[Alan Okey]

[David Roth Weiss] “I could have made such good use of that over the last year. If only I had known about it…”

Yeah, tell me about it. I just discovered that you can normalize audio right within FCP. I’ve been exporting dialogue tracks to Peak, Logic Pro or Soundtrack Pro to do this for the past year.

I only discovered this because I was bored, had some free time and decided to browse through the FCP user manual. I think I’ll be doing more of that in the future… You never know just what gems you’ll find lurking within all of those pages!

[Alan Okey]

Look up “Edit with transition” in the user manual. You can drag several selected clips from the bin into the canvas and choose the “edit with transition” overlay and all of the selected clips will be put into the timeline with the current default transition applied between cut points.

The trick is getting the order of the clips to be correct. This might involve renaming clips in sequential order (how you want them to appear in the timeline) or possibly arranging their icons in that order in the bin.

It might be easier to drop each clip onto the canvas overlay one at a time to ensure the proper clip order.

[Alan Okey]

[Dave LaRonde] “let’s all pray they don’t follow the model of recent versions of Quicktime.”

Boy, you’re not kidding…

I would love to see an intelligent update installer that could detect whether or not certain Pro Apps are installed on a system, and at the very least provide a warning that certain applications may not function correctly if a given update is applied. Once the update has a chance to be tested/certified internally by the Pro Apps division, a certificate could be issued that would “approve” the installation of a given update on systems with Pro Apps.

It’s maddening that Apple still makes a distinction between Quicktime and Quicktime Pro (and charges for that distinction), but doesn’t take adequate steps to ensure that any updates won’t break Quicktime Pro functionality within Pro Apps.

[Alan Okey]

If there’s a distinguishable level difference between the subject’s voice and the background noise (4-6 dB or more), you could try using the expander/noise gate filter. Set the threshold of the filter to kick in whenever the subject is not speaking. Set the gain reduction sparingly or it will end up sounding like a hard gate, cutting in and out and sounding generally nasty. The goal is to reduce the level of the background noise when the subject isn’t speaking without reducing the level of the subject when he/she is speaking. Adjust the threshold and gain reduction until an acceptable result is obtained.

There’s no magic fix for bad audio. If you don’t get good audio to start with, there’s little that you can do to fix it in post with the tools that are currently available. Chalk it up to a hard lesson learned.

Lavalier mics should be up close to the subject’s voice box, within about 4-6 inches from their chin. You might get away with a bit more distance if the mic has a cardioid capsule (as opposed to omnidirectional), but proper placement is key for getting good results.

[Alan Okey]

[Nate Stephens] “This might be the reason we finally get Blue Ray on our Apples.. And we will have to thank Mr Harrington for pushing Mr Jobs to wake up..”

It’s amusing to me how people assume that it is through sheer cluelessness that Apple hasn’t yet added Blu-ray support to Macs. Despite the rumors to the contrary, Steve Jobs is a pretty bright guy, and I’m sure he’s given the issue a lot of thought. If there’s not yet a publicly announced Blu-Ray strategy for the Mac, you can bet it’s for a good reason/reasons.

To imply that the company that created the iPod, iTunes Music Store and the iPhone somehow wildly missed the mark on Blu-Ray is pretty presumptuous. Keep in mind that Apple is notoriously secretive. Speculation runs amok until Apple shows its cards on a particular topic.

If Apple does eventually support Blu-Ray authoring, I’ll wager they will do it with an elegance and thoroughness that sets the bar for the rest of the computer industry. As for the playback of commercial Blu-Ray discs, I suspect that the DRM limitations of the platform make it very unpopular with Apple as a matter of philosophy, not to mention its competitive status with Apple TV.

[Alan Okey]

[Bryce Hoover] “I am wondering if I can apply a CC effect/filter to angle A, and if angle A appears 10 times in the multi-clip edit,will that effect also be applied to all 10, simultaniously?”

