[John Davidson]

FWIW Vimeo Pro really is the best option here. Post to it directly out of FCPX, make a custom player frame with no branding, and it’ll look great every time.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I don’t know if this is totally relevant to your situation but I make a full multicam, then I make a second cleaned up multicam before I start editing. Lay out your narration with that -then use the first one to grab whatever b-roll you need to overlay.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Hey Michael,

We got two of those 50 inch Seiki’s last year that aren’t amazing for color but do a solid job representing 4k when we work in it. An Atomos Spyder helps get them a little closer to the right color.

I recently just got an LG 55 inch and it’s great. Also 4k. For serious color we do use a FSI 17″ with a black magic mini monitor, but we don’t worry too hard about frame accurate playback with it.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

If you’re using FCPX on a pro tube, we ended up putting all our mini monitors in a shoebox and running HDMI from the tube to our TV’s. It has the added benefit of working on a 4k monitor and doesn’t lag or do weird stuff like this. Just set the 2nd monitor to be an event viewer display.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

I agree with Richard. Making a corp or LLC is just a huge pain. I have a producer friend who has been operating as an individual and doing big network shoots, hiring crews, insurance, etc., and never went the incorporation route. When your accountant is screaming at you to incorporate – that’s when you do it. If you feel weird about it, get a DBA (doing business as) name and keep it simple.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

You’re welcome!

You know, one thing you could do is clone your system drive and keep it as a backup to use when you have to use Avid, and then upgrade your main drive to Yosemite. This way you don’t have to buy an upgrade for Avid and hopefully, maybe, you won’t have to use Avid again :). Even something like a USB 3 passport drive would ‘probably’ be good enough for this.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Try opening it in compressor. Then when you want to make a grab use Shift-CMD-4 and drag over the area you want the frame grab. It’ll save the file on your desktop. Compressor sometimes is a useful cheat for stuff like this.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Unfortunately I haven’t seen FCPX 10.1.4 run in ML, only Yosemite. I think there were lots of under the hood things added to the latest X that are integrated with Yosemite.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

[Charlie Austin] “”…an OS riddled with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions.”

Well, that’s specific. Be nice if he maybe noted what he was talking about…
“

That’s what I was thinking too. I find Yosemite to be much more tightened up than Mavericks was. This point last year we were still having IMAP issues and all sorts of fun stuff. This year Yosemite has been surprisingly stable. Just the SMB upgrades alone were worth it.

Do you think this has something to do with annoyance at having to rewrite Instapaper’s safari plugin?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[John Davidson]

Almost all our suites use the stock mouse and wired keyboard. Art director uses a trackball and wacom tablet.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.