These days there are many tools which might be able to help you do those steps automatically upon completion but what if the program crashes, or someone shuts down your machine, and those steps do not complete?

Sometimes, you just need to be able to see that it went through alright so you can have a restful night of sleep knowing that the work is done, rather than anticipating a disaster waiting for you in the morning.

Essentially, there are times you need to do something at your edit station, but it’s such a minor step that the amount of time you would take to go back to the office just to do it seems like a huge waste of time.
This will help you do that so you can be more productive and not waste time waiting around watching a render bar or waiting for a long file transfer.

Either way, there are 2 very important acronyms you need to know about to make your life that much easier.

VPN (Virtual Private Network)

A Virtual Private Network is a computer network which adds an additional software layer over an existing network for the purposes of establishing a secure connection for communication across an insecure network.
In this case, the insecure network is the internet, and the Virtual Private Network we will be trying to establish between the VPN Host (The computer being controlled) and the VPN Client (The computer you will be using to control the VPN remote host).

By using a VPN, we will not only be able to connect to the office network securely as if we are physically there, but with the use of VNC, control the VNC Server with the keyboard and mouse on the VPN Client.

For the purposes of this article, we are using Hamachi, a zero-configuration VPN. It was originally open source before it was bought by LogMeIn. Since then, development for the Mac OSX, and linux versions have stopped.
There is an unofficial frontend for the Mac, which is HamachiX. I will demonstrate how you can use this, but also show you the command line interface as the frontend is buggy and sometimes crashes.

VNC (Virtual Network Computing)

Virtual Network Computing allows you to control the mouse and keyboard of a remote computer using your own keyboard and mouse, as if you were sitting at that machine.
This can be very useful within the large offices to allow you to control the machine in the server room or for the technical department to troubleshoot problems without physically having to be at the machine.

What a remote machine looks like in Mac OSX Leopard’s Screen Sharing app.

Why must we use VPN and VNC?

What we are trying to do is to extend the VNC functionality to computers which are not on the same network in the physical confines of the office.
A VPN is one of the means available to establish this connection, which allows computers which are not physically connected to the office network, to connect to the VNC Host as if they are, requiring only normal internet connectivity.

Configure your VNC server

This needs to be done on the machine which you want to control remotely.

Leopard/Snow Leopard has a VNC server built in.

Open System Preferences > Sharing.

Click Remote Management, then Computer Settings…

Select as shown.

Go back to the Remote Management page and Allow access for: Only these users

Add the users you want to give remote access privileges to with the + icon.

If you’re on Tiger, use Vine Server. It works in a similar fashion.

First, install Vine Server.
Then open the application.

Enter your desired password. You can leave the other values at their default.

When you start your server, this status screen will show you the IP Addresses and the port through which you can connect to the server.

If you want to ensure that you will be able to connect to your server, you should not allow the machine to sleep.

Allow multiple VNC connections so failed sessions do not tie up your machine from being controlled.

Click the System Server button to make Vine Server automatically start at boot.

This is the configuration menu for the System Server. Requiring SSH is a more secure option of controlling your server.

The Server is configured! Now how do I control it?

If you’re on Leopard/Snow Leopard, you have /System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app.

If bonjour is functioning properly, you should also be able to see the server on the finder window and click Share Screen.

If not, just launch Screen Sharing and enter the Hamachi IP of the computer you want to control. Remember that it must have Sharing and Remote Management set up before you can control it.

If you’re on Tiger, use Chicken of the VNC.

It works as well, but Screening Sharing has a more efficient way of compressing the data stream and is much more responsive.

Be a Control Freak

Now you should be able to control your server within your own network by accessing its internal IP.

You can check this by opening /Applications/Utilities/System Profiler.app on your VNC Server.

Go to the network page and look at the column named IPv4 Addresses.

You should test if the VNC server works within your own network before trying to setup your VPN for external connections to the server.

Externalize your Control Urges

Firstly, it is much simpler to connect to your office network if you are using a static IP Address.
This means that your IP will never change and you can simply type this address into Screen Sharing.app from anywhere and it will connect to the server.

Static IP addresses normally cost more, most people are on dynamically assigned IP Addresses, which the Internet Service Providers rotate regularly, so you do not always have the same IP Address.

