[Brian Wells]

Okay, I promise I’m not in the “Axe to Grind” category or anything, and this is strictly for humor, but this is too good an opportunity to pass up:

So we’re discovering that the one thing we’re now certain of in FCPX that works EXACTLY the same way it did in FCS3 is “Trash Your Preferences”?

Aheh.

Heh heh heh.

Hnxxxt.

BWWAAAAAAAH-HAAAAA-HAAAAAA!

[Brian Wells]

Speaking of crowds, David – are you thinking of hitting the “Special” LAFCPUG meeting next Tuesday? I might bring popcorn just ’cause I expect a jim-dandy bit of a hullaballoo. I’m definitely planning on doing a lot of listening.

Ooo… I wonder if Horton will set up an Octagon or a cage.

[Brian Wells]

[Chris Jacek] “So I can spend 20 years building a career, and it’s my house from college that gives me cred on the Cow!”

Sorry, Chris, was the only way to verify in three words or less 🙂

As to how I am and where I’m at, we should take that offline unless you’re planning a jaunt to Hollywood for, say, a LAFCPUG meeting, but I can tell you that FCS 3 is a core part of my day job here in Anaheim ( sort of rhymes with “Frisbee”) and I’ve noodled around in Vegas Pro. Got an email? I couldn’t find one in your Cowfile.

Also, Luscious Johnny B can get hold of me on FB or by phone. Good to see you in the World, as it were.

[Brian Wells]

Temporarily completely off-topic, Chris, but are you the same Chris Jacek formerly of the infamous Casa Del Macho?

Back on-topic: I will say that I am intrigued by the possibilities associated with the open-source move made by LightWorks. The concern I have on that front is one of upgrade speed. Is the “new” open-source LightWorks ready for prime time? I’ve never tried it, but I suspect it will run like a demon on my high-power gaming PC at home. Blender is a very impressive 3D modeling and animation tool (reminds me a lot of when I was noodling around in LightWave), but takes a while to get upgraded.

Can there be a reasonable business model for plug-ins and associated programs to work with something like LightWorks (i.e. say Boris Continuum for LightWorks), or do we as a community have to wait for a code angel who happens to also be a competent editor to come up with the right klud… I mean, open-source tool for a job? Would we ever see something like DVD Studio Pro (which I will definitely still need at my day job, no matter what Steve Jobs says, if perhaps not so much when doing my own thing) that would work with LightWorks? How ’bout Color? Motion / AE ? Does a broadcast-level facility owner like Walter Biscardi have any motivation whatsoever to even think about going that route when simply switching to Adobe’s beverage vs. Apple’s solves his problem in a week or less?

CAN something like LightWorks explode in popularity? Sure. WILL something like LightWorks tear off the starting line? Not until there’s money to be made at it. Pure and simple. Whether directly through plugins and ads and such, or indirectly through the payment made by clients to production and post facilities.

[Brian Wells]

I don’t know if this will be any help, but I shoot pretty much exclusively on one or both of a pair of HMC150s these days. I cannot recall having ever mixed either frame rates or resoultions on a single card as yet, so this may be a complete non-starter. Your mileage may vary.

That said, when archiving raw footage, here’s my SOP:

1) I have a designated directory on my archive drive specifically called “Raw Footage”

2) Under this directory, I create an individual directory for each separate card I’m archiving, usually with a very descriptive name, for example, “20110531_ProjectName_HelpfulDetail_Camera_ReelNum”. I’m a bit of an old school geek, so I use underscores to separate. A lot of our stuff is simple standups, so the “HelpfulDetail” is usually the talent name or something similar

3) Into said directory, I copy the entire “PRIVATE” directory straight off the card. Not one level below or above, just the big folder labelled “PRIVATE” gets pulled over and copied.

4) In FCP, once I recheck that my logging bin is designated, I then pull up L&T

5) In L&T, I hit the “Add Diretory” button and navigate to my Raw Footage directory and the appropriate subdirectory there, then select the entire “PRIVATE” directory I just archived and open that “PRIVATE” directory in L&T.

6) From there, it’s logging/labeling, “Add to Queue” and watch the magic happen. I recommend verifying the usability of an ingested clip before blanking the card, but I’m known to be… careful with my source media.

It’s worked for me. I may have to run a lab test with mixed resolution and/or rates, but I haven’t had cause to shoot that way as yet.

I hope this was some help. If not, maybe someone can use it.

Best of Luck,

Brian Wells
Media Services
Walt Disney Travel Company
Anaheim, CA

Obligatory Disclaimer:
1) I work for a company. A not-so-small company. Any opinions I may express ought not to be assumed to be those of said company.

