section is the most interesting (and going to be the biggest hassle).

Ron Brinkman - Former Shake Product Designer on Final Cut Pro X

2011-06-29T09:01:00.000-04:00

Ron Brinkman (former product designer for Shake) has some things to say about Final Cut Pro X and Apple in not caring about the professional market here.

AudioCapture - Another Audio Recording App

2011-06-28T22:08:00.001-04:00

There are myriad audio recording apps for the Mac now. Some are (kinda) built in like Quicktime Pro's "New Audio Recording" and some are expensive like Final Cut Studio's ability to record directly into Soundtrack Pro and Final Cut Pro.

A new FREE audio recorder is AudioCapture [app store link] It records to these formats:

But it does so as a .mov which while not a deal breaker is a bit of a hassle. Still, it's free.

Final Cut Pro X Can Almost Import Final Cut Pro XML Projects

2011-06-28T19:06:00.000-04:00

MacMagazine has discovered [google translation link] that the ability to import a Final Cut Pro XML file is kinda sorta already in Final Cut X but isn't working. Either it's going to be implemented in an update or will work in tandem with a stand-alone app that converts Final Cut Pro XML into something Final Cut X can import.

Either way, there's a little teeny tiny bit of hope.

Apple Refunding Some Final Cut Pro X Purchases

2011-06-28T18:56:00.000-04:00

The Next Web is reporting that Apple is apparently issuing refunds to some people who have purchases Final Cut Pro X and have been less than satisfied with it.

So there's hope if you've been trying to log tapes, or cut multicam projects or open FCP6 or FCP7 projects in FCPX.

RoaringApps Final Cut Studio Compatibility Check with Lion

2011-06-27T23:30:00.001-04:00

Wondering if Final Cut Sutio 2 or 3 works with the upcoming Lion OS?

RoaringApps tries to keep track of what works and what doesn't with Lion, you can check out the F lettered apps here. Currently FCS 2 is untested and FCS 3 has some issues but they seem to be Quicktime ones, not specifically FCS 3 issues.

Worth checking once in a while to see how things are going.

UPDATE: Apple says FCP7 will work with Lion here. No word on FCP 6 from them however.

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

2011-06-27T00:58:00.000-04:00

I mentioned this FREE app [app store link] to a friend the other day and was surprised they hadn't heard of it considering they work as an editor for a tv network.

Anyways, Blackmagic Disk Speed Test stress tests a selected hard drive to determine what kind of read & write speeds it can handle and subsequently what kind of video playback performance you can reasonably expect. Check out the included manual for a quick explanation of what everything means.

Dvice has an article on Final Cut Pro X

2011-06-26T13:28:00.000-04:00

Dvice has an article titled "Final Cut Pro X: Apple's biggest mistake in years?" which you can read here.

Randy Ubillos Emails about FCPX

2011-06-26T13:15:00.002-04:00

There's a lengthy thread here with all manners of comments after Randy Ubillos apparently returned an emailed question about FCPX.

Josh Mellicker talks FCPX

2011-06-26T13:14:00.000-04:00

Josh Mellicker has a quick write up of his thoughts and history of FCPX here.

David Pogue talks Final Cut Pro X

2011-06-24T18:42:00.000-04:00

Pogue weighs in on professional editors weighing in on FCPX.

Pogue's review of FCPX.

Conan O'Brian On Final Cut Pro X

2011-06-24T18:35:00.000-04:00

FCPX made an appearance on Conan O'Brian.

Youtube link here. Second link for backup here.

How To Run Final Cut Pro X on Non Open CL Capable Cards

2011-06-24T00:27:00.004-04:00

Hardmac has an article up describing how someone discovered that, while slow, FCPX and Motion 5 can run on a Mac without a video card that supports Open CL.

"Yesterday I was unable to install Final Cut Pro X on my Dual-Core Mac Pro Intel Xeon rev. 1.1 (from September 2006) because the graphics card is not compatible with OpenCL. I created a session with my name on a friend's recent MacBook Pro and bought it with my iTunes account to test it on his computer and buy it on mine after would have changed the graphics card.
Today I put the MacBook Pro in target mode to transfer some video files.
Then, from my Mac Pro, opened the Application folder of the MacBook Pro and I was able to launch the Application!
I then copied it in the application folder of my Mac Pro and tried to launch it again, it worked!
I went to the software update menu and the other softwares were installed!

For Motion, a 10 seconds animation is read in 23 seconds in Motion 5 on the Mac Pro.
Graphics cards are important, but since I am not a professional, it is plenty enough for me. I understand that Apple didn't want that lower performances with older hardware would be officially possible.
On the MacBook pro 5.2 (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz), the animation is read in real time, 10 seconds."

I'm unure of the complete legality of this but it's pretty interesting. It would likely be too slow to be of any real use though in real-world editing.

Apple has a support document here which lists cards that do support Open CL.

The Clip's Master Clip Is Not Present - Error

2011-06-24T00:02:00.000-04:00

FCP has a long standing bug where when you have the playhead in the Timeline over a clip and hit SHIFT + F for Reveal Master Clip, you'll inexplicably see this:

Restarting FCP will not help.
Reconnecting the clip will not help.
Trashing prefs hasn't helped me in this case.

Bizarrely, the clip will be fully visible in your Browser and/or Bin yet FCP will simply not be able to find it. It may be able to find other clips in the Timeline that reside in the same Bin as the errant clip, though.

I have no solution but it's an irritating, frustrating bug.

See, with the Timeline in the foreground and placing the playhead over a clip and tapping The F Key will perform a Matchframe where the frame -and Master Clip- that the playhead is over will appear in the Viewer.

But, hitting SHIFT + F with the Timeline in the foreground and placing the playhead over a clip and tapping F will perform a Reveal Master Clip; only sometimes it will just stop working. I have no idea why.

A workaround this to find a Master Clip and have it load into the Viewer is, like I mentioned, just place the playhead over the clip, make sure the Timeline is in the foreground (active) and tap the F key. You won't see the clip in the Bin or Browser but you'll be able to scrub around to see what else the clip holds footage-wise.

It's an incomplete workaround however especially if you need to see the following and preceding clips around the clip you're interested in. You'll likely find yourself doing this a lot while cutting a documentary and know that the footage is listed chronologically; a Reveal Master Clip would show you where the clip rests in accordance to the order the clips were shot in.

Another quirk is that if you do hit OK to "add a master clip to the browser" it'll do just that; and it'll find it if you load that into the Timeline (or Viewer, Reveal Master Clip works if the Viewer is the active window as well) and perform a Reveal Master Clip. Frustrating.

So there is a solution if you're willing to add a master clip to the browser (at root level) for every clip that suffers from this bug. But there's no guarantee that it won't randomly happen again. In fact, if you do add a master clip to the browser, place some of it in the Timeline, then for fun delete the newly created master clip from the Browser, FCP will toss up the Master Clip Not Present error.

RIP Final Cut Server & Final Cut Express

2011-06-22T23:09:00.000-04:00

Apparently Apple has killed off Final Cut Server and Final Cut Express according to Appleinsider.

What Final Cut Pro X Can't Do

2011-06-22T21:51:00.001-04:00

I'm keeping a list as I run across things. Don't expect this to be complete, always accurate or exhaustively detailed.

Here we go: (this is for the dot zero release, btw and keep in mind I haven't played with FCPX very much yet)

1. You cannot currently import FCP6/7 projects into FCPX (see #4)
2. There is no Multiclip/Multicam.
3. Many plug-ins currently do not work.
4. Currently there is no XML Import or Export.
5. Currently there is no native OMF Export or Export to Logic.
6. Doesn't currently work natively with R3D or XDCAM (they need to be re-wrapped first).
An update has already addressed this somewhat.
7. There are no longer distinct Canvas and Viewer windows.
8. You cannot set In and Out points for tape capture nor (AFAIK) is there a batch tape capture ability.
9. You cannot "Save As" to duplicate a project (at least not that easily).
10. Apparently you can't Print (output) to tape, anymore.
11. Currently there is no support for EDL Import or Export.
12. You can't easily open two projects at once and drag media, sequences or custom filters between them.
13. Apparently lacks support for HDMI Input and Output
14. Apparently lacks support for SDI Input and Output
15. Not compatible with many, if any 3rd party video (capture?) cards
16. Timeline seems to always start at 00:00:00
17. Can you keyframe effects? I can't find it.

Apple vs. Final Cut Pro X User's Reviews

2011-06-22T21:42:00.003-04:00

There's been so much backlash against the new version of FCP (FCPX) that Apple may have removed not just some but as of this post, all or nearly all reviews on the App Store (not to be confused with Amazon's Appstore, btw).

They're back up as of now.

9to5 has a post about it here.

Daring Fireball has more info about FCPX's reception in general here.

Arstechnica has some more reactions and comments from Apple on FCPX here.

Appleinsider has an article on reactions to FCPX here.

Installing FCPX and Final Cut Studio Side by Side

2011-06-22T02:24:00.001-04:00

Apple has posted a rather interesting support document about how best to install FCPX along with Final Cut Studio.

It's here, and well worth a read if you plan on installing FCPX while having FCS also installed.

