I had great fun last week presenting the Final Cut Pro X multicam editing webinar for Moviola Filmmaking Webinars. It was a lightning fast 90 minutes and we covered a lot of ground but we didn’t get through everything I wanted to cover. The On-Demand version can be purchased and I recorded an extra screencast about one topic that I didn’t get to cover in the webinar. Check it out after the jump.

Adobe is making a big play for Final Cut Pro users with their CS6 release of Premiere Pro. It’s vastly improved over the Premiere Pro of old and is a lot like Final Cut Pro. There’s even a keyboard shortcut layout for Final Cut Pro users. But it is a totally different application than our old Final Cut friend and some things you’re used to in Final Cut Pro either aren’t there or just work differently. Figure out the differences and work with the changes as Premiere Pro CS6 is a great application … and as we all know Final Cut Pro 7 isn’t going to get any better.

With the 2012 NAB show a thing of the past that means the Post|Production world conference is a thing of the past too. One of the classes I taught this year was Essentials of Avid Media Composer Editing for Migrating Editors . It was a great class and a full house of people moving or thinking about moving to Media Composer. I promised the class I would post a list of links and resources they might find useful when moving to Avid. Here’s that list.

Many, many years ago I wondered if we were going to get some good filmmaking apps for the iPhone. That was 4 years ago and it didn’t take long for some timecode calculators to enter the store. Now there’s a whole website devoted to iOS filmmaking tools. A timecode calculator is still one of the most useful things on an iPhone and the makers of Panoptik Timecode have offered a a few free codes for our readers to get a copy of their good ole timcode calculator app.

I was fortunate to get my hands on an early release of Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 and an edit that came up last week seemed like the perfect place to test it out. It wasn’t an overly complex edit, a 3 minute piece shot on RED with interviews and b-roll. I cut the offline and it will then go to an After Effects artist for some fancy graphics and Baselight for color grading. As I was taking notes on the new version of Premiere Pro for an upcoming review I thought it might be interesting to just publish those notes in a blog post about Premiere Pro CS6. Here they are.

One little booth I happened to come by as I walked the NAB show floor was SpectraCal. A bright red screen with a little device attached to it was all that I needed to stop by and check it out. SpectraCal was showing their solutions for measuring and calibrating accurate color on your client and grading monitors. Why do you need an accurate monitor? Are you using DaVinci Resolve?

Apple didn’t have a booth at the 2012 NAB show, and no one expected them to. Even though no one was surprised they weren’t there a lot of folks commented that they thought it would’ve been more appropriate than ever given that Apple now has a shipping version of Final Cut Pro X. But Apple’s presence was felt all over the show floor with tons of Apple products on display. They were even having on the record meetings off the show floor and I was lucky enough to be invited to one of them.

One company that I wanted to be sure and check out at this year’s NAB was EditShare see how they’re coming with Lightworks. I don’t have a Windows machine so I haven’t been able to download it. Their Mac version has fallen behind schedule but they were showing a Linux version running on a laptop at their booth. The official Lightworks release is scheduled for May 28. It’s been many years since I’ve seen a Lightworks running in the real world but I remember them fondly. In fact a Lightworks was one of the first machines I ever assisted on back before I had ever really used an Avid. I’m happy to report the shark is still there.

Filmlight was taking time in their booth on the NAB show floor to demo their upcoming Baselight for Avid Media Composer plug-in. It was an early build and when it ships it will be another part of their Baselight Editions initiative which aims to put a Baselight plug-in into many of the top NLE and fx applications. We’ve already got Final Cut Pro and Nuke so Avid Media Composer is the next logical choice.

If you’re lucky enough to work in the rarified air that is Quantel then you’re probably well aware of all their product offerings. If you’re not then it’s worth noting that Quantel has entered into the “lower cost” post-production arena by introducing lower cost versions of some of their hardware and software, including a software only option for their flagship Pablo product. Of course “lower cost” is a relative term and the mid-five-figures might be lower cost to some an not to others.

Promise Technology has become a major player in the relatively new Thunderbolt storage market and their Pegasus RAIDs were all over the NAB show floor. If you’ve never seen a Pegasus RAID, they’re big, fast, multi-drive units, just like a professional desktop RAID should be. Promise Technology also introduced two new small drive enclosures that will them continue to be leaders in all things Thunderbolt.

NewBlue, Inc. is a software developer that had a booth in the South Hall’s plug-in pavilion. They were showing their NewBlue Titler, a dedicated title creation and animation tool that resides in most all the major NLEs. It has a clean, simple interface that didn’t look like it breaks any new ground as far as design goes but that may be okay if you’ve got the need to create and animate your titles in a hurry … which many of us do.

One of my favorite products being shown at NAB 2012 is the upcoming PluralEyes 3.0 from Singular Software. Many of use have been using PluralEyes for a lot of years now in all of our NLEs but when PluralEyes 3.0 ships, probably this summer, you’ll see a totally different and cleverly redesigned application.

I wandered into GoPro’s rather large booth on Thursday morning as they had both a Porsche 911 and Ford GT40 on display with a ton of GoPros attached. An announcement late in the NAB week was that an update to the tiny GoPro cameras would finally give them 24 frames per second capability. It was also a surprise that none other than Technicolor was going to supply a flat cinema-style picture profile for a bit more dynamic range in your GoPro footage as a part of that firmware update. I was even more surprised to see Technicolor demoing a new color correction application called CineLights in the GoPro booth as well.

Autodesk has been saying for quite a few weeks now that Smoke is changing and they were right. What was previously a very high-end, very expensive, somewhat inaccessible piece of post-production software is now a very high-end, much more affordable (though still expensive for many) and more approachable piece of post-production software. The biggest news of all is that Smoke for Mac has gone from $15,000 down to $3,495. The second bit of news is that it should be a lot easier for editors to use.

