We have a few months, so I figure I will throw some of my ideas out there and see if anyone else has any better ones!

Concept 01 – KISS

This revolves around just using a shuttle or a shuttle pro. These have a scroll and jog wheel they have user re-mappable keys, and you can even define keysets for each specific app. I think the only thing difficult about this would be configuring a mount for it, but I could see a long piece of aluminum (to go between his arm and his body) bent at roughly a 45 at where his wrist hits it. The 45 would have a velcro patch on it, and so would the bottom of the shuttle. I think that between sliding the aluminum, tweaking the bend and moving the velcro he would be able to get pretty comfortable.

Concept 02 – Numeric pad

Same idea as before, but remap one of those small number pad usb keyboards and mount it in the same way. This has the advantage of more buttons, but I’m not really sure how many buttons is too many for one hand.

Concept 03 – Custom all the way!

This would involve a bit more study and then create a keyboard using a keyboard emulator. It would probably involve lots of little pushbuttons. The benefit would be that the common modifier keys could all be grouped together, and the functional keys could all be laid out semi-ergonomically. This would need a pretty special enclosure, and would surely be a wiring rats nest.

I have all kinds of other (mostly bad) thoughts involving foot switches, left hand mousing, and a variety of other dead end technologies. I want to hear your thoughts! What is the best hardware for this kind of project? If you had to cut the # of keys down to as few as possible, what ones would be on your list? What could you remap inside of final cut in order to save time?

I can’t wait to see your comments!

Click on the end of a clip and drag it to your desired length. The tool will keep the in and out as marked, and time remap the clip to fit your new selection. If you select an edit between two clips it will adjust both clips accordingly. This is exactly how I would like the tool to work, and it is super convenient.

If you have excellent vision you can see that the clip “Nightlights01″ has been remapped to 66% Three s’s and a drag was all it took!

Bitterness aside, I generally have two options: try to eq the voice out (and often take a significant part of the music with it) or find an instrumental or karaoke version of the track (which is often unavailable or sounds terrible). I was poking around on a dj forum a while ago and found out about a third option! It’s called phase cancellation.

Phase cancellation is a relatively simple concept. All sound travels in waves. When two sound waves hit each other they end up combining. Sometimes when the waves combine they make a sound that is as loud as both of them added together and it is called constructive interference. Sometimes they make a sound that is approaching silence and it is called destructive interference. Check out wikipedia for more info. This is the principle behind bose noise canceling headphones. The headphones each have a microphone on the outside of the headphone. They invert the sound wave coming in and then play it back through the speaker on the inside. When the sound from outside and the new sound from the headphone speaker reach your ear both sounds have been silenced by destructive interference.

Theory aside, editors are presented with a unique opportunity here. Almost all music is in stereo, and most instruments are recorded in mono. In the mix a fairly common practice is to mix the instruments together into a stereo mix, and then apply the vocals equally to both audio channels. Since the vocals should be equal in each channel, we are able to invert the signal, play it back as dual mono, and reduce or remove the vocal track!

This only works on some tracks (if they were mixed as I described above) and it works best on uncompressed audio files. Try to rip straight from a cd if you can.

Here is how you can try out a track:

Download the free audio app Audacity. Open up a music track (remember, mp3′s will usually yield bad results. If it has to be a mp3, then convert to aiff first) Pull down the triangle in the track viewer and select “Split Stereo Track”

Next select one of the two tracks (it doesn’t matter which) and go to “Effects > Invert”

You are almost done! Click once more on the triangle pull down in each one of the tracks and select “Mono”

If all goes well, then when you hit play you will hear a de-vocalized version of the track! Depending on compression, and mixing and your luck you will hear something between a perfect instrumental and exactly what you started with. If your first track doesn’t work; try another, and possibly try something older. Here are the original and de-vocalized versions of a track I tested this with. It’s not perfect, but it will definitely pass if you have a voiceover chugging alongside it.

This uses a Wii remote, a bluetooth dongle (if you don’t have one built into your computer) and a copy of the free app DarwiinRemote

Darwiin Remote receives commands from the wii remote and converts them into keypresses. When you first fire up the app hit the “find Wiimote” button and then press the 1 & 2 buttons.

It will soon find the remote and start showing you the x,y and z axis accelerometer data. That doesn’t really matter to us, but it does look cool. Now go into the preferences in DarwiinRemote>Preferences and create a new preset. Feel free to bind your keys any which way you want, but here is how I did mine.

