you down with FCP?

I am hearing that automatic duck is now free. Interesting…

From Wes and Harry:

October 28, 2011

If you missed our mail last month you should check it out as it got a lot of people talking. Today we have a follow-up.

Our web site has relaunched* and while the overall look of the site is similar there is a dramatic difference in how we are distributing our plug-ins.

Starting today Pro Import AE, Pro Import FCP and Pro Export FCP (both versions, for FCP7 and FCPX) are available at no charge. You read this right. Free.

We are unable to provide support at the same level as we have over the years, but we didn’t want these plug-ins to go away while they remain useful. So if you can make use of these plug-ins in your projects, enjoy!

Thank you to all of our users, working with you for the last 10 1/2 years was a truly wonderful experience.

- Wes and Harry

here is the download link.

I may be going crazy (probably in fact) but last night I was up super late rendering a bunch of things out of After Effects and for some reason they were all failing. I had 5 or 6 renders fail, and then right before bed one of them failed and it made a really loud donkey whinneying noise. Has anyone else ever heard that? Is it an easter egg, or an “undocumented feature?”

I’m going to try to recreate it, but I don’t have high hopes. Let me know if you’ve run into this before.

It turns out the noise is just the default render error noise. I guess I’ve been lucky enough to not hear it before! Oh yeah, it’s also more like a sheep than a donkey.

Walter Soyka said this on the creative cow post

You can trigger the goat sound effect manually in AE by shift-clicking on the second line of the effects panel (the one that identifies which layer is selected, i.e., “Comp 1 • Black Solid”).

There you go!

Just now I found myself with an angry Nuke install that wouldn’t recognize quicktimes unless they ended with “.mov” I have a few hundred linked files at this point, and thankfully most of them weren’t in nuke yet. What did I do? Well I mentioned finder “scripting menu additions” before, but this time I opened one up and tweaked it just a tiny bit to make it much much faster for the specific job I had to do.

The one I modified was “add to file names”. As it comes it brings up a popup box when called and asks you to type in your new text to add, and then asks you if you want prefix of suffix. That’s not really a lot of work, but it is a separate typing step and a mouse clicking step. That slows things down. I modified one line in the script so that it auto populates the text box with “.mov” and also has the default button set to suffix. That means I can call it and hit return and I’m done!

The code change is stupid simple. I added default answer “.mov” and default button 3 to the existing popup. Done. If I would have had more time I would have made it work recursively, so that I could do my whole directory structure in one blow, but that would have been more time coding than compositing, so I stopped there.

If you want to grab a copy of “add mov to filename”, here it is.

I’ve also used it a bunch since then and decided to create a “silent” version. No dialog box. The only thing it does is to add .mov as an extension. You can download “add mov to filename silent” here.

I’ve waited as long at I could to put in my two cents on this one. I’m tired of hearing people moan about how they are switching from FCP to something else. I’m tired of this being the reason why people dig up the age old saws about “professionals use AVID.” Lastly I’m tired of hearing every wedding videographer and youtube-videoblogger try to make their statement about FCP X somehow solidify their position in the “international brotherhood of people who do amazing work.”

If you have faith that Apple will fix things that need to be fixed and continue innovating then continue being patient and eventually you will be proven correct or incorrect.

If you think FCP X signals the end of the world, then feel free to move on to one of the other editing platforms. Apple doesn’t owe you anything, and you are literally one of a million people using the product. Secondly no one is ripping FCP 7 from your computer. Just as you were able to edit a month ago, you are still able to edit with the exact same program. No training required! Otherwise start learning.

I’m generally faithful and patient, however If FCP X doesn’t prove to be a workable solution in the next 6 months then I will look into transitioning to something else. Post production has always been a bleeding edge industry. We are early adopters and we are used to bugs. If you have ever shot on a RED then you know what I’m talking about. All of the fear and self-interest in this FCP X discussion needs to go away so that we can get back to the actual discussion.

I work at a pretty big company, and we have pretty big servers, and sometimes a producer will send me a filepath that is well over 10 directories deep. That’s just too far for me to look at the email and then hunt and peck my way deeper and deeper until I find it. Here are two ways to do that faster.

