Here’s a technique that can totally change how you think about sequences, nests, and the special effects you can create with them.
Adobe Premiere can create text transcripts of your media files. prEdit takes those transcripts and allows you to edit a rough cut for either Premiere or Final Cut just using those transcripts. For editors wading through a ton of material trying to find just the right quotes, this software can make your life VERY easy, as this product review explains.
Transcriptize is a new piece of software that takes the text transcripts automatically generated by Adobe Premiere or Adobe Soundbooth and formats them so people, rather than computers, can read them. PLUS, it allows you to a great trick to import those text transcripts into Final Cut Pro to speed your editing.
Judging by my email, handling still images is by far the most confusing part of editing video — especially because the computer creates images using square pixels and video uses rectangular pixels, in a variety of shapes. This article explains everything you need to know to create great looking still images for your next video project.
In this article Larry advises a subscriber who downloaded a beta version of Soundbooth and believes there may have been an error in his workflow.
Working with still images in Final Cut Pro is very, very confusing. Not least because video ignore the DPI settings of your image. In this short article, I explain what you need to know to size your images appropriately.
Nothing causes more confusion for video editors than trying to figure out how to size still images for video. I’ve written extensively about this in the past — which is referenced in this article — this is an additional follow-up.
The lighting is perfect, the acting superb, the audio flawless — except the boom mike has crept into the top of the frame. Here are several quick techniques you can use to get rid of it — without reshooting.
Working with still images in video is hard, because images created on the computer are not compatible with video. A new software – PhotoMotion – seeks to solve a lot of the challenges in working with still images. This is a detailed review of how the product works.
This detailed analysis looks at how to create graphics on your computer that look “right” on FCP. It’s a detailed look at the difference between square and non-square pixels.
Video is hard enough to understand. Throw in fields, frames, field order, and interlacing and it’s enough to make you cry. In this article, I explain what you need to know to successfully navigate around the land mines.
The world of HD is awash in incompatible formats. Worse, it has eight different frame rates. And selecting the wrong frame rate in After Effects can make your video uneditable in Final Cut Pro. This article explains what you need to know.
If you’d rather use Preview as your default Final Cut Help Viewer, this article tells you where to find your help files and how to change them.
Probably no subject generates more email than questions about the best way to prepare still for both HD and SD. In this article, David Scott provides this step-by-step approach to making your stills look great. (Note: For a video tutorial on this subject, CLICK HERE)
Final Cut makes it challenging to line things up properly in the Canvas or Viewer, because there are no grids or guides. Here’s a quick technique you can use to create your own grids.
Larry fields a few questions regarding DVD problems from transcoding HD to SD, the advantages of Blu-Ray, and more.
Have you ever created a still image, only to see the color or gray scale shift when you imported it into Final Cut Pro? This article explains what’s going on and how you fix it.
The native format of HDV isn’t QuickTime, it’s .M2T. However, FCP can’t play M2T files – it needs to convert them. There are two ways you can do this — using Compressor or using MPEG StreamClip. This article shows you how.
Sometimes you need more than QuickTime to meet the needs of a client. In this brief article, we present a variety of solutions you can use to create WMV files of your Final Cut Pro projects on a Mac.
Freeze frames, also called “still frames,” are fun to work with and easy to create. However, in Final Cut 6.0.2, Apple changed how it exports freeze frames. Reading this article is critical to preventing problems with image scaling. This was fixed in version 6.0.3.
If you’ve ever compared the quality of your DV movies in Final Cut to what they look like in QuickTime, you can very quickly become suicidal. Why does QuickTime make your images look so bad? This quick article explains.
Want to give your DVDs a more professional look? In this detailed, step-by-step article, you’ll learn how to create menus and button highlights in Photoshop, import them into DVD Studio Pro, build a menu and add buttons, all to create a professional-grade menu. (Part 1 of 2 – the second part discusses how to create a motion menu in Final Cut Pro for a DVD.)
One confusing issue new editors need to deal with is getting Final Cut Pro to recognize 16:9 (also called “widescreen,” or “anamorphic”) video. As well, if the editor is a new Mac user, they may also have problems with exported file sizes. This article addresses both these issues.
Here’s a seven-step process to export your Final Cut video sequences to Flash.
One of the current limitations of Final Cut Studio is that it does not natively support creating Flash video output from a Final Cut Pro sequence. However, all is not lost. This article describes three different ways you can get what you want.
Want to give your DVDs a more professional look? In this detailed, step-by-step article, you’ll learn how to create menus and button highlights in Photoshop, import them into DVD Studio Pro, build a menu and add buttons, all to create a professional-grade menu. (Part 1 of 2 – the second part discusses how to create a motion menu in Final Cut Pro for a DVD.)
In this article Larry fields a question regarding recommended color space when importing images into FCP.
Ever wonder what levels to set your reference tones to? Should you output tone at 0 dB, -12 dB,-18 dB, or -20 dB. In this discussion, Larry is joined by Woody Woodhall, president of Allied Post, to get a better understanding of the issue. And, yup, it’s just as confused as we thought!
AVCHD Discs are a nice compromise between full-HD Blu-ray Discs, and the standard def DVDs we’ve all been using for the last 20 years. While, currently, Final Cut Studio can not create Blu-ray Discs, it can create a version of Blu-ray called “AVCHD.” This article explains what AVCHD Discs are, why you would use them, and how you create them.
64-bit memory addressing is new with OS X 10.6. But what does this really mean? And what does it mean for Final Cut Studio (3)? In this short, moderately technical, article, we take a look a this new term and what it means for the future of video editing.
Need to find some new fonts — or looking for a way to add them to your system? Here’s how.
