Final Cut Studio: January 2009 Archives

There is an easy way to turn the visibility off on all but one track, or lock all tracks but one, or even isolate a single auto select. Any of these actions can be performed by holding down everyones favorite Final Cut Pro key, the option key. By option clicking on the track visibility control, FCP will turn off the visibility of all tracks but the one you selected. By option clicking on a track lock, FCP will lock all but the track you selected. By option clicking on an auto select control, FCP will turn off all but the track you selected. 

The Track tool is a great way to select an entire track or tracks. There are 5 different combinations of the T key to activate the 5 different states of the Track selection tool. Hitting the T key once thru five times will toggle thru the five tools.

I tend to use the Select All Tracks Forward (pressing the T key four times) most often. Recently I discovered that by activating the Select Track Forward tool, and holding down the shift key, it will do the same thing. This works the same way with the Select Track Backward tool, and is a very useful modifier key to know.

Avid's DNxHD codec and Apple's ProRes are both riffs on the Cineform theme of high-quality digital intermediate codecs for editing.  Both offer more efficient compression than some competitors (especially at larger frame sizes), plus 4:2:2 chroma subsampling (which provides greater color fidelity than DV's 4:1:1 subsampling or MPEG's 4:2:0).  But the advantage of one of the other cool features -- support for 10-bit color depth -- has gone largely misunderstood or overlooked.  [Ed.: Some readers have asked me to emphasize that BOTH DNxHD and ProRes offer 10-bit color depth.  Apologies for any confusion.]

For starters, it's worth pointing out that each of the "extras" that ProRes confers may at first seem irrelevant: after all, broadcast NTSC still (for another month or so) uses YCbCr, and broadcast ATSC and DVB still use a variant of MPEG-2, with all the associated limitations.  Don't be fooled, though. 

Your post process almost inevitably involves changing the source image in some way or another, either through color correction, transitions, or any number of other processes -- and when you have all of the "extra" information in the ProRes picture, you're able to create an edited master that still has more information than you'd need for a "perfect" quality broadcast.  Similarly, you'd never edit in MPEG-2 directly (I hope) -- so using the higher-quality intermediate codec gives your compressor more "wiggle room" as the compressor tries to paint the highest-quality picture for the MPEG-2 transcoding step.

But enough of that ... more on bit depth specifically after the jump.

In Final Cut -- in a lot of different video applications, for that matter -- you may have wondered about Import/Export functions based on XML.  In fact, Apple made a big deal about Final Cut's XML Interchange Format when it first released, and for good reason.

As studios and production houses and newsrooms shift to a digital workflow, more and more pieces of the production process have to "talk about" the same footage.  At one broadcast network where we recently conducted training, the entire workflow -- from ingest to scriptwriting, roughing, package editing, promos, and output -- relied on a central media repository. 

Needless to say, that's a whole lot of pieces of software that need to talk to each other -- and making a separate copy of the source media for every step in the process is inefficient (imagine the extra disk space to hold 6 different copies of the same full HD footage for a 24/7 broadcast), not to mention confusing.

Using a FTP site as your destination from Apple Compressor is very easy to do. This process can be a big help in terms of efficiency. The old adage killing two birds with one stone comes to mind. With the big difference being you don't have to wait an hour to throw a stone. This process will compress and upload to your FTP location in one move. We have all sat around waiting for an export, so we could upload the exported file. This Compresor function keeps us from having to do that anymore.



It is very similar to uploading to your iDisc. When are in Compressor and want to have the compression automatically upload to a FTP site. First you must choose to add a new destination, and choose remote. Once you choose to add a new remote destination, the inspector will open and you will be able to add your FTP information. This is where you could also choose to upload to an iDisc. Make sure the file path represents the folder you are loading to.

GeniusDV provides 'online training services' for a variety of video software programs.  We use a nice tool called MouseLocator so students can easily see the mouse cursor.  Better yet, the utility is free!

 

To install Mouse Locator, download MouseLocator.dmg from 2point5fish.com.

 

 

 

 Click the Download Alternative Locator Graphics from the installation screen. This will open a web page with various mouse cursors that you can choose from.  You can choose to download the gallery package or you can download an individual shape by right-clicking (control-clicking) the shape and downloading it. You will want to save it to the top level of the Pictures folder. If the mouse locator program is already active, close it and reopen it. It will find and load the new shape when it reopens. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the installation is complete, the Mouse locator will appear as an icon in the Other section of the System Preferences as shown below. You activate it and set its parameters from here.

 

 

 I like using the small red rectangle. I use the Always On setting when I teach.

 

Within the preferences, you can set the cursor to fade after the mouse is pushed. The (Show button clicks) setting causes a yellow circle to flash when the mouse button is pressed.