One of the great perks of working with a new group of people is learning a new set of tricks. Many thanks to Jordan Kim who showed me this wonderful After Effects script called Popcorn Island that I can use as an alternative to Boris Transfer or Automatic Duck. Here is a video on how I have used Popcorn Island. It’s pretty simple. Popcorn Island (download and learn the rest here) will show you how to use their After Effects script (it’s a lengthy video, so I have provided my own if you can install the script file yourself).

On this show, it was not uncommon for the crew to shoot some takes with both angles and only camera on others, so at first it didn’t alarm me. However, if I had looked at the lined script more closely, I would have noticed right away that the footage was missing it’s equal pair.

We checked the on site and off site backups. It was gone.

What? How could that have happened?

Easy. The assistant was sloppy and she had backed up the same piece of footage twice. D’oh.

I don’t blame myself for the mishap, but I do wish I would have caught on to what was going on sooner. The lesson for me in this cause is check your lined script as you are first going through your scenes, not when you are just looking for your desired shot.

Make sure your assistants are qualified. Train them. Talk to them. Don’t do their job for them, but mentor them. Luckily, this isn’t one of those shows where someone had to be fired because of it (in fact, it was a stand in substitute that just won’t get hired back again). We got along without it, but every time the director watched the episode he expressed his wish that he could just have that footage back again.

We are using Mac Pros that are a few years old; they work just fine.

Some of our machines are using FCP 6; it works just fine.

Sometimes in the outside world we get so wrapped up in what’s the latest and greatest. I know I lost focus on what I was cutting because of what I could be cutting with or cutting on.

Just a thought for the day.

Back to work. Back to blogging more often soon.

While hype can motivate an individual to do a good job, to take action or to do something noteworthy, in my opinion, hype causes a lot more stress in the workplace than it is worth.

On most of the projects I have been on, when we have a deadline and we aren’t sure what kind of footage we will get from production, there tends to be a lot of hype. When I say hype, I mean the worrying, the stressing and the emotional disaster that comes from the fear of the unknown.

I’m guilty of this myself, but I notice when I tell myself “whatever it is, it will be fine” we usually get out at a decent hour and we have good results. Too much hype can lead to rushing, doing work improperly and not backing up correctly. Building your editorial staff’s confidence by going over workflows in downtime, experimenting ideas or running tests is what should be going on, not overthinking the amount of work.

I remember one instance where we knew we had footage coming in at 6 PM and we had to prep it as soon as possible. We would not be able to go home till it was done. We knew it was probably going to overwhelm us. The less experienced crew members all talked about how it was going to be nuts, how it was probably going to keep us there until after midnight. The more experienced didn’t say “No, it won’t” but they didn’t add to the hype either. They sat back and smiled, very calm and confident. The footage came in and we tackled it as a team. I got home at 8:30 pm. Yeah, 8:30. No big deal. So what was all the commotion for beforehand? Did it help anything we had been working for? Did it boost morale?

So when you are helping set the mood in the editorial, don’t hype up the work. Keep a cool head and build your team with confidence instead of fear of the unknown.  Your co-workers will remember you for it and keep you in their plans for future work as it appears.

Cammon Randle of BluFire Studios shares some lighting technique with us based on his work as a DP on the film, “Orcs.”

Instead of talking about “what will we ever do to survive,” I decided to look for what answers there were. I thought back to the Media Composer 5 road show I attended in Burbank at KeyCode Media last summer and in my notes I wrote about Boris coming out with transfer software, similar to the infamous Automatic Duck. I don’t have Automatic Duck and I have looked into it before and for the type of projects I am doing lately, I just don’t have the budget for it. Especially because it is a one way street. So while you read this review, keep in mind I haven’t ever personally used Automatic Duck, I only know what it can do and know how it has performed for friends.

There are two great benefits I see immediately for editors who want to use Avid more in their workflows or want to keep aspects of FCP in their new Avid lives. I’ve successfully transferred a few Final Cut Pro projects into Avid using the Boris AAF export tool, even using AMA (ProRes only tested). I have also tested it with batch importing this clips. So there, I have moved a few clients archived projects they still like to pull from into the Avid, out of Final Cut.

The other advantage was using the Avid export to FCP tool and then taking that into Color. I know people have their workarounds, but this was by far the easiest one for me. I actually did a “half ass” test and it seemed to go fine. I took a 5 minute video with T3i footage in Avid, exported it, pulled it into FCP and all the H.264 original files reconnected perfectly. From there, I should media manage and then take it into Color, but I just tested it to see if it would work into Color. It worked fine.

So that’s exciting. Boris says that their effects will transfer from Avid to FCP as well. I think that is pretty cool and as always, I will keep doing more research on these tools and utilities and posting them when I discover new, useful things. I must say that you should follow all the instructions very carefully as you use Boris Transfer
FCP. If you assume you know how to do it in a way that will make it work, there is a good chance you won’t. I found that out the humbling way. Read the instructions, get used to their guide and you shouldn’t have a problem. For $300, it’s a good deal to go on the two way street between Avid and FCP. There is also a fully functional 14-day trial you can use. Much easier on the wallet than what the $800 the bundled Automatic Duck would cost you.

So the right project came along and it was getting closer to purchasing PluralEyes for Media Composer. I saw that for a limited time you can crossgrade (keeping your old license and getting another product for 50% off) to another PluralEyes. Woo hoo! So I picked up my Media Composer PluralEyes license this morning and I am one happy editor.

I think this is a great promo that has come of a lot of people wanting to switch to something else in the future after Apple has proclaimed its non-professional love of Final Cut Pro 7 users. More on that another time…