They recommend you re-partition your boot disk but if you don't, make sure to launch Motion 4 first. Sound messy? I thought so too. It's very un-Appley in my opinion.

Disk Utility and Invalid Content in Journal

2011-06-22T02:05:00.001-04:00

Yesterday while switching around external hard drives to media manage some old projects that are going to be handed off forever (yay!) to a client I accidentally unplugged the wrong firewire cable and disconnected a drive that was mounted but not currently in use.

I don't think it was spinning at the time but I can't be sure. However, plugging it back in I found that it wouldn't mount. I tried a few times, tried using USB but it refused to mount. All the spin up, head alignment noises were there but it didn't mount.

Running Disk Utility showed an "Invalid content in journal" error. Now this wasn't a FCP drive, just a storage drive of mine. It's good practice to not journal your render drives (if you use an external one) for reasons such as this, speed, etc…

But this storage drive was journaled and apparently something went poof when its firewire was unceremoniously unplugged.

Running repair in Disk Utility showed:

The volume BLAHBLAH was repaired successfully.
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Repair tool completed

But Disk Utility lied. Running Verify or Repair showed the same "Invalid Content in Journal" error every time. And it still refused to mount.

I decided to give Disk Warrior a go even though my version is out of date and after it's 10+ step process of rebuilding and replacing the directory the drive mounted.

Out of curiosity I rechecked it with Disk Utility and found no errors but I did notice that apparently Disk Warrior had turned off Journaling on the external drive.

Just to see what would happen I re-enabled Journaling through Disk Utility and re-ran Verify and again, no errors.

So if a drive won't mount, and you see the "Invalid Content in Journal" error in Disk Utility give Disk Warrior a try. Looking back I wonder if I could have just disabled Journaling on the un-mounted drive and then mounted it.

FCPX - Removed Comments & Reviews

2011-06-21T21:57:00.000-04:00

Apparently, Apple is removing negative comments and reviews from the discussion page and the App Store review site. I've seen two reviews removed from the App Store and I've noticed some posts and comments are no longer on the discussion site.

FCPX Options for Ingesting Media from Photo-Based Devices

2011-06-21T17:57:00.001-04:00

Apple has put up a page covering the basics on ingesting and importing media from "photo-based devices" into FCPX which really means SD cards and DSLRs.

Adding Arrows Super Fast in Final Cut Pro

2011-06-21T17:16:00.000-04:00

I'm working on a video that has lots of little intricate things that are pointed out in the text. Arrows on screen definitely help in this specific case.

A super fast way to add graphical arrows in Final Cut Pro is to use the Windings 3 font. Yup, a font.

You can launch Font Book -which is in your applications folder- to see exactly what arrows are available but for basic ones use the FGHJKL keys.

Now you can manipulate them as you would any graphic. Resize, alter color, rotate, keyframe etc…

FCPX and Supported Cameras

2011-06-21T15:17:00.001-04:00

Apple has a pretty nifty page up here that lists supported cameras.

FCPX Requirements

2011-06-21T14:55:00.003-04:00

Can your Mac Run FCPX?

- Mac computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor or better
- 2GB of RAM (4GB of RAM recommended)
- OpenCL-capable graphics card or Intel HD Graphics 3000 or later
- 256MB of VRAM
- Display with 1280-by-768 pixel resolution or higher
- Mac OS X v10.6.7 or later
- 2.4GB of disk space for Final Cut Pro
- 2GB of disk space for Motion
- 685MB of disk space for Compressor

More specific info about requirements and graphics cards is here.

What do you have?

1. Hold down the OPTION key.
2. While holding it down click on the Apple logo at the top left of the Menubar.
3. It'll read "System Profiler…"
4. After System Profiler launches click on "Graphics/Displays" under Contents > Hardware in the left column. Your graphics card(s) will be listed in the right-hand pane.

FCPX Questions and Answers

2011-06-21T14:40:00.008-04:00

FCPX has dropped into the App store along with Motion and Compressor. Those links are App Store links, btw.

Many initial questions are covered here. It's well worth a read.
Macworld has an article on it here.

However, right off the bat with the dot zero release:

1. You cannot currently import FCP6/7 projects into FCPX (see #4)
2. There is no Multiclip/Multicam.
3. Many plug-ins currently do not work.
4. Currently there is no XML Import or Export.
5. Currently there is no native OMF Export or Export to Logic.
6. Doesn't currently work natively with R3D or XDCAM (they need to be re-wrapped first).
An update has already addressed this somewhat.
7. There are no longer distinct Canvas and Viewer windows.
8. You cannot set In and Out points for tape capture nor (AFAIK) is there a batch tape capture ability.
9. You cannot "Save As" to duplicate a project (at least not that easily).
10. Apparently you can't Print (output) to tape, anymore.

Panasonic's P2 Card and the Format Error!

2011-06-21T12:45:00.003-04:00

Hopefully you'll never see this:

The error message blinks which is why it looks faded here.

It's a FORMAT ERROR! (I think it actually reads "FORMAT ERR!") which can occur very rarely on P2 cards for seemingly no reason. Recently we had one while on location.

What happened was someone forgot a standard USB cable to load in footage from an HVX200 camera to a Hard Drive - I've had extremely bad luck with going directly from the camera to a hard drive in the past so I avoid it at almost all costs now - and since we were on location with pretty much nothing around us in the way of stores and rummaging around through everyone's bags and equipment cases looking for a USB cable I decided to load in the footage via Firewire.

Now this camera and another we've been using have had Firewire issues in the past. Namely extremely slow and getting slower over time Firewire transfers. Resetting the cameras and restoring the Firmware seems to have no effect. USB xfers are multiple times faster than Firewire at this point so I've been going with USB regularly, often and without issue when there's no card reader available.

So, finding a Firewire cable and setting the camera to be a Firewire device and hooking everything up I began the copy from camera to laptop. While slow -as expected- it was going and I told everyone to take a coffee break while it copied over.

About 400MBs into the copy there was a Finder Read/Write error, I didn't have permission for something or other and it konked out. I suspect it was something to do with the "LASTCLIP.TXT" file which is locked by default.

So I tried to unmount the camera with no response and ended up just power cycling it since it was completely unresponsive and the Finder on the laptop couldn't unmount it even after waiting 5+ mins.

Powering it back on I saw the dreaded "FORMAT ERROR!" in red on the screen.

Now this is a very rare error and unfortunately there's not much you can do about it on location. Some people have had luck with a few power cycles and mounts and unmounts, others have had luck with Disk Utility repairing it but I wasn't one of them. I'm reluctant to have the Mac do anything to the cards but we were desperate and the director said go ahead so I tried a few repairs with the Terminal and Disk Repair but nothing seemed to help.

We ended up calling and overnighting the card to Panasonic who was able to recover the footage in their labs. They copied the footage back to the same card of ours and shipped it back to us. Panasonic was amazing, fast and helpful.

So the bottom line solution for us, upon seeing FORMAT ERROR! was to just ship the card to Panasonic and have them recover the footage.

My new rules for loading footage from a P2 card when you have to use the camera as a reader is to:

1. Lock the card with the write protect switch before mounting it on the Mac.
2. NEVER use Firewire. USB only from now on.

MacBook Pro 2011 Not Recognizing SanDisk Class 10 SD Cards

2011-06-19T21:57:00.001-04:00

A few people are reporting that a Class 10 SanDisk SD Card won't be reliably recognized in a 2011 MacBook Pro.

What does seem to work as a temporary workaround is restarting the Mac with the card already inserted. But even then it's not recognized if you remove the card and then reinsert it or another similar card.

"I use a Sandisk SDHC Extreme Class 10 SD Card and have problems getting it to read through the inbuild SD card reader.

I tried the following:

Reformatting on Disk Utility
Reformatting on my Canon 450D
Restarting Laptop
Resetting PRAM
Resetting SMC
Repairing Disk Permissions
Repairing Disk

All of these did not solve my problem. I have a card reader which when plugged into the MBP, works fine and detects the card.

The Weird Part

I plugged the card into a friend's iMac and it detects it every time. And then right after I do that, I plug it into my MBP, and it detects the card, but the problem is once I eject it, and slot it back in, it fails to detect again! However if I try this method again (Slot to iMac, remove, slot back to MBP), it will fail the second time. "

Someone tried a card in MacBooks at an Apple store and:

"They had me EFFA back the machine, and provided me with a new one. I tested the new one right out of the box and it worked fine, but after Migration, it no longer worked. Restoring using the included disk back to factory specs DID NOT restore the ability to read the card.

In checking random machines at the apple store, only 1 on the entire floor recognized that a card was inserted, when I tried the Sandisk SDHC Extreme Pro 8GB 45MB/S card."

Apparently Apple and SanDisk are aware of the problem but if you use SD Cards for production or have them sent to you for editing it's a good idea to be aware of this issue. I've not seen it as I've been using an external USB card reader. Hopefully it'll be addressed soon with a software update.

FCPX Apparently "Not Ready for Professional Use"...yet.

