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.

"Making 3D Text" in Motion

This seems like a handy tutorial on Motion 3 over at the Creative Cow. The technique in the tutorial lets you add some depth to type in 3d space. The whole 3D thing with cameras and lights is new in Motion 3.

The EditBlog has a post about another cool thing for Motion 3--a free plug-in called Vee You. It creates the effect of VU or EQ meters that actually reflects an audio track. You get the plug-in here.

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.

Motion Tracking Tutorial

"Warp Speed Workflow #5: First Look: Motion Tracker in Motion 3"

This is a helpful tutorial movie over at dvcreators.net. Shows you how to do motion tracking in the new vesion of Motion. Unlike Apple's demos where the motion tracking just magically works perfectly, this shows you what to do when there are problems. Basically, Motion is analyzing the video trying to follow a particular object around the screen, and it is only so smart. So when it gets distracted and loses track of the object you define, you have to set it back on the correct path.

At an Apple demo, they showed where Motion will suggest tracking points. I think maybe you hold down the Option key to see recommended tracking points, but I can't remember for sure.

What's New in FCP 6

Final Cut Studio 2 is now shipping. I don't know when I'll get my hands on it, but Apple has posted many of the manuals online. I took a look at the manual What's New in FCP 6. I've written before about my thoughts on FCS2 and FCP6, and here's some new things that jumped out at me after reading that manual.

SmoothCam Filter
This borrows Shake technology to steady shaky footage. This seems to be the only implementation of Shake in FCP according to the "What's New" manual. If so, then no great slo-mo's in FCP. Looks like you'll have to go to Motion for those.

Bloom FX
More FX's from Motion are coming to FCP. I like the Bloom filter and there are a few more.

Rendering Native HDV and XDCAM HD Sequences to the Apple ProRes 422 Codec
This is a new sequence preset. So as I discussed before here, it makes less and less sense to transcode HDV to another codec, like uncompressed, when capturing. With the Open Format Timeline you can load and cut your native HDV footage and then render in whatever codec you like (uncompressed, ProRes 422) when you want to filter or composite.

External Video Monitoring
This is very cool. I don't remember hearing about this capability when the new version was announced. Here's something I pulled from the manual:

You can now output to external video interfaces whose settings don’t match those of your sequence. Here are some examples of some of the possibilities:
-A DV or HDV sequence output to an SDI signal on a third-party interface
-An uncompressed NTSC or PAL sequence output to a DV FireWire output
-An HDV sequence output to a DV FireWire output

Before you had to rely on hardware from AJA or Kona to do stuff like this. Now FCP and your Mac's CPU will handle this. Of course, if you are throwing an Open Format Timeline and down-conversion at the CPU that's a fair amount of work. The better the chips you have, the more luck you'll have with this type of stuff. But I pretty much got a DeckLink card because I wanted the option of seeing HDV downconverted to SD (the Kona LS wouldn't do that.) Now Kona LS users will get this capability with FCP 6 if their computer is fast enough.

For more on the new manuals for Final Cut Studio, check out this post at HDforIndies.com.

New MacBooks, Still No Good with Final Cut Studio

Apple did a speed bump on the MacBook's today. Nothing major. The MacBooks don't have a dedicated graphics card, which is problem with some aspects of running Final Cut Studio like Motion. You can do some stuff with Final Cut Pro 5.1 on it, but you aren't supposed to run it on a MacBook. So nothing has changed about it. As for FCP 6, we'll have to wait and see until the software is out, but it isn't officially supported on the MacBook either (or the Mac Mini for that matter.)

Mike Curtis at HD for Indies writes about this here. He actually has a MacBook and goes into more detail on his site about what the MacBook will and won't do with Final Cut Studio.

So if you want to run the whole Final Cut Studio on a laptop, you'll have to pony up for the MacBook Pro.