fcp – Post Fifth Pictures

Smart DX – Tracking Takes and Creating Markers Live

I’ve been working on a several animated projects in the past few years (Tron: Uprising, Kung Fu Panda 3, an upcoming feature produced by Paramount Pictures among others) and one thing that has always been difficult is the manual process of breaking down dialogue. I’ve learned to become very fast at it, but it’s still very time consuming and always seems to happen when there is already a crunch going on in editorial.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to streamline the process and I grabbed some friends and colleagues and have come up with this application called Smart DX. It helps you track takes while you are in the recording session and lets you change marker colors (circle takes vs. false starts vs. producer picks) as you go.

I’ve created a KickStarter page for the project. I’ll post some tutorials in the next coming weeks as to how this can be useful for one man band shops, small companies and bigger budget features. Take a look at the project and if you the project would help you, reserve your copy.

Boris Transfer FCP Review

With all the craziness of the Final Cut X going on, people threatening to switch NLE’s, wondering where to go and every blogger writing 10 articles about why FCPX is great or why it isn’t, I decided to take action. I didn’t want to write about it right away though. Cammon and I made our video about why you can’t use FCPX on a feature and that’s that.

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.

Final Cut X: I Don’t Get It

Before reading this article, this is what you should know:

– I didn’t go to the SuperMeet. My wife is expecting any day and I decided to stay home instead of potentially miss our little girl’s birth.

– I followed the feed and tweets of everyone there as best I could.

– I use Final Cut Pro every day.

Another FCP Feature I’d Like

I wish I could play a clip, switch applications and the clip…

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.