2011-06-17T23:26:00.004-04:00

"Whenever you've got something which is that big a re-write, stuff gets changed, stuff gets left out, stuff gets added later because they can't get it all re-written and I guarantee you that on day one when the dot zero release ships it will not be ready for professional use.

Apple has a very poor track record of perfect dot zero releases. So for those of you saying: "this is without a question the second coming, I'm going to bet the ranch, I'm buying this the day it's released and God help me I'm plunging forward whether it's ready or not" -- I want your clients.

I think there is only one company on the planet that could rethink non-linear editing like this. I think it's Apple. It's not ready for prime time. First it's not ready because it isn't shipping, then when it is shipping it's time for us to experiment."

Larry Jordan said recently.

Later on he expanded upon his remarks but said some interesting things:

"Based on what I learned during my conversations with Apple, I believe this release provides us with an opportunity for a large step forward."

An opportunity (to me at least) is not the same as the actual "large step forward."

Wait till it drops and I think your jaw will drop for one of two reasons at the dot zero release of FCPX.

Of course, a few months from now, after some FCPX updates all of this will be moot, but fun to look back on.

Locking (Protecting) P2 Cards Before Ingesting

2011-06-15T09:21:00.001-04:00

We've been having a problem with one of our P2 cards here on location which may warrant it's own post in the near future but one suggestion I've been reading about (and talking to friends, thanks, you know who you are) is that it's generally good practice to Lock your P2 cards before you mount them on your Mac.

Why?

I've been told that the Mac will write files to the P2 card upon mounting in the Finder so I decided to find out. Here's what I did to test:

1. With the camera not connected to the Mac format a P2 card.
2. Shoot a test clip.
3. Turn off the camera.
4. Switch the Lock switch on the P2 card to PROTECT.
5. Turn on the camera and mount the P2 card on the Mac.
6. Fire up the Terminal and type in (with out quotes) "cd" hit space bar then drag the icon of the NO NAME P2 card to the Terminal and hit Return to Change Directory to the P2 card.

Your Terminal should read something like this: cd /Volumes/NO\ NAME

7. Type "ls -a" which lists all, including hidden files.
8. You should something like this:

.
..
CONTENTS
LASTCLIP.TXT

Ok, cool, so with the Write Protect tab ON that's what's on the card from the camera untouched by the Mac.

Let's try it with the Write Protect tab set to OFF.

Just mount the card like you normally would but leave Write Protect off. Now, with the unlocked card mounted run the Terminal steps again. After "ls -a" you'll see:

.
..
.Spotlight-V100
._.Trashes
.Trashes
.fseventsd
CONTENTS
LASTCLIP.TXT

So there you have it. The Finder WILL write to a mounted P2 card without you having to do anything. Has that caused a problem for me in the past for the thousands of cards I've loaded in in my life? No, but the possibility is there that the Panasonic camera may not like the files that are on the card after mounting.

My new rule of thumb is to lock the cards before mounting them in the Finder…just in case.

Even More FCPX Screenshots

2011-06-13T03:26:00.000-04:00

No telling how long they'll be up. Take a look here.

Streamago for Video Streaming and Serving

2011-06-09T00:14:00.000-04:00

A friend showed my Streamago the other day and while I haven't really played with it too much, it looks like it could be a handy (largely FREE) resource to stream video and post videos of limited size.

Ya know, for when Youtube isn't "classy" enough for a client or for when Wistia isn't cooperating with some browser.

Macrumors Posts FCPX and Motion X Alleged Screenshots

2011-06-09T00:10:00.000-04:00

Have a look here, before they get pulled. They were already pulled from the original source apparently.

Uploading Videos to File Sharing Sites

2011-06-02T15:52:00.000-04:00

Here's a quick tip: When a client wants you to upload some selects or some rough edits to some video sharing site, many support multiple simultaneous uploads.

Try highlighting (using Shift or Command) more than one video in the upload window and then hit send or upload or whatever the button is and see if you can upload more than one at a time.

It saves time but I was a bit surprised that more people don't try it.

Loader organizing software

2011-05-28T01:03:00.001-04:00

Loader from Digital Heaven…

"…works alongside Final Cut Pro (launching and quitting automatically) and appears as a small tab on the left side of the screen. When tracks from iTunes or files/folders from the Finder are dragged onto the tab, it slides out to reveal a list of projects currently open in Final Cut Pro. After dropping the items onto the desired project, Loader copies them in the background to the assigned media folder linked to that project. In addition, those audio file formats that don't play nicely in Final Cut Pro (.caf, .m4a and mp3) are automatically converted to an AIFF file before import. When the copy is complete then the copied files are sent to a new bin in Final Cut Pro.

Loader also offers the ability to sort copied media into subfolders according to the file extension. By default, subfolders are automatically created for audio, graphics and movie file types and settings can be changed at any time to suit specific requirements."

also

"Some types of audio formats don't play very well with Final Cut Pro so if you drop an mp3, AAC or Core Audio Format (.caf) file onto Loader then it will automatically convert it to an AIF file."

It's $79.00 but if you find yourself in FCP and doing lots media ingesting and organizing this could be a fairly handy timesaver. I haven't tried it yet and it seems a tad pricey and word on the street is that it copies all your media which could be an issue if you have large assets and limited space but it could eliminate some hassles which is always a good thing.

Check it out here.

Making 1920 x 1080 smaller and keeping the aspect ratio

2011-05-23T03:15:00.001-04:00

Just a quick note, when you want to make 1920 x 1080 smaller but keep the same aspect ratio here are the most common sizes:

1080/1920 = 0.5625

For 1920 they're:

1920 x 1080
1440 x 810
  960 x 540 (this is half-size)
  480 x 270
  240 x 135

720/1280 = 0.5625

For 720 they're:

1280 x 720
  960 x 540
  640 x 360 (this is half-size)
  320 x 180
  160 x 90

424/640 = 0.6625

For 640 they're:

640 x 424
480 x 318
320 x 212 (this is half-size)
160 x 106
  80 x 53

If you like math I posted something about how to calculate your own aspect ratio sizes years ago here.

PAL to NTSC

2011-05-21T21:36:00.000-04:00

If a client gives you a video clip that they want on DVD you'd do well to check that it's NTSC before you convert it to DVD or something, especially if it's something long.

Recently a client handed me a .mp4 file of a long interview that they received from the interviewer. I let it encode in Compressor to DVD only to find out that it was PAL when I went to import it into DVD Studio Pro.

The quickest way to check if something is PAL is to open it in Quicktime and then hit Command + I to open the HUD Info Window. If you see "FPS: 25" it's likely a PAL video.

In compressor, after you've brought the video in, and set it's settings and destination(s) in the Inspector hit the Encoder button (second from left) and you'll see this:

Hit the little lock/gear button to the right of the grayed out PAL drop down and it should default to NTSC like this:

You should be good to go with your NTSC encode/conversion.

Compressor Won't Stop Compressing

2011-05-21T21:24:00.001-04:00

Say for some reason or another you've cancelled a Compressor job but noticed that your temp is still up (if you use something like SMC Fan Control) and the Mac is sluggish it's likely because Compressor has been told by Batch Monitor to keep compressing a file even though you've told it to stop, trashed the output file and anything else. The job's in the que and Compressor is determined to finish it in spite of you.

You'll even find that if you quit the job in Activity Monitor it'll just relaunch and keep on compressing. It'll even keep compressing across a reboot. What do you do?

Launch Batch Monitor (likely in your Utilities Folder, Hit Command + Shift + U to open that folder from the Finder) and hit the nice X stop button (in-between the Pause and Info buttons) to cancel the job. Ignore any complaints from Batch Monitor and just hit the X button again if it does complain.

ProRes Cheat Sheet

2011-05-20T23:04:00.000-04:00

I ran across this the other night and thought it was kinda handy.

ProRes Cheat Sheet

It's from here and can be handy when someone asks what all the different types are good for.

Batch Convert Images Without Photoshop

2011-05-17T02:11:00.003-04:00

I forgot to mention how I batch resized images from some Timelapses we've been working on since Photoshop CS4 won't open .NEFs from a Nikon D7000.

Use Preview. Yup.

0. Launch Preview and hit Command + (comma) to open it's preferences and under General make sure either "Open all files in one window" or "Open groups of files in the same window" are ticked. This is important.

1. Drag the folder containing all the images for the Timelapse onto Preview's icon.

2. After Preview opens all the images in one window hit Command + A to highlight them all.

3. Goto Tools > Adjust Size… and type in the resize you want or need.

4. Hit Okay, and wait for Preview to do it's thing.

5. Hit either "Save All…" or "Save As…" as per your need.

Done.

How To Create A Timelapse with Quicktime Without A Black Screen

2011-05-16T19:23:00.004-04:00

We've been shooting some timelapse with a Nikon D7000 and the stills are .NEF files which Photoshop CS4 doesn't like and apparently there's no update to open these particular files so yeah, there's that. Photoshop requires that it be CS5 to open the D7000's .NEF files. Thanks Adobe!

