Tip: Monkey Extract Painlessly Converts R3D to QuickTime or Sequences

I have advocated that – in most cases - when working with R3D files you should convert them to another format instead of attempting to preserve the R3D as long as possible. How exactly to optimally adjust footage in REDAlert and output it is the subject for a longer article that will have to wait until later, but the practical question of how to take, say, a rough cut in Final Cut Pro and convert it from R3D to QuickTimes or TIFF or DPX sequences is much more easily solved with a shareware tool called Monkey Extract.

Tip: Shift Habits, Control Energy Use, Eject Waste

It’s unfortunate for those of us doing the processor-intensive work of video and computer graphics that we typically disable Energy Saver settings because they can thwart renders. You’d think that the system could tell the difference between an After Effects or Maya render that requires several minutes per frame and all the little pings of low level network activity, but it seems to be a hard problem to solve. It only takes one crucial failed render to make you set “Put the Computer to Sleep” to “Never.” Your displays, however, don’t present this level of difficulty.

Tip: Track a Mask in After Effects with TrackerViz

It’s Script Sunday, and today’s script is so useful it made the cut and was included in the latest edition of After Effects Studio Techniques. TrackerViz was written by Charles Bordenave, the guy behind NABscripts (no apparent relation to the conference beginning this weekend), based on requests and ideas from artist Sean Kennedy. Here’s an excerpt in which I describe it.

Tip: Display Timecode or Frames in QuickTime Pro

What if QuickTime Player Pro gave you other options than that counter in seconds? Think of the options – you could specify a particular frame for feedback instead of saying “it’s between 1:52 and 1:53.” Search source timecode of footage to look for logged clips right there instead of firing up Final Cut. Refer to frame count numbers instead of minutes and seconds.

Tip: CS4 Update Actually Gets You All the Way from FCP to After Effects

Last week Matthew Jeppsen posted an article to this Adobe TV video entitled “Import FCP Projects into Adobe Premiere CS4” – today’s tip is that the title could just as easily have said “Import FCP Projects into Adobe After Effects CS4” – keep watching, and the whole workflow is there.

Tip: Render the Impossible via Proxies in After Effects

True story: I was animating a design that involved multiple “filmstrips” of HD video: 6 or 8 of them with a couple dozen HD clips each.  I worked on it until past midnight for an early morning deadline only to realize it would never render in time; it wanted over 2 days to process all that 1080 footage. Then I remembered that I could set up a series of proxies and render those in a giant cascade. When I awoke the following morning everything was fine. Here’s how.

Tip: Double-click to Open R3D in REDAlert with RedPortal

A while back (late 2007 to be exact) Anders Holck posted a Mac helper app that lets you double click an R3D file to open it in REDAlert. The link was only ever posted on reduser and disappeared at some point after it was posted.

Tip: Add “Missing” Finder Tools

Today’s tip features two freeware and one shareware application that I’ve found super-helpful in a multi-Mac studio environment.

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