Final Cut Studio: October 2009 Archives

Recently we talked about creating multiclips in Final Cut Pro.  Today, we'll take it one step further, and talk about how to actually edit that multiclip we created.

Assuming you already have your multiclip ready in the Browser, double-click on it to open it up in the Viewer.  The active angle is highlighted in a blue/green box.  Now click on the View pull-down menu and click on Show Multiclip Overlays.  This is so you can see each clips' angle number, name, and timecode. 



Now suppose you want those camera angles positioned differently in the Viewer; you can Command+drag any of those angles into another position.  So if you wanted your main camera angle to be in the number one position, just command+drag that main clip into the the first window; the clip that was in that position will simply move into the new arrangement.  If you have a lot of camera angles to organize, just Cmd+drag each clip into whatever position makes the most sense for you.

Now, click on the Playhead Sync pop-up menu in the Viewer.  Select Video.  This will allow you to switch between just the video sources, and you can use just one of the the audio clips from whichever angle has the best sound.  If you were to choose Video + Audio, you may have uneven sound levels between clips or even audio "popping" between edits.  Now notice once you've changed your Playhead Sync to Video only, and click on the number 2 postion, the blue/green box separates.  The green represents the active source your audio is coming from, and the blue highlight box switches to the active video angle.

Continue reading to edit your multiclip...

If you've watched the weatherman on your local evening news, you know what a green-screen or blue-screen does.  The chroma keying process is the most popular way to extract talent or props from a moving image and composite them into another image -- like an animated weather map, or a virtual set.  Chroma keying allows your software to cleanly and automatically separate subjects from the background, while retaining their full range of detail.

Final Cut ships with a simple but powerful set of tools for pulling keys from green screen footage.  The keying tools in Final Cut Pro work based on the same engine as the tools in Motion, so you're free to work in whichever environment you're more comfortable with.

In today's article, a quick two-part guide to shooting reasonably good green screen footage and pulling the key in post.

Here's a short video tutorial on a creative way of using green screen.

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Final Cut Pro 7 has made some improvements recently when it comes to Multicam editing.  Now you can cut multicamera footage just as quickly as if you were switching in real-time.  You can view and cut multiple sources by using the 1, 4, 9 or 16-up display and group up to 128 sources into multiclips; and now you can prepare multicam projects faster thanks to the new features in markers.  Retain markers on multiclips when you switch angles and add marker notes to make multicam projects more efficient.  So let's take a look at creating multiclips.

First of all, a multiclip is basically a virtual container from more than one source of clips or angles in which you can actually playback up to 16 at a time.  We said that you can group up to 128 clips into a single multiclip, but, very importantly, each of those clips must use the same codec, image dimensions, and frame rate; otherwise, you're gonna have a lot of headaches down the road.

Read on for a quick tutorial on creating Multiclips:

When you are not having sound coming out of your Final Cut system it can be a number of things. Lack of audio can too often be something that makes you say "Duh". Like  Is the volume muted? Or are there a pair of headphones plugged into the system?  I t could also be that there is no audio associated to a clip. 

Here are two troubleshooting techniques:

1. Do you see the audio meters moving when the clip plays?

2. Load a clip into the Viewer window.  Click on the audio tab at the top of the Viewer window.   Do you see an audio waveform?

 If you answered "no" to either of the last two questions, you're not hearing any audio, because there isn't any.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about disabling Expose' for the purposes of Final Cut Pro.  However, if you're currently not using Final Cut Pro, Expose' can have a lot of benefits to you just within your Mac OS X.  Let's take a quick look at what Expose' can do for you!

If you're like me when working on your Mac, you have several files and different applications open on your desktop at one time.  With Expose' you can cut through the clutter and find things on your desktop quickly.  By hitting the F3 key on your keyboard it activates Expose', and displays all of the open windows on your Mac so that you can quickly find the one you're looking for.

 

A couple of other quick key commands are Cmd + 1 arranges the windows alphabetically, and Cmd + 2 sorts them by application name.  You can also use Expose' from the Dock to see the window of a specific application; so to see all of the open Safari windows, just click and hold on the Safari icon. 