Depending on how much control you really want to give up you can make the controller start/stop, or go whole hog and add scrolling, markers, and cuts. If you really want to you can set the tilt sensor to control your mouse too! Its a very touchy and complicated way to control a mouse, but it’s still fun to try. One quirk about how this app seems to work is that when you restart it you will need to go to system preferences>bluetooth and delete the last instance of the wii remote. The other quirk is that the app seems to be unable to save the “space” key press. So if you want a button to send the space bar you will need to retype that into the Darwiinremote preferences panel every time you start it up. I just went for k / l to work around that glitch.

You can get the wii remotes from amazon for under $40. Most laptops have bluetooth built in, so this could be a $40 project! I could see this being super useful for all kinds of remote triggering work. Use it to start and stop Pro Tools sessions, to tell a tethered camera to fire, or even to do the same job as an apple remote pausing and rewinding music and videos. If you come up with an interesting use for a wiimote, let me know in the comments!

We’ve been running this Uber-DIY/ghetto way and getting good results.
Just in case you can’t see the photo; it is an iphone with a windscreen. That’s it! It isn’t that revolutionary of an idea, but it works (for scratch) and it looks stupid enough for me to want to share it with the world! Emailing from the iphone is faster than bouncing out of protools most of the time, and for our needs the quality is perfectly acceptable. Sometimes second best is more than good enough!

OR you can select that folder in the finder and just drag it into the import “select folder” window. The box will update to the directory you just dragged in and you saved a lot of clicking. Enjoy!

The few apps I have found this to not work with are the apps that use non-standard dialogs, like color and nuke. I’m sure there are more, but this works in most apps.

Enter io graphica It is a cool little piece of software that logs your mouse activity. When you move your mouse it will draw a thin black line. The longer your mouse sits in one position the line will turn into a dot and then a huge blob. Io graphica will run silently in the background while you edit. Turn it on and then crank out a few hours. Then take a peek. Provided you spent all (or most) of your time in final cut you can see a direct correlation between on screen actions and your window layout. If you want to you can take a screenshot and layer the two in photoshop to see how they line up. This info could be the final thing to help you move into 3 point editing, or it could help show you that you should really not use the pull down menu for copy and paste!

This will definitely take some introspection and careful analysis, but it is one clear way to work on the actual mechanics of editing. It will also work on many different apps, try it in illustrator, photoshop or after effects. Hopefully this will show you room for improvement, and possibly point you to some new shortcuts!

Well, Apple didn’t fix that. Thankfully the smartest man alive recently told me how to ease the pain by creating a shortcut for the unshortcut-able “Bring All to Front” in the compressor menu.

It turns out you can bind keyboard shortcuts to any menu items in in apple’s Keyboard system preference panel! Go to the apple>system prefs>keyboard and then click on the keyboard shortcuts tab.

Click on the plus sign under the main window. From the Application pulldown select Compressor. Now type the menu name in the Menu Title box EXACTLY AS IT IS SPELLED AND CAPITALIZED. Finally select a keyboard shortcut. I used command b. Hit add and then go to compressor and test.

This isn’t a ‘fix’ per se, but it is much easier than pulling down that menu item. This method can be used in any app that doesn’t have keyboard remapping like final cut does, so I’m sure there are plenty of great uses for it!

It generally exploded when Lee Stranahan posted an open letter to James Cameron and it got picked up by the mass media. Lee has a lot of very valid points, such as

Just take a look at a list of the world’s top grossing films of all time – of the top 30 films, every single one of them is a visual effects driven or animated film.

That is definitely compelling. The top grossing 30 movies could certainly afford to break off a little piece of that for the vfx artists that helped make those movies so great. None of these movies had just a ‘little’ bit of vfx. Vfx MADE these movies. There are several films below where much of the ‘acting’ was in fact vfx. If they were actors they would have been paid far better, and worked far less… To be clear here is just the top 10.

1 Avatar
2 Titanic
3 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
4 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest
5 Alice in Wonderland (2010)
6 The Dark Knight
7 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
8 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
9 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
10 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

The point of this article is to look waaay back to 2003 in this little article from Hello Magazine where Keanu Reeves pledged to gave back £50m of his future proceeds from the two matrix sequels to the 29 costume and special effects artists! He was estimated to make roughly £70m out of the two sequels from both a flat paycheck and a percentage of box office revenue. That pledge amounts so him giving away 71% of his earnings from the two films!

The fact that Keanu deems it so important that he is paying them out of his paycheck is staggering. It is sad that it is the only occurrence I was able to dig up, but it is still a step in the right direction. Hopefully studios will start responding accordingly, and pay attention to things other than their bottom line.