Stephan Walfridsson
Forum Replies Created
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The new Epic camera can do 5k… And will FCPx be able to handle HDRx?
Stephan
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That’s the correct settings.
Stephan
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I’ve found that it’s faster to export a selfcontained QT and then use Compressor to transcode.
That being said, compressing to a high-quality h264 or mpeg4 is a processor intensive task, and a 1920×1080 framesize means a lot of pixels to process.Stephan
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[Davis Sprague] ” with the same settings as the clip”
What are those settings and where did the clip come from?
/Stephan
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[Morgan Schenk] “Obviously this is my first time teaching and while im confident with my final cut ability, teaching a class is another thing. Am I missing anything important? Any suggestions are much appreciated.”
I’ve taught Final Cut (and Avid) editing on some occasions and the first thing I realized was that it doesn’t matter how good I am at FCP (and I’m pretty darn good). The question is how experienced are your students? Do they know editing at all? And are they all at the same level?
Assuming that you will be teaching a fairly varied group of more or less beginners I can tell you that you’ll have to go really slow and keep everything at a very basic level. When you start talking about selecting codecs and “using easy setup” to match their footage at least 80% of them will stare at you with a confused look, not understanding a single word of what you are saying.
I seriously doubt that you will be able to go through 25% of what you aim for if you expect them to have learnt anything. Sure you will have told them how to send to motion and back again. But for many, if not all of them, the only thing they will remember is that there was this thing you could do to enter another completely incomprehensible program to do some fancy stuff.
What you need to do is find out what level your students is at and prepare your lessons accordingly. Realizing that things will take a lot more time that you imagine. The old trick of imagining that you are teaching 5 year old children is not a bad idea.
Regarding your material, make any demo projects as streamlined and small as possible. They don’t need hours worth of material. Three or four different shots that somehow belong together (like a wideshot, a medium and a closeup of the same action) is everything they’ll need.
Letting them work on their own projects is a good idea as it will force them to solve real life problems and eventually they will be able to help each other out.
So, good luck. (You’ll need it, trust me.)
Stephan
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What you need to do to create those kind of effects is called rotoscoping, where you manually create a mask to cut out your foreground object. Final cut is very limited in its rotoscoping capabilities, but you can do a simple mask by applying an Eight-Point garbage matte to your foreground clip and then adjusting the points to the shape you need. You then have to manually adjust and keyframe the shape as the object moves.
To create high quality masks, with very complex shapes, you can use Motion which is included in Final Cut Studio. After Effects would be an even better tool for creating this kind of advanced effects, but Motion will do fine.Another method is Keying where you place the forground object infront of a colored background (usually green, aka greenscreen). This automates the creation of the mask but rotoscoping is often needed to perfect it.
There are plenty of tutorials if you google. And of course head over to the Motion forum here on the Cow.
(Tip: You don’t need to keyframe every frame. Put as few keyframes as possible and let the computer do the frames in between.)
Stephan
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[Craig Seeman] ” If “the marketer’s” goal is to get the product on your machine, Apple has already won (I expect).”
I’ll buy it, no doubt about it, I wish it was already on my machine. And I have no doubt in my mind that Apple will succeed in growing their marketshare even more with FCPX. That was partially what I tried to say in my post.
[Craig Seeman] “As long as FCPX gets it foot in the door, it will at $299, it will eventually win people over based on Apple’s past pattern with new products.”
But the question if the new release of FCP will remain my main tool of choice doesn’t depend on wether other people are won over (by the low price or the feature set). I need to make sure that it’s still the best tool for me and currently I have no clue. Very little was shown and since it isn’t based on the old FCP architecture I can’t make the assumption that it will have the same features as FCP7.
Their past pattern also shows that they aim for the mass market, not the niche market (which I have a sneaky feeling that I may belong to). As Oliver put it:
“But it certainly has been quite willing to concede sales when products hit too small of a share or don’t warrant the level of investment Apple has to continue to put into them. Prime examples are Shake, Xserve RAID and Xserve.”I usually find choosing NLE a matter of choosing the lesser of a number of evils, no reason to think it will be different this time.
Stephan
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[Craig Seeman] “I think all those, except the most rash, claiming to jump ship are really waiting and that’s EXACTLY what Apple wanted to happen, given major purchase decision are made as a result of NAB. Apple put the jumpers on hold IMHO.”
Very true.
It’s quite funny how divided our initial response to this sneek peak has been. Some see the proverbial glass as half empty and others as half full. Everybody speculating wildly as we don’t really know anything except that the flavor of what is in the glass is new and presumably “improved”. Probably to the taste of some and disgust of others.
Some here on the Cow really give Apple the benefit of the doubt, others just doubt. My personal point of view is that I’ve seen Apple release shiny, innovative, gorgeous things before that were in many ways lacking in features compared to the competition. Just think of the iPhone, a truly new way of thinking of a mobile phone (well some had thought of similar ideas before but Apple obviously set the standard). But the first iPhone was not top of the line in features or specs. The camera sucked, no 3g, lousy batterylife and much more. And they are still behind in many areas. Yet A LOT of people bought it and keep buying the new iPhones, including me. Apple with all their marketing wisdom were able to make the iPhone a success story despite all of it’s shortcomings. It’s actually what they are really good at, isn’t it?
I think FCPX looks very promising, 64 bit and background rendering are things that I’ll really appreciate. But I don’t think that Apple has discovered the holy grail of editing when creating FCPX, and I am convinced that many things that were present in FCS3 will be missing, and missed by a lot of people. Building new software from the ground up is difficult and many features will have been pushed way down on their list of priorities. Some will even be gone forever because they don’t make business sense to Apple. And history shows that they have no qualms about skipping features or killing apps if it makes business sense to them.
Some things will reappear in future updates, but software as complex as FCP and the other studio Apps aren’t easy to update every 3-6 months or so. Bug fixes sure, but not adding major features. Beta testing and development takes a lot of time. The AppStore distribution model isn’t that different from the software updates that we are used too. And we all know how hesitant we are to install those.
Stephan
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‘Low end’ was not in any way referring to the capabilities of AE. I just meant in comparison to the high end market, the big post houses doing feature films and high profile commercials, where Nuke has more or less taken over as the standard compositor. Shake used to have this position when Apple chose to kill it off. AE on the other hand is the standard application in the lower end of the market. But thanks to a maturing feature set, low price and especially the extremely large userbase AE is of course steadily making it’s way into the ‘high end’.
Stephan
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Aindreas, you are absolutely right, but what I am saying is that I’m not convinced that everybody who bought the Studio package will invest in the other separate applications. If Apple takes the basic/most needed features from Color, Motion and Soundtrack Pro and incorporates them into FCPX then my (absolutely uninformed) guess is that only around say 20% of the FCPX users will have a need for the extra features that the other applications bring. So the revenue and profit would be substantially lower. So either they have to sell them for a much higher price than FCPX, or sell them dirt cheap to increase volume which they of course could since they have more or less zero distribution costs. But I don’t think apple has any interest in developing niche products, if they can satisfy 80% of the users I doubt they will spend much resources reaching the last 20%.
But I may be wrong, it’s happened before.
Stephan