Automation Mixing

From what I have seen, many editors shy away from using Soundtrack Pro 2, as they feel that they have the same tools in Final Cut Pro, and it’s one less step they have to go through, by mixing in their editing timeline. Let me say, if you think this way, you are missing out on one of the best “not so hidden” features of Soundtrack Pro 2, and that is Automation Mixing (AM).  AM used to be reserved for the sound engineers who had mixing consoles hooked up to their Mac’s, but not any more.  You can use this excellent advanced technique for not only regular mixing, but 5.1 surround mixing as well. 

Stills in Final Cut Pro

The point of this entry is to create clean, professional sequences of animated still photos inside Final Cut Pro.  If you have a short deadline, one way to make this deadline is to prep your images in Adobe’s Photoshop CS-4 and animate directly in Apple’s Final Cut Pro.  This project relies on a few basic Photoshop (PS) techniques to prepare images for 2D manipulation.  Leveraging PS in preparing images maximizes the animation process.  The structure of this entry is to walk through the process of building a two minute long animated stills segment with voice over and music in the DV widescreen format.  FCP will handle the square pixel conversion to anamorphic pixel aspect ratio (PAR).

In Photoshop, we’ll start by previsualizing the images, size and crop them saving them as jpg’s, importing and animating these images in FCP.  We’ll be using the Viewer’s Keyframe Graph Area for keyframing Scale, Rotation, Center, Crop, Distort and Opacity parameters.  This is a good workflow for down and dirty stills animation based on an overnight job for a public relations client completed last year.

Plugins You Should Know About

Just a quick follow-on to last week’s FXScript article—some real-world examples of FXScript plugins that add value to FCP. Some are even free.

FXScript: FCP’s Most Under-appreciated Feature

So, these guys throw me a feature needing some digital janitorial work. I spend a few days in Motion and Shake, hand-tracking in fixes atop super-wide-angle, wildly distorting, handheld shots with exposure changes in ‘em, and faking up some greenscreen comps for stuff that didn’t get shot. Cool. But there are also stuck pixels throughout: the show was shot with a pair of HD camcorders: one had a bright white pixel in the upper right side of its image, the other in the upper left side (this, apparently, is what “fair and balanced” is all about). What to do? FXScript!

Inside the New Mac Pros

Last Tuesday Apple announced new Mac Pro models based on Intel’s Nehalem architecture (at long last!). We got some things we’d been hoping for (Nehalem architecture, improved memory handing, MUCH faster GPUs, cleaner internal layout), and not some others some of us had been hoping for (Blu-ray burners, 10GigE networking, cookie dispenser). Read on for Mike’s breakdown of all the BTO options, what they mean, what they cost, and what Mike recommends in a new Mac Pro. Read on after the jump for the Full Scooby.

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