To see the open pages windows, click and hold on its icon.  Expose' displays the windows on a grid on the desktop.  You can view a full size preview of any window in the grid.  Just hover over the thumbnail with the cursor and tap the space bar.  Customizing Expose' is easy by opening System Preferences and selecting Expose' & Spaces.  You can assign keystrokes or mouse clicks to display all windows as thumbnails, to view all windows in the application you're currently using, and to show the desktop.  It can also set up active screen corners to trigger expose functions just by moving the cursor to the corners of your screen.



By taking advantage of all the great features of Expose' in the new OS X version of Snow Leopard, you're able to stay more organized on your Mac.  Now if only they could do that for my house!

Just about any new MAC will run Final Cut Studio.  However, if you plan on doing a lot of work with Apple Motion, it is important to take a careful look at the graphics capability of the computer.  This is particularly important if you are purchasing a Mac Book Pro or an iMac.
 
If you have the budget to purchase a Mac Pro (desktop), then read no further, because its graphic capabilities are fine for most hard core graphic designers.  You can even add upgrade your Mac Pro to the ultimate graphics card which is currently the Nvidia Quadro FX 4800.

Okay, for the budget minded, I recommend a 24 inch iMac or Mac Book Pro.  For most editing scenarios the low-end models will work just fine.  However, I must say, go for the 27 inch screen over the 21.5 inch screen.  The real-estate in terms of screen size is a must have for a proficient video editor. The 27 inch iMac has a native screen resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels .  Now that's awesome! 

On the Mac Book Pro side of things, I have mixed feelings, because of the portability factor.  I travel quite a bit, and the 17 inch Mac Book Pro doesn’t work so well on an airplane.  I dare you to try and open the 17 inch Mac Book Pro while sitting in coach.  Just pray the person in front of you doesn’t decide to recline the seat.  If so, crunch! There goes your LCD screen.

Now, depending where you go, you’ll hear different stories about what works, and what doesn’t work.  I can tell you, as of today, that ALL the new iMacs and Mac Book Pro’s will work with Final Cut Studio.  You may hear stories, that if you do not buy the more expensive iMac, that Final Cut Studio will not work, or will not install.  It’s simply not true.

Now, to be fair, there is some fine print on Apple’s website for Final Cut Studio System Requirements that states ‘integrated Intel graphics processors not supported’. So what exactly does that mean?  Here’s my take.

Apple Motion is a motion graphics software product that is bundled with Final Cut Studio.  The performance of Apple Motion depends on the speed of the graphics card.  Depending on the model of  a Mac Book, Mac Book Pro. or iMac, it may have a graphics processor called the Geforce 9400M.  For most video editing scenarios, this is perfectly fine.

Apple chose The Nvidia 9400M Graphics processor to be a part of its hardware, because redefines the notebook architecture by combining a mainstream GPU, system memory controller, and system I/O into a single chip. For Apple computers this goes by the name of Geforce 9400M. The 9400M graphic’s processor allows for the smallest and most efficient Mac Book Pro ever.  However, there is one catch; The 9400M shares its processor memory with the main memory to process graphics.  This slows things down a bit when you’re doing complex tasks that require graphics memory.  You’ll see this item listed as ‘graphics processor with 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM’

The higher end 27" iMac processor models offer the ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics processor with 256MB or 512MB of GDDR3 memory. The key is to look for GDDR3 instead of DDR3.

In case you’re curious, DDR stands for: Double-Data-Rate Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory.  GDDR stands for Graphics Double Data Rate memory.
 
That being said, you can still run Final Cut Studio on any new Mac Book, iMac, or Mac Book Pro.  It just depends on how much you plan on using Apple Motion. If you plan on building complex scenes with Apple Motion, then you should really consider purchasing the new 27 inch Quad Core iMac.  Or, for the ulimate configuration, go for a Mac Pro desktop which allows more expansion.

Apple just released the new iMac's and they are incredible. For the first time you can get into a Quad core Final Cut system for under $3000. That's right the iMac line now has a quad core machine. If that's not enough the top end iMac now has a 27 inch screen with 2560 by 1440 resolution, and a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card.

