Final Cut Studio, Avid, Adobe, and Video Streaming

I know it seems pretty obvious, but someone asked me the other day, "What do you mean by handles?"  Handles in Final Cut Pro are basically the extra frames of unused video or audio that are on either side of the In & Out points in an edit.  Think of it like a rolling pin, where you have those 2 handles on either side of the actual part you use.  More of a shooting technique than an editing technique, but in alot of cases you are performing both jobs; and if you're not, you want to make sure your camera person is doing this too.  Recording an amount of tape before the action starts and after the action ends is essential for creating those "handles".  A good rule of thumb is at least 5 seconds on either side.  You really need these especially when you're using cross dissolve transitions, or a fade in or out before or after your clip.  If you start recording right when the action starts, you won't have enough footage to "fade in from black".

Understanding Handles is important before getting too deep into trimming clips.  In order to extend a clip in the Timeline to a longer duration, you need to have that extra media available.  An easy way to check if you have enough media to trim is to double click on a clip that is in the Timeline.  You can see the available header and tail areas that you can use for trimming purposes by loading the clip into the Viewer.  This means you can extend the clip beyond its edited length within the sequence.  Once you have determined that a clip has enough material to trim, you can extend the clip by the duration of the available handles.



Note that the sprockets here means it is a clip from the Timeline.  Keep reading for another tip...

Final Cut Assistant is a freeware program available from Apple to help you make the most out of your Final Cut Pro system.  All the little annoying things you have to mess with in Final Cut Pro are all put together in a nice little package for you.  Functions included are listed here.





New Empty Project lets you avoid Untitled project files and unnamed sequences in your projects.  Use it everytime you start a project to name it.

Reset Final Cut Pro is like trashing your preferences.  Reset gets your user preferences back to their original state.

Restore from Backup allows you to choose from any of the available earlier versions of your User Settings.

The "Backup" that you are restoring is created when you "Save User Settings..." The Backup contains Window, Keyboard, Column, & Button Bar Layouts, as well as Favorites and User Preferences. This is much easier than saving each of these settings individually. The Backup is a .zip file located @ User/Backup/com.apple.FinalCutPro. The file name can be changed to a user's name for example. On a system where multiple editors use the the same OS user, this is a great way to maintain multiple User Settings. Personally I intend on coping the zip file to my iDisc so I always have access to my User settings.

 

Back Up Now backs up your User Settings

Deactivate Final Cut Studio allows you to deactivate it in order to move it onto another computer.  It removes licensing information without actually uninstalling Final Cut Studio.

Configure OS X for Final Cut Pro:  This is huge; sets your screen saver to never, and sets the hard disks to sleep never

The rest of the functions within the menu are pretty self-explanatory.  Even though all of these functions are available thru the Finder, it's nice to have them all wrapped up in a bow for you.

Once downloaded, Final Cut Assistant has it's own little icon in the Menu Bar for activation.



Final Cut Assistant is quite effective and will no doubt become part of your everyday editing process.

Layered menus in DVD Studio Pro can allow you to create menus with far more sophisticated-looking buttons than the native DVD standard allows.  Unfortunately, this extra functionality comes at a cost.  The layered menus that you create in DVD Studio rely on some behind-the-scenes tricks to work -- and this can make them play back in unexpected ways when viewed on computer DVD players.

Symptoms
When you play back a DVD with layered menus on a computer-based DVD player (but not in DVD Studio's Simulator), and you try to navigate the menu using your mouse, you have to click a button once to "select" it, and then click it again to activate it. 

The menu behaves normally:

• in DVD players, and
• in most software, when you use the arrow keys rather than the mouse to navigate it.

After the jump, the explanation ...

The term 'interlaced video' may cause chills to the seasoned video editor.  There are a variety of ways to 'deinterlace' video, but depending how you go about the process may lead to inferior results. 

Today, you'll mostly likely encounter an 'interlacing' problem when viewing 'standard defination' mini-dv video on the web, or viewing a QuickTime file playing SD media on a computer screen.

I stumbled upon a free program called 'Deinterlacer' by JES Schotsman.  So, I ran through a quick test using it's default parameters.  Here are the results.  Wow!, I'm sold.

This is a typical example of what an interlaced frame looks like from an interlaced SD or HD video source.  Notice how the image looks blurry from displaying both fields of video on a single frame.



Notice the difference, after the video has been deinterlaced.  You'll also notice that 'JES Deinterlacer' also runs a color correction algorithm to automatically for color contrast.