2) The content I create and the tools I use to create it are generally the property of said company, meaning it is highly unlikely I will be able to publicly share said content. In the event that I do share said content, any failure on my part to remove or obscure proprietary elements of said content shall not be construed as permission to do anything whatsoever with said elements or with said content as a whole.

[Brian Wells]

And, as he always has to date in my admittedly meager experience, Larry once again keeps a cool head, stays with a topic, weighs the data and readjusts his thinking and his public stance when presented with new evidence or gets a new answer to a question. I often suspect Larry may be the all-too-rare type of guy who wonders why more people aren’t like that.

Was good to see you out in public playing Guru at LAFCPUG last night, David. Michael Horton indicated it was a first for you. I hope it won’t be a last. Had I not been in a hurry to get back to OC and bed (There doesn’t seem to be much of an OCFCPUG to speak of. Besides, how would you pronounce it; “Ock-Fussy-Pug”? “Ock-Fick-Pug”?), I’d have stayed and said hello. I hope you’ll come back and sit in again.

[Brian Wells]

If it’s any help, Tom, we use the Digital Juice stuff constantly here. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, they all work beautifully as a simple overlay. Drop the transition/swipe on a high track and scootch it laterally so the proper frame(s) obscure the edit below. DJ usually gives you two or three frames of fullscreen coverage to cover any vertical edit.

For that hundredth occasion, they also supply perfectly matched alpha mattes to go with each transition as well as pretty much all their motion elements, L3rds, isolative overlays, etc. just in case you need the extra definition. Appropriate sound effects come with ’em, too.

I swear by the stuff, and highly recommend their backgrounds as well. Makes most of my projects very easy indeed, and I’ll use them to help me cook up proprietary mo-graphs in Motion when I need something more brand-specific.

DJ do try awfully hard to convince you to use their proprietary media browser/organizer called Juicer, but I’ve had better luck just archiving the raw stuff itself so I don’t have to keep loading DVD’s to recall a toolkit I used six months ago. Select appropriately to your license/needs.

Brian Wells
Media Services
Walt Disney Travel Company
Anaheim, CA

Obligatory Disclaimer:
1) I work for a company. A not-so-small company. Any opinions I may express ought not to be assumed to be those of said company.

2) The content I create and the tools I use to create it are generally the property of said company, meaning it is highly unlikely I will be able to publicly share said content. In the event that I do share said content, any failure on my part to remove or obscure proprietary elements of said content shall not be construed as permission to do anything whatsoever with said elements or with said content as a whole.

[Brian Wells]

Not to bring the question or discussion down too far, but since I didn’t see a direct answer to his reference, I’d at least hang a quick +1 on Shane’s post by double checking that:

a) The Timeline is completely free of In and Out points (the old Alt-X cure), and/or

b) Any In and Out points in the Timeline are exactly where you want your exported clip to start and end.

[Brian Wells]

Thanks again, Dave. For a moment there, I was afraid I’d been doing it all wrong. 🙂

Yeah, so far, given the smaller-scale projects that are our usual fare here, it’s generally been a lot easier to whip up graphics, logos, and even the occasional transition in Motion, export each as a complete self-contained clip, and then just bring each clip into FCP. That way, we still have all the clips for future use in other projects, and it’s easier to wrap my head around the “top-down” nature of FCP’s video track layout rather than the indented “layer-style” nature of Motion. I tend to gravitate toward more “modular” or “granular” approaches like that.

I think the most ambitious comp I’ve yet tried was a “Brady-Bunch” style 3X3 grid with all nine sections having both video and keyed stuff behind them. I honestly cannot currently remember if I did that in Motion or FCP – I’d have to dig it up and check…

Looks like even that ended up getting comped in FCP, though I can see that I did try it at least once in Motion, and I’m thinking it was due to the easier layering of all those tracks. I also vividly remember being scared silly when the FCP export clip ended up looking all distorted in and of itself, but then somehow was perfectly fine when brought back into FCP for the final stitchup.

As for AE, it is my genuine hope that I can budget that in for our next fiscal year, but I admit to also being interested to see what Apple’s plans are regarding other FCS component applications after FCPX hits.

Anyway, thanks again for the insight and advice, Dave. The project’s working fine with the Animation codec export clips out of Motion, and seems to be getting good feedback from my clients, and, like pretty much everything else I do, I wish I could post it for at-large feedback or bring something to LAFCPUG, but the copyrights are decidedly not mine.

Also thanks to Dennis for the Adobe plug. Sadly, Premiere’s not likely to be on a high-priority list for me soon, but Web Premium is all I hoped it would be, and hopefully I’ll get to play with AE soon.

[Brian Wells]

So, going back to the OP on a complete (and yes, completely whimsical) tangent:
Wouldn’t “the gestapo/Apple” be better referred to as the “GestApple”?