[Boyd Mccollum]

You could also bypass the dv start/stop detection (you could start over and trash those subclips). Open what you’ve captured in the viewer, then place a marker where you think it should be. Hit M on the keyboard to create the marker, then hit M again and it will open a window which allows you to name the marker (good habit, as you can end up with hundreds of markers and they become meaningless at a certain point if you don’t name them). After you go through your captured media, turn all the markers into subclips. Don’t forget to use bins (just like folders in finder) to organize your media. Standard ones to use are audio, clips, sequences, stills/photo’s etc. Within each bin, you can have more bins, ie interviews, b-roll, and so on.

Boyd
“Go slow to go fast”

[Boyd Mccollum]

Looks like they shoot with a pretty wide lens as well, not to mention the closeups, that are really close up. It also feels as if they are shooting single camera. The lighting helps as well. I’ve wonder about how they achieved the look as well. I like it, but in a weird way, on a visceral level, I kind of don’t – it doesn’t seem quite right on a television screen.

Boyd
“Go slow to go fast”

[Boyd Mccollum]

I just upgraded over the weekend from a 17″ G4 1.5 GHz Powerbook with 1.5 Gigs of RAM using a 23″ Cinema Display to the Quad w/8 gigs of RAM, two 400 gig harddrives and a 30″ Cinema display. Huge increase in performance, and I’m in the middle of a graphics heavy project that I can’t imagine doing on my laptop. I picked it up at the Apple Store and kept the stock graphics card; I’m not doing a lot of Motion at this point so it’s not really an issue – in 6-8 months it might be, but if so, I’ll just a get a better card at that time. The 30″ display rocks. I know folks talk about the benefits of more screen real estate with two 23″ monitors, but I love the vertical real estate of the larger monitor.

Boyd
“Go slow to go fast”

[Boyd Mccollum]

[Matte] “But if you want to treat EACH NAME as an individual effect”

Hey Matt,

is there a way to do this as a list of names in one title, applying the effect to the list, not individual names? Instead of a crawl or a roll, bring in each line in a similar fashion as outlined above – where you can choose where each line begins in the frame and what happens, before it brings in the next line?

Thanks! (I do more documentary/narrative editing, so my titling/graphics skills are pretty weak to say the least).

Boyd
“Go slow to go fast”

[Boyd Mccollum]

I’ll look into Automator and I downloaded Traffic – I’ll need to spend a little time on both to see whether they can help me out.

I did find a workaround of sorts. All the names are in a word file (and excel), so I copied them into a powerpoint slide and used the outline tool to put one line of text to one slide. I made the background black and the text white saved the slides as individual jpegs (it even created a folder to put them all in). I then brought the folder into FCP, and used one of the slides as a template to crop the background, position it, etc. and then pasted the attributes to all the other slides. Not perfect or pretty but functional.

Thanks all for you help. I may cross post to Motion or another forum – the eternal optimist in me hopes that this type of situation has come up before somewhere and someone has written a plugin or script to handle it.

Thanks!

Boyd
“Go slow to go fast”

[Boyd Mccollum]

I use a Powerbook G4 17″ 1.5ghz with 1.5 Gigs of ram. Works well with FCP 5, though it can take some time to do renders, etc. I have Studio loaded but haven’t done much with the others apps yet. The complete Studio package eats a ton of space on my hard drive. I have several Lacie drives, some just for backing up data, others I use to contain project media.

[Boyd Mccollum]

You should nest your sequence(s) before applying the widescreen filter or the matte. You’ll also need to go through your individual clips and recompose shots to make them work with the new aspect ratio (moving the picture up/down, zoom out a little, etc.).

Boyd
“Go slow to go fast”

[Boyd Mccollum]

if you have access to a second camera or deck, the simplest solution might be to make a dub, then capture the dub into FCP.

Boyd
“Go slow to go fast”

[Boyd Mccollum]

Two features at one time…that might be half of the problem! Keeping a mental picture/roadmap gets easier over time as you get used to the volume of material and the form of a feature as opposed to shorter stuff.