So the basic workflow for these sorts of Timelapse is this:

1. Shoot with the intervelometer setting on the still camera.
2. Bring the stills into the Mac (either while shooting or load them in afterwards).
2a. Monkey with them in your image editor of choice. (Optional)
3. Launch Quicktime Player 7.
4. Hit Shift + Command + O (letter o) and select the first image in the sequence and hit Open (Return). This is "Open Image Sequence…"
5. Let Quicktime Player do it's thing then Export it to the format of your choice.

Done.

However…I noticed an interesting quirk in all this while assembling timelapses from the Nikon D7000.

A native .NEF file from the D7000 is 4928 x 3264, and while you can open them willy-nilly with Preview and Aperture, Quicktime Player 7 really doesn't like them because they are rather large. You'll see a black screen. Converting them to something else, like a .TIFF doesn't seem to help.

So I tried an experiment to see what the maximum size is that Quicktime Player 7 can handle by opening the .NEF file in Preview and making it a bit smaller then saving it as a .TIFF and found that (for me at least on this one Mac) 41% reduction works.

42% didn't.

2020 x 1338 will open in Quicktime Player 7 while 2070 x 1371 will not.

So in order to load them into Quicktime Player 7 as an image sequence you'll need to reduce them by 41% en masse.

How To Open Nikon D7000's .NEF files in Photoshop

2011-05-16T18:45:00.005-04:00

We've been shooting a bit on a Nikon D7000 (I'll post about it's video capabilities later on) and the stills look amazing. However, Apple Digital Camera Raw Compatibility update which lets Aperture and Preview (and Quicklook) open the files, doesn't let Photoshop open up the D7000's .NEF files. Weird right?

Looking around you find this page at Adobe. Which has a plug-in to open all sorts of still image formats.

But if you read the page you'll see this:

"The Camera Raw 6.4 plug-in is not compatible with versions of Photoshop earlier than Photoshop CS5."

"Camera Raw 6 is not compatible with Photoshop CS4."

What that means is that Photoshop CS4 can't natively open the D7000's .NEF files.

What to do?

You can check here what the minimum version of the plug-in is needed to open files from your camera; in this case it's 6.3.

Next, you look here to see what the highest version of the plug-in your software supports is; in my case CS4 supports up to version 5.7. So, I'm SOL.

If this is you, you need to install CS5 in order to open them in Photoshop or convert them to something Photoshop can open which kinda defeats the purpose of shooting Raw in the first place. Nice right?

What and how to convert?

Head over to here to download Adobe DNG Converter software. Although it does retain all the information post conversion, I think this is a bit nuts; making me convert all the stills after importing them, it's an extra step and I don't like extra steps. So my solution is to get the production to buy a copy of CS5 which they actually did. Crazy.

So if you have Photoshop CS4 and a Nikon D7000 you basically have four options:

1. Don't shoot Raw format.
2. Shoot Raw format and convert them all to DNG.
3. Upgrade to Photoshop CS5
4. Use Aperture instead of Photoshop.

The Price of Blank Optical Discs Is Going Up

2011-05-16T18:20:00.000-04:00

Hardmac has an interesting post about the rising prices of blank optical media. Apparently as people use them less and less the idea is to raise prices to compensate while making fewer at the same time.

You Cannot Replace The Internal Hard Drive In The New iMacs

2011-05-10T18:59:00.001-04:00

UPDATE:

A company is developing a little bit of kit to enable hard drive replacement: the cBreeze (site in German).

It's beginning to look like the latest round of iMacs from Apple may be a poor choice for some users due to the fact that:

"As noted by OtherWorld Computing, Apple has implemented a new temperature sensor system on its latest iMac models that significantly hampers the ability of users to replace their original hard drives in the case of failure or a desire to upgrade. Without the custom 7-pin hard drive cable and proprietary firmware included on stock hard drives in the new machines, the new iMacs' fans spin to full speed and the machines fail to pass the Apple Hardware Test."

They have lots more info on it here, but the basics are that if you use a new iMac, and it's internal Hard Drive fails you can't really replace it on your own. It has a proprietary connector and custom firmware right on the drive itself.

More from them:

"From our testing, we’ve found that removing this drive from the system, or even from that bay itself, causes the machine’s hard drive fans to spin at maximum speed and replacing the drive with any non-Apple original drive will result in the iMac failing the Apple Hardware Test (AHT).

In examining the 2011 27″ iMac’s viability for our Turnkey Upgrade Service, every workaround we’ve tried thus far to allow us to upgrade the main bay factory hard drive still resulted in spinning fans and an Apple Hardware Test failure. We swapped the main drive out (in this case a Western Digital Black WD1001FALS) with the exact same model drive from our inventory which resulted in a failure. We’ve installed our Mercury Pro 6G SSD in that bay, it too results in ludicrous speed engaged fans and an AHT failure. In short, the Apple-branded main hard drive cannot be moved, removed or replaced."

Hard drives always fail in time.

It's like buying a new car and finding out that only the dealer can make an extra key for you...wait...my car is already like that...umm...

Apple has locked out another option for the customer (who should have the option of voiding their warranty if they so choose) who wants to replace a failing, failed or too limited in capacity or specs internal hard drive. Apple has effectively tacked on an extra bit of profit for themselves (replacing an internal hard drive) at the expense of customers for so far, what seems no valid reason.

Hopefully in time, the reason for this will make sense but as it stands right now it just seems rather unfair.

Soundtrack Pro's Temporary Files Folder

2011-05-10T00:50:00.000-04:00

If you find yourself suddenly running out of hard drive space while working with Soundtrack Pro check it's Temporary Files folder which is likely located at:

Macintosh HD/Users/[YOURACCOUNTNAME]/Documents/Soundtrack Pro Documents/Temporary Files

The one on the Mac I'm using here on the road is several gigs large with stuff from way way back.

Easy Shallow Focus with Point-N-Shoot Cameras

2011-05-09T19:36:00.001-04:00

Shallow focus is all the rage in print advertising because "It brings the customer closer to the product, ya know" or so they tell me. It's especially popular in food photography and once you notice it you'll see it EVERYWHERE.

Out on a shoot last week the producer wanted to see what some title cards looked like with some "flowery" stuff behind them, so they proceeded to take some photos with their smart phone and wasn't happy with the lack of shallow focus. That's because shallow DOF is tricky on small CCD cameras and they being a print person was used to seeing everything photographed with a razor-thin DOF.

I thought really hard on whether I should bring up the whole DOF vs small CCD issue but decided against it and ran outside to the hotel grounds and grabbed these shots:

With what? A very badly road-worn and banged-up Nikon S550.

It's an old trick I'm surprised I don't see more people using and works fairly well across the spectrum of little cheapy point-n-shoot cameras provided you can:

1. Turn on Macro Mode.

2. Zoom all the way in (but no digital zoom!)

3. Get a proper exposure

The "trick" is to let the camera focus in macro mode while you're optically zoomed all the way in. Tighter zoom is shallower DOF and Macro Reduces the DOF even more. These were just some quickie test shots but after some work in Photoshop they looked great as backgrounds for some title cards for this project.

It's not perfect as diffraction can cause the image to lose a bit of resolution but in a pinch you can get some interesting selectively focused images.

Now this doesn't apply to all point-n-shoots since they all use different designs, chips, software and whatnot but it's worth trying out if you need a more shallower Shallow Focus shot than one macro alone will capture.

Soundtrack Pro and removing Background Noise

2011-05-07T00:26:00.002-04:00

A few hours ago my buddy emailed me a .wav file of "cat riding in car" for his short film. It's more of his ambient soundscapes projecthing™ and who am I to question his genius.

Listening to it, it sounds more like a cat hiding under the seat in a small airplane with one of the windows down; plus there are some crackling noises which I've chosen to ignore.

He asked (he's actually a really good friend) if I could make it sound more car-like even though it was already recorded in a real car with a real cat. His chosen recorder (a small point-n-shoot) for the audio really isn't all that good so the audio needed some fixin'.

Soundtrack Pro has a great feature called Noise Reduction which takes a sample or "print" of a background sound like a hum or an AC unit or something and can do a really wonderful job reducing this constant sound while leaving the rest of the audio more or less intact.

It was of little help here since the bulk of the audio spectrum was airpl...car noise so it's on to more drastic and dangerous methods.

Here's the spectrum of the sound After and Before I reduced the car noise.

You can see the yellow near the bottom on the right untouched side.

That's the car's interior road noise. Yikes.

Noise Reduction wouldn't do much here without distorting the important sounds, mainly, those little yellow blobs you see in the green portion: that's the cat meowing about being car sick. The goal is to get rid of the yellow along the bottom (harsh car noise), keep some of the green (car noise) and the cat's little yellow blobs of complaint.

The first step was to run though a light Noise Reduction to just clean up the audio a bit. It doesn't do much in this case but, whatever.

1. Highlight a portion of the clip that has just the noise you want to remove. The longer the bit the better.

2. Process > Noise Reduction > Set Noise Print.

3. Command + A to select all (you're applying the "fix" to the entirety of the clip)
4. Process > Noise Reduction > Reduce Noise...
5. Monkey with it until you get something you think sounds okay.

Next up for me was applying the Channel EQ.