How do I check my IP?

You can find the external IP assigned to you by your ISP by using this online IP detection tool.
Use the java applet to find your real IP address, the initial result may give you your ISP’s proxy server address instead.

Loopware also provides a useful tool which resides in your Server’s Menubar.

This shows you all the IPs your computer is assigned, including the hamachi IP which you will need to know to remotely access your server via the hamachi VPN.

How do I know if my IP is dynamically assigned?

The most definitive way is to ask your ISP. The more cumbersome way would be to first take note of your current external IP, reset your ADSL/Cable modem and reconnect it a few minutes later.
Check your external IP again to see if it is different. If it is, you are probably on a dynamically assigned IP.

However, do not take it for granted that you are on a static IP, checking with your ISP is the more accurate way of ascertaining that.

My IP is dynamically assigned, so how do I connect to my server if the IP keeps changing?

There are a number of VPN solutions on the market. I use hamachi because it runs on Mac OSX, windows and linux, and is free.
I cannot vouch for the effectiveness of other solutions.

The role that hamachi provides is Network Address Traversal, which allows it to tunnel through routers and firewalls, as well as its mediation server, which determines the respective IPs of the server and client.

To install hamachi on the Mac, download HamachiX.

It is not the official release, but it comes with a graphical frontend that makes it more user friendly for non commandline users.

I use the commandline with hamachi but HamachiX makes installing the tap/tun drivers easier, so this is my recommendation for users who are not comfortable with the command line interface.

HamachiX installation instructions

After installing HamachiX, open the application.

You will not be able to connect to any networks yet because the system components which operate behind Hamachix’s graphical interface have not been installed yet.

To install those, click Help > System Support > Install system components.

Then, click Help > System Support > Reset hamachi background process

Quit HamachiX and start the application again.

Configure Hamachi Network

If you have a windows machine available, use this machine to create your hamachi networks.
The windows version of hamachi has more features and allows you to manage your networks and the members of those networks through a web interface.
Update: Hamachi version 2 has been inconsistent with its ability to connect to linux and mac clients. Use the old version of hamachi instead.

This is the hamachi windows interface, very similar to an IM client. The clients are categorized by their network names.

To join or create networks, use the Network drop down menu.

This is the interface through which you create your network. Do not forget your password. There is no password recovery tool. Managed networks are a new feature in Hamachi V2 which allow for web-based administration. Your mileage might vary on their interoperability with Mac and linux clients.

Network names are case-sensitive, so bear that in mind when you create and distribute the details.

This is the context menu available when you right click on a user’s name.

The mac and linux versions of hamachi are v 0.9xx and are unable to re-assign network ownership to other users.
This becomes problematic if the computer which created the network is damaged/reinstalled/formatted/sold/stolen.

What would happen is that you would have a network where people can join (if they know the password), but you would be unable to evict or ban users as you would not have ownership of the network.
This can be a security risk if you give your password out freely to part-timers, freelancers or vengeful ex employees.

This is the reason I recommend you create your networks on a windows machine. I have a VMware Fusion Virtual machine exclusively for this purpose.

Instructions for setting up your networks using HamachiX (if you do not have a windows machine)

To set up your user account on the hamachi network, first login to the Hamachi network.

Then, open your preferences and set up your Nickname.

Click the Add icon to add a new network.

After this, create a unique Network Name. This is case-sensitive so remember to take note of that when distributing the details to users.

I recommend you setup one network for employee access only, and another for clients.
You might also want another for external vendors or tech support, or another for directors of the company depending on how many tiers of security you have.

My recommendation is to keep it simple and have as many as you need but no more than that.
Administration becomes increasingly complex once you add too many layers of complexity and hierarchy that are unnecessary.

The reason you might want to configure hamachi networks for external parties like clients and vendors is that if you configure your client’s computers, you can remotely access their computer with their permission to show them how to fix a problem like installing codecs or upgrading their version of quicktime if they don’t know how to do it themselves.

A separate network for your tech support allows them to remotely help you troubleshoot your systems or make qualitative assessments before they decide if they need to be onsite & save yourself from incurring unnecessary transport charges.

Obviously, the reason these networks are separate is for security. Be judicious about the clients you connect on the same network.
If they are competitors, don’t put them together, otherwise you could well be facilitating industrial espionage.

