Blog Archives

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!

Trying to get up to speed on HDV quickly. This article gives you a primer on the current status of HDV – what’s good, what’s bad, and 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.

Here are some design tips to help your text and images look good in 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.

The Grad filter has been used by professional photographers for decades. Now, this same power is available to you inside Final Cut Pro.

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.

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.

The simplest definition of rendering is to convert an effect or image from its native format to match the video format of your timeline.

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.

We toss around terms like 8-bit depth, or 10-bit depth, even 12-bit depth. But what do those terms actually mean? Does it make a difference what bit depth we work in? The answer is yes. Bit-depth determines how accurately we can digitally represent an image, compared to reality. This article provides more detail without going into too much tech.

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.

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.

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.

I have a client who’s beginning to edit to documentary that has over 100 hours of material to be edited into a 30-minute documentary. What he wants to do is log each clip, then copy that logging information out of Final Cut so he can load it into Excel. The advantage of exporting all this data is that he can think about his clips, and share this information between producers, without running Final Cut.

Recently, I was asked to give a demo of the latest Boris Continuum Complete plug-in suite at the LA Final Cut Pro User Group, and this is how it works.