Quicktip Day 04: Tear off the Avid tool palette

Quicktip #4 (February 4, 2009) Tear off the Avid tool palette

By default the Avid tool palette lives between the source and record monitors under the little “hamburger” menu. Click it and it drops down:

but drag the mouse away while the tool palette is open and it will “tear away” into its own window which can then be positioned anywhere:

It’s a great place to store lesser used commands. As a bonus Avid tip, head over to the Rockhopper Post blog for their continuing series of Avid tips.

Remember Adobe Premiere Express?

A while back I seem to remember Adobe announcing Adobe Premiere Express, its Flash-based online video editor. I never played with it and really didn’t hear that much about it but it is alive and well as part of the new Hyundai Genesis Coupe advertising campaign. And over on the Hyundai site you can even edit your own version of a Genesis Coupe commercial and post it for all the world to see. I gave it a try and I have to say that while it’s exciting to see that the Internet has progressed far enough for feature rich “applications” like this to exist the last thing I want to do is edit with Premiere Express. It may not be the interface itself (though it’s not the most pleasant thing) but the Hyundai site as I was only able to get a few of the user generated edits to play at all. As cool as the Genesis Coupe looks I’m sure the site isn’t that overloaded!

Quicktip Day 03: Project folders in the Finder sidebar

Quicktip #3 (February 3, 2009) Put Project folders in the Finder sidebar

I access my Final Cut Pro projects folder and my Avid projects folder all the time so I put those folders into the Places sidebar in the Finder window via click and drag. They are always there, even in an Open and Save dialog box. This is on my machine at home where I have both Avid and Final Cut Pro installed on the same drive. Another good tip if you run both applications is to install two separate boot drives, one for Avid and one for Final Cut Pro. Then you can keep your OS and your QuickTime version at the currently supported versions. It’s a bit of a pain to manage two drives but it’s better than doing a random update and then having a crashing application to troubleshoot when you need to be working.

Quicktip Day 02: Map your 9-split exactly to the keypad

Quicktip #2 (February 2, 2009) Map your 9-split exactly to the keypad

Final Cut Pro already has the 9-split multicam view edit keys mapped to the keypad of the Multi-camera Editing keyboard layout as a default where you can switch to the various cameras 1 - 9 with a press of the camera number you want to switch to. I like to change those mappings around where instead of the number on the keypad matching the number of the camera it is the placement of the key that matches the camera in a 9-split multicam view. For example, in my keyboard layout cut to camera 1 is mapped to keypad shift+7 (I mapped it to the shift tab so I didn’t have to change keyboard layouts for multicam editing):

To me this is much easier to make quick camera cuts on the keypad without even having to look at any buttons since the keys now exactly match the 9-split. Depending on where your cameras land when making your multiclip you can rearrange the cameras in the multicam view and place them where you want. For me I put camera 1 in the upper left corner where it matches the 7 key on the keypad. Camera 2 in the middle of the top row to match keypad 8 and so on. Plus it changes part of what I think is FCP’s illogical default keyboard placements. Once you feel the raised bump on the 5 key you are cutting away.

Quicktip Day 01: Use that CAPS LOCK!

Quicktip #1 (February 1, 2009) Use that CAPS LOCK!

In Final Cut Pro, when working on an edit sequence with lots of graphic layers, it can take a few seconds to render the current frame for display (especially if working in HD):

Use the CAPS LOCK key to temporarily disable rendering and you can do a lot of really fast work in the timeline without having to wait on FCP to render the frame between adjustments. And you get an alert in the viewer and Canvas to let you know why you can’t see the frame:

I find this particularly useful when cleaning up my timeline, prepping an edit for online or OMF consolidation for audio mix, generally any kind of housekeeping or fine-tuning a multilayer edit.

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