JPEGs are highly compressed, which means they often show blockiness or other image artifacts. However, they tend to have smaller file sizes. TIFFs are uncompressed with great image quality. However, their file sizes tend to be lots bigger. All things being equal, I recommend using TIFFs.
Preference settings have changed in FCP 5. This article shows you how to optimize your setting to get the most from your editing system.
Apple changed the algorythms FCP uses for scaling and rotation for FCP 5. This explains what the changes are, how to use them and how to convert to the new settings.
With FCP 5’s support for HDV, you need to change the size of images you import. Here are new scan numbers you should use.
With the release of Final Cut Pro 7, we got a new export menu option – Send. In this article, I take a first look at the differences between Share, Send, and Export; and explain which one to use.
As you know, most versions of Final Cut Pro are tied to work best with certain versions of QuickTime. However, as time passes, it gets harder and harder to remember all the different permutations. Here’s a quick link to a website that has the answers.
The issue of converting to ProRes is addressed along with a walk-through of the pros and cons of the different version.
When I was writing my first book on Final Cut Pro a few years ago, I developed a nine-step editing workflow that answered the question: “What should I be doing right now?” However, over the years, I’ve learned more and Apple has released new software, so this nine-step process has become a bit outdated. Today I want to revisit and update it. Especially for editors that are new, or just getting back into the industry, my hope is that in following these steps, you’ll have a better way to keep track of what you should be doing “right now.”
Apple released Final Cut Studio (3) on July 23, 2009. This is a quick look at the announcement and an exclusive interview with Richard Townhill, Director of Video Application Marketing for Apple, about the new software suite.
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.
“Interlacing” is a term that confuses many people. This article explains what it is, how to work with it, and how to remove it in both video and stills.
By default, Final Cut only displays one field of video – this makes images much easier to view while editing. But, sometimes, you need to see both fields. This very, very short article explains exactly what you need to know.
One of the biggest challenges editors face is getting organized at the start of a project, then staying organized during a project. Here is a collection of tips and techniques from a variety of readers than can give you the system you need to get on top of your project.
This technique describes an interesting effect combining a traveling matte and a pond ripple filter which allows you to color an effect as it moves across the screen.
Over the last few versions, Apple has added new options in Final Cut Pro that make finding clips a lot easier. In this Technique, I want to show you what some of them are. Whether you are looking for clips in the Viewer, the Browser, or the Timeline, here are some very cool, and little known, techniques.
A quick technique to use when you need to find a specific clip.
Here’s a secret technique that allows you to add the default transition to any number of selected clips in the timeline — all at the same time!
This technique shows you how to get the most from your FireWire drives, from partitioning through formatting to daisy-chaining.
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.
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.
Three of the most powerful keyboard shortcuts in Final Cut Pro are blocked because OS X uses the same three keys differently. This article shows you how to remap the OS shortcuts to release the power in Final Cut.
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.
Gamma settings control the gray-scale midpoint. The reason this is significant is that Macs, video, and Windows all use slightly different settings. This means that video that looks good on one system, may look washed out or too dark on others. Snow Leopard, however, has changed the rules. In this article, I explain what gamma is, how to use it, and where to set it.
I discovered this technique to be very useful when I want to make a shot-by-shot comparison between an existing movie and a sequence.
Garbage mattes are a fast way to exclude portions of a frame that you don’t want the viewer to see. This article shows an example of using garbage mattes to hide light stands in a music video.
As we gear up for the 2010 NAB Show – where the Digital Production Buzz is the Official Podcast of the event – I thought you’d be interested in the gear we are using and how we are using it. Next month, I’ll report on what we did.
A reader writes that his 10-year-old daughter is interested in editing and wants to know the best gear to buy and how to get trained in FCP. This is a great question, but the wrong question. This article explains that it isn’t the gear, its her interest. Fan that first, then buy gear second. You can read how here.
This tutorial shows you how to create a glowing lantern effect in Final Cut Pro using the Light-rays Glow filter and some video generators. It isn’t fine art, but this will show you how to create some amazing effects, easily, on your own system.Easy, I thought… use Light Rays.
Looking for different ways to add some excitement to your transitions? This article explains a little understood transition in Final Cut that provides some truly exciting, and unusual, transitions.
Gradients are a smooth ramp from one color, or shade of gray, to another. Gradients can be easily created in Final Cut Pro, but the button to do so is very hidden. In this article, I show you how to create a gradient, how to adjust it, and provide some ideas on what you can do with it.
Have you ever wondered what that thin green line means at the top of some of your audio clips? Well, this short article let’s you in on the secret.
Great looking chroma-keys start on set with how you light. However, once you’ve got the footage, what’s the best way to create a key. Here’s a quick sidebar that lists some other software you might want to try if you are not able to get the effect you want using the keyers that ship with Final Cut or Motion.
This is a comprehensive look at how computer and video graphics are different and what you need to know to create great looking video text and graphics. This article can make your life a LOT easier!
This article is based on research done by William Aleman, who sent instructions and links on how to embed metadata into H.264 files. Some interesting reading!
Handles are critical for transitions and trimming. In this article, discover what handles are and why they are necessary.
Hard drives are essential to video editing. Which makes it really, REALLY aggravating when they stop working. Here are two techniques you can use to trouble-shoot hard drive problems: having too many disks attached, and not being able to boot from the system disk.
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.
DVDs are always standard definition video. Which means that if you shot your project in HD, you need to down-convert it to SD before you can put it onto a DVD. This short article describes what you need to know.
HDV uses rectangular pixels to represent its image. Each pixel is short and fat, which means it only needs 1440 pixels to represent an entire line of HD video. However, the computer (and some other video formats) use square pixels to represent the image. So, when you export from HDV to a QuickTime movie, Final Cut converts the pixels from rectangles to squares.
By definition, all DVDs are only standard-def (SD). If you need high-def, you need to create Blu-ray Discs, which are not the same thing. But what if you want to take HD material and put it on a DVD? You need to convert it. And this article, describes how.
Larry fields a question related to transferring HDV footage and traces the problem back to the process of compressing the video. A walk-through of changing the output settings in the Geometry tab provides a detailed guide to preventing this problem from reoccurring.
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)
Here is a very slick technique to find audio in your sequence that’s distorting. It won’t fix it — but it will find it; and much, much faster than real-time.
Recently, Apple announced a new video format – iFrame – and Sanyo announced new cameras that support that format. This article looks at this announcement and speculates on what this means for the video professional. (Note: Currently, Final Cut Pro does not support iFrame files.)
Here are some design tips to help your text and images look good in video.
One of the most complex steps in video editing is getting your computer-based images to look good in video. This article explains how video images are different from computer images and what you need to do to make them look great.
Final Cut Pro allows you to import text into a text clip, which allows you to write your text in one place, then display it in Final Cut. The problem is, that importing doesn’t always work properly. This article describes the problem and provides a solution.
What’s the best way to get the highest quality video images during export? DV, especially, looks particularly poor when you view it in QuickTime. This article explains what’s going on and what you need to know to make your exported video look as good as it possibly can.
Not everyone needs HD. However, HD can make reframing a lot easier — especially when it is integrated into an SD timeline. This article provides an example of how this is done.