At GeniusDV we use iMac's in our classroom for our Final Cut Studio training. Aside from some limitations to what you can hook up to an iMac in terms of peripherals, the iMac's make for great Final Cut systems. I have personally edited  numerous jobs on an iMac, and find them to be quite satisfactory.

I always tell students that unless you need to have MacPro for whatever reason, consider getting both a MacBook Pro, and an iMac. I find that you can get so much accomplished having two systems. Personally I can't imagine not having a MacBook Pro, because I travel so much, and do plenty of editing at 30,000 feet. With this new iMac I can now have a powerful desktop system as the primary Final Cut Studio editing system, and the MacBook Pro system too, for thousands less than a high end MacPro system.

I was a little confused today about the difference between WAV files and other audio files such as CD, MP3, and AIFF.  In case there are some "freshman" out there, it is important to understand the various issues that may come up when dealing with these different formats.  First of all a WAV file is basically an audio file for Windows used for storing audio on a PC, similar to the AIFF format used on a Mac.  It is the main format used on Windows systems for raw and typically uncompressed audio.  Both WAVs and AIFFs are compatible with Windows and Mac.  A WAV file can hold compressed audio, but the most common WAV format contains uncompressed audio. Audio experts use the WAV format for maximum audio quality, and WAV files are universally compatible with most audio editing applications.
 
Even though .WAV files are compatible with Final Cut Pro, it is best to convert them to an .AIFF format with a sample rate of 48k. This will save system resources when Final Cut Pro plays the audio files.  Otherwise, you may encounter dropped frames or an annoying beeping sound while Final Cut Pro plays your sequence. 

Here's a quick tutorial on how to convert audio files to 48k .AIFF files:

You can create awesome slideshows right within DVD Studio Pro; however making sure your source material is properly prepared ahead of time is vital if you want to avoid wasting time and headaches down the road.  DVD Studio Pro lets you use most common image formats in slideshows such as PICT, BMP, JPEG, TIFF, TGA, QuickTime image files and Photoshop PSD files.  Once a still image is imported into DVD Studio Pro, it is converted into an MPEG image and if necessary, will automatically be scaled to fit the framesize.

You can create 4:3 and 16:9 slideshows.  For the best results, you should make sure your slides match the resolution of your slideshow.  Slides that are bigger or smaller than the slideshow's resolution are automatically scaled to fit.  If you have a slide where the aspect ratio doesn't match the project, a color background is automatically added to fill in the gaps.  The background color is defaulted to black, however, you can change that background color under the DVD Studio Preferences menu.

One of the newest tricks of Final Cut Pro 7 that I've discovered this week is the Reveal Affiliated Clips in Front Sequence command.  What's that all about?  Well, this is a great little trick to use if you ever need to find out quickly how many times you've used a clip in a sequence, say for color correction for example.  Let's suppose there are 10 different places in your project that you've used the same clip, but it needs a bit of color correcting.  You don't want to accidentally forget to fix one of those clips; believe me, someone will notice; so what you can do to make this really simple is select your clip in the Timeline and from the View Menu, choose Reveal Affiliated Clips in Front Sequence.



Now every affiliated clip will become selected in the Timeline.  Better yet, you can drop a color corrector filter on top of any of those affiliated clips, and the filter will be applied to all of them.  How simple is that!



If you just need some tips on organizing your media, check out this article on Finding Used and Unused Clips in Final Cut Pro.  And don't forget to check our class schedule to learn just about everything you can about Final Cut Pro!

Here's a quick video tutorial on how to create a countdown using a plugin from Too Much Too Soon.

Continue reading for a full text based tutorial on this same tutorial.

QuickTime X is the newest version of QuickTime Player developed for Snow Leopard.  Now you can trim your media right within the QuickTime Player.  It displays frame-based thumbnails that help you make the perfect edit.

It's great if you just need to remove a portion of the beginning or end of a movie, to make it shorter or remove unwanted content.  All you need to do, is once your movie is opened in QuickTime Player, choose Edit > Trim, (or Cmd + T) and the Trimming Bar appears.

Use the Trimming Bar to select the portion of the movie you want to keep.  Drag the playhead, represented by a red vertical line, to find the section of the movie that you want to get rid of.  Drag the start and end of the trimming bar, using the yellow handles to select the portion of the movie that you want to keep.  Click the Trim button.  The movie is now shortened to the portion you selected.

