September Blogwad

Hard Disk Warning!
Larry Jordan says don't leave a hard drive sitting on your shelf for more than a year with data that you want to keep. Explains why and gives some suggestions on how to keep old hard drives from losing data.

The Freesound Project
Sound effects here. They are available under Creative Commons licenses. Not sure if that would include any of Link's work. As I understand it, Creative Commons means that you aren't doing the project for money and your work will also be available to others under the Creative Commons agreement. But I'm not an expert.

DA Font
Some fonts here some are in the public domain, others are available under Creative Commons licenses. Again, I'm not an expert in Creative Commons licensing. But public domain is obviously cool.

Ripple Training
Some good tutorials in the Ripple Training section of the ProVideo Coaltion website.
Remove the Jitters - Covers the SmoothCam feature in Final Cut Pro 6.
Photoshop & Motion - Simple way to do a quick animation on a multi-layered Photoshop document in Motion 3 by using its 3D features.
Color Workflows With Different Video Formats - Covers how to use different codecs with Color. Warning here about working with Long-GOP formats, like HDV.

HDV video to SD DVD Using Compressor 3 and DVD SP
Exporting HDV Video from the Timeline to Standard Definition DVD
Man, working with HDV can be slow. Hopefully these tutorials will save you some time if you need to make a DVD from some HDV footage. They are over at kenstone.net
Also at kenstone.net, a tutorial on making a Blu-ray high-def video disc on a Mac. Takes you from FCP through Compressor to Adobe's Encore:
Blu-ray with Final Cut Pro, Compressor and Encore

ProRes 422 was one of the big features of Final Cut Pro 6. It was essentially a QuickTime codec, but Apple wasn't going to give it away. Too bad, because it's an efficient codec and very useful, especially for high-def footage. Well, Apple is finally letting people playback ProRes 422 footage on systems without FCP 6 installed (but you still can't create ProRes files without FCP 6.) Here are the links to playback ProRes on Mac's and PC's.

Mac OS X 10.5: Creating and maintaining a bootable "universal" external disk
I didn't know you could do this:
You can make a "universally bootable" external hard disk that will work with both Mac OS X 10.5-compatible PowerPC-based Macs and Intel-based Macs.

Bluetooth Earpiece--2-way radio
Do production? Need to buy a bluetooth head set? Then consider the Dragon. It will work as a 2-way radio with another Dragon headset. They even sell a device that will allow you to link up to 5 Dragon headsets together. Probaby not the cheapest way to communicate with a crew, but it's nice that it will do double-duty as the wireless headset for you cellphone.


Making Compressor Multiprocessor Aware
This one of Larry Jordan's Tips of the Day. Uses QMaster to make virtual clusters on multi-processor systems.

Summer Blogwad

I'm just dumping some interesting links here to check out.

Digital Rebellion: Recommended QuickTime and Mac OS configurations for Final Cut Pro
A list of recommended combos of FCP, Quicktime, and OS versions. Let's just call this why not to update your systems unless you absolutely need to. On the other hand, it sucks being caught in FCP 5.1.4 world while everyone else has moved on. That's more of a money issue than a technology issue though.

Digital Rebellion: List of QuickTime downloads
A continuation of the theme of don't upgrade if you don't have to. If you have to upgrade but it's not to the latest and (ahem) greatest, then this page will help you find the appropriate upgarde for QuickTime. Similarly, the LAFCUP has a wiki page on Quicktime updates.

Little Frog in High Def: APPLE PRO APPS UPDATE 2008-02
Good advice on downloading all updates to Final Cut Pro even if you don't intend to upgrade. The reason is that Apple doesn't make old updates available for FCP (unlike QuickTime). There are situations where you might want to upgrade but not to the latest version--if you don't have the update then Apple isn't going to help you. You can download updates through Apple's Final Cut Pro page--you don't have to upgrade through the Software Update control panel.

Final Cut User: Using FLVs in Final Cut Pro
Some good tips on using video downloaded from the web from sites like YouTube. I didn't know about using the QuickTime wrapper to help the editing of FLV's--sound like a helpful tip.

"Ten Tips For A Better Final Cut Pro Experience"
This is a good read. An experienced editor wrote down 10 good tips. Good write-up on media management. Also some interesting tips on multicam, amongst a number of other good ideas.

kenstone.net: Color Workflows With Different Types of Sources
By Andrew Balis
Want to work in Color? This seems like a good guide for getting footage in and out for your next go as a colourist.

Overview Video on Sony EX3
I don't think I've talked about the Sony EX3 because I think the MSRP was over $10K and that's my cut-off point for talking about cameras. But it lists for under $10K, and it looks like a good upgrade to the Sony EX1. I've been hearing about and seeing folks use the EX1. Seems like the XDCAM format on SxS memory cards could take off.

ProLost: On Clipping, Part 1
Very tech-y. But interesting to get a theoretical understanding of how video works. Folks interested in Red should read. It helped me understand why there is more grain in dark areas of video than in light areas. Also discusses important differences in how film and video represent light.