The simplest way is to copy it and hit shift-command-g in the finder. Paste your filepath in there and hit return. There are a few ways it can get messed up, including if it doesn’t have the proper /Volumes/… prefix or if it uses spaces or non-escaped characters in the name. But try it. It works sometimes.

The other way is to open up terminal and type ‘open ‘ and then paste in your filepath and hit return. That ought to open the directory in finder for you.

For both ways you need to make sure you have a directory not a file, and escape characters can cause trouble, but it can save a ton of time if successful.

For a bonus mini-trick: dragging any file into the terminal window will show you its filepath. Super useful if you are pointing someone else to it.

1) price: $299
2) release date: June
3) no interruption for rendering. everything (including transcoding) is done in the background.
4) sample level precision for audio (FINALLY!)

for more insights, check out the logs of @fcpsupermeet as he was live tweeting (via text) better than even a teenage girl during the announcement, or just look anywhere on the internet. It may just end up being big news…

Just in case you didn’t know, the rumors are deafening that apple will be demoing/unveiling the new final cut at the LA FCP supermeet. That will be happening tonight (april 12) at 7pm pacific.

In case you can’t make it and want to try to get a live stream of the happenings, then we’ve got a man on the inside. Follow @fcpsupermeet as he tries to get enough of a signal to get the word out.

7pm pacific, be there or else… you will have to read up on it tomorrow morning.

I just got back from one of the most interesting shoots I have ever been on. Our client wanted multiple short pieces shot, edited, and uploaded daily with a 12 hour turnaround. To make things more complicated we would be traveling 6-12 hours per day and every day we would wake up in a new city! Also, as we got more comfortable with the turnaround we would ramp up our shoot schedule from from 2 edits per day to 4.

I thought that this was interesting enough that I would do a quick rundown of our workflow. We had two editors running 17 inch macbook pros in the back of the bus. Oh yeah, we had a bus too. A full-on rock band tour bus with bunk beds for 12, a kitchen nook, rear lounge area and xbox and ps2. The editors claimed the rear lounge and set up shop. Each shoot consisted of two hvx-200s and anywhere from one to four flip cams and/or a goPro.

Immediately after the shoot we would ingest the p2 cards to the laptop drives and transfer the goPro/flip footage. All the consumer video was converted to prores, and then everything was transferred to a backup drive for safekeeping. Once an edit was completed, all of the assets would be backed up to a separate external drive. It was a huge concern to be editing on a constantly vibrating bus and to have to wipe p2 cards and memory sticks once or twice a day. Data loss was always in the back of my mind, but I think our backup strategy mitigated it as best as possible.

We had both creatives and legal on the bus, so there was very little waiting for feedback. I would cut a rough, show them, and then start making changes. There were two samsung flatscreens in the back and we used them as client monitors. Since the road noise was pretty severe we used headphones for audio playback. Thankfully all parties involved had been at the shoot, so everyone was roughly on the same page as to how things went down and what footage we had captured. In the next few bumpy hours I would churn out the remaining changes, add titles, music and legal. Eventually we would have an edit that was “bus approved” and we would upload it to our proofing server via a myfi 3g to wifi bridge. From there we would check in with the client to get approval and then upload to the live server. It really was weird to be humming along in the Idaho hills and have a strong wifi signal!

This project ended up being really cool for much the same reasons that 24 hour film fests are cool; There is a deadline regardless of if you want it or not. The work must get done so that new work can be done. There is a certain reassuring feeling knowing that no matter how hard something is, it will be finished or killed in the next 24 hours.

I learned a ton about how to cut faster on the trip, and it was a really refreshing change from sitting in my office all day long. I also gained a ton of respect for cast and crew of live shows. Near time is tough enough, let alone live!

Occasionally I will find myself wanting to burn a dvd from a video_ts folder. That is seemingly an easy thing, but if you simply burn the folder onto a data dvd, then you end up with a disc that will sometimes play on a computer, but never on a standalone dvd player. That is the result of the disc formatting. A DVD needs to have UDF formatting, while a data dvd will end up with (probably) HFS+.

The easiest thing to do is to use toast or popcorn from roxio to burn them to disc. Either one will format the disc properly and let you get on with your business. The only problem is that I don’t have either of those on my editing station. It turns out you can do it via DVD Studio Pro! Here’s How.
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Here you go.