Sometimes, you need to change the color of part of an image (like a car or sculpture), but not all of it. Or you want everything black and white, except one thing. This article shows you how.
With the release of Final Cut Studio (3), Apple signaled that LiveType was not long for this world by no longer bundling it with the suite of software. However, FCP 7 still supports LiveType files. This is a shame, as I truly like working with LiveType. This article details what makes LiveType fun to use, and features in Motion that would help us make the transition.
When you press the backslash key, Final Cut loops around the current position of the Playhead. This article explains how to change the amount of time plays during this loop.
In researching my up-coming seminar series, I was studying LiveType and discovered two ideas which I want to share with you.
While most of LiveType’s effects and animation don’t require keyframes, LiveType has a powerful keyframe system hidden deep inside. This article shows you how to create and use keyframes inside LiveType to create some great looking effects.
If you haven’t worked with LiveType you are missing a treat. This article shows you how to take LiveType past bouncing TV sets and sunflower characters into creating some amazing animated text effects.
SmoothCam is magical – but the analysis it requires is glacially slow. In this article, discover two tips you can use to speed things up.
Last month, I showed you how to hide someone’s identity using a traveling matte. (Technique: Creating a Traveling Matte.) This month, I want to show you a technique suggested by Tom Wolsky, where the mask, shape, and tracking are all contained on one layer, rather than two layers in a traveling matte.
Sometimes, simply color-balancing is not enough, you need to make the same object or person look the same between two different shots. This article explains how.
The way a monitor wall works is that you send it a full-screen feed for each camera or image you want it to display. It will then composite them into a single display. This gives you the highest image quality and the ability to zoom one of the images full-screen.
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.
Creating scrolling text in Final Cut is awkward at best. Here’s a much more flexible way to create scrolling text in LiveType that allows multiple font sizes, colors and, gasp, a pause at the end!
Here’s the problem. You have high-definition (HD) 16:9 footage that you need to create a standard-definition (SD) 4:3 full-screen image. This means that you are going to lose some visual information on the sides of your image. What’s the best way to do this? This article explains what you need to know.
I discovered this technique a few months ago and was stunned at how easy it is to change the speed of a clip without have the duration change destroy the organization of the rest of my sequence. This is VERY cool!
Chapter markers are frequently used in DVD production. However, you can also put them in QuickTime movies to simplify navigation. However, compressing using H.264 makes this process a bit more difficult. But not impossible, as this article explains how to do it.
Chroma-keying, also called blue-screen or green-screen, is the process of making the background transparent so you can insert the foreground into a different shot. It sounds easy, but in practice, its tricky. This is because the chroma-keyer in Final Cut is, to be kind, sub-optimal. In this article, I’ll show you a better way to key — using Motion. Better yet, you don’t need to really know Motion to get great results.
The most common use of color correction is to correct for cameras that didn’t white balance properly. This article gives you a seven-step process to help make your images look great.
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.
Taking a portion of a 16:9 image and expanding it so it fills a 4:3 screen is called a “center cut.” While taking a center cut of an HD image to fill a 4:3 SD frame is easy, this article describes how, and whether, to expand a 16:9 SD image to fill a 4:3 frame.
This technique grew out of a classroom discussion looking at all the different ways to copy and paste filters. There’s more than one way — in fact, there are at least five. Here they are.
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.
You may have heard that Final Cut sequences can be customized. But what you may not know is how significantly you can make changes — as long as you don’t want to play the results on a DVD or record them to video tape. In this article, I’ll show you how to change the size of your sequence to any size you want.
Philip Roy writes in with a question about saving custom transitions, if only in part, which Larry answers and is later expounded on by Andy Mees.
We can’t always use the latest video technology to capture our images. Sometimes, historical footage requires a film transfer. In this article are some tips you can use to make your film transfers look better.
Keynote is a very fast way to create bullet slide and animated text for video. However, when it comes time to export your images, this article explains how to do it fast and with the best quality.
This technique generated a LOT of responses — how to export a series of still to create a slide show. This technique shows you a couple different ways to create this effect.
The Grad filter has been used by professional photographers for decades. Now, this same power is available to you inside Final Cut Pro.
Dramatically slow motion is easy to create in Motion – if you know where to look. This article details all the steps you need to take to make your fastest shots move in balletic slow-motion.
Creating a slow-motion clip is easy: Modify > Speed. But what if you want to create a fast-motion clip and your hard disk isn’t fast enough to keep up? This short article explains what you need to know.
Creating favorite filters is just a quick drag away, using this technique.
Tired of recreating the same effects over and over again? Final Cut has a better way – create a Favorite Effect. This article shows you how fast and easy this is.
Here’s a great technique that not only provides a interesting effect, but teaches you how to use cropping when you are creating effects.
Final Cut’s text tools are pretty limited in the design department. But here is a simple way to make your closing credits look much more interesting without a lot of work.
The default video transition in Final Cut Pro is a 30 frame cross-dissolve. This article shows you how to change it.
In this technique, I want to show you how to use clip distortion to create an interesting opening title sequence. Distortion, also called “corner pinning,” allows us to change the shape of the frame from a rectangle to a parallelogram, then modify it using keyframes so it changes over time.
What do you do when your client requests a video that’s almost 13,000 pixels wide? (Well, after panicking a bit first…) Steve Sebban took on this task for a museum. Since then, I’ve heard from other editors who need, or use, this technique for the chasing lights around the edges of stadiums. Fortunately, Final Cut Pro makes this easy… if you ignore render times.
I am getting periodic reports of missing render files inside Final Cut Pro. This short article may give you a hand in tracking down the problem.
These ten suggestions on ways to improve your audio recording are excerpted from The Sound Effects Bible written by Ric Viers. If you are having problems getting your recording to sound the way you want, check out these tips.
One of the signs of getting older is that our hearing is not as sharp as it once was. So one of the things I do in my mixes is to be sure that I make things as clear and easy to understand as possible. This article walks you thru the specific steps you can take in Soundtrack Pro to make your audio as clear and distinct as possible.
Here’s a neat trick to make a constant speed change to a video clip without changing the sound of the audio.
This is a quick simple technique to automatically create keyframes for an audio filter. Basically, audio key-framing in real-time.
Using Pro Tools to mix your Final Cut Pro project is a great way to achieve excellent audio. However, there are some tricks you need to understand in this process, as explained here.
Understanding how auto-render works can save you hours on each project. Here’s a step-by-step that explains it.
With FCP version 4.1, Apple changed the rules on how copy and paste work. You now need to know about “auto-select.” This article explains it.
Keyframes and motion paths are used in Final Cut to move images around the screen. However, every keyframe contains additional Bezier controls if you know where to look. This article shows you where they are and how they work.
Stereoscopic 3D video is not just for theatrical release. Cable and satellite channels, even YouTube, now display images in 3D. In this musing, I reflect that even if 3D isn’t the future, we can make money on it now – without spending a ton of money.
Traditionally, effects were recorded to DigiBeta tape in two cuts. The first cut was the hold-out, which defined the alpha channel and the second cut was what went into the matte. However, creating an alpha channel from tape is not obvious. However, it’s easy to do and this article shows you how to do it.
It’s hidden in plain sight, near the top of the Motion tab in Final Cut Pro: Anchor Point. But, what does it do?
In Final Cut Pro, filters process before motion effects. Most of the time, this is fine. However, this order prevents creating certain effects. This tutorial shows how to create nests, how to change this processing order, and how to blur both a clip and the edges of a clip.
When it comes to creating 16:9 projects in LiveType, the process is not intuitive. However, after you read this, whether you need 16:9 in PAL or NTSC, it will be a piece of cake.
