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Somebody treid that a couple of months ago. He was told that they aren’t set up to accept donations…”thanks, but your money’s no good here”…

Maybe someone remembers more detail on that?

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Actually, you can skip the Shift-N….You can export a still directly from the timeline. Just park on the frame you want, and export using QT conversion.

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Hoo-boy—

I really mis-read the issue. Sorry.

As for my system….it stable for two reasons…1) my technogeek and 2) it’s only a production machine. No email, no internet, no Excel, no Word, no QuickBooks. All of the “admin” stuff is done on other computers.

The technogeek does most installs & updates and makes sure everything is cloned and/or backed up and properly buttoned up. There’s no real secret, other than housekeeping must be done, even on a Mac. Lucky for me, I have someone else to do it.

I don’t have any actual proof that this is the reason, but so far, it’s not let me down.

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There’s FCP Attic as well as FCP Rescue that let you back up your settings. Every time you make a dramatic change to your settings that you’d like to be able to restore, just use the backup feature. Then when it’s necessary, use the restore feature. Google should get you those.

You could also backup favorite keyboard layouts and other customizable goodies from the Final Cut Pro User Data folder in your [user name]>Library>Preferences. (FCP Attic may do this. I’m not certain)

That should get you most of the way home. Do you save your custom window layout after you’re rearranged thing to your liking in the Window>Arrange>Save Window Layout? Then you should be able to restore that at any time using Window>Arrange>Load Window Layout.

Still, FCP crashing even every few weeks feels problematic to me. I haven’t had a crash in months and months and months, and I don’t think I’ve ever had a crash that wiped out my customizable settings.

Trashing preferences will do that, but never because of a crash, that I can recall.

& I have it on very good authority that I’m the weird one….

;P

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To be honest, FCP shouldn’t be crashing so often that this should be a thing you would post.

Maybe it’s time to take a look at your setup and make sure it’s opertaing optimally.

There’s an article in the first issue of the Creative COW magazine about building a rock solid FCP system. That may even be the title…

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Canvas size set to “Fit to Window”?

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It takes you a whole 5 minutes?!?!

Maybe your workflow needs adjusting!

(tee hee!!)

;P

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I recently had a chance to get very familiar with several of the Strata Series disks from SmartSound, and to use them in the SonicFire Pro 4.

What I find most interesting, from an “I’m an editor, not an audio mixer” standpoint, is the flexibility there is in just one of their tracks.

For example, there are 10 tracks on one of the disks I have. Each one of those tracks not only has on average 6 different variations that dramatically change the way the music sounds, but then there are the “moods”, as they call them, that adds a dozen different ways the piece can sound/feel. Each variation has it’s own moods. So you’re looking at…well, a lot of math to determine how many different ways just one track can sound.

The flexibility of being able to make the track the exact length I need it to be is huge in my book. The ease in how you can take a piece of music that may have high energy for an open or a graphic break, and drop it down under a talking head by changing the variation or the mood is worth the price of admission right there. How may of us have struggled to get a musical transition at just the right spot?

Also, you don’t have to purchase all the music. You don’t even need to buy entire disks. The Maestro feature lets you preview music you haven’t even purchased yet via the internet within SonicFire Pro. You can just buy the tracks you need, as you need them, but have access to their entire library so you can test-drive many tracks as you make your musical decisions.

For flexibility, nothing beats a real composer scoring your video. In my humble opinion, the combination of SonicFire Pro and the Strata Series is the next best thing, especially if you don’t have a huge budget for mixing.

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In the Browser, hit CMD-c on the new clip you want to use. Use use Paste Attributes function on the old clip in the timeline that has the filters, etc., When you tick the box for Content, it will essentially swap out the video (content), leaving the filters and all other attributes that are on the original. ONLY tick content. Leave all the other tick-boxes alone.

Try it!!

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Select your Sequence in the Browser. Hit CMD+0 (zero, not the letter O).

Click on the Timeline Option tab at the top. There is a Starting timecode box. Subtract the length of your bars, tone, slate and black from 00:00. Enter that into the box. Hit the “OK” button, and that should be it.

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