One thing you might want to do is keep an editor’s logbook. You could have a couple of sections in it, one that deals with the broader elements in the film: story elements, character arcs, themes, objectives for specific scenes etc…, then another that you’d update daily with what you did that day and why. That way, you can always come back to see how you got to where you are.

[Rick Sebeck] “Sometimes you make a small change in version 7A, and it doesn’t end up in the 6 other versions because you don’t copy and paste!”

Decide on what kind of version control to have and stay consistent. Everyone works differently and has different organizational structures. In the above example, if 7A is the most recent, why make any changes to 1-6? If 7A doesn’t work out, go back to the previous one that did, maybe version 5, name that one version 8 (or whatever) and keep moving forward. If weeks or months down the line you come back and say “didn’t we do something that was interesting back weeks or months ago?” you can check your logbook.

[Rick Sebeck] “He mentioned something about having a different FCP project for ever 3 minutes of screen time. Anyone know why you would need to do that?”

It could be a couple of different reasons. From a workflow perspective, the smaller projects are easier to work on and share among the different areas of production (from the director reviewing a cut, to the sound department). They probably keep one scene to one project file. It would also be easier when sharing files and to know what the status of each project file/scene was. Imagine having a whole series of scenes on different sequences in one project file – which one needed foley work, etc? Though I think they just shared QT movies between departments. Also, by keeping discreet project files of 2-3 mintues segments, you keep the actual file sizes down. I’ve heard FCP project files growing over 10-15MB can cause problems (not an expert here!). And if one project file gets corrupted or lost or whatever, it’s not as critical. It’d be interesting to chat with Sean about it.

[Rick Sebeck] “On the same note. Walter Murch and Sean both mentioned that FCP was too slow when opening new projects. I have to say that both projects I am working on (one 35mm telecined to miniDV and the other on HDcam 720p) open in about 2-3 minutes. “

Probably when you have 40, 50, 60+ project files, and you are moving back and forth between them, constantly waiting a couple of minutes or even a minute can be irritating. Yes it’s blazing fast compared to the old days, but when you get into a rhythm and then in specific areas hit a traffic jam, well you complain about that traffic jam. And if they are opening a project file to just check something in another scene that will take all of 2-3 seconds, but they need to wait 1 minute or 2 minutes each time, that is an area for improvement 🙂

[Rick Sebeck] “Also, just a little note on our workflow – the director, myself, and my AE all have FW drives with all of the media on them. We then pass FCP projects around and re-link the media (which takes about 5 minutes). Its a pretty cool workflow, thought I would share.”

It is. Thanks for sharing. What’s cool is you can all be in different locations and just email files to each other. (This is one area where version control is absolutely critical!)

Good luck on your films.

Boyd
“Go slow to go fast”

[Boyd Mccollum]

I apologize if I offended Shane (or anyone) with my using the word pretentious – which was meant to characterize HOW he said what he said, NOT what he said. He’s the one that used the phrase “legal reasons” to explain why he couldn’t tell someone how to convert mp4 into AIFF. Saying “legal reasons” doesn’t actually explain anything and relies on the solemnity of the phrase itself to make its case and not on any reference to any actual law. And I don’t see how insulting me clarifies any of the legal issues involved either.

I believe the legal issue you are referring to, as you stated in an earlier post, was circumventing copyguards. However, the methodology outlined does not do that.

1. I have the legal right to make a copy of purchased music for my personal use (on an ipod, on a cd, as a backup in case my hd crashes, etc.)
2. I can burn a CD from iTunes.
3. There is no copyguard on the CD iTunes makes.

I now have a CD without any copyguards whatsoever and have not violated any laws.

4. I can import files from a CD into FCP as long as they are in a format that FCP recognizes.

At no point has copyguard been violated. A similar analogy would be that while it is illegal to make a u-turn in the middle of the interstate, it is legal to go to the next exit, go across the overpass, and use the onramp to get back on the interstate going in the opposite direction.