Post Fifth Pictures

“Forget The Flash Drives” Spot

Bryce Randle — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:21:49 +0000

Another short piece edited for Novell along with BluFire Studios and directed by Scott Dastrup.

“Dressing Room” Spot

Bryce Randle — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:26:39 +0000

Orphan Files

Bryce Randle — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:35:19 +0000

Here is another spot I edited recently. I think this one was really fun to do. Turned out to be very funny.

Robbers Spot

Bryce Randle — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:25:57 +0000

Here is a spot I just cut for a group in Salt Lake City. It was a fun piece to edit. There were 4 spots total. Nate Hoffman did the sound work on it. I think it turned out well.

FCP Guru

Bryce Randle — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 18:02:22 +0000

Last month I had the great pleasure of working with Matthew Celia on a project for nearly a week. Matt was my post producer on a :30 commercial in Los Angeles. Matt shared some of his great knowledge with me, some of which I will mention in future posts regarding using the Phantom format and plugins, and I wanted to take a moment to give my approval. Matt runs FCPGuru.com and gives classes on how to use it as a beginner and as an advanced user. I think that these classes are a good idea for people who seem to dwell in the worlds of offline edits and don’t get to do much finishing ever or just output to the web.

His classes are reasonably priced too. Go to FCPGuru.com and check out what he has to offer.

Funny Editor Video

Bryce Randle — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 23:44:31 +0000

So this video is hilarious. I should be back to posting soon. I apologize for being a horrible blogger lately, but been busy editing some good work and took a little vacation. Enjoy this video in the meantime. There is some language, so be warned.

True to My School

Bryce Randle — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 04:14:04 +0000

I saw this and was fairly bummed in the first 5-10 seconds, but then was fairly surprised at the amount of work they put in. Proud to be a Cougar!

Starting with Compressor

Bryce Randle — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:48:42 +0000

Here is a post for getting started with Compressor. In most cases, you have the software and have no idea what it does or how it could save you a lot of time or you just never learned it. That’s okay. I am surprised how many people use Final Cut Studio, but don’t take advantage of this huge timesaver. The best part about FCP7, to me, is that you can render using compressor in the background while you continue to edit in Final Cut Pro.

However, for this post, let’s talk about getting started. You have an AVI or MPEG file and you want to make it editable in Final Cut Pro.

Open Compressor.

Click on the “Add File” button on the top left corner of the window. You can also drag multiple files into the Project window (normally on the top left).

Also, this isn’t necessary, but I found that if you close the “Preview” window, things move a lot faster.

Now that you have a file in the project window, you can assign it a compressor setting and then a destination.

First assign a compressor setting. Apple has plenty of default ones available. To get it to work best in Final Cut Pro, I would recommend using either an Apple ProRes 422, ProRes 422 HQ or ProRes 422 (Proxy). That’s just my opinion, but I have found it to work fairly well.

Take that setting and drag it up to your file. If you click on the setting that is now on your clip, you will see some other options appear in the Inspector window. There are options in windows labeled summary, encoder, filters, etc. You can add a timecode generator, letterbox, etc. I think Geometry is a good one to play with too. You can change the sizes of your file there.

Now right click on your file and choose a destination. Hit submit and you should see the time of export in the history panel or you can click on the batch monitor option in the top right of the project window. That will open up the Batch Monitor utility and you can monitor multiple compressions.

Changing Red Color Data in Media Composer 5

Bryce Randle — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 16:44:12 +0000

I don’t work with the RED all too much, I do use it from time to time. One of the new advantages of Media Composer 5 is the ability to import R3D files through AMA and edit them natively.

I loaded up some files on my MacBook Pro (without any other accelerator attached, like the MXO2 mini) and started to edit some pieces. It stuttered here and there, but I put most of the blame on the speed of my computer. I changed the draft quality to “best performance” (all yellow if you read the last blog post) and it seemed to work very well. I think it works better than the H.264 through AMA edit, but more on that another time.

One of the advantages of the way Avid handles Red footage is the ability to change the color data within the application itself. To do this, import your RED clip through AMA. Right click on the file and choose Set Source Settings. You will be taken to another window that will give you the options to change your color, exposure and all the other RED editable settings. Works well. At least I think so.

MC5: Video Quality Control with XDCAM

Bryce Randle — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 18:03:17 +0000

Today’s piece is focused on changing the quality of the clips you are working with in Media Composer. Using the Video Quality Control button, found on the bottom of the sequence window, you can toggle the playback quality of the clip. This works great when you are working off a USB powered drive, editing HD material while on your laptop.

By clicking on the button highlighted, you can control the preview quality of the sequence you are editing. Just yellow means it is rough and half yellow and green means full quality.

I’ve been using the feature while editing a multi-cam piece that was shot on XDCAM EX format. I’m loving how easy it is to change how it looks so quickly.