Final Cut On iPad Rumors Begin

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.

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

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.

Video Editing Is Everywhere

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.

Shooting and Editing on an iPad without using iTunes

An interesting question was posted the other day on this post.

Basically, the question is if there is a way to shoot footage and edit it on an iPad without having to use iTunes to sync or in fact, any computer at all: just cameras and an iPad with iMovie.

Now, I don't have all the stuff on-hand to test this but this is what I would try first:

1. Set up your iPad with iMovie.
2. Buy the Camera Connection Kit from Apple.

"The iPad Camera Connection Kit gives you two ways to import photos and videos from a digital camera: using your camera’s USB cable or directly from an SD card. iPad and the Camera Connection Kit support standard photo formats, including JPEG and RAW, along with SD and HD video formats, including H.264 and MPEG-4."

3. Buy or find a camera that shoots H.264 or MPEG-4 to SD cards. Something like the Kodak Zi8 perhaps (just guessing here)?

4. Shoot, then pop the SD card out of the camera and into the Camera Connection Kit that's plugged into your iPad.

I don't know for sure but you may have to reduce the quality (bit rate) or size of the video you shoot so the iPad can handle it. Again, I can't test this at the moment.

5. Ingest with iMovie? (I don't have the stuff here to test this, just thinking aloud)
6. Edit in iMovie

As for output I just don't know if the Camera Connection Kit is something iMovie can export to. The new iPad2 can easily plug into a TV, monitors and projectors via an HDMI cable apparently so there is a way to show videos to groups.

And there are some App Store apps that let you monkey around with video, meaning copy it to SD cards and the like but I've never tried them.

Another option would be to use AirPlay but I that requires an AppleTV or display that supports AirPlay.

Or you could use DropBox, perhaps, to upload your videos to where ever you need them. DropBox needs to be installed on the iPad at least.

Apple has a Knowledge Base article on iPad file sharing here.

And some clever people have noticed that the new version of iMovie can run on the iPad1.

Unfortunately I don't have the hardware here to test this out. Let me know how far off I am :)

UPDATE:

Apparently file names need to be formatted in a certain way (to import images and video clips into iMovie in some cases) and in a certain folder in most cases. More info is here.

Deleting Photos from (the) iPad (aka the Over-Syncing™ Nightmare)

Still on the road here. Yay. Is a difference between Waffle House, Waffle King and Huddle House? I can't tell anymore.

One of the producers here who is using the Camera Connection Kit (to manage stills for this documentary that I'm to incorporate into the documentary and which are EASY to delete) and an iPad asked me how to delete photos from an iPad that were originally synced via iTunes.

I told them I dunno, because I don't understand Syncing since it seem to always copy and re-copy everything back and forth every time you make the slightest change to the iDevice which I call Over-sync™.

So I looked it up on The Google…

Hey look, I didn't even get that far before The Google helpfully helped me out with some help. Apparently this is one weakness in Apple's highly touted streamlined syncing methods.

Deleting photos from an iPad is far more complex than it ever should be. And I'm not alone in this.

There are two ways. (and you cannot delete individual photos from (the) iPad if you originally put them there via iTunes unless you connect (the) iPad to the original computer that placed it there which defeats the whole point of a "mobile" device)

Deleting photos that you acquired on the iPad WITHOUT iTunes:

1. Go to Saved Photos
2. Tap the Arrow button on the top right.
3. Tap on the photos you want to delete. It can be more than one simultaneously. You should see little checkmarks on the ones you've tapped on.
4. Hit the Delete button.

Deleting photos that you synced to the iPad WITH iTunes:

(Note this may not work for you, like, at all)

In iTunes, with the iPad connected:

0. Goto the "Photos" section/button at the top of iTunes after you click on your iPad in the left-hand list.
1. Toggle (meaning UNCHECK) the "Sync Photos from" check box. You'll see a window asking you to remove photos.
2. Hit Remove Photos.
3. Hit the Sync button.
4. Wait a long time while iTunes does all manners of things that have no relevance to just deleting a few photos you synced prior to this.
5. Double check to see that the photos are actually removed.

See what Apple is making you do here to delete photos? They're making you delete them by NOT SYNCING them to the iPad. Not syncing = Remove Photos in this case. Make sense?

