[Brandon Vaughn]

Ahhh good ol’ RTFM. A well-used phrase in our company technical support as well. 🙂

[Brandon Vaughn]

I am a major fan of sans-serif fonts. Unfortunately, the owner of the company has an obsession with Rockwell. I tried my case and my hands are tied with that font – readability or not.

Mark, your comments on the tromboning zoom effects is very well received. Thanks for pointing that out. I have been wondering that myself. And you are right – in the end, all I’m shooting is a machine sitting still, which makes the temptation to make my camera a visual insemination machine, a strong one.

Being the director, shot designer, cameraman, editor and producer on our films is stressful, exciting and terrifying all at once, but I still don’t really know what I’m doing yet. Thanks for the honest feedback guys.

I just got back from a trip to Michigan to film a customer’s usage of a couple of our machines. I’m in process of editing and producing now – I’ll throw it up when I’m done and hopefully learn a bit more about this.

[Brandon Vaughn]

Cory – you rock buddy. I give you a virtual man hug. That’s exactly the kind of mentoring I’m looking for.

I designed the TigerRack logo for our company. I’m a self-taught amateur graphics designer with no formal training. Thanks for the feedback on the type. You nailed it and I can see it.

I’ve noticed poor quality type effects in FCP as well. I’m an avid Adobe user when it comes to graphics, we have CS5 Design Premium, but I lack Adobe Premiere or After Effects, unfortunately. I’m sure Apple Motion will be a good substitute for the type. It is just painstaking to creating titles in Motion and then import them into the FCP timeline etc. etc. There must be a better way – I just don’t know of it yet.

I’m currently working on another project as we speak – I can’t wait to start applying all of your awesome feedback into it.

[Brandon Vaughn]

You guys are giving such killer constructive criticism. I can’t thank you enough – I’m definitely going to be a CreativeCow-ForLifer (how would one say that…? Anyways).

Mark, everything you are saying makes total sense.

The problem I thought I would run into by using a different codec for the main sequence settings and then drop all my video clips into that sequence, is the need (my perceived need) to render everytime I do any edits to those clips.

Am I explaining that correctly?

Let me try and phrase it another way. Currently I log and capture all my clips from my Sony camcorder. When I drag and drop those clips onto my Sequence, it informs me that my sequence is improperly matched, so it changes itself to using the DV codec.

No rendering while I edit, slice and dice = beautiful.

Crappy graphics and nasty rendering when done = yuck.

Since 90% of my film is using the DV codec (raw footage), should I still perform all my edits, piece everything together, and then change the sequence settings to a codec such as Prores or 10-bit uncompressed?

You guys are spot on – I definitely need to get my study on regarding rendering – there is a lot I do not know, but I see the immense value of that knowledge.