Master Multicamera Techniques is a must have book for editors

Quite a few months ago I had a long conversation with editor Mitch Jacobson about multicam editing. The point of this conversation was to, hopefully, provide some good information on multicam editing for what was then his upcoming book about the topic. That book has finally gone into print and I picked up a copy not long ago and began reading it. Besides the much appreciated contributing writer credit that Mitch gave me (and a lot of other people who helped pull the book together) the book is a treasure chest of all things multicam.

Export via Sorensen Squeeze 6 from the FCP timeline

Just the other day I needed to export mp3 audio files from several long Final Cut Pro timelines to send to a client for review. There was no reason to send video and they wanted to get small audio files that didn’t have to be of great quality attached to an email. What better format than mp3! With that I remembered that Sorenson Squeeze 6 (now at version 6.5) installs an Export Using QuickTime Conversion option in FCP. After making the mp3s I thought that a reminder of this would make a good blog post.

Kicking the tires on DaVinci Resolve for Mac

DaVinci Resolve for Mac has begun shipping en masse and is now getting into the hands of a lot of end users. Apparently I talked up the right people as I stalked the Blackmagic Design booth at NAB as they sent over a copy for testing and review. I wanted to install Resolve right away but a busy week of editing meant I didn’t have to time gut the office machine to get the cards in for a proper Resolve configuration. After looking at the install discs sitting around for a few days I couldn’t stand it any more and took them home to install there and at least get a taste for what Resolve for Mac is like. But my home Mac Pro doesn’t really meet the recommended system requirements ....

Review: Get - Phonetic searching for Final Cut Pro

One of the big hits at NAB 2010 was a little program set up in a tiny booth at the plug-in pavilion called ‘Get’, from a company called AV3 Software. Get isn’t really a plug-in at all but rather a stand alone application that works in conjunction with Final Cut Pro to phonetically index media and allow the editor to search for words within that indexed media. In its simplest terms, if you have an interview with a subject that’s talking about resumes, you can search for the word “resume” and Get will return results of all the clips that it indexed with the word “resume” including markers on each clip where the word appears. Since Get is a standalone application you then send the search results to Final Cut Pro where the clips will import with markers intact. Many editors will instantly see where this might come in handy.

Burn-in timecode will make your client happy

If you’ve ever had to send out a copy of an edit for client review (and really, what editor doesn’t do this on a very regular basis) then you may have very well been asked to provide a BITC. BITC stands for burn-in timecode and is as old as editing itself. Dylan Reeve noted right after this post went up that in some countries it’s called TCIP for Timecode in Picture. The numbers running on a BITC give the client an exact number to provide back to the editor when commenting on specific points in an edit. That timecode references the master sequence timecode of the edit. Back in the “old days” of editing you often had to output a cut to videotape and then make a dub of that tape using the super-output of the deck. But today’s non-linear editors provide a filter that you can throw on a cut to produce the BITC. Media Composer and Final Cut Pro both have this effect but they operate in a very different way.

Bill Warner, Walter Murch multi-part stories, links galore

There’s a couple of really good multi-part interviews that have been airing incrementally around the Internet that I wanted to point to. If you haven’t been following them then you’re in for a real treat as you catch up. Hollywood Reinvented is currently in part 5 of an interview with Bill Warner, the man who created Avid. Flickering Myth is taking an extended look at the career of Walter Murch.

SO, YOU’RE AN EDITOR… video diversion

Well here’s another little NSFW video (4:38) that someone made from the Xtranormal “movie” generation website that’s make its way around Twitter (thanks for finding it Shane). This one is titled SO, YOU’RE AN EDITOR…. You can just imagine the subject matter as an editor talks to a .... well I won’t spoil the ending.

Clean up a sloppy FCP timeline with Auto Collapse

When I was teaching the Music Video Workflow class at NAB this year, one part of the discussion centered on the editing timeline and how, if you’re not careful, it can become a multi-layered, sloppy mess. Everyone has their own way of housekeeping within the editing timeline but one thing you should never do is turn over a sloppy, unorganized timeline to another editor. I got an email from one of the attendees after the class that pointed me to a program called Auto Collapse that can automate timeline cleanup in Final Cut Pro.

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