DC Metro Final Cut Pros

Larry is fun to listen to and he really knows how to keep a class from dragging by often getting up to tell a funny story and involving the class participants in them. He’s also different live versus recorded in his lynda.com tutorials. His voice is less bass, he’s more energetic, he looks and sounds younger than what you’d think from his voice on those tutorials.

Here’s some personal highlights from the two seminars I attended.

Adobe integration with FCP:

Adobe’s Bridge can be a very powerful, more visual and finer-grained than spotlight, way to find clips spread out across multiple projects or even disks. And once you find a file you can drag and drop it into an FCP bin. The good news is it can at least read files on PC drives and unlike FCServer it’s trivial to set up.

But note that any searchable tags you assign files with bridge are kept in separate files from the media they reference. Lose those sidecar files and you’ve lost the work that went into entering that metadata. Similarly if your asset management scheme in the future won’t recognize Bridge metadata then your work will be lost. One alternative mentioned by an attendee was to use the more limited QT metadata fields contained within QT files.

If you have the right Adobe collection installed you can export FLV files from inside FCP using QT Conversion, and use Flash Video Encoder to turn exported reference QT movies into FLVs.

Photoshop CS3’s tools for selecting parts of a video frame and managing the frame-by-frame editing “rotoscoping” of problem video are actually pretty cool.

By right-clicking on a clip for an .eps file in an FCP timeline you can jump from FCP to Illustrator to change its colors in the source document while maintianing the colors’ relationships using the color wheel button at the top center of Illustrator’s screen. Save and quit Illustrator and the colors are changed in FCP.

In Larry’s demo, the quality of Adobe Soundbooth’s CS3 assisted music scoring capability is really weak compared to the scoring edition of SonicFirePro 5. But if you have the Adobe Suite already, give a listen to the music files in Soundbooth and export the ones you like. And while the scoring is weak in SB, it may be able to produce quality music clips at multiple common durations which you can then notch and envelope as needed.

Larry mentioned that Soundbooth CS4 will feature dialog-audio to text conversion. It will not require training of the program to a particular voice and will offer below-human but acceptable accuracy. We’ll have to see what “acceptable accuracy” looks like when used in our own projects, but if it’s good enough that the time spent cleaning up the transcripts is manageable, this could be a huge money/time saver for everyone who depends on transcribing interviews to write scripts. He said there may well be other surprises from Adobe soon too.

Inside FCP:

He offered an excellent, well paced and complete description of going from FCP to SoundtrackPro to fix low or noisy audio as well as do mixing (including notching music for dialog with Fat EQ, and quickly selecting your ins and outs on zero-crossings in the audio).  I’d seen some of this before of lynda.com but seeing it again live since I use STP infrequently really helped it sink in. He also answered a question that long bugged me. If “send to STP audio file project” is grayed out when your clip is selected, it’s because the clip is dual mono and must be made stereo or mono before sending.

The demo of the impressively quick and easy music scoring capability in SonicFire Pro 5. The complete version is an impressive value for what it does (speeding up the process of; finding music, making it the right length, replacing sections with a dialog-friendly variant for use under dialog, and tweaking the qualities of the music it to match action in video). But SFP only works with the music smartsound sells, so listen carefully to all of the samples on the smartsound site in the genres of music you will use. I listened to some of their corporate music and thought it was so-so to good (though maybe I just dislike that kind of music) and some of the narrative/doc stuff was good to very good. Note that after getting the software I think you have the ability to preview and buy songs by the track from within the program, which is nice.

I also noticed that while smartsound tries to get you to buy a CD of music with it for $49, you can get the SonicFire Pro 5 basic express tracks application with a set of sample tracks that you get to keep for free forever if you download the 3 week trial for the scoring edition. When the trial is over the scoring capabilites are locked until you buy the scoring capability ($149), but the free tracks and presumably any additional tracks you bought from them are still available for use with the basic application indefinitely.

Larry’s section on compression for DVD and the web seemed like the same solid and complete material as I’d heard on the Lynda.com tutorials except that he suggested quitting compressor as soon as jobs are submitted and setting output frame rate to same as source for web video. Also, since the compressord process that does the real work of compressing files is separate from the Compressor application, Compressor should be closed as soon as jobs are submitted. Or better yet, make droplets for your common output formats and never open Compressor again.

With editors excited about the coming support of blu-ray in OSX, Larry gave a thoughtful analysis of the dangers of blu-ray disks as an archive format for projects if blu-ray dies dies like HD-DVD did. LTO tape backup is more expensive up front and offers slower and less direct access to files, but it has a very big installed user base among IT departments of corporations with lots of very valuable data on that kind of tape. So the continued production of LTO tape, decks, and support for those decks is a good bet in an uncertain world. Other pro editors have been reaching the same conclusion.

While I’m glad I went, the following small changes could have made the seminars better. I use FCS2 and Abdobe Master Collection CS3 at work and anyone’s views on the usefulness of advice training is partly based on how much more the student must (convince the their boss to) spend on hardware and software to make that training useful. I also learned much of what I know about FCP from Larry’s outstanding tutorials on FCP on Lynda.com. So I was going in the seminar to learn new things rather than get a general purpose intermediate-level live FCP seminar. Your mileage may vary.

 

* Skip covering basic of video encoding terminology and concepts (editors should know this stuff)

* Replace Automatic Duck as a sponsor unless the seminar topics change. Their tool(s?) for moving projects one-way between FCP and AE are powerful but a narrow and expensive solution that is only attractive to people doing complex effects work in AE  coming from already cut FCP sequences every week or two. So demoing the product is not useful to many attendees unless the course is on effects editing.

* Fully demonstrate of how to use motion templates in FCP6 to do lower thirds

* Skip sections rather than doing them in a rushed way if the schedule gets too far behind. This only happened once that I can recall (on down-coversion of HD video to SD) but it did really impair the usefulness I got out of that section.

* Don’t bother covering how to edit (and monitor) 5.1 surround sound. It was interesting, but I mostly do work for the web and don’t expect to be cutting in anything but stereo for a while.

 

Editor’s comment: Shayne, thanks for attending and providing such as great assessment of your experience.

 

Rodney – DCFCPUG