The people who spend their time debating the Final Cut vs. Avid argument should know that this battle wouldn’t be happening today if Microsoft didn’t try and bully Apple into dropping QuickTime for Windows.
For a good summary of the story, visit Roughly Drafted. The site was recently redesigned, so visit the new location for some deep, deep Mac fandom.
My friend Adrian asked for a Final Cut Pro tip today. He wanted to exchange one clip for another in the timeline, while maintaining the filters he applied to it.
1. Select the new clip in the bin and Copy it (Command-C).
2. Select the clip in the timeline and paste attributes (Option-V)
3. In the dialog box, check the Content checkbox
Yesterday I had the task to add an alternate language commentary track to a DVD. It was a quick job that didn’t need any finessing of levels. They wanted the original soundtrack to be ducked so the original atmosphere was still audible, but quiet enough that the new dialogue was clear.
On a 90 minute movie, it takes a while to render the audio every time the level changes on a track. I used the Range Selection tool (ggg) to choose a small section of a clip. When I then rendered the audio (Command-Option-R), only the part of the timeline that was selected was rendered – quicker than rendering all the audio for the 90 minute clip.
You can also use the Range Selection tool to apply filters to part of a clip without blading it.
Here’s a tip if you’re showing people your work using QuickTime Player: You can control playback using the J, K and L keys.
L – Play forward
LL – Play forward at double speed
LLL – Play forward faster
K – Pause
J – Play backwards
JJ – Play backwards at double speed
JJJ – Play backwards faster
K and L – Step foward one frame
K and J – Step backward one frame
The player is pretty good at playing the soundtrack at the same pitch even when playing the visuals quickly. These shortcuts work when presenting movies in full-screen mode. If the controller pops up, you can drag it off the edge of the screen or to another monitor.
On recent jobs I’ve been having to modify the motion and filter settings for many clips on my timeline. If was applying the settings from one clip to many, I could use command-X and command-option-V. Unluckily for me in this case, I’ve had to change only one slider in the motion tab or one slider in a filter tab – where I need to keep varied values in other tabs.
That’s where I can save some time by using the ‘playhead sync: open’ mode. This connects the viewer to the canvas such that the clip under the playhead in the timeline is automatically opened in the viewer. If you have a specific filter or panel open with the current clip, any clip you move to will have that panel open.
There is a pop-up at the centre of the top of the viewer and canvas, but sometimes Final Cut switches out of the mode, so I add the command to my keyboard layout using the Tools:Keyboard Layout:Customize command –
Walter Murch says that being an editor is about maintaining the plumbing, writing with the materials you’ve been given and performing to the rhythm of the story…
He presented at the LA Final Cut Pro User Group Supermeet at NAB earlier this year. He also explains how he edited the new Francis Ford Coppola film Youth Without Youth on Final Cut at DV resolution. The rushes all fitted onto a 2GB hard drive.
Find out more on this video podcast.
There’s lots of room for buttons on the iPod Touch home screen. How about:
Final Cut Server client: Stream the current version of an FCP project. Make selects and simple edits (a la iMovie 08) on an FCP project on a server somewhere using a gestural interface
AppleHome: stream my 100GB+ collection back home to me whenever I have Wi-Fi access
Sling-Pod: stream my TV tuner signal to me
Today I visited Ascent Media in Soho. I was there on a tour that was organised as part of the Soho Shorts festival. The festival organisers feel that celebrating the culture of Soho includes visits to the artists who work in the post industry.
On Tuesday I visited St. Annes Post, where we had the opportunity to play in a Da Vinci grading suite (UK: grader / US: colorist), and see Avid DS Nitris in action. Today we had a tour of sound and picture restoration, a big machine room and a new media department.
I suppose that Ascent (which includes Rushes and St. Annes) looks at the post world in a different way from Outpost Digital. Ascent uses ‘the right hardware for the job’. Each room is dedicated to a specific operation. The control surfaces for audio and grading stay in their chosen suites. Outpost Digital uses the flexibility of software to make each suite multi-purpose.
That means betting the business on Apple products. As Apple acquires an example piece of each stage in the post flow, Outpost Digital dumps the competitor product and buys the Apple solution. Apple buys Nothing Real’s Shake, Silcon Color’s Final Touch, Proximity’s Artbox. No need to buy the next expensive version of the high-end compositing, grading or asset management software.
The man from St. Annes says that more and more people are learning DS. The grader knows that Da Vinci is just a tool. People are adding more seats to their Unity networks.
We’ll see who wins out in the end. It makes little difference to me. As Ascent and Outpost Digital say, the most important thing for their business is finding the right people to operate all that technology. I wonder if I should get involved…
Although film production is mainly about the combined work of specialists, we editors sometimes need do some of the work others are responsible for. We add titles, do simple composites, a little colourisation and temp mixes. This is to make test screenings run more smoothly. It is easier to show audiences ‘good enough’ titles, composites and so on without a lack of such refinements distracting people from the story.
This means we have to create our own temp mixes: add simple sound effects and temp music while balancing the elements to make the dialogue clear.
For a long time I wondered about the pan settings in Final Cut Pro. I found it odd that all the stereo tracks I imported had their pan set to -1. If they were mono, the default pan was 0. That meant that I usually set all stereo tracks to have a pan of 0. I didn’t want all the sound to be on one side of the mix.
It turns out that ‘pan’ for stereo tracks in Final Cut should be labelled ‘spread.’ A value of -1 means that all the information from the left channel in the source gets sent to the left output channel, with the right going to the right. A value of 0 sends both left and right channels equally to both outputs. A value of 1 sends the left content to the right output and the right content to the left output.
This meant that when I ‘fixed’ the pan of my stereo music and room tone effects so that their pan value was 0, I was making sure that the music and room tone sound came from the centre of the stereo field. That’s not a good idea if you want to make your dialogue clear: because for temp mixes, you should always set dialogue to come from the centre (0) with nearly everything else coming from the left and right (-1). That makes your temp mix much clearer.
I think it would be a lot clearer if ‘pan’ was marked as ‘spread’ when a stereo pair is loaded into the viewer. Pity that the value of normal stereo is -1, which is a trap for new users – which is probably too late to change now.
That’s the thing about being a professional editor. You need to make it seem that whichever system people provide, that’s the one you are most happy to use.
So I’ve started writing a guide to Avid for Final Cut users. If any of it doesn’t make any sense, please comment!
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