1. Highlight the whole clip with Command + A.
2. Process > Effects > EQ > Channel EQ

It looks like this:

The great thing about the Channel EQ is that you can drag around the EQ in real-time while the audio clip plays and refine your selections by moving the mouse up and down. Here you can see on the right the higher sounds have been brought up and on the left side the low rumble of the car has been brought down.

You can sweep with the mouse (button held down) and listen as the EQ does it's thing. That's how I located the rumble and eliminated most of it. There's still room to improve what's being removed but this is a good starting point for my friend to see if this is close to what he doesn't know he wants yet.

Again, you can toggle the button to the right of the volume slider to hear what effect the EQ has compared to the original audio clip.

This is just the very basics of this stuff. There are myriad ways to achieve the same thing, some better, some more complex, some just take longer. I'll post more as my friend hands me more stuff to fix.

Equalizing Audio Levels in Soundtrack Pro

2011-05-06T19:08:00.003-04:00

A buddy of mine is working on a short film and needs lots and lots of "ambient location soundscapes" (his term :) and a few of the recordings have wildly different volume levels.

For example one recording is a person whispering between bouts of a person yelling a speech and thunderous applause. Yeah, I know; could you get any worse for post-production? Well, I did have a client once ask me if I had a "color filter" and I was like, "Yeah?" because we do but they meant something that turns black and white footage into color. I just told them yes (always say yes) but that it's VERY VERY EXPENSIVE (always say it's prohibitively expensive when you want to say no).

So, not really sure what my friend wanted this little bit of audio to sound like because they didn't either I tossed it into Soundtrack Pro, removed the background hiss/AC Unit/whatever it is via a noise print, and then used the Compressor filter.

It looks like this:

It's under Process >Dynamics I think and what this little HUD does is basically, bring up low levels and bring down high (or loud) levels.

Set the Limiter Threshold to something like -6 or -3dB (don't forget to tick the blue box to activate this slider), monkey with the Gain so overall it's at a level you like and generally bring up the Compressor Threshold a bit to clear out some background noise.

Now, some audio people are undoubtedly reading this with one eyebrow raised but yes, I know what all this stuff does but this is Quick Fix Post Friday Madness.

See the little play button to the left of the volume slider? To the right of that slider is a preview button of sorts which will toggle the audio playback with and without this filter applied so you can see if you're making things sound worse or better; it's easy to mess with stuff so much and lose track of just how much you've changed things from the original.

Hit Apply to apply.

You'll see all sorts of fun adjustments happening and when I was done with this bit of audio the whispers were loud enough to hear but not overbearing, the applause was now less room rattling and a bit of the background hum was removed as well.

Sometimes on some systems there's a bit of a nasty bug with some of these effects. Occasionally you'll hit playback to see what your changes sound like and the resultant audio will be full volume and screeching from distortion. I don't know why. A few times toggling the play button usually resolves it, I'm told.

Solid State Drives are not Immortal

2011-04-25T13:26:00.000-04:00

Hardmac has some fun information about the life expectancy of solid-state drives (SSDs) here. After writing over 250TBs of data some of the cells are reaching their 10,000 cycle life expectancy limit.

The good take-away from this is that under normal* use SSDs should last reliable for years.

* I'm not sure normal use qualifies for video editors since we thrash drives with HUGE files often.

Timing Voice Overs with Handy (FREE) Apps on an iPad or iPhone

2011-04-21T17:52:00.001-04:00

I've been on the road for a few days and while shooting we've been roughing in some potential VO's to show the client.

I didn't realize it right away but my iPad doesn't have a built-in timer to time VO's to 60 & 30 seconds.

Here are two FREE timers I found that I dig:

1. Timer Z

Timer Z has an optional alarm when time is up and has a stress-inducing optional visual aid which frankly I love watching. It also has a great history log of times which you can email if you need to.

2. LabTimer

LabTimer can run 4 timers simultaneously which is more helpful than you'd think. Plus seeing the duration of past attempts is handy.

Not Showing Location in Titles on iMovie for iOS

2011-04-15T15:49:00.001-04:00

I've been playing around with iMovie on an iPad2 and noticed a little hassle. iMovie REQUIRES location services to be on in order to see footage that you've shot or transferred over from another project which is bonkers in my opinion.

It sees footage in two locations, btw:

1. Camera Roll
2. Synced iPhone Library (which you do via iTunes).

I'll post later on the steps to transcode stuff to ingest into iMovie for iOS.

Anyway, if you're in iMovie for iOS and add a title, often you'll see the location under your typed title. There's no one-button way to get rid of this.

But there is a simple workaround.

1. Double-tap a clip that has a text element with location text you want to remove.
2. Tap "Location"
3. Tap the Location listed.
4. Delete the location shown there and tap Done.
5. Click outside what is now called the "Edit Title" pop up window to dismiss it.

Done.

Find Footage Faster with Final Cut Pro's Find Window

2011-04-14T16:52:00.003-04:00

I'm continually surprised by what some editors I talk to don't know or know about but for some reason don't do or use.

When a deadline permits or there's just a vast amount of footage that was shot while I wasn't around I go through all the clips and even before pulling "selects" I label, color label and comment on bunches of it.

Why?

Because when you're sitting down with the script or director or both and are looking for footage you can now search for clips very quickly. Let's run though the ways:

1) In FCP, in a bin you know you can rename a clip. You can also second-click on it and rename the file to match the clips name and vice-versa. I have some naming conventions I have become attached to over the years when people forget slates: INT-S02-Bob-Single for Interior, scene 02, Bob's Single Shot or something like EXT-Building-Pan Left-Wide.

So go through and name all your clips to something helpful and descriptive. If you don't know what something is or who someone is give 'em a nickname: Yellow Building, Ball Cap Hammerer, Short Pants, whatever, just as long as you know what you're talking about.

2) Highlight a clip and hit Command + 9 for the Item Properties window. You'll see four tabs: Format, Timing, Logging and Film.

Format has a lot of helpful info about the clip.

Timing is what you'd expect. Length, In point, Out point, Duration and some other stuff which is also shown in other tabs.

Logging is the most helpful for organizing. We'll get into this in a little more detail in a little bit.

Film is again, similar to the others but a lot of these should be filled in when you ingest.

Now, go to the Logging tab and see all the blank space? You can fill that up with helpful and searchable info. Take Description for example. Click on the gray area where text should be to the right of the word Description. You'll see a text box magically appear with a happily blinking cursor. Type your description into here.

Be aware that since the OK button is the default, if you type then hit return you'll save your change and close this window. Try and get into the habit -if you're going to modify more than one field- of hitting the Tab key until you've filled in everything you want to.

Bizarrely enough unlike most other places in Mac OS X, hitting Shift + Tab does not go back to the previous text entry box. I have no idea what it doesn't.

3) Close the Item Properties window and then add some info for other clips. Any field that you want to. Close the Item Properties window. Now, with the Bin as the active window tap Command + F for the Find window.

Search: Set this to whatever suits your needs. Usually the default is enough though.
For: All Media. Again change this if you need to. This is actually a quite powerful setting as you can search for All, Used or Unused Media.
Results: Replace Find Results starts your results out anew upon each search. I find this one most helpful.

Below those you'll see "Any Column" and "Contains". This is just like Find in the Finder. But, take a look at all the things listed under Any Column. Anything you change in the Item Properties Window you can search for here even if it's not listed. If it's not listed just use "Any Column."

4) Hit Find All. Why not Find Next even though it's the default? It's a personal preference for me; I like the little window of everything found in that search to pop up. I wish Find All was the default button actually.

So you can see that once you fill in some basic info into the Item Properties window or at the very least name all your clips something helpful, you can search and find them all at once quickly and easily.

I've found this to speed up editing overall tremendously. At the bare minimum I'll name all the clips, green label all the stuff I think is best, red label everything I think is useless then with a quick Command + F and a search term I have all the EXT or INT or CU or ECU or Wide or Tilt or Pans listed. Or "Bob INT" or "Building Pan" or whatever.

The search is a handy way to exploit your own organizational styles. I've been startled by some client's reaction to how quickly I can find a very specific clip seconds after they ask for it while we're editing together.

Explore around the Item Properties window in conjunction with the Find window and see what suits your organizational method best.

Final Cut Pro X killed iMovie Pro

2011-04-14T14:48:00.000-04:00

Back in the day the VCR was going to kill movie theaters, music videos were going to kill radio stars, 3rd party phones were going to kill Ma Bell and audio cassettes were going to kill the record industry all together. And home cooking is killing the restaurant business.

I've been keeping up with the development of FCPX for a while now and everything clicked when I recently watched someone using it and thought, "That's iMovie Pro."

I've given this a lot of thought since then and have come to a conclusion: it isn't.

The hue and cry over the new GUI, greater ease of use and lower price point I think really brings one thing into focus: editors, like all creative people like their tools to be complex. Complex means that you've put in the effort to learn it, even master it and since it's complex -speaking strictly software here- THEY need YOU. You can command a price for unleashing your knowledge. It props you up; makes you worth that rate because you know what Shift + Control + O does.

But, honestly, a large part of what editors do, in my experience, is routine, repetitive and frankly, boring. Clicking buttons, dragging stuff around isn't rocket science. The naysayers, referring to FCPX as iMovie Pro feel threatened, it's as simple as that. But why?

