Blog Archives

How do you capture the screens from a game. There are a number of screen capture utilities on the market. This article explains which works best on the Mac for capturing a game.

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.

Flip cameras, and other inexpensive devices, capture footage in a variety of unusual formats. This article explains what you need to know to work with it inside Final Cut Pro.

Final Cut is not, generally, used for live recording. However, in this article, discover how one reader uses it for live recording and simultaneous playback.

Folks that have worked with video for a long time are often confused about where to set the black level for digital video. This article explains what you need to know — and, relax, it isn’t that hard.

Video, generally, has two bit-depths: 8 and 10. In this short article, I provide an analogy that helps to understand what bit-depth is, why its important, and when you should consider working in 10-bit depth.

HDV is the latest video format craze, but it isn’t like DV; or any other video format we are used to working with. This article explains how HDV is different and what you need to know to use it successfully.

Final Cut expects all cameras to shoot audio at 48 kHz. But, what happens when they don’t? Well, you get audio drifting out of sync, or no audio at all. Many low-end cameras record audio at 32 kHz. This technique shows you what you need to know to capture your audio accurately.

When capturing from tape, Capture Now should always be your last choice, not your first. Sometimes, when using Capture Now, your audio may drift. If that happens, read this article.

Setting the correct audio recording levels on a video camera is crucial to obtaining the best sound during production. This short article explains some of the choices and what you need to know.

One of the easiest questions to ask, and one of the hardest to answer, is “What’s the Best Camera?” The problem is that tricky word “best.” In this short article, I provide some general guidance, along with a list of a dozen questions you need to answer before you can find the camera that’s best… for you!

There are two questions I get asked a lot: what’s the best camera, and what’s the best hardware. This article explains why answering the hardware question is so difficult. It isn’t that there’s no answer, its that the answer is TOTALLY dependent on what YOU need. Take a look here at why.

HDV is the latest video format craze, but it isn’t like DV; or any other video format we are used to working with. This article explains how HDV is different and what you need to know to use it successfully.

A brief, but important, reminder on the subject of FireWire cable limits.

I am not a testing organization, but, recently, Jon Schilling over at CalDigit (www.caldigit.com) sent me a 500 GB SATA RAID to examine (Model #S2VR Duo).

Setting the Anamorphic Flag to tell FCP how to treat your footage.

Here’s a conversation between Peter Tours, of TNT Video Services, and Tony Lauria, of AJA Technical Support, on the best way to ingest footage using AJA video cards. (Reprinted with permission.)

One of the common problems that inexperienced Final Cut editors run into is audio that slowly drifts out of sync. While the problem may appear to be within Final Cut Pro, the cause is actually due to mismatched audio sample rates between the video you shot and the way you are capturing it. What makes this worse is that many consumer cameras default to an audio sample rate of 32 kHz, while Final Cut expects 48 kHz. In this step-by-step tutorial, I’ll explain what an audio sample rate is and how to change your Final Cut settings to capture your audio accurately.

There are four ways inside DVD Studio Pro to control how 16:9 video plays back on a 4:3 monitor. This article describes what you need to know and provides suggestions on which one is best to use.

Even an iSight camera can be pressed into service for capturing video when nothing better is available. This tutorial shows you how fast and easy this can be.

What do you do when you have hundreds of hours of material to capture? Well, first, you have a number of decisions to make. This short article outlines what you need to know before you start.

Final Cut Pro is, most often, used for editing after the recording is complete. However, there are some situations where you need to record live and edit as soon as you can. This article talks about that and provides options to consider. There’s also some relevant reader feedback.