Month: November 2010

Categories
Assisted Editing Item of Interest

Is Clip Used? (in FCP Sequences)

Is Clip Used? (in FCP Sequences) http://tinyurl.com/28kkfmm

Inspired by LAFCPUG forum feature requests, a new applet from Assisted Editing.

Do you want to know which clips have been used in which sequences in your project? Is Clip Used? updates your Browser clips using a simple menu command.

Is Clip Used? sets the clipsʼ Label 2, Comment A or Comment B column (your choice) to the sequence name or names where theyʼve been used.

Is Clip Used? is an applet that shows as a menu item in the right-hand side of the menu bar. Choose the Browser column to use for the sequence name or names from the menu. The name of the Sequence or Sequences where the clip is used will be updated in the chosen column of the project immediately. If a clip hasn’t been used in a sequence, the field will be set to blank; if a clip has been used in more than one sequence in your project, the field will be set to all the sequence names separated by commas. You can easily undo the Browser column change by choosing Undo.

Requirements:

  • Final Cut Pro 6.0.2 or later (part of Final Cut Studio)
  • Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

Categories
Assisted Editing Item of Interest

Update coming for prEdit

Greg has been doing some amazing work on prEdit yesterday and today. Might be an update next week: write your v/o script in prEdit in between the clips. Now that we have script export to text (with timecode stamps) this is the logical next step.

But it gets cooler: your narration will be voiced by the system voice and speed of your choice!

Categories
Item of Interest The Technology of Production

How Hollywood killed the movie stunt

How Hollywood killed the movie stunt http://tinyurl.com/24oxk7k

An interesting article that is really more about changes in editing style than it is about stunts in movies – including early “movies” that were essentially a shot of a stunt.

I ask because in looking at that image of the stuntman diving into the Hudson, and running through a mental checklist of my favorite movie stunts, I realized that almost none of them occurred in films released during the last 10 years.

What’s the significance of that time frame? Well, for one thing, it’s the approximate start of the Digital Era of cinema — the point where video started to replace film and practical effects (meaning effects that were created in order to be photographed just like any other physical object) started being subsumed by computer-generated effects. And for another (and this is surely related) the late ’90s/early aughts marks the point when classical or “old-fashioned” editing — which dictated that every cut should be dramatically and aesthetically justified — was supplanted by what the film theorist David Bordwell calls the “intensified continuity” or “run and gun” style. The latter seeks to excite viewers by keeping them perpetually unsettled with computer-enhanced images, fast cutting and a camera that never stands still.

If you’re an editor,  writer or producer, you should read this.

Categories
Item of Interest

The Terence and Philip Show Episode 13

The Terence and Philip Show Episode 13 is out http://tinyurl.com/22o6o4f

Terry starts the discussion about audio levels and the perception of loudness, in the wake of the recent FCC ruling. This leads to the main discussion of deliverables: aka “pining for PAL vs NTSC”! Formats and deliverable metadata add to the complication that delivering a program has become.

The discussion veers into the endless discussion of generalist vs specialist before ending on the value of value.

Categories
Item of Interest

20 Years Ago Today: The Web Was Proposed.

20 Years Ago Today: The Web Was Proposed http://tinyurl.com/25hp2k6

Only 20 years! That is, sadly, not even close to half my life ago! I joined in May 1995 with my first ISP account, with our first website following not long after. I’d heard from the (short lived) Sydney Media 100 User Group that there was an email list for Media 100 users, and that’s why I purchased a modem and got an account with an ISP.

Think how 1990 was. No Google, Amazon, YouTuvbe, Facebook, online banking, online shopping, research, wikipedia, etc, etc, etc. I can’t imagine the massive loss of productivity that losing the Internet would mean.

Here’s Tim Berners-Lee proposed the web:

HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN. 

The project has two phases: firstly we make use of existing software and hardware as well as implementing simple browsers for the user’s workstations, based on an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments. Secondly, we extend the application area by also allowing the users to add new material. 

Phase one should take 3 months with the full manpower complement, phase two a further 3 months, but this phase is more open-ended, and a review of needs and wishes will be incorporated into it.

Categories
Item of Interest Media Consumption

Nielsen – Small Minority Of Viewers watching True HD

Nielsen – Small Minority Of Viewers Watching True HD http://tinyurl.com/3xghhq6

Nielsen are not saying – as you might think from their headline – that only 13% of those with an HD set are watching HD, but overall the number of views in HD is still only 13%.

Only 13 percent of total day viewing on cable and 19 percent of viewing on broadcast television is “true HD” viewing, the audience measurement company said. That means, despite the billions of dollars that was spent buying HD sets, more than 80 percent of television viewing is still a standard definition experience.