The newest version of QuickTime X also offers a clean uncluttered interface with controls that fade out when you're not using them.  You can also use it to publish your media to MobileMe or YouTube without worrying about formats or resolutions.

Be sure to check out this tip about QuickTime Player and Snow Leopard too.

In Final Cut Pro, mixing resolutions and frame rates in the same sequence is actually quite common.  There are lots of different HD and SD formats and you will probably at some time receive media from a variety of different formats.  So your best bet is to mix everything to the highest format available.  If your final output is HD, you want the best quality when converting clips that are in SD.  Final Cut Pro fortunately does this for you, however you will need to specify some settings.

First, highlight the sequence in the Browser window and and right-click it to choose Settings from the contextual menu.  The Sequence Setting dialog appears.  Under the Video Processing Tab, click the Render all YUV material in high-precision YUV radio button.

For some reason, we seem to get a lot of people coming to the site looking to draw a heart beat.  I haven't the foggiest idea why, but I'm glad – it's one of those examples where Motion can make your life a lot easier.

This is what we're setting out to make today; you can dress it up however you'd like, and you can even use a shape that looks more like a "real" heartbeat than the one I drew.  We'll do a couple of approaches -- one is quick, the other is better-looking.

We talk about it all the time; media management and organization.  Still, with some, it just doesn't seem to sink in.  We all want to become more efficient editors, but we're just wasting time by not having our media organized.  So let me give you a different spin today on organizing your media, but without ANY media at all.  Creating a project template in the Finder.

Do this BEFORE ever opening Final Cut Pro, or capturing any video.

Start out by creating a new folder called Project Template, then create subfolders inside it such as Video, Audio, Stills, Graphics. 

One of our newest 2 day training classes, Google Sketchup, will be offered  at our Orlando training facility November 5th & 6th, 2009.  We are offering a special price for the November class!

Google's Sketchup is an amazing 3D modeling program that has users from all walks of life from professionals to first timers.  Whether you're an architect, civil engineer, or filmmaker, you will be astounded at what Sketchup can do for you.  And the best part?  It's one of the easiest programs out there to learn and use.  With Sketchup, you can build everything from basic 3D models to entire scenes with a virtual walk-through, and it allows you to add your 3D elements into your video projects.

Other features of Sketchup is the ability to facilitate the placement of models in Google Earth, which is a great tool for video producers when trying to figure out where your shadows lie at a specific time of day during a video shoot.  Another great feature is the ability to use the 3D Warehouse, which lets users search for models that are created by other users and lets users contribute their own models to the warehouse.

There's no limit to what you can create with Google's Sketchup.  There is a limit however to our class size, so call today to reserve your spot!

You can customize your button colors in DVD Studio Pro to make your menu buttons your own.  By default when drawing your own buttons, the button color is white, and usually defaults to something simple when using templates as well, like white, black, yellow, or red.  Boring.  Get creative, and change those colors!  You can do this very easily in the Button Inspector in DVD Studio Pro.

Button states are defined as Normal, Selected, and Activated.  When someone is viewing your DVD, and chooses a button with their remote control, the button becomes selected, and it displays the highlight color you have chosen for the selected state.  The activated state shows up for a split second when the user presses the Play button on the remote control.

Assuming you have already drawn and named your buttons, in the Button Inspector, make sure you have the Include Text in Highlight checkbox selected located at the bottom of the inspector in the Style Tab.

You can easily find sound effects or movie files by using the Find feature within the Apple Finder.  Press (command + F) to activate the ‘Find’ window.

 

The key to finding specific elements is to change the ‘Kind’ menu to a specific file type.  For example, if you are looking for a specific sound effect, you would set the ‘Kind’ menu to music.  Now, only audio files will show up in the search list.

If you have an iPhone, you know what the transition between photos looks like, kind of like in a slideshow.  You can actually emulate that transition with a plug-in from Noise Industries' FxFactory.  It's called the cell phone browser transition.



Once you have downloaded FxFactory, you will be able to find the transition under the Effects Tab > Video Transitions > NI Transitions > Cell Phone Transition