Generally, I recommend adding only your absolutely most important clients, the ones that represent more than 40% of your business and whom you trust implicitly.
I don’t want to have to start Hamachi manually. Can I make this do it automatically when OS X boots?

To install the hamachi boot scripts, download this file.

This file is provided by faib who re-wrote this hamachi daemon installation tutorial by SilveRo. Feel free to make a donation to him if this script is useful to you, it certainly was for me!

Open Terminal.

Navigate to the directory where you downloaded the file.

To do this, type cd

Put a space at the end of the ‘cd’ and click and drag the folder the file is located in on the Finder into the Terminal window then hit enter.

From here you can enter the rest of these commands by copying and pasting them into the terminal.

sudo cp hamachi-boot-macosx.tar.gz /Library/StartupItems
cd /Library/StartupItems
sudo tar zxvf hamachi-boot-macosx.tar.gz
sudo chown -R root:wheel hamachi

This should result in a directory

Containing the files

The files you need to edit are

/Library/StartupItems/hamachi/hamachi_helper

/Library/StartupItems/hamachi/hamachi_networks.conf

It is best to copy the files you are editing to the desktop or another folder, as you will be unable to save the file if you edit it directly. This is because the /Library/StartupItems/ folder has permissions set which prevent you from modifying files directly. The workaround is to copy them to a folder you have permissions for, making the changes, then moving them into /Library/StartupItems/hamachi/.

So copy these files to your desktop, so you can make changes to them, then when you’ve made the changes and saved them, copy these files back into /Library/StartupItems/hamachi/, OS X will then prompt you for your password and allow you to overwrite the file. If you make any mistakes, just delete the folder /Library/StartupItems/hamachi/ and start over.

The changes to make

Open hamachi_helper with TextEdit, and edit the beginning of hamachi_helper, replacing “hamachi_account” with the User Account Hamachi was installed to.

You can check by clicking the Apple Icon on the top left of your menu bar and checking the User Account after the words Log Out.

If you installed Hamachi as root, I believe the script will work if you set HAMACHI_OWNER=root and HAMACHI_DIR=/var/root/.hamachi.

After hamachi_helper works, change hamachi_networks.conf to contain the names of the networks you would like to sign on to. One network name per line, as many lines as you want. As far as I know there is no hard limit.

This package is designed to be run by SystemStarter during the boot process. However, you can test it manually by entering commands in the Terminal:

sudo SystemStarter start hamachi
sudo SystemStarter restart hamachi
sudo SystemStarter stop hamachi

Test if this works by pinging the server’s hamachi IP, then restarting your server.

You can do this by opening Terminal and entering the following command. (All hamachi IP start with 5, replace xxx with the correct numbers)

ping 5.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Can I control it from my iPhone?

Now you can!

Jaadu VNC app has been my favorite iPhone VNC app since it was released and v3.0 ups the ante by allowing you to connect to your server even if you are not connected to the same wireless network.

You need to install the Jaadu VNC connect software on your Server.

Allow Jaadu VNC Connect to run as a service so it will automatically start on boot.

Enter your google credentials on the Jaadu VNC Connect dialog.

This is what the drop down menu from the MenuBar should look like if you’ve connected successfully.

Jaadu VNC Connect uses google as a DNS updater to negotiate a connection between your iPhone and your server.

Whenever you are logged into your gmail on 2 different computers, you will see a notification on the bottom of the screen indicating other computers have this same account open, listing the IP Addresses of the other computers.
This is likely to be the API facilitating the connection.

Show me the money! How do you control it from the iPhone?

Install Jaadu VNC Version 3.

This is what the application looks like. This is the Manual Connection Tab. You can manually add IP Addresses or DNS names here.

The Discovered Tab shows servers automatically discovered by Bonjour.

This is the Internet Tab. All servers with Jaadu VNC Connect installed and logged in to the same google account are available here.

The tab will list all online servers logged in to the google account.

Screen is loading. Take note that I am on 3G, so the loading is significantly slower than on Wireless G.

These are the soft keyboards available on Jaadu VNC.

These are the connection settings.

Hamachi did not work for me! Is there another way?

You need to be setup your server to update your IP to a dynamic DNS server. This server resolves your dynamic IP to an address that you choose.