The short article then goes on to explain the reasons why the time viewing HD is so low compared to total viewing.

Categories
Business & Marketing Distribution Item of Interest The Business of Production

Who Needs TV Networks?

Who Needs TV Networks? Mattel Grabs Whitney Port and Goes Right to Hulu http://tinyurl.com/2ej52pz

In what I think will become the dominant trend, Mattel are creating their own programming and going public with it via Hulu. Traditionally Advertisers/Brands rented the eyeballs that Networks and Cable aggregated (in a neat bait and switch to the viewer).

But why should Brand “rent” an audience when they can buy their own? It’s generally cheaper and more effective.

The real story here is the end-around the brand is playing here, bypassing a large spend on traditional TV with a non-trivial spend sent right to an online network (Hulu) for an original web series. Hulu and other online networks like YouTube have proven they have the scale of audience to deliver on what the brand wants to reach. So why bother with bloated TV budgets? The significance of this isn’t lost on Hudsun Media’s CEO Michael Rourke.

“What we are doing with Mattel and Genuine Ken is a complete game changer, ” said Rourke. We have created a wildly compelling, network-quality reality show that, for the first time, can be distributed directly to the viewer in a non-traditional but very effective way.”

All those charts that get marched out in board meetings about how ad spending for online video is shooting up, have projects like this to thank for such lofty forecasts. With some $70 billion spent by brands on Television, the measly $1.4 billion or so in online video seems marginal, but the shift is on.

Categories
Item of Interest

QuickTime Pro: About the “Conform Aperture to” setting.

QuickTime Pro: About the “Conform aperture to” setting http://tinyurl.com/39xqu5c

QuickTime Player Pro 7 introduced a new conform setting – basically an overscan for video played back on computers, something I’d prefer it didn’t do.

Fortunately it can be changed with the QuickTime 7 player (not the QuickTime X player) as the instructions in the linked Knowledge Base article show.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps

So Final Cut Pro 7 was to be the 64 bit release?

Over dinner last night we were discussing the history of Final Cut Pro, various WWDC announcements and it suddenly struck me that Final Cut Pro 7 was originally going to be a 64 bit release, until Apple pulled the rug from under the Final Cut Pro team (as well as other developers, specifically Adobe).

For a little background you could read John Gruber’s The $64,000 Question but the salient points is that Apple announced 64 bit Carbon support at WWDC 2006 (and withdrew it at WWDC 2007). Like Adobe I presume that the Final Cut Pro team decided that would be the simplest way of moving Final Cut Pro forward and chose to use it.

Except when it was pulled a year later, getting to 64 bit became a major rewrite as most of Final Cut Pro is written in Carbon.

If we consider that Final Cut Pro is on roughly 2 year release cycles up until now (which it has been), a 2009 Final Cut Pro 7 release would have had to start planning well before the Final Cut Pro 6 release. The general way software is developed is that features are allocated to a release and then it’s decided 9-12 months before the release what is actually going to make it or not. This is generally before internal QA testing and external beta testing; usually before the version is finished.

That would suggest that the major features of Final Cut Pro 7 would have been decided sometime in mid 2006: around the time 64 bit Carbon was being announced. Given that would – if 64 bit Carbon had happened – meant that a 64 bit Final Cut Pro was a recompile (and tidy up) away, why wouldn’t you plan that instead of a major rewrite. While significant work, it would be nothing like a complete Cocoa rewrite.

Then came WWDC 2007 and no 64 bit Carbon. Features for the Final Cut Pro 7 release would have been pretty much locked by then when 64 bit Carbon was called off. That’s also why there were no 64 bit Cocoa releases in Adobe CS4 either! (I believe Adobe were able to get to a 64 bit Cocoa release faster is because most of their code is cross platform and the Cocoa-ness of the application is largely in the interface layer. Plus Adobe aren’t dependent on QuickTime at the core.)

Too late for Final Cut Pro 7 but I think that late 2007 was when the Pro Apps group decided that the only way Final Cut Pro would be able to follow the company mandate that all Apple software be 64 bit would be to rewrite the whole application. And if you’re going to do that, why not rethink it as well. Most Apple software has already switched to 64 bit, except where there are significant dependencies on QuickTime!  (See iLife 11 is still 32 bit.)

 

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Item of Interest

So, Edit to Tape in FCP survives?

So, Edit to Tape in FCP <next> survives? http://tinyurl.com/26ojoyp

So it seems my hypothesizing abut the need for Log and Capture might have been way off – as people told me at the time. Apple have filed a patent application for an improved (simpler) method of laying off to tape. At least that’s what the headlines say. LIke most patent applications this one is a little impenetrable!