Mark Suszko
12
Apple Final Cut Pro X Coins
15
COW Coins
2
Premiere Pro Coins
4
Apple Motion Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Is the car in actual motion?
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Update: the backlash in viewership was so severe, the mattress company has closed and gone out of business.
I would not have done this spot: like Greg, we have almost a fiduciary responsibility to protect our client from stepping on their own… whatever. A former boss came to me and asked me to edit a highway safety spot using footage of a pretty graphic real car accident with fatality: chopper aerials of a driver thrown out of a tumbling car sans seat belt, the car then rolling over him, squish. I said I didn’t think a station would let this pass review, but I wasn’t going to be the enabler that tested that theory. Boss shrugged and re-assigned it to another guy, outside our office, who dutifully cut it. I don’t know that it aired, but I was willing to be fired over that, had it come down to it. Though I was pretty sure the union would have had my back.
Somebody out there is always willing to stoop to do these things. But you know, for the life of me, I can never remember them being proud enough to put it in their reel or submit it to a contest. They don’t, AFAIK, get great promotions out of doing this dirty work either. So you gotta wonder: is it worth the damage to your brand, your professional reputation, to do stuff like this? I can only think of one genre’ where such editors can end up and still find work afterwards.
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Build the cost of a storage drive for their raw and finished work into your billing. It’s an extra couple hundred, chicken feed. In your contracts or deal memos, put in a paragraph describing your archival policy. One example:
We retain a client’s raw material files for a period of one year from the beginning of work. All files will be deleted after one year, or if the client is in arrears for over 90 days, unless the client pays an annual maintenance fee of (whatever is fair to keep paying for spare drives). Archived files can be purchased by the original client for ( a rather high surcharge because if they ask for these it means they are taking their future business elsewhere). Some files associated with a client production are proprietary to the production company’s internal creative process, and these are not available for outside use. (I.E. you never give away project files and EDL’s, etc. without charging big for them: they are your “secret sauce” developed on your software by your creatives.)
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I have done rotoscoping work the hard way, exporting to Photoshop, then re-importing. You can export a “frame movie” from FCP7 and import that into Photoshop, and it may make it easier for you to make your alterations to multiple frames within a section several seconds long. It can be tedious, unless you’re in the right frame of mind.
BTW, the new draw mask tools in FCPX make this SO much easier, it’s ridiculous.
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They might be keying over a black under-layer?
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This might be a good time to add FCPX on a laptop to your gear arsenal.
Failing that, have you tried Apple Compressor or MPEG Streamclip on this stuff?
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Short answer: yes, you could use several audio tools right within FCP7 to handle this. The notch filter, the AU High Shelf filter, the parametric EQ, the multiband compressor, notch filter and noise gate filters will all help. Some will also have an effect on the rest of the audio around the “hit”.
Longer answer: While I’d start with the notch filter, it may be that another technique will work better for you: grabbing a few frames of clean audio just before or after the hit, and pasting that directly over the top of the “bump”, on a new audio track. Then mix between the two until it sounds good. Once you have this down for one instance, you can copy/paste it over all the other “bumps, or at least most of them.
Apple Soundtrack is a good tool for audio repair. The free Audacity app is perhaps easier for a beginner to work with.
If this is worth a lot of money to you, buy IZOTOPE and that can fix a lot of sins.
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One could also first cross-convert using Apple Compressor or MPEG Streamclip, then work natively.
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“It’s the caviar of the South”.