This allows the client to make a connection to your dynamically assigned IP. However, if you have a router, you need to configure it to forward the connection to the correct computer in the office.
This might involve configuring a custom port on your Server and setting your router to forward requests to that specific port to the Server.

This method allows you to connect to your server even if you have a dynamic IP, but is less secure than an end to end VPN connection, due to the open nature of the connection.

I will not go into detail about how to setup vnc using a dynamic dns service and router port forwarding.
If you do not know how to configure custom ports for your servers and forward ports in your router, you probably also do not understand the security implications of allowing vnc access over an unsecured WAN connection.

I hope this tutorial has released you from the shackles of the edit bay and you no longer need to spend wasted hours watching a render bar.

Tim Wilson eventually contacted me about making that post an article for Creative Cow.

Since then, I’ve continued using Automator to ease my workload of repetitive tasks but somehow the use of this timesaving tool never seems to have taken off.

I realize that this is in part due to the overly technical nature of my post and the lack of ‘proof of concept’.

To that end, here’s a video of how I’ve been using Automator, and a prepared excel spreadsheet, to automate graphic super replacement for an episode of Glitch, one of the shows I am currently working on.

The resulting email was so detailed I thought it would be a great template for me to send out to anyone thinking of cutting their showreel.

This might also be useful for editors to send to a talent before they cut their reel with you to save them money and you, heartache and frustration. Everybody wins!

Introduce yourself

• Put your name and contact details very clearly at the start.
• Whoever’s watching might not have the time to watch your showreel to the end and you want to make it easy for them to contact you if they’re impressed enough with the first minute.

Best foot forward

• Following on the point that most people might not watch it through, put your most impressive work first.
• You can start with a montage at the start to highlight the diversity of your work. This is for stuff that shows a different side of you that might not be included with your most impressive work at the start.

How you can save money

• If you are paying by the hour, be organized to save yourself money. Make sure all the editor needs to do once they meet you is to start cutting.
• Convert your footage to an editable video file format. Check with your editor what files he/she needs. They should tell you the file extension(.mov or .avi), and codec (DV-PAL,ProRes, DVCPRO50,IMX,DVCPROHD, etc).
• Ask whether they’re working on a Mac or PC. Provide them with the files on a harddisk. Make sure your harddisk is formatted as NTFS if you’re cutting on a PC and HFS for a Mac. Harddisks formatted as FAT32 can be read and written to on Mac and PC but cannot accept any file larger than 4GB. Video files will get that large easily.

Prepare the assets

• Do the conversion yourself if you can. If we do the conversion for you, we will charge you for the time and harddisk space at our full rate because of our opportunity cost.
• Learn to do it yourself and you can do it on your own time, instead of being charged by the hour to watch a render bar move.
• Before you spend hours converting everything, I recommend that you convert a small file first and send it to your editor to make sure it’s in the right format, and that it can be viewed in real time.
• Having a harddisk also means you can ask for a copy of all the video files and the project file when the project is completed.

Future Proof Yourself

• Negotiate about whether you get to keep the project file before you start, if your editor wants to charge more for handing over the project file, decide if it’s worth it.
• Having the project file will make adding material and recutting your reel easier. I normally give it to clients for free but some editors might not and it is their right to do so.
• Be aware of what Non Linear Editing (NLE) platform the project is being cut in. This could be Avid, Final Cut Pro, Quantel, Vegas, or Premiere
• Translation of project files between different software platforms is not completely seamless and you’d be better off working on the same platform, so make sure the NLE your editor is using is widely available in case you ever need to recut it with someone else.

Give yourself enough time

• Do not assume it will only take a couple of hours. Make no other plans on the day of the edit, and come early, especially if you have never worked with the editor before.
• We have the right to start charging from the appointed time, because we’re turning down work to be available to you at that time.

Have an idea of what you want

• Decide on your structure and sequence in advance. Have a rough duration in mind for each section/part of your showreel and select a music track long enough for it.
• Each definative section of your reel should be accompanied with a music change and a visual transition. Don’t let viewers confuse one piece of work for another because you did not signpost it properly.