ProLost: Go Naked pt. 2
A good example of the guerrilla filmmaking model as described in Stu Maschwitz's "The DV's Rebel Guide." More interesting to me is that Vimeo not only streams HD, but allows downloads too of Quicktime movies (the film shown is downloadable at 1280x720). You can upload up to 500MB per week to Vimeo. An interesting way to share footage encoded in h.264--nice that it allows both streaming and downloading.

stockfootageforfree.com
Not awesome but could help in a pinch. I did about 10 searches on foreign countries, and the only video I got was touristy stuff from Cancun. Some OK shots of D.C., SF, and NYC. [via freshdv.com]

Final Cut Studio Gets New Features, Leopard Support

Apple updated all of the apps in Final Cut Studio with official support for OS 10.5 today (the updates also work with 10.4.11, also out today.) But wait, there's more! If you call now, you'll also get support for some of the new high-def cameras.

The XDCAM EX format is now supported under FCP 6.0.2. So footage from Sony's PMW-EX1 is now supported. AVC-Intra, which Panasonic is using on its high-end cameras, is supported. And JVC's HDV recordings in 720p60 and 720p50 are supported. There looks like there is also more support for progressive recording from Canon's cameras and Sony HVR-V1. Check out the release notes for all of the details.

I looked at the release notes for the other products and nothing jumped out at me. It looks like Color got a lot of bug fixes based on the release notes.

Mike Curtis offers more detail and some commentary on the new features at HDforIndies.com.

What You Could Do with Color

Yesterday, I pointed out some tutorials for Apple's Color app. To see what you could do with Color, check out this posting by Stu Maschwitz over at ProLost. Stu made a sort of before and after color grading using stills from the movie Transporter 2. Gives you an idea about how the feel of an image can be radically changed with color grading.

I've written about Stu before and his book "DV Rebel's Guide", which provides guidance and even some basic tools for color grading.

Video Tutorials on Color

Walter Biscardi is working on a series of tutorials about Color over at Creative Cow. As a total Color newbie, the tutorials gave me much more of an impression about what an alien product this is compared to any other Mac app that I'm working with. There are 3 videos in the series so far--short and worth watching if you are wondering about Color.

Macworld Reviews Final Cut Studio 2 (Updated)

UPDATE: Macworld added their review for Compressor. Highlights of Compressor 3: Optical flow does good job frame rate conversion (e.g., 60i to 24p), easier clustering (including on one system), streamlined interface (oh no, does that mean we have to bid adieu to Batch Monitor!?), watermarking, more formats supported.

MacWorld has revews of all the new apps in Final Cut Studio 2, except for Compressor. Worth a read, especially if you haven't been keeping up on what's new in these Apps

Motion 3
I think the first paragraph really sums up the value of Motion:

Motion, Apple’s motion-graphics and video-processing software, has always stood apart not so much for what it does but the way it does it. In many visual and video tools, you spend much of your time preparing graphics and then watching rendering progress bars, but Motion’s workflow is built around real-time adjustment and experimentation. With Motion 3, Apple has focused on the major capabilities previous versions lacked: motion tracking and stabilization, painting tools, and a true 3-D graphical environment to augment speed and easy, improvisational control. Motion may not become your only motion-graphics program, but it could easily become your favorite tool for quickly creating visuals

Color
Caveats galore for Color--just because you edited something in FCP doesn't mean that it will work in Color. This article doesn't even mention the problems with the HDV format that the Creative Cow mentioned. I imagine when I start using Color, it would just be for a shot or two at a time and not taking in a whole project. So far, this is how I've also used...

Soundtrack Pro 3

Final Cut Pro 6
Review by Mike Curtis of HD4ND's fame.

Tutorials and Demos Galore

"A look at lights in Motion 3"

"Click-thru Tutorial: Magic Bullet Looks"

"Click-thru Tutorial: GenArts Sapphire"

"Creating Node Trees in Color and the special case of interlaced video "

"Creating Footage with Shatter and Particle Playground" (After Effects)

These are all worth a look. New features in Motion and Color. No shadows in Motion 3--darn. Magic Bullet and Sapphire aren't something that I'll be using anytime soon, but it's interesting to see what they can do & gives me a few ideas. I haven't used particles in After Effect, but this article could get me started.

More Creative Cow on ProRes

"Part 2: ProRes for HDV, with a splash of Color"

More nitty gritty fromt the Creative Cow on using ProRes 422. Here's my big takeaway:

PPPS. Just so there's no question here: most (but not all) of you are certain that native HDV capture is the way to go. Skip AIC. Skip DVCPRO HD. Just render to ProRes.

PPPPS. Of course, some of this changes once we add a little Color.

So basically if you have HDV footage you can capture it as HDV over firewire, and don't need to think about how you would transcode it to ProRes or rig your system to capture it to ProRess, which you can't do while capturing over firewire. Capture to HDV, but render in the timeline to ProRes 422.

Apparently sending HDV to Color and then rendering back to ProRes is totally screwed up. All your clips get out of sync. Seems like Apple didn't put the kind of quality control into Color as they do FCP before releasing.

Also an interesting note about removing pulldown on 24p footage, as an update to my previous post. Compressor 3 has a smart pulldown remover where you don't have to worry about the cadence of the pulldown. The downside is that you lose timecode.

And the article says that capturing to standard-def ProRes 422 is OK on a Quad G5. But for HD ProRes you need at least a quad-core Intel.