Yes – I just recently discovered this myself as I was cutting a multiclip sports project. Drag a CC icon from the effects bin to a multiclip angle in the timeline and hold the icon over the clip without releasing the mouse button. An overlay will appear, letting you choose between applying the filter to the particular clip or all instances of that angle in the multiclip. It’s very slick. The terminology in the overlay is a bit confusing, however. Make sure to read the manual entry to understand what each option does.

[Alan Okey]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Save yourself the trouble and get yourself an ioHD and avoid any HDV compression. You can capture out analog component straight to ProRes 422 or (HQ) and record better images than if you record via firewire.”

Or better yet, save yourself the money and get a Kona LHe card and capture to ProRes 422, letting the Mac Pro do the ProRes encoding on the fly.

Io HD – $3000

Kona LHe – $1600

The Io HD’s main selling point is its ability to be used with laptops. If you already have a Mac Pro, you don’t need the Io’s hardware ProRes encoding because the Mac Pro’s CPUs are more than fast enough to do realtime ProRes encoding on capture.

[Alan Okey]

I forgot to mention Final Cut Server.

FC Server is a capable asset management tool, but it’s not meant to be a replacement for a SAN. It can certainly work well in a SAN environment, but its primary function is to help keep track of assets shared by multiple users, not to provide the underlying infrastructure for actually sharing the data. For that, you need the hardware and software components provided by a SAN.

[Alan Okey]

This is a job for a professional SAN integrator, and it will require a significant financial investment. If you try to home roll your own solution, you will be sorry and spend a lot of time and money just to find out that you haven’t really solved your problems.

The situation you described, 5 or more editors using a shared pool of assets, is an ideal candidate for a SAN (storage area network). This entails having a Fibre Channel card in each of the editing systems and having them all connected to a Fibre Channel switch, which is itself connected to a Fibre Channel RAID (or group of RAIDs) shared storage pool. Each workstation will need client license for the SAN software, and then there’s the (usually) required SAN metadata server that controls data access and permissions at the file level. XSAN and other SAN products require a dedicated metadata server, although MetaSAN does not.

Check out this thread for more info on this subject:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/977991#978143

Bob Zelin’s comments are right on the money:

…let me make one thing VERY CLEAR TO YOU. This is not a firewire drive that just plugs in and works. It appears that even though it is inexpensive to implement (and may actually work), you will need SOMEONE QUALIFIED to set this up for you. Which means that you will PAY SOMEONE MONEY to do this for you – (you will not do this by yourself). Many people say “why can’t they just come out with a shared storage solution that is cheap and so easy, even I can do it”. Well, today may be the day that “cheap” or inexpensive may actually exist (I will see in April at NAB), but EASY (easy like a firewire drive) is not today.

I am a video engineer with years of experience, and let me assure you that systems like XSAN (the full configuration) are not only expensive, but they are complicated, and require TRAINING to configure and maintain. Even the “easy” solutions (like Facilis, Editshare, and this solution – MetaLan) require some nominal training, that cannot be “easily answered” by asking questions on forums like Creative Cow.
In short, you’re looking at a big investment here, not just a few thousand bucks. Make sure you do your homework and hire a reputable professional that has expertise with setting up SANs in video post environments.

And here’s another gem from Bob, from this thread:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/971880#971938

THERE IS NO CHEAP SHARED STORAGE SYSTEM FOR VIDEO MEDIA. Not unless you consider $20,000 to be cheap. All these home brew “psuedo” SAN (NAS) systems DONT WORK. There are LOTS of companies making SAN systems – Apple XSAN, EditShare, Apace Systems VSTOR, Facilis Terblocks, Charismac, Studio Network Solutions, and “home made” Tiger Technology Meta SAN (which is very nice) – but they all have one thing in common – THEY ARE NOT CHEAP. Anyone that tells you otherwise is misleading you.

Good luck, and check out the XSAN forum for more related threads.

[Alan Okey]

Probably the best option is to throw out that miserable crumb-catcher called the “Apple Pro Keyboard” and get one of the new Apple aluminum keyboards. It takes about a day to get used to the feel, but once you switch you’ll never go back. The aluminum keyboard is way easier to keep clean, in addition to being much easier on the fingers and not jamming up after a few months of use.