Now anyone can grab an affordable copy of FCPX from the App Store and with all it's fancy new automated this and that be editing before everything's even ingested; hence editors are obsolete, right?

I don't believe this to be true. You have to look at this from a wider context. FCPX is a natural progression of editing, it's Apple not only heading in the direction all digital media is going but they're leading the charge. Remember the lamentations of the end of floppy disc? The death of ADB? The lack of an optical drive on a MacBook Air? What do you mean my Performa doesn't come with a 56k Modem?

By placing powerful tools like FCPX into more hands, more hands are empowered. It levels the playing field in many ways but not all. Cheap, simple to use software is no replacement for raw talent and interest. This is why I think so many people on so many message boards are decrying FCPX: their creative talent, or lack thereof, will meld with coming tide of new FCPX users and they know they have little to help them stand out. I really believe it comes down to talent.

I've recently had some very interesting conversations over this over too many cups of coffee and FCPX at $300 does away with two things: the person who (likely pirated FCP) does adequate work for a quick paycheck and could have used FC Express or iMovie instead, and the person who invested in Final Cut Suite hoping that the high price would re-coop itself over time since few others could afford it.

Have you noticed how many people are unloading their original AVID systems in the past handful of years? One friend of mine offered to sell me his SCSI-based Avid system, computers, monitors, speakers and all for $2500 just to get it out of the office. Tack an extra zero onto that and that's what he paid for it originally.

Back in the day (and still true today somewhat actually) one or two people in a town would buy a Stedicam rig at a HUGE cost. They'd rent it and themselves out as an operator and make pretty decent livings just being an operator. They invested the big dollars and reaped rewards later because few people could afford the large initial purchase. Today Stedicams are cheaper and more and more places have them. Several editors I know have at least one, sometimes two; but they're great operators. The point is, even though the hardware is affordable (or at least more so) just owning something doesn't make you skilled at using it. Some of my friends are great Stedicam operators and are hired out for their talent even though the company hiring them could easily buy their own Stedicam.

You see, having the expensive hardware automatically sets up a demand. You have it, they need it, they rent you and the equipment. It's a simple formula. It worked.

In my younger days I owned an Arri SRII and would rent it out with me as the operator. I made a killing. Digital cameras make that less lucrative now days, but the skill at being an operator, DP, director, etc…endures. Anything rare, hard to obtain or unique is valuable. Intangibles are valuable as well.

So when the price point of the hardware or software drops to a level that everyone can afford it what's left? Skill. Creativity. Interest. Talent.

There are only 26 letters in the english alphabet but not everyone is a pulitzer prize winner.

FCPX doesn't hand-hold creatively as iMovie does now. There's no automated trailer building and the like. What it does do is act more like a 3rd assistant editor than anything else; that saves time (I bill by the hour sometimes as well, I know what you're thinking) which makes time for more creativity, exploration and problem solving. If FCPX chops my new project organization time down by even 20mins that's HUGE.

I believe that those who are crying foul about the simplicity and perceived hand-holding of FCPX don't feel a threat against their livelihood, they're actually fearful that their lack of talent, creative problem solving and interest in editing as a profession will be uncovered. It's easy to go through the motions in any project, it's faster and less stressful to turn in something good enough. However, now anyone can. If anything, iMovie was more of a threat to FCP editors than anything else.

I see FCPX as making talent and quick turn around of a project command a higher price because when the restriction of high-priced software is eliminated what's left is the final project, how long it took and how good it is.

Someone's Flip video assembled in iMovie and shown at their corporate retreat is only a threat to those editors and videographers who distilled down their work to that level using better cameras and FCP instead.

I see FCPX and it's greater usability and very affordable price point as separating the wheat from the chaff. Clients will always pay for talent, creativity and quality because they can slap together mediocrity quite easily on their own.

It's the difference between in-house good enough and outsourced "I didn't think it would turn out this good."

FCPX doesn't eliminate the need for experience-based knowledge. All those crazy formats, connectors, output formats, compatibility and long list of fixes from past catastrophes are still valuable.

So what if an edit takes one click now when it used to need three and a key command? The result is the same. You know what they know now in terms of the basic machinations and the rules and like the old adage goes, once you know the rules you also know how to break them. That's also not to say that knowing all the intricacies of FCPX won't be valuable either.

Knowing a piece of software intimately actually escalates your thinking to a new level; you think in results rather than individual progressive changes. Ask any super Photoshop user; it's not that adding a bit of noise here will look like noise, it's that it'll combine with what they did before and after and look like photo-realistic rust or cloth or skin.

An example was a long, long time ago a friend built a project in Motion, saved it, packed up his equipment and headed to an extremely large convention to present it; ready for any final tweaks. He lands, the client asks for some very minor changes to the sample video they saw and my friend discovers that the laptop his company packed for him (I say company when I mean assistant) didn't have Motion installed, just FCP which was only used to load footage on-sets and not only that, it would barely run Motion if it were (even could be) installed. He did have the drive with the original media the client sent him weeks ago, however.

He called me in an absolute panic, literally tearing up as we talked. This was a HUGE HUGE client, international stuff, the presentation was listed on the event list and the CEO was there to present it. There was simply no time to ship out his HD and original laptop, or just buy anything (Apple store? Not built yet.) so together he and I worked in shifts, on separate portions of the project, re-building it entirely in FCP with about a forty two bajillion keyframes between us. We both knew the more dimly lit corners of FCP and keyframes and compositing and filters and etc… to re-create what he had originally done in Motion to really a surprising extent.

We render out our respective portions at a "slightly less than" full resolution to save time, merge them into one file and play it directly from the laptop in front of "a lot of people" and the client is pleased never knowing the sweaty sleep-deprived panicked 14 hours spent in a small hotel room upstairs huddled over a tiny underpowered laptop while the other person sketched out on paper what they'd do next.

Having FCPX ingest stuff for you, sort and catalog footage and help you out in all those little ways for $300 isn't never going to replace Raw Editor Know-how. It's going to accentuate skill, not hide the lack of it.

No real-time playback in Multiclip

2011-04-12T20:20:00.003-04:00

A friend is editing a two camera shoot using multiclip. The problem he's having is that there is no real-time playback when editing in multiclip no matter what he does. Out of complete desperation I drove to his place to investigate.

Looking over his project it all seems set up correctly but when you click on a clip in the Viewer it stops playback, playing via the Timeline or Canvas will not cause the clips in the Viewer to play but the thumbnails will update when playback is stopped.

Playing in the Viewer results in full-window playback of the currently selected (blue boarder) camera.

Digging around I noticed his clips are 720x402.

Suspecting that wasn't a multiclip compliant size somehow, I transcoded some clips (in the same codec) to 720x480 brought them into FCP, set the Canvas to "Correct for Aspect Ratio" and got better results.

Now, playback in the Viewer worked; it was no longer full-windowed but there was still no real-time. The Canvas would play or the Viewer, but not both concurrently.

Testing further I transcoded 60 secs of two of the camera angles to ProRes 720x480 and set Correct for Aspect Ratio. Now it all worked (well, the audio needed rendering and I didn't bother to check why); the Viewer and Canvas played in real-time together.

So the lesson here is frame size does matter. It seems that it must be a "standard" size and something listed (I guess) in the Easy Setup menu (Control + Q) to have real-time multiclip playback and editing.

I did lose Command + Z undo function on one test sequence but that seems like a FCP bug more than anything else. I did render the audio on this test sequence but Undo was still non-functional.

Looking at his Option + J (Button List) Keypad numbers are "Switch Video to Angle" while Command + (keypad number) is "Cut Video to Angle"

Super Quick Generic Backgrounds Part 2

2011-03-31T22:05:00.001-04:00

I mentioned one quickie way to make an on-the-spot-background here, so I thought I'd mention another fast way to produce unique backgrounds when you're limited by time and/or options.

1. Grab a still image or a freeze frame (Shift + N) from your footage. Pick something with colors that match the project you're cutting or at least fit the mood.

2. Dump it into the Timeline and add Gaussian Blur. Video Filters > Blur. Really just about any type of massive blur will work here. The key is to blur it by a huge amount.

3. Scale up the blurred image by a bunch, 300% or more even.

4. Keyframe it so it slowly rotates, or slides left or right or moves up or down, up to you. Slow adds the feel of it being animated when it's not. Experiment with different speeds and/or different areas of the image; you'll be surprised how animated it can end up looking.

It can work particularly well beneath some generic text or title cards. It may not be the prettiest but when the clock is ticking…

Keeping Hard Drives Spinning for Free (and fun)

2011-03-31T16:25:00.001-04:00

I've been "in the field", literally on-location and during setups I get bored. No internet per se, and not many games on the laptop I have sitting here. I've noticed that the external hard drives here will spin down after 5mins or so of inactivity and it's annoying to have to wait for them to spin up when I decide to do something in FCP, so I tried a few things to keep them spinning.

There are things out there like Disksomnia which are FREE and work but if you don't have internet and are as bored as I am you wanna start messing around.

