Final Cut Studio: June 2008 Archives

Have you have ever run into problems cutting something from your sequence and not being able to paste it in the track you want to?  To copy from one track and paste to another, you need to turn off the Auto Select control for the tracks below the track you wish to paste to. For example, if you copied a clip from V1, and you wanted to paste it into V3, you would need to turn of the Auto select controls in V1 and V2. This will force Final Cut to paste into the first available track. Another way to go about this is to Option click on the Auto Select control of the track you wish to paste to. This will cause the track you Option clicked to become the only one turned on. Keep in mind if you are copying a linked clip, FCP will paste either to the same track they came from if the auto select for that track is not turned off. In other words you need to assign a destination track for both Video and Audio before you paste.

The media management tool in Final Cut Pro can be quite confusing.  One VERY important thing to note is that the Media Management tool will not work with clips that do not contain time-code. 

To verfiy this, take a look at the Media Start Columnto make sure each clip has actual time-code values other than 00:00:00:00.  This is a real drag if you plan on using clips that inherently do not have timecode.  (i.e. background animations, music from CD's, and multimedia movies),

As you can see in this screenshot, these particular clips do not have timecode information.  Therefore the Media Manager will not work correctly with these clips.

Fortunately, there is a trick to add time-code back into the clips. 

You can use one of two methods.

#1  Edit all your clips to a sequence.  Set the sequence start time, and then export a self-contained QuickTime movie.  Then re-import the movie into Final Cut Pro.  The clip(s) will now work correctly within the Media Manager.  *Do not export using QuickTime Conversion, because it will not preserve the FCP sequence timecode. 

#2 For the die-hard tech geeks, you can use the QuickTime Developer tool to create a timecode track and manually change or add time-code information to each individual QuickTime movie.

After you've confirmed that all your clips have actual embedded timecode information, the Media Management tool will work correctly.

Okay, it's time to go geektoid on you!  There is a cool feature within Final Cut Pro that integrates a new feature in Mac OS 10.5.X (Leopard).  Here's how it works.

While running Final Cut Pro, navigate to the help menu and you'll see a blue search box.  Type in a specific phrase.  In this example 'mark'. Park over the list of choices and Final Cut Pro will automatically open up the appropriate menu for you and it will point to it.  Better yet, you can click on the search term and it will actually perform the function!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a great feature if you are an educator or trainer.  For the rest of us, it's just another geeky function.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have you ever noticed when you render motion effects in Final Cut Pro that the quality isn't always up to par? You may also notice a 'stutter effect' when zooming in and out of clip elements.

Recording audio key frames during play back is as simple as turning on a button. You will want to know your audio very well before attempting to perform this operation. You may even want to set some markers to help you know when to raise or lower your levels. If you wish to raise and lower your audio levels while in playing your sequence, the first thing you need to do is open the Audio Mixer from the Tools menu (option + 6).  The next step is to turn on the Audio Keyframe Record fnction, by clicking the Record Audio Keyframes (Shift + Apple + K) button in the upper right corner of the Audio Mixer. Place your cursor on the slider of the track you wish to adjust the level, and press the spacebar to start playing your sequence. As your sequence plays drag the slider up and down to the desired levels. Once you stop the playback the audio keyframes will be applied to the track. To apply changes to both channels of audio within the same audio track, you will want to make sure they are a stereo pair. To apply keyframes to all audio tracks at the same time, you will need to nest the tracks together and then apply the keyframes to the nest.

Yes, it's possible to create chapters (similar to regular chapters on a DVD) to videos in your iphone.  The trick is to save a standard QuickTime movie with embedded Chapter markers.  If you're not sure how to embed chapter markers into a sequence, click on the link. 

Do not use the standard iPhone export setting within QuickTime Conversion because it will not allow you to save the embedded chapter markers.

Take the QuickTime movie you've exported into Apple Compressor.  Don't worry, Apple Compressor will maintain the meta-data for the chapter markers. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Within Apple Compressor use the H.264 Preset for iPod and iPhone video.  That's it!  You'll now have embedded chapter points within your video clip on the iPhone.

 

 

To give your mattes more definition, you can add an outline in LiveType after adding a movie or image to your matte. In the Matte category of the attributes tab you can composite a movie or image into your whatever you have highlighted in the timeline. A matte in LiveType can be any glyph, graphic, or object. Many editors don't realize that you can place an item into your LiveType project, and matte to it. The object you place into your LiveType project needs to be on an alpha channel to be able to matte to it's shape. Keeping in mind if there is no alpha channel showing thru the object, it will be one solid matte.

iDVD allows you to create chapters, but is limited to where you can place the actual chapter points.  Did you know that you can use Final Cut Pro to create specific chapter points that will automatically turn into iDVD chapters.

To do this, all you need to do is add markers directly within a Final Cut Pro sequence.  Press the 'M' key to add a marker point at the place you'd like to have a DVD chapter.  Make sure the marker is placed within the actual Final Cut Pro sequence, and NOT within the actual clip. You don't need to add a marker at the very beginning.

Next, press the 'M' again to bring forward the Edit Marker dialog box.  Within the Edit Marker box, press the 'Add Chapter Marker' button to add the required meta-data into the marker point.  This is so iDVD knows to create a physical chapter point from the marker.

Next, all you need to do is export your sequence as a QuickTime movie.  Navigate to the File menu and select 'Export -> QuickTime Movie'  The save dialog box will appear. Change the 'markers' menu to include chapter markers.