Monday, July 28, 2008

Ten Reasons To Switch To Final Cut Studio

Kevin P. McAuliffe | 07/28- 02:15 PM

With all the editing programs and packages on the market today, deciding on which one is right for you can be difficult and confusing.  I thought I would take a look and list my top ten reasons why you should either switch to Final Cut Studio 2 or make it your first choice when buying for the first time!

10. SMOOTHCAM AND THE INTRODUCTION OF BACKGROUND PROCESSING

Anyone who has used Shake will be familiar with SmoothCam.  It was designed to, as the name says, smooth out camera bumps and shakes in your footage.  Most people might look at this and think that it is not really that big a deal, but believe me, it is.  Why you ask?  SmoothCam not only lets you smooth your footage out, but it introduces a new feature to Final Cut Pro that let’s you process the effect “live” in the background.  The way the effect works is that once you add it to your timeline, FCP immediately starts analyzing the original clip to see what is happening inside the frame.  Keep in mind, if the shot you captured was an hour long, it will process the whole hour long clip.  In most cases, with anything that needs processing or analyzing, you would need to stop and wait for it to finish.  Not anymore!  Now, Final Cut Pro will analyze while you are working.  Once you hit play on your timeline to see what you are working on, the analyzing will pause, and once you stop playing to do effects work, titles, etc, it will keep processing until it is done.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Distressing Text Edges - Photoshop for Video

Richard Harrington | 06/12- 04:50 AM

Instructor Richard Harrington shows you how to use a patterned image to degrade the edges of your text for a unique text effect in Photoshop. 

Monday, June 09, 2008

Motion Quick Tip: Importing Illustrator and Photoshop Files

Mark Spencer | 06/09- 01:15 PM

Working With Fixed Resolution

When working with Motion, you’ll often import content that was created elsewhere. For example, Illustrator and Photoshop are two powerful applications for creating and manipulating images. They both work very well with Motion, but to get the best results, you need to know about setting in Motion that isn’t necessarily obvious or easy to find.

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

What’s in a Name?

steve martin | 06/04- 09:47 AM

Manage Your File Names without Leaving the Browser

As any editor knows, good media management begins by establishing proper naming conventions.  In a perfect world, proper clip names would be entered during the logging stage.  However, due to tight deadlines or perhaps shear laziness on the part of the editor, media file names are sometimes injested or captured with non-descript file names such as “untitled” or, as is the case with the Panasonic AG-HVX200, transferred with their 6 digit camera-assigned file names. This article will show you how to rename your files directly in the Browser using Final Cut Pro 6.  Below is an screen shot of an edit in progress using clips transferred from an AG-HVX200. 

Before you can rename the file, you first must locate the Master clip.  Park your playhead over the clip to be renamed, then press Shift-F to reveal the clip in the Browser.  The clip will become selected.

In the Browser, give your clip a meaningful name.

From the Modify Menu choose Rename>File to Match Clip.

You will be warned that what you are about to do will modify the original file. Go ahead, live life on the edge…

Because of Final Cut Pro’s Master/Affiliate clip architecture, all Affiliate clips that reference the Master clip will be renamed.

In the Finder, you’ll see that the file name was actually changed to the new name you entered in the Browser.

Monday, April 21, 2008

AE Puppet Tool

Richard Harrington | 04/21- 11:03 PM

Want to learn how to turn photos into animation?

To get the hands on files Photoshopforvideo.com

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

NAB 2008: Plugged In

Chris and Trish Meyer | 04/16- 10:40 PM

We came away with three themes buzzing in our head: plug-ins, training, and Nuke.

As expected, NAB 2008 did not reveal any major new software releases for motion graphic designers, but it did showcase a number of interesting new plug-ins. We’d like to give you a quick round-up of our favorites here; we’re arranging to give many of these more in-depth reviews up here on PVC over the next several months. We also were very interested in with what The Foundry has done with the high-end compositing application Nuke (which they acquired from Digital Domain), and came away with the impression that in this slow economy, training has become more important again.

Page 4 of 6 pages « First  <  2 3 4 5 6 >