Graphics, Effects & Supers

• If you want fancy graphics, bear in mind that it will take time and think carefully about whether it’s even necessary.
• It might make the overall look of the showreel more slick, but it might also distract from the strength of your performance.
• Remember, you’re selling yourself, not the skill of your graphics artist or editor. Also, not every editor will do complex graphics work unless you are willing to pay for it.
• If you insist on complicated graphics, I suggest you do that in advance, before the edit session, so it will be rendered and ready to be inserted when the edit session commences.
• Prepare graphic supers of your contribution to each project (eg Choreographer, Ballet in the Park, Singapore 2008, etc).Better to dig up dates, namecards and flyers for the information before you’re 10 hours into your edit and realize you can’t complete it because you’ve forgotten the name of the project.

Music

• Choose your music before you start. Pick different tempos and have fallback options in case your first choices don’t work.
• If you are going to have upsound (you’re speaking in the video), choose some music without vocals.

Be productive, specific and assertive

• Supervise the editor, let him/her know early on what you want and be clear and decisive about it. If you change your mind, say so immediately, so you can get back on track.
• Don’t be distracted and surf the net or check your emails while the edit is happening. It’s a waste of your money for the editor to spend time polishing up and color correcting a part that you’re going to cut out anyway.
• Listen. You may be in love with a certain piece of work, but if the editor recommends that you leave it out, find out why and decide. Few people get into conflict for its own sake, so there might be a good reason for that.

Pay on time

• We need to eat too. Some editors have been forced to hold the final cut hostage so they can receive payment.
• This is unneccessary, unpleasent, and we don’t enjoy it anymore than you do. Pay us on time and let’s avoid all that.

Any other tips I’ve left out? Feel free to add them in the comments!

He had great photos of film and video technology from the days of tape splicing and hilarious anecdotes from his 40+ years of working as an editor. He also kindly brought footage from his sitcom According to Jim for us to work on and it was really impressive watching their logging workflow with Avid’s script view function.

I’ve not touched the Avid for 5 years and it was good to get reacquainted with what I did love about it. The timeline navigation, the speed of preview, the intuitive command key edge snapping, the timecode window, a WORKING trim mode. Kris had to remind me a few times to use trim mode because I was so used to working without it since FCP’s implementation of it remains sluggish at best and downright unstable at worst.

It was great fun and I’m looking forward to having an Emmy award winner to ask editing questions to for the next year that he’s going to be in Singapore.

Great move by Ngee Ann Poly to bring him here and we can only hope that more people like him would take the chance to come to Singapore to teach, while exploring what they would consider an exotic part of the world.

Pictures of the workshop after the jump

Editing Workshop with Kris Trexler (LA)

TimeCode

I understand animators are more in demand there at the moment, with Weta leading the way.

What are the opportunities like in Auckland and what’s the working environment like?

http://magazine.creativecow.net/issue/the-games

Page 34

• Zoom Tool
  • Press z to activate the Zoom Tool.
  • Hold cmd to toggle to the Hand Tool.
  • Opt click toggles the zoom out.
• Track Tool
  • Press t to activate the Track Tool
  • Hold shift to toggle it to All Tracks
• Blade Tool
  • Press b to activate the Blade Tool.
  • Hold shift to toggle it to cut all tracks
  • or use ctrl v to cut all.
• Roll Tool
  • Press r to activate the Roll Tool.
  • Hold shift to toggle a single sided trim.

That’s all for this microtip. Feel free to leave comments if you feel there are any I’ve left out.
I’m pretty sure there are, as this was written in ten minutes.
These tips will be edited to reflect the additions and your contributions will be credited to you.

Similarly for editors, there is an element of mise en place as well.
I can’t confess to have the same as everyone else, in fact, I’m pretty sure you have a completely different way and methodology for placing your windows.
This particular configuration suits most of my needs and works very well for me.
This is what my Finder window placement is like.

The top right hand window is my ~TO BE CONVERTED folder. This contains files that need to be converted to FCP compatible formats.
All files are prepended with the project name and episode number and converted into ^TO BE IMPORTED.

The window in the center is my ^TO BE IMPORTED folder. This contains all files that are waiting to be imported into FCP projects.

When I import these files, I drag them into the lower left window, which is the Capture Scratch of the project.
After that, I then import the files into the project. Once the files are imported, I mark them grey.
This way, whenever I need to import new files into the project, I know which ones have already been imported.