Essentially they're saying "Don't sync the photos that you already have synced between your computer (iTunes) and the iPad and that will remove them because you don't want them synced." Not Synced is Not on Both. Not synced is not the same on both. Why is this so complicated?

THE ACTUAL SCREWED-UP WAY (I had) TO DO IT:

1. Launch iTunes
2. Connect (the) iPad
3. Click on the iPad listing in the left-hand list
4. Click on Photos at the top-right of iTunes
5. Leave "Sync Photos from" checked.
6. Select "Selected Folders"
7. Make sure NONE of them are check-marked.
8. Hit Apply in the lower right-hand corner.
9. Wait a while for iTunes to waste your time while doing some kind of time-consuming whatever-it-is-that-it-takes I-didn't-say-backup needless over-syncing™ to just delete a few photos.

(Hint: It syncs at this point which means copying everything all over the place again [from (the) iPad to your computer, mainly] in a long at-least-three-step-process which will include copying over all your Apps AGAIN).

How silly and confusing and un-Apple-like is that? Btw, syncing (the Big Sync button you need to hit) will copy over any and all apps you've installed on your iPad so make sure your computer has the space for all this stuff being copied (ie..synced) to it. The laptop here ran out of room for the iPad's 8+Gigs of Apps during a sync leaving no recourse to fix it outside of outright deleting stuff from the iPad itself, then starting again at step 1.

I'm thinking that (the) iPad needs something like 10Gigs scratch room on a hard drive just to perform a sync or something.

Btw, fun fact: Apple Mail won't stay launched if the hard drive is full.

Here's the iPad's user guide. Page 48 is all about photos and page 132 are photo settings.

From page 48:

"Delete a photo: You can delete photos from the Saved Photos album, which contains photos you save from email or the web. For photos synced from your computer, you need to delete the photo from the album on your computer, then sync iPad again."

Page 132 has nothing related to deleting photos.

See what Apple did there? Delete the photo from the computer to delete it from (the) iPad. WHAT THE?

Apple has a Knowledge Base article on this here.

"To delete photos from your device

1. In iTunes, select the device icon in the Devices list on the left. Click the Photos tab in the resulting window.
2. Choose "Sync photos from."
   • On a Mac, choose iPhoto or Aperture from the pop-up menu.
   • On a Windows PC, choose Photoshop Album or Photoshop Elements from the pop-up menu.
3. Choose "Selected albums" and deselect the albums or collections you want to delete.
4. Click Apply."

There seems to be no way to manually manage everything between (the) iPad and iTunes. The screwed up thing is that since you have to sync things to manipulate them, if you only want to NOT SYNC your photos (to remove them from (the) iPad) you could un-check other sync options like Apps, but then you run the risk of removing apps from your iPad during the sync! It's absolutely crazy.

I'm not even going to attempt it because the Producer would likely throw me out of this moving car (which I've started calling Serenity and they don't get the joke) through a closed window and keep my Slurpee suicide which they made me pay for myself. I saw you looking at it!

If you know what un-checking the sync app box does when you sync, meaning if it removes apps from (the) iPad let me know. I'm very curious.

Like for me, myself here, now, if you toggle sync books, iTunes will warn me about removing videos. WHAT? HUH?

Would it be so hard to just have (the) iPad mount on the desktop, you open it up, open the photo folder, select all and then trash in the Finder? Or hey, here's an idea...ALSO LET IMAGE CAPTURE MANAGE PHOTOS THAT WERE SYNCED VIA ITUNES? Can't we all just get along? Would that be so hard?

Now I remember why I hated my original iPod-has-to-be-synced-to-one-folder-and-if-you-change-or-remove-that-folder-the-iPod-ends-up-empty-I-hate-sync Shuffle.

This is so tricky and un-Apple-like that people who don't get it (and I am still one of them) end up making their own convoluted and detrimental workarounds like this:

"The way I get around this is to sync photos then go through them one by one on ipad maybe resize for better composition then take a snap shot by pressing home button and button on top of ipad for 1 sec this puts the ones you want to keep into the saved folder. then i sync my next batch of photos from a different folder this deletes the old ones and replaces with new photos and I repeate the process. "


p.s. once you over-sync™ to delete your photos, you'll find some .ipa files in your trash that can take up significant hard drive space.

iPad and Image Capture

Using an iPad for photos is great, handy and fun but deleting them is a nightmare. I'll post on that in a bit.

However, a handy tip; for photos that you acquired on your iPad via the Camera Connection Kit, saving in Safari, Email etc… basically any way OTHER THAN SYNCING VIA ITUNES, you can use Image Capture.

Launch it while your iPad is connected and copy and delete images to your heart's content.

iMovie on iPad2

I'm on the road going from location to location for a documentary...as a passenger, and they won't let me drive!

All I've seen for the past 4 hours.

I could have made a documentary on telephone polls from my window seat here if it weren't for the fact that there's a surprising lack of diversity among them. Anyways…

In the Mystery Machine here (which is what I call the crew transport because the Producer told me to stop "audibly calling it the Rebel Transport and/or Honeywagon" (direct quote, btw) and because where we're going each shiny new day is a complete mystery to me) I've been doing roughs (rough cuts) of the previous day's footage to show the director. Which doesn't make sense since we can't go back to the previous location anyways. Anyways…

iMovie's been on the iPhone but now theres a bit in the most recent keynote where iMovie is demoed on the iPad2 and it's actually very interesting. Reverse-pinch (seriously, no one has come up with a better term? Unpinch? PullApart? Lot? Reave?) to move into "Precision editing" mode which while cool and necessary and everything, really seems more like a way to overcome the small screen and lack of precision cursor (your finger) control.

Can you frame-advance? Does it support TimeCode?

What I'm wondering is how and if you can get video into iMovie on iPad2 that's not shot by the iPad2 itself. Maybe you can iTunes it over, I dunno. (iTunes = verb) I'll know after mine gets here I guess.

UPDATE: I'm being told you can import footage from your Mac for use in iMovie on iPad2.

Handling of still images gets some tweaks but while there's the Ken Burns effect there's still no Jack Cole effect.

iMovie for iPad2 outputs to a few formats that can be pretty client-handy, which is nice; heck, even CNN iReport. (Rogue gorilla film crew kidnaps handsome and helpless editor!) I suspect I'll be seeing iPad2s with iMovie along with the requisite iPhones with iMovie (and seemingly endless parade of Flip cameras) on corporate shoots where the client (or their "Social Engineer" which is a glorified name for someone who gets highly paid to post stuff to Facebook on a companies behalf) makes a behind-the-scene video to show their friends (competition) then offers it to me 'in case there are any shots I may have missed.'

Really.

Didn't Social Engineering mean something else just a few months ago?

Btw, if anyone on a set mentions that their phone shoots HD "as well" meaning like the main camera we're using, I will hide that phone behind their car tire for them. (Hope you find it before you leave!)

While mirrored video output will be pretty helpful showing roughs to clients one of the best things about Sharing The Drama may be having one on set and doing a rough edit right there, in-hand, along side the "this is the big boy's camera, you don't touch" camera.

I'm still recommending clients steer clear of iMovie (to save my own wallet) and because of it's posterization issues.

Other things I'm wondering about concerning the iPad2: Camera resolution, memory and despite Steve Job's email about it being "on the way" there seems to still be no wireless syncing.

I am so bored.

VLC for the iPad

VLC is coming to the iPad. Suddenly the iPad seems a lot more handy for dealing with clients.

Using Unsupported Devices on an iPad

More and more clients seem to be carrying around iPads now and they like stuff on them that they can look at. Here's a quickie tip from MacOSXHints for getting stuff onto the iPad with the Camera Connection Kit.

Basically just make a folder at root of the device named "DCIM" and put things in there.

The full tip is here and some limitations are here.

Personally I can't stand how the iPad (and iPods I guess) create an ENORMOUS "iPod Photo Cache" folder  when you sync things to the devices (that are sometimes larger than the original files!) but that's another post/rant.

Video Editing on iPad

From tonight's D8 talk with Steve Jobs:

"7:12PM Walt: So you made iWork for the iPad. Do you see things that the iPad can't do?

Steve: Well, you can imagine all sorts of things for the iPad. Video editing, content creation...

Walt: Does it require a faster processor?

Steve: Well time has a way of working these things out."


Link here.