[Debe]

I’ve always keyframed stills in FCP. After I’d built a half-dozen or so, I’d make copies and reuse the moves, tweaking as necessary.

I still find it takes a lot of time. I was thinking of looking into one of the third-party pieces of software for time-saving the next time I got a still project with more than, say, 20 stills.

So, Kevin, you don’t think the third party pieces of software would add a significant decrease in time spent tweaking positions in FCP? That’s my main reason for wanting to try out another way of moving stills other than keyframing.

debe

[Debe]

There are several, from “iPhoto” to “PhotoToMovie”.

With iPhoto, you get what you get. The newest version will allow you to set your target, so say that nice head shot doesn’t end on the throat, but very minimal tweaking allowed.

PhotoToMovie, although I’ve not used it myself, comes highly rated. I used to have a link, but it seems to have gone missing. Google it! It’s $50, if I remember rightly. I’ll likely pick up a copy the next time I have a project with more than a handful of stills. Gotta work within those self-imposed budgets! No spending that can’t be directly or indirectly billed for until the new video and audio monitors are paid off!

There are others…I’m sure several someones will add to the options!

debe

[Debe]

I’m not sure about the built in FCP text generator, or Boris Calligraphy, but LiveType sure does have spell check!

All are components of FCP Studio.

debe

[Debe]

Yup. that’s the kind of thing you learn to do after something like this happens to you.

For the record, Avid doesn’t put leading zeroes in, either, unless you start out with them.

Likely you’ll use the zeroes in naming your clips from now on, eh?

debe

[Debe]

Are you viewing your video on an external NTSC (or PAL) monitor?

If you’re only looking at the canvas, then you’re not seeing everything. The canvas can de degraded to as much as 75%, showing you only a quarter of the information going out the FW port to your external monitor.

Check out the manual for proper video and audio monitoring setups.

debe

[Debe]

In FCP 4.5 I’ve used Media Manager to successfully move render files from one FCP station to another.

Haven’t tried it in FCP 5 yet…

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[Debe]

I work on one system that has 2 23s, and I do find that I lose the cursor frequently. It’s actually quite frustrating. I never thought I’d say there is such a thing as too much real estate, but here I am.

IMHO, one 23″ and one 17″ seems to be the perfect match.

debe

[Debe]

This reminds me of the old “Production Triangle” that we learned of in school.

Picture each one on the tip of different points on a triangle:

Good

Fast

Cheap

Then tell your client to “Pick two”.

If your corporate producers want fast turnaround and lots of flash, then they need to pony up for some stock effects and filters. Find a budget for it. If they don’t then each project that needs to be done in a hurry is not going to have the flash. Each project that needs to be done and needs flash will not be done quickly, unless some money is made available. There’s not that much of a way around it.

Digital Juice’s Editor’s Toolkits are good for stock graphics, as well as 12 Inch Design, just to name two. I have Boris Red and Continuum Complete for effects and filters. However, the learning curve on those is steep, and after 9 months of owning it, I don’t feel like I have a handle on how to use it AT ALL. I might look elsewhere for filters if I were shopping again.

They can find a couple grand in the Marketing budget. There’s always money in the Marketing budget. Convince them to buy once, use forever. (Okay, they will eventually get stale, but I find the Editor’s Toolkits are a great jumping off point. I use the packages and other Digital Juice products (JumpBacks and VideoTraxx) to create my own customized graphic treatments.)

Stock gfx and filters should be viewed by corporate producers just like stock music and sound efx. They just need to exist. Period. They don’t have the sound guy build a new piece of music for each production, do they? No, there’s not the money or the time for that. Why should they expect an editor to design a new graphic treatment every time? Same argument. New decade.

You know the politics of your place. Find the most diplomatic way to explain to the person who holds the purse strings or makes the decisions about when the purse strings get pulled that stock graphics, filters and footage are pretty much status quo these days. Not spending the money to have it available to you for every project actually costs them more money because it takes more of your time to build graphic elements from scratch. If you need to, add up how long it takes you to create a graphic treatment, to build a background. Multiply that by how many projects you do a year. If they can see the savings in your time, and therefore their money, and also know that is shaves 4 hours off of every project, they may see the wisdom and value.

You really have to argue your case to those who don’t understand the process, especially when those are the folks who are making the money decisions. They need you to explain to them why it’s beneficial to them to spend this money, even if there’s no internal client to bill it back to. They can build that in to the budget for each new project. Add $100 or $200 per project for graphics, or whatever, and paying for the stock will eventually pay for itself.

These tools exist to make our lives easier, but also to save our clients money. There’s no reason to recreate the wheel for every lower- or medium-budget project when such great resources exist already.

debe

[Debe]

[mus man] “But that requires the Media Manager and no one trusts it, so I’d avoid going that route.”

I wouldn’t go that far.

Media Manger is not as intuitive as it should be, and it deals with media in a way that sometimes only makes sense to itself, but if you’re archiving, and you take your time to test the archive before you blow stuff away, Media Manager CAN be a useful tool.

I test mine by making archives on my G5 and then restoring on my G4 laptop. I trust it because this way the G4 has no knowledge of previous incarnations of the project. I’m still using FCP 4.5, but I’ve never had a problem ending up with a solidly archived project. Sometimes it takes a couple of attempts, but that’s usually due to pilot error because I can go two or three months before I need to archive and forget to do something like make my sequence clips independent first.

I agree that Media Manger as it is certainly can be made better, but it does function. It just takes hand-holding.

IMHO,

debe

[Debe]

This might be a little too late, but use Render Manager under the Tools Menu.

Then you don’t have the pesky “render media has gone missing” warning every time you open your project.

When Render Manager opens, it’ll give you a list of folders that correspond to sequence names. The best thing to do is to delete the oldest ones. If you don’t make copies of your timeline as you work or have effects that haven’t been updated through several timelines, it might be more tricksy. The only thing you risk is the time to re-render if you delete too much. Only render time, no rebuilding of effects.

Look at Render Manager. It’ll make more sense to you when you’re lookin’ at it.

debe