[Burt Hazard]

Actually on my laptops (Panther & Tiger) I use Mac Janitor and Cacheout X (freeware apps) since of course they aren’t on all the time.

[Burt Hazard]

That’s right…as a matter of fact DV magazine had a feature a while back on the making of THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE and they definitely used Photoshop and After Effects (they took the archival stills and made separate layers in PS, then used the 3D tools in AE, like having Bob Evans closer to AE’s “camera” and the background swimming pool layer “farther away” with more depth on the Z-axis, for instance).

[Burt Hazard]

Maybe a way would be to have the talent wear a blue or a red stocking/ski-mask on his/her face (and then you’d be able to have a separate key pass), but I suppose you’d lose some of the facial silhouette detail.

Or I suppose you could hand roto the headphones with Commotion, Curious gFX, or (what is the new one?) Silhouette or something? (This is a good compositing question for Matt Silverman over at the Commotion forum here at the Cow.)

[Burt Hazard]

http://www.joesfilters.com
“Joe’s Filter”
http://www.nattress.com
“Film Effects” “Filter Sets”
http://www.cgm-online.com/eiperle/cgm_e.html
“CGM DVE filters”
(I just bought CGM DVE 3 to get the morph filters and transitions but I haven’t had a chance to play around with ’em yet. The twirl transition is pretty nifty.)

Also, Boris (www.borisfx.com) has 14-day trials of: Red, Continuum, Final Effects, etc.

[Burt Hazard]

I know I’m a little bit late on this post…I’ll second what these guys are saying and add that I’ve just experienced what may be a similar problem. I had output a project from a G4 Powerbook with a Firewire drive onto an analog tape going through a Sony GVD-300 “deck” (one of those little mini-DV things) and had instances of picture freezes on the final tape (and without FCP stopping playback and displaying the Frame-Drop error window). I watched the second time I played back and saw that the timeline was playing fine and there were still no Frame-Drop error messages but that it did have some freezes on the NTSC monitor. That of course means that the media drive and FCP are OK, but that the deck is having a frame-buffering problem of some sort. I corrected the problem by hooking up another camera to PB. That stupid GVD-300 has always given me problems…I might throw it out of the window and send it into an orbital trajectory to hit the Sony HQ in Tokyo! 🙂

[Burt Hazard]

I’m pretty sure INTOLERABLE CRUELTY and SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW were edited with FCP.

[Burt Hazard]

And I’ve actually experienced a variation of this myself in FCP HD. Basically I’m in the middle of a project where I have created 4 Projects and at least 14 sequences (so far). I had a couple of nested sequences back to back with regular clips; basically sequences within sequences! My fix was to go into the Render Manager and erase all the previous render files and just do a clean render of the current sequence.

The Render Manager is your friend! 🙂

[Burt Hazard]

Excellent tip.

Also, COMPUTER ARTS PROJECTS issue 72 has Cinelook 1.9 plugin for “free” (well $15 for the mag). True they are a little heavy on the “grunge” look, but that’s because it’s considered “hip,” “edgy,” and “now.” That’s of course until it becomes as “passe” as flying Toaster-style 3D logos in irredescent gold and John Gaeta-ripoff MATRIX bullet-time, etc.

[Burt Hazard]

You’re right, they don’t teach this stuff anymore… I have a day job in Master Control and you’d be amazed at the crap that comes in on a daily basis!

[Burt Hazard]

I’ve just recently (partially) brought myself up to speed on LiveType and went out and bought CREATIVE TITLING WITH FINAL CUT PRO by Diannah Morgan which does cover the app. It isn’t super great, but it’s enough to get you started.

Actually, I’ve learned a lot by just playing around with LT…as you might have guessed, it’s as intuitive as FCP…to extend a static title with a “regular” font, just grab the end of the title clip with the mouse and drag it. You’ll notice that effects show up underneath as purple clips and you can drag the effects to affect different portions of the font clip as well as changing the duration of the effect by dragging the ends. So-called Live Fonts are in fact small animation movies and you don’t have as much control over them, but you can add effects to them as well.