Blogging – Page 8 – Post Fifth Pictures

Avoiding Cutting Boredom

I will be the first to admit that I don’t always work on some exciting stuff. Every once in a while we’ve all had to fill in the cracks, pay the bills, call it what you want. I get pretty bored in the middle of these edits sometimes. I start to daydream of the last project I was on or surf the internet or twitter or end up watching all SNL Digital Shorts known to man to avoid cutting. When it comes down to it, they need to get done though.

How do I fight this boredom? How do I get past the edits staring at me? I do two things.

1) Breakdown the Edit.

Refresh the A/V Devices

When your canvas in Final Cut Pro is stuttering, in most cases…

NES for Your FCP

I read a really cool post by Ross over at You Down With FCP? about making a client controller out of an original Nintendo controller. With his permission, I have reposted the first piece of the post, but you should go over to his blog to check it out. Read the full post here.

Ever since I was a wee lad, and I outgrew my NES for a turbografx 16 (don’t ask) I have been yearning to get back to using that classic rectangular controller. With this project I was finally able to do so.

Avid Media Composer 5.0 Features I’m Excited About

I work from home about 50% of the time. I do all of that work off of a MacBook Pro. I would love to invest in a nice Mac Pro setup, but whenever I do hard core work I get brought into an office with a nice Symphony system or FCP suite. All in all, I am very excited about the new Media Composer software because it gives me a few reasons to tell clients that it would be more efficient to use Avid instead of FCP for once.

Now, I am not going to dive in deep to analyze everything possible, as I was not able to attend NAB and therefore have not tried the software out myself. These are just some thoughts I’ve had over the past couple days.

1) Editing H.264 and ProRes. HDSLR footage, come my way please. I tend to edit 1-2 pieces a week shot on the 7D and this just makes me excited. I can spend more time on the editing and less time on converting the footage to Pro Res before it comes into the system. Good feature for us flat rate payment guys. And then ProRes, really? Great. I’ll take it. I usually use ProRes as something to convert footage that isn’t editing well (H.264) on timelines so I only use it when its HDV or shot on a HDSLR.

Don’t Fear the Default: YouTube in Compressor

Youtube

I’m not usually a fan of deafult settings. I can personalize a project or a preference to be easier to use or to speed things up. In this case I want to talk about trying the default items out. I’m a big fan of some of compressor’s default settings. One in particular is the YouTube compression. This was added in Compress

or 3.5 I believe. Just go into compressor, just like you already do, and do a search for youtube in the presets. Select that option and submit away. You get a really nice image up to 720p. It’s an H264 image that is about 3.6 GB per hour. Give that a shot and see how it helps your image.

Transparent Graphics in After Effects

You may be an expert in Avid or Final Cut Pro, but there may have been a couple times where you’ve had to open After Effects to do one quick change. This may have been easy, but in many cases you’ve never opened After Effects before. You figure you know can work your way around in Photoshop so how hard could it be? Well, if you need to send something to the render queue and need to export something with a transparent background, it could be tough.

First you need to learn the terms After Effects uses. When you want to export something with a transparent background the correct term is having an alpha matte. If you export something with only an alpha matte, you won’t see any of your artwork or lower thirds.

Avid: Customizing Your Bin

I had to create my own bin settings in Avid so I…

Wanted: The Underestimated “L” Cut

After getting a lot of hits on my post titles “I will judge you be your sequence,” I decided to dip into more of my editing ideology. I’ve thought about what topic it should be for a while and came up with the “L” cut.

The “L” cut is an edit I use to distinguish the level of an editor I am taking over for or mentoring (I work with a group of students from BYU from time to time as a mentor or internship provider). It is also one of the easiest ways to make your scene look better. More often than not I take a look at a student’s cut and see a timeline of the stacked Legos. Video, Audio, Audio. Video, Audio, Audio. All like three blocks have been stacked on top of each other over and over. And we all know how that works in a Lego world. No bricks are attached to each other and your creation not only looks lame, but it has no structure.

A few years ago I had the great opportunity to be taught by Steve Rivkin (recently nominated for his editing on Avatar, congrats Steve) and Craig Wood while at the Disney College program at Walt Disney Pictures. I spent three months there. While I did spend some time on different aspects of post production on Enchanted, Underdog and Santa Clause 3, I spent close to three months solely work with the editorial crew of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End as an editorial intern.

What is your favorite (temp) font?

When you don’t have a font right away from your client or…