My upper left window is my ^EXPORT folder. This contains all files that have been exported sorted into subfolders named by project title.

The lower right window is any other folder that I might need to transfer files to and from, like my internet download folder or project backup folder.

Obviously, if you don’t have to deal with conversions as much as I do, you can replace the ^TO BE CONVERTED folder with a music library or graphics folder.
If you ingest almost everything, then this will be of more use to you in the event of having to import items to your projects.

Thus, I’ll be blogging more bite sized nuggets surrounding a particular technique, hack or workflow. That way I update more often and get more useful information in the public sphere.

Some of these tips are old but too minor to fit into any of my other articles, or so ingrained as part of my workflow that I don’t quite realize it might not be as obvious to everyone. Either way, enjoy.

The answers to these questions aren’t always the same.

Sometimes, when you’re working on a really polished product, where the footage is well shot, sound is recorded perfectly and the director is organized and clear with what he wants, all I do really is to not screw it up. That’s when a great team effort culminates in a good commercial, film or program.

On the other hand, sometimes a project arrives in your hands as a complete mess, and it’s through relentless searching through rushes, splicing individual words or syllables, finding the most obscure cutaways, making non-native speakers sound fluent, that you salvage a decent product from what could have been an unmitigated disaster.

When you put these two different project side by side, the difference in overall quality may be stark, even startling. But sometimes, your best and most inspired work comes from saving lost causes.

On a seperate but remotely related note, the proliferation of easy to use NLEs has heralded the rise of youtube/flash video mashups, some amusing, many crap.

Here are a few that I found interesting.

It’s native codec is MJPEG, this file was transcoded to h264 to be uploaded to vimeo.

Click the HD link within the player to see the HD version at vimeo.

More to come on the camera and it’s weaknesses and strengths.

Rockband with real rockstars from Dustin Lau on Vimeo.

We bought it to replace the Planex BLW-HPMM-G router we had and it is brilliant.

Firstly, the combination of Gigabit ethernet and Wireless Draft N mean our file transfers are going so much faster than they used to.

A 1 GB file that used to take me 2 or 3 minutes to transfer over the network is now copying over in less than a minute.

Of course, it helps that the MZK-W04G supports jumbo frames but the feature that gets me excited is the dual USB ports at the back to connect harddisks to serve as an NAS.

Essentially, if you want write support on Macs, Windows and Linux, you can partition the drives to ext2 and download the necessary drivers for all OSes to read the filesystem, should you choose to connect them directly to your computer. I don’t see any reason why it’d be necessary though because the transfer speeds over Gigabit are sufficient.

As a test, I ingested a 20 minute file encoding to DVCPRO50 PAL with 2 tracks of 24 bit 48kHZ audio with nary a frame dropped.

The wireless performance is also really impressive.
My director sits on the opposite side of the office about 80-100 metres away from the router.
The signal also has to pass 2 edit suites and a machine rack to get to him.
He experiences some signal degradation but still has no problems copying and transferring video files to and from my computer.

My decision to get this router was pretty simple.
I researched every single router I was considering by googling their product name and the following phrases.

1. Issues
2. Problems
3. Dropped

Basically, what I was looking for was any potential problems or widespread build issues.

The only results I got for the MZK-W04G were glowing forum posts and recommendations.
Add this one to the list.

Well done, Planex. Please expand your product line in Singapore, I’m especially interested in your 2.5″ Harddisk-Memory Card Reader Combo that has still failed to be available here.

EDIT:

Just to add to this, a few weeks after this post, a freelance editor who takes over me once in a while, got his iPhone added to the router permissions list.

The next day, as he came in, he asked me for the model number and make of the router. Apparently, while he was parking his car 3 floors down in our industrial building, which has 3 metre high floors, his iPhone prompted him to connect to the wireless network. Now that leaves me a little concerned about what those signals are doing to my brain chemistry, but a very impressive connection strength story nonetheless.

Marker tool is a great find, it allows you to transfer markers from clip level to sequence level with many options.

Been busy of late working on the Creative Cow print article, look out for it in 6 weeks or so on the Creative Cow magazine.
In the meantime, I’ll be updating with more tutorials and writing in the near future.

Mark