Mon 08 Feb 2010 ACE Members Blog A couple of colleagues recently discussed with me problems using Final Cut Pro. One is a feature editor. The other does documentaries. I’ve most recently used FCP on an episodic series. Three different types of productions, but I think there are some common solutions. Solutions we’re planning on using on the second season of Warehouse 13 for the SyFy channel. read more...

Sun 07 Feb 2010 digitalfilms Modern digital acquisition, post and distribution wouldn’t be possible without data rate reduction, AKA compression. People like to disparage compression, but I dare say that few folks – including most post production professionals – have actually seen much uncompressed content. In fact, by the time you see a television program or a digitally-projected movie it [...] read more...

Fri 05 Feb 2010 ProVideo Coalition I see a lot of questions on the forums about Motion and transparency - primarily when folks try to export a movie from Motion to place over a video clip in Final Cut Pro. Here’s a few things to check, to watch out for, and a suggested workflow to make everything play nicely together. read more...

Wed 03 Feb 2010 alex4d: Editing organazized Spent most of the afternoon trying to chase down a Final Cut Studio bug. Today’s task was to generate an audio-only OMF version of my movie for the sound editor. I wanted to check the OMF included the handles and keyframes that I had specified. As Soundtrack can import OMFs, I tried that. My audio OMFs exported from Final Cut Pro 7 weren’t importing into Soundtrack Pro 3. There was no error reported, the command just did nothing. After some trial and error, I discovered that OMFs won’t import if they have any clips created using the Bars and Tone generator. read more...

Wed 03 Feb 2010 Studio Daily Blog There’s several utilities out there designed to help housekeep your Final Cut Pro install; doing things like backing up user data, resetting cache files and other system maintenance issues. A new one that I saw mentioned via Twitter is called Final Cut Assistant. It takes a little different approach as it installs a little drop-down menu to access its functions: read more...

Sat 30 Jan 2010 digitalfilms Production music is a subjective decision. You can never have enough resources to satisfy clients. I routinely use a variety of options, including SmartSound, Adobe’s tracks for Soundbooth, Apple’s tracks for Soundtrack Pro and the whole range of music from Killer Tracks, FirstCom and others. Now editors have a new option: MyMusicSource, which comes complete with [...] read more...

Sat 30 Jan 2010 The Editblog You got less than a week to get tickets for the next FCP User Group SuperMeet. This one is February 5 in San Francisco. It will be at the Robertson Auditorium with doors opening at 3:30 pm for the “Digital Showcase” and the show beginning at 7:00. Just looking at the event’s website it looks like there’s a great list of raffle prizes … as always. This one includes a Canon 5D Mark II, AJA Ki Pro, Adobe CS4 (!), Avid Media Composer 4 (!!) and several BlackMagic cards among a lot of other great goodies. Prizes aren’t the only thing on the schedule and this agenda looks to be a strong one: read more...

Sat 30 Jan 2010 Little Frog in High Def Are you going to MacWorld in San Francisco? Or are you going to be in the San Francisco area around the date of Feb 5, 2010? Or are you close enough that a drive there wouldn’t kill you? And do you like hanging out with other Final Cut Pro editors and networking and swapping edit war stories? If so, have I got a place for you to go! read more...

Fri 29 Jan 2010 Creative COW Blogs Our XSAN volumes are set up all wrong, unfortunately. Apparently the person put in charge of our XSAN implementation has had no training and now we're faced with some pretty major roadblocks. I had previously purchased a book on XSAN and he's studying it now. I also found some very helpful info on the xsanity wiki page which has some sample diagrams of some install examples. We have a few serious flaws in our layout that will cause us quite a bit of pain. However, if we don't suffer through the process of reconfiguring XSAN, we will certainly be on a path for failure with Final Cut Server. read more...

Wed 27 Jan 2010 Creative COW Blogs Being that we are mixing our Final Cut Server into an existing workflow, we have a couple of infrastructure issues to go over tomorrow. I'll be looking into these in even finer detail this evening. What I learned in the class is that Final Cut Server does not play well with the so-called magic triangle. This is a commonly used method by admins to sync up Open Directory (Mac server) groups with Active Directory (Windows server) groups. The bottom line is that we have to choose one method of user authentication or the other - we cannot hybrid the two. read more...