Blog Archives

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.

Money was tight, so “they” decided to shoot the project using both SD and HD cameras. Now, your stuck editing them. HOW??? In this article, we explains a variety of ways you can intercut between SD and HD material, and how to avoid problems with poorly converted video.

Interlacing, deinterlacing, progressive — three very confusing terms to many people. This article explains what they are, when you use them, what to do when you see them, and why you should care — not, in many case, not care at all.

Apple has announced their new iPad, though as of this writing it has not yet shipped. What is the iPad good for? Should video professionals pay attention? In this article, I share some of my thoughts on where the iPad fits in.

File journaling is new in OS 10.3. This article explains what it is and what video editors need to know about it to optimize their systems.

I was surprised to discover I haven’t written about this technique – I use it in almost every project I edit. Built into Final Cut Pro is a really fast, REALLY easy way to find keyboard shortcuts or menu items — if you know where to look. In this article, I’ll show you where.

Here’s a technique you can use to create multiple keyframes in multiple clips at the same time with a single mouse click. Then, I’ll show you how to get more control over the keyframes you set.

Here’s a fast way to use Keynote create text animations — especially for text-heavy clips. This is also a much faster way to create animated bulleted lists as well. This technique shows you how to make this work.

Keynote is a secret weapon in the arsenal of creating motion graphics. The problem is getting the files exported from Keynote into something we can edit. This article describes the process, along with several tips from readers.

The latest versions of Final Cut Pro, Motion, and DVD Studio Pro were announced, along with a brand new application: Soundtrack Pro 2. This article gives you a behind-the-scenes look at what’s new.

Gary Freedline sent me a long screed decrying missing features in Final Cut Pro. However, in reading it, I realized that many of them are already there if you know where to look. This article points the way.

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.

Frame offset was invented to allow you to compensate for the delays between your computer and an external device, like a deck. Here is how it works and why you should care.