One simple (yet fairly inefficient) solution I found was to have Quicktime Player loop a file that's placed on the drive that's spinning down.

1. In FCP drop in an audio Slug. Video Generators > Slug
2. Export it as an .aiff to the hard drive that keeps spinning down.
3. Open it in Quicktime Player and set it to loop (Command + L).
4. Hide Quicktime Player (Command + H).

It's not efficient because while it works silently in the background it will eat up a significant bit of CPU if you check it with Activity Monitor; but still, it's free and something that can be done with (arguably if you have the now optional QT7 install, installed) what you already have.

Fixing Offset Audio Levels

2011-03-31T01:29:00.002-04:00

MANY, many people will offset audio levels while on set to avoid having the audio peak. For example they'll set channel 2 to be lower than channel 1.

This way when the audio does peak, it'll peak in channel 1 but not in 2 so you have clean audio. It's a great zero-cost way to have a little insurance that you have clean un-peaked audio. But it's a pain to clean up in post if you don't know about it before hand.

Tip #1: Listen to the footage with a decent pair of headphones.

An edit I'm working with now has the audio levels all over the place. My guess is that when they were shooting the cameraperson adjusted the audio levels on the camera when he or she remembered to; it's not consistent at all.

Here's my quick fix for it…after it's been dropped into a timeline. Ideally you'd only set one target audio track in the Timeline then center and boost from there but if your assistant didn't check the audio with headphones before hand…

In this case I only need channels 1 & 2.

1. Highlight the clip with the offset audio levels. In this case Ch1 is GOOD Ch2 is BAD.
2. Hit Option + L which is Toggle Stereo Pair. You'll see the "bow ties" on the clip vanish.
3. Hold down Option and click on the BAD channel, in this case Ch2. This lets you highlight just one of the stereo tracks.
4. With the BAD track as the only thing highlighted hit Control + B for Toggle Clip Enable. This will un-enable that channel. Disenable? Nonenable?
5. Hold down Option and click on the GOOD channel.
6. Now, hit Control + . (period). This will Pan Center the audio track.
7. If you need to boost it's level you can:

A: While it's still highlighted hit Control + + (plus) or - (minus) to bring it up or down 1 dB at a time, or use Control + ] (right bracket) or [ (left bracket) to bring it up in increments of I think, 3 dBs at a time.

B: While the clip is highlighted hit Option + Command + L to adjust Levels… (Unless you know the dB of the clip as is I suggest using "Absolute" here)

C: Head to Modify > Audio > Apply Normalization Gain (this does not have a key command by default, unfortunately) This will set the loudest portion of the audio to what you tell it here.

Be aware that if you try to set the audio tracks back as a stereo pair via Option + L after you make adjustments you'll undo most of the audio work you just did. I just leave them un-stereo-paired.

I prefer trying these in this order as usually option A works for me.

Video Editing Is Everywhere

2011-03-29T13:35:00.001-04:00

First Youtube released rudimentary video editing capabilities, then we had iMovie on iPhone and iPad and now Vimeo has a video editing app for iPhone (and iPad?).

"An easy-to-use video editor

• Capture video with focus control and grid alignment
• Combine, edit, and trim your videos
• Add transitions, titles, and effects
• Add music and recordings
• Control volume levels
• Save edited videos to your camera roll or upload directly to Vimeo

The whole Vimeo experience

• Watch and manage all your existing Vimeo videos and download them to your camera roll
• Easily upload your raw footage or edited creations in HD or SD
• Pause and resume uploads
• Replace existing videos
• Edit title, description, tags, privacy and credits
• Share with Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, Email or SMS
• Add your clips to your Groups, Channels and Albums
• Stats on daily plays, likes and comments"

We're going to be seeing on-set editing more and more I'll bet; rough cuts right then and there. I've already experimented a bit with this just goofing around on set and I can see it coming into it's own soon. I just loathe the day that clients want to see a rough cut the same day as the shoot and expect it to be sent to them before the crew heads home.

How To Convert .MOD files for Final Cut Pro

2011-03-23T18:58:00.001-04:00

I've mentioned .MOD files before but thought I'd just update a bit of my workflow when using them.

I'm getting ready for a multi-cam project that involves many, many small Cannon cameras (all synced) which create troublesome .MOD files.

Now a .MOD file is just an mpeg2 file with another name. Look at a .MOD file using the File command in the terminal and you'll see:

"MOV001.MOD: MPEG sequence, v2, program multiplex"

So, it really isn't anything special but Final Cut Pro won't ingest them.

What happens if you rename one to say .mpg? Quicktime will open it (not sure if Perian helps here or a default install will do) and will report that it's an "MPEG2 Muxed @ 29.97 fps.

After renaming it FCP will ingest it but, as it's a Muxed file, there will appear to be no audio tracks; the same goes or when it's opened in Quicktime.

You must convert -actually transcode- it and my transcoder of choice in this case would be MPEG Streamclip.

Open the .MOD file in MPEG Streamclip and hit Export. But make sure that you've set it to the correct aspect ratio because depending on the type of camera and what it's set to the image may be 4:3, 16:9 and /or Squeezed…or not. That's what the handy "Preview" button is for. Oh, you don't need to rename it in order to transcode it.

I like to transcode them to ProRes (especially for multi-clip editing) but the export format is up to you. I recommend testing a small file (or portion thereof) first for testing your export settings.

Moving Just the Video of A Linked Clip Up One Level

2011-03-23T12:23:00.001-04:00

Let's say you're cutting a long green screen project and during editing you forgot to set your target track to something besides V1 so you don't have a lower track to put the green screen background on.

You need to move all the video up at least one track but all the video is Linked to it's audio; how can you move just the video up a track quickly without Unlinking and Relinking the audio?

1. Hit Shift + Z to show the whole Sequence in the Timeline.
2. Hold down Option then click and drag-select just the video portions of the footage.

Holding down Option while you click on Linked footage temporarily Unlinks them. You'll be able to highlight just the video of Linked footage (or audio if you so choose).

3. Now, with just the Video highlighted, let go of the mouse and hit Option + Up Arrow which will move the highlighted video up one video track. Obviously make sure that the track above it is empty.

Now you have your video on V2 (or at least not on V1) and it's still Linked to it's respective audio.

Name Clips while They're Playing in the Viewer

2011-03-23T12:05:00.002-04:00

You can begin playing a clip in the Viewer and while it continues to play you can rename the clip in the Browser which can speed up organizing a project.

I'll double-click a clip in the Browser, then tap the spacebar to play it.

Click on the clip in the Browser, type in the name I want then (for once you shouldn't use a keyboard command to return to the Browser as it will stop playback, use the mouse here. Yeah, I know…) hit Return.

Then hit Down Arrow to highlight the next clip then Return to load it into the Viewer, then Spacebar to begin playing it.

Use the mouse to click on the file's name in the Browser and begin naming…wash, rinse, repeat.

So the pattern is:

1. Double-click clip in the Browser
2. Hit Spacebar
3. Use mouse to click on file name in Browser and (re)name
4. Hit Return
5. Hit Down Arrow
6. Hit Return then goto step #2.

To stop playback after you name the last file I have the habit of hitting Command + 1 to highlight the Viewer but you can stop playback many other ways without using the mouse.

Turning Markers into Subclips for Batch Exporting

2011-03-23T01:26:00.000-04:00

You've made a bunch of Markers along a long clip and now want to Batch Export them and find that you can't because Batch Export in the Menubar is grayed out and right-clicking on them in your Bin doesn't show Batch Export either.

No problem; you have two simple solutions:

Solution #1:

Highlight all the Markers you want to Batch Export and hit Command + U which will turn them all, instantly, into Subclips. They'll be loose in your Bin so prepare for the mess early by naming the Markers something helpful before you do this.

Then Batch Export away.

Solution #2:

Create a new Bin (Command + B) in FCP's Browser and then drag your Markers (helpfully named) into your new Bin and they'll automagically turn into Subclips.

I like this method because it helps a project stay organized in the Browser window.

Youtube's New Stabilization Feature and Rolling Shutters

2011-03-22T16:49:00.002-04:00

Youtube has launched some new stabilization and 3D features and I thought the stabilized example was particularly interesting.

You can clearly see it zooms in on the image a great deal to avoid showing the frame edges as it stabilizes and produces (evident in the very beginning and near the end as well) the quite interesting problem of stabilizing video taken with a rolling shutter; specifically how the buildings are swaying back and forth a bit while everything else is mostly stable. It's fascinating that stabilization technology is now free, available to all when it was only once available to police, military and NASA which, back then, didn't have to deal with the amount of wobble and smear that modern rolling shutter cameras produce.

It effectively makes the footage look artificial or somehow doctored which for my money, is the exact opposite of what you want your real footage to look like after trying to improve it. I can imagine, in the near future, people recording news events and whatnot and people calling foul that the footage was doctored somehow before we all get used to clips stabilized like this.

It's interesting how new technologies like this, which improve footage in one aspect, yet can cause issues in interpretation and believability overall, actually expand our "film language" once they are accepted. We as an audience have grown accustomed to shaky poorly shot footage but as technologies continue to improve and become cheaper to produce and buy, and as CPU's become more powerful, distributed and cheaper altering the footage becomes easier and hence our internal language which helps us interpret what we see continues to evolve.

I suspect there will be a flurry of people pointing at buildings seemingly swaying in a gentle breeze and crying out then, in time, the voices will subside and we'll collectively accept it as the new new thing and move on as our visual filters acclimate and block out the anomaly for us. That is, until someone uses the effect against us on false and/or doctored footage in order to give it that "real" feel of everyday stabilized rolling shutter footage.

QuickTime shows a 720 Video as 1248 X 702

2011-03-21T15:53:00.004-04:00

You open a video and notice that it's Info window shows it as 1248 x 702 rather than 1280 x 720; what's going on?

It's a documented "feature" in QuickTime. I'm not sure why it gets set wrong but recently I was handed some footage and only after editing did I happen to notice the size shown was wrong. In fact Apple recently monkeyed with this setting.

What's going on is that QuickTime 7's "Conform aperture to" setting is set incorrectly. It's likely set to "Clean" rather than "Production". (Personally I think it should default to Production but that's me). However Apple believes differently:

"Additional Information

Note: QuickTime Player in Mac OS X v10.6 always displays movies using the Clean aperture mode."

The main reason I don't like this is because it tends to crop the image and for production that means seeing someone clear the frame or not clearing it…by pixels. From an editing standpoint, things like this affect the timing of the edit which in turn affects the mood of the edit so it's not just me expostulating for no reason.

What to do?

Open the QuickTime clip in QuickTime 7 and hit Command + J for "Show Movie Properties", then click on "Presentation" then at the bottom of the window look for "Conform aperture to:"

Checkmark it if it's not already, then set the pull-down to "Production".

Save.

I'm still looking for a way to do this to a multitude of clips simultaneously reliably.

How To Crop A QuickTime Movie

2011-03-21T03:03:00.004-04:00

Cropping a QuickTime Movie is a hassle; but there are some ways to go about it to make it slightly less hassleful. (yes, I just made up that word)

A: Use an image editing program to make a mask.

1. Open the movie file in QuickTime and hit Command + C to Copy it. (You're actually just copying a frame)
2. Launch your image editor and paste in the clipboard's contents (the frame of your video file) into a new document. Make sure the document size is the same size as the image you just pasted.
3. Using the Selection, Paint Bucket, Fill or whatever tools you have available make the part of the video you want solid black. Make the part of the video you want to crop (to go away) solid white.
4. Save out your image as a .jpg or .gif or whatever format you like.
5. Open the movie to be cropped in QuickTime 7 if it's not already, and then hit Command + J for "Show Movie Properties".
6. Click "Video Track" in the top portion of the window.
7. Click "Visual Settings" in the lower portion.
8. Under "Mask" on the left hit the "Choose…" button. (or, even easier, drag your mask image file into the Well here.
9. You'll INSTANTLY see your opened QuickTime movie crop to the mask.
10. Notice that both the Movie Properties and QuickTime Player windows have "unsaved" dots in the close widget. Close the Movie Properties window.
11. Export away.

B: Use MPEG Streamclip.

1. Download and install the FREE program MPEG Streamclip if you don't have it already.
2. Open your QuickTime clip in MPEG Streamclip.
3. Hit Command + E for "Export to Quicktime".
4. At the top of the "Movie Exporter" window that pops up under "Compression" select the codec you want. (yes, you may see ProRes 422 listed twice; no I don't know why. It's likely the bottom one is actually ProRes HQ, but that's just a guess)
5. Monkey with all the rest of the options there if you know what your'e doing. If you don't, don't touch.
6. Near the bottom, above the "Presets…" button Checkmark the "Cropping:" checkbox.
7. At the end of this line you'll see a pulldown. You'll probably want to leave it on "Destination".
8. Now, how the heck do you know what numbers to put into here? Open the SAME QuickTime clip you're cropping in QuickTime 7. Yes, really.
9. Make sure it's full size and then hit this key combo: Command + Shift + 4 which will let you take a screenshot of a portion of the screen. Click-N-Drag out a box that has only what you want the exported QuickTime movie to have. Let go of the mouse. You'll have a screenshot on your desktop.

Note: You can just watch the cursor here to get the numbers right before you let off the mouse but it's up to you.

10. If you didn't memorize the numbers the cursor showed in step 9 before you let off the mouse go and look at the Get Info of the screenshot (on your Desktop) that you just took. Depending on how you have your Finder options set up, you make see the size of the image listed under it or next to it. If you don't, highlight it, tap Command + I for "Get Info" and look for "Dimensions" under "More Info:"

Lets just say it's 604 X 636, for fun.

11. While you have your QuickTime clip opened in QuickTime hit Command + I for "Show Movie Inspector" and jot down the size under the "Format" line. Let's say ours is 830 X 876 to make things interesting.

12. MATH TIME!!!! Now we can rough in the crop numbers.

For the top to bottom take the actual height and subtract the desired height: 830 - 604 = 226. Now divide (we're distributing it equally) it by 2 and we get 114.

For Top and Bottom in MPEG Streamclip's Cropping line enter 114.

Now for the side to side: 876 - 636 = 240 and divided by 2 that equals 120. Type 120 into both the Left and the Right boxes in MPEG Streamclip.

13. Hit the bottom-left "Preview" button at the bottom.

Is it close? Told you we roughed it in.
Adjust the cropping numbers until you're happy.

In my test my final numbers were:

Top: 114 Left: 120 Bottom: 127 Right 124
instead of:
Top: 114 Left: 120 Bottom: 114 Right 120

Oh, and fee free to monkey with the Center options in this window as well. The Positive Numbers in the first box will move your image to the RIGHTWARDS while Positive Numbers in the second box will move your image DOWNWARDS.

Honestly, I'm not sure why it's off like that but I've used this method to rough it in for a while. I discovered it when I was on a company's Mac that didn't have an image editor at the time and the IT people (Grrr…) REFUSED to allow me to install an image editor to make an image mask with.

Sure there are other ways but they usually involve people mentioning VisualHub which is getting mighty long in the tooth and is totally unsupported now (sniff…) or they're even more convoluted than these two methods. If you have another way you like please pass it along.

QuickTip: Keep a flash drive on in your pocket with Gimp installer (it's FREE) on it but it's not much help if you don't have Admin access to the machine anyway. There are ways around this though.

Viewing Files While They Are In The Trash

2011-03-21T01:53:00.000-04:00

Here's a quick one:

A file is in the Trash, you double click it and get the familiar "The Document Can't Be Opened Because It Is In The Trash" dialog. What to do?

Sure you could drag it out of the Trash but unless you know or Get Info to find out where it was you may have to copy it someplace which, if it's a large file, may take up time and space.

You could use the "Put Back" command but won't show you where it went.

A: You can use QuickLook (Spacebar while something is highlighted) to preview it if the file type is supported.

B: You can also view the Trash in Column View and preview a file with the Preview column.

Ingesting & Importing A Screen Recording .mov into Final Cut Pro

2011-03-21T01:41:00.000-04:00

As if we didn't have reason enough to hate QuickTime X here's another:

You can't just ingest a Screen Recording you make into FCP. Nope. You have to convert it first to something else.

I suspect it's because of the odd frame rates that screen recordings are in. Take a look at this example:

8.23 FPS.

If you try and ingest it into FCP you'll see this:

What's going on? How can you load a QuickTime movie (a format by Apple) made by Quicktime X (software from Apple) into Final Cut Pro (Video editing software made by Apple)?

Insane, right?

I think it has something to do with the frame rate. Although I can't fathom why, FCP seems to want some "normal" frame rates in this case.

Test #1 - Export using QuickTime 7 to H.264 @ 29.97 FPS

Result: FCP will accept.

Test #2 - Export using QuickTime 7 to H.264 @ "current" FPS (8.23)

Result: FCP will NOT accept.

Test #3 - Export using QuickTime 7 to ProRes (non HQ) @ "current" FPS (8.23)

Result: FCP will NOT accept.

Test #4 - Export using QuickTime 7 to ProRes (non HQ) @ 29.97 FPS

Result: FCP will accept.

Bonus Test #1 - Export using QuickTime 7 to ProRes (non HQ) @ 8 FPS

Result: FCP will accept.

Bonus Test #2 - Export using QuickTime 7 to H.264 @ 8 FPS

Result: FCP will accept.

I have no idea why QuickTime X records Screen Recordings at a frame rate that FCP doesn't like. Likewise, I have no idea while FCP won't accept certain frame rates, but at least there's a work-around.

Btw, this is FCP 6.0.6. I haven't tested it under FCP 7.x yet.

I'd recommend transcoding your Screen Recordings into ProRes at 8 FPS which will make them a bit smaller compared to 29.97 (obviously) and less CPU intensive.

2011 MacBook Pro's Are Locking Up Under Load

2011-03-20T12:45:00.001-04:00

I had a few calls about laptops locking up while on location while editing, running prompter software, audio recording etc... and it turns out it's a Thing™. You can read the pretty long (30 pages so far) post about it here.

My guess is it's too much thermal paste like in the past but thats an off-the-top-of-my-head guess.