The cat is out of the bag on the Adobe CS6 Production Premium. It isn’t shipping yet but I’ve been able test out some of the CS6 products for a few weeks now. While there’s big additions and changes in the entire Creative Suite my first and main focus was to see just how Premiere Pro has changed, what new features have been added and what hasn’t been addressed as of yet. Overall, Adobe continues to make Premiere Pro a better product that will let you “edit your way”. It isn’t perfect (no NLE is perfect) but it’s a lot better than 5.5 … and 5.5 was pretty good itself. Here’s my top 5 (or so) features in Premiere Pro CS6 and a couple of comments on what is still missing. Please forgive some wonkieness on PVC if you’re not seeing certain images as we’ve been having some server issues recently that they are working to fix. A reload of the page might help.

Here’s a handy little tip for viewing and previewing Avid Media Composer .MXF files outside of Media Composer itself. It came up via Twitter recently and it’s one of those little tips that I can’t believe I didn’t know before now. It’s mainly for those moments when you wonder … “what’s in the file that is called OS020705A01.CBA36E04F7E03DB.mxf?” Is a human really supposed to be able to read those things?

At NAB 2011 FilmLight surprised most everyone with a preview of their Baselight for Final Cut Pro plugin. It was surprising because I think many people expected them to release a lower cost, Mac-based version of their flagship Baselight color grading tool. Instead they showed a different strategy that looks to revolve around very powerful color grading plugins and interoperability with the full Baselight systems. The FCP plugin had been in beta for a while and was just released. For $995 Baselight for Final Cut Pro can be yours.

ARRI has begun to ship its DNxHD update for their Alexa camera. This announcement that the Alexa would get DNxHD as an onboard recording option (besides ProRes) was welcome news to post-production people like myself who use Avid Media Composer. While ProRes is supported in Avid both by AMA linking and direct MXF creation (in the Media Composer version 6 on Mac that is) DNxHD is Avid’s own in-house codec and is a perfect option for compressed hi-def media. But ARRI’s onboard DNxHD recording uses an MXF format that’s a bit different than Avid’s. Read on for a discussion of why that is (and lots of OP).

The big National Association of Broadcasters convention is just over a month away. It’s a week of fun, fellowship, education, parties and more gear than your brain can handle. There’s a ton of both official and unofficial events that happen during the day and in the evening. There’s not really an official list anywhere and as I’ve been trying to compile a list of my own I thought I’d post that list of events here on the Editblog. I’ll continue updating this list as the show draws near. If you have anything to add to the list please put them in the comments below or email them to editblog [at] me.com

A number of filmmakers involved in the Boston Creative Pro User Group got together in January to give the new Canon C300 a test. Their result is this short piece called Hustle. New camera tests on Vimeo are a dime a dozen these days but after speaking with the BOSCPUG folks involved in post I got a few before and after color grading stills. As an amateur colorist myself, I always enjoy seeing these types of before and after images. Not so much to analyze the technical quality of the image and a camera’s latitude but more to look at the creative decision in the grade. I hope you enjoy seeing them too.

In honor of TipTuesday over on Twitter I thought I’d share this simple Avid Media Composer tip that I use to counter the lack of a clip enable / disable feature in Media Composer. It’s all about saving an effect and getting easy access to that saved effect. There’s actually several tips in here that can be used for most all effects in Media Composer.

When Apple released the latest Final Cut Pro X update there was a very important 3rd party utility released right alongside the 10.0.3 update that finally allowed the importing of legacy FCP7 projects into FCPX. It wasn’t entirely surprising that it was Intelligent Assistance releasing 7toX for Final Cut Pro. I say that because they had already created Xto7 (to move projects from FCPX to FCP7) and are arguably the best company for creating high-quality XML workflow tools for the FCP universe. There’s been tons of blog posts about 7toX for Final Cut Pro since its introduction but most of them are nothing more than a here it is here’s the link kind of thing, including one of my own. Many have taken a simple sequence to try this conversion but my thought was to throw everything at 7toX for Final Cut Pro and see how well it did ... or didn’t work.

As we all know by now Apple released their promised update to Final Cut Pro X that added multicam. It’s only been a week and there’s already a lot of articles and tutorials about how this new feature works. I sat down with it some over the weekend to kick the tires and see how it performed. What follows are some thoughts, notes and observations as I was working with it. I was especially curious as to how it might work for music videos.

Is it early 2012? It is and Apple has kept its promise with an update that takes Final Cut Pro X to 10.0.3. The promised features are there as well including what looks like an interesting and well thought-out multicam implementation. Broadcast monitoring is there too but it’s labeled as a beta implementation though if the drivers are there it should work. And they said it couldn’t be done but it has been: there’s now a way to easily move a Final Cut Pro 7 project to Final Cut Pro X that’s made possible by an updated XML and a 3rd party software product.

Word came out today from Tangent Devices that the first Element panels are now shipping. If you don’t remember the Element is Tangent’s newest color grading control panel that uses a modular design that is four separate pieces that can be purchased separately. They are designed to work together to make a more full featured panel than the Wave with trackballs and rings, knobs and buttons and transport controls if the buyer so desires. As for supported applications, Assimilate SCRATCH and Apple Color are two more common applications on the list but the one many people are asking about, DaVinci Resolve, is (so far) missing.

Last week a review that I wrote of Avid Media Composer 6 went online over at Studio Daily. Here’s the link so if you’re interested in what I think is a rather thorough review that tries to go beyond just bullet points and a feature list then please give it a read. Now that I’ve had a couple of months beyond the first kicking the tires reaction here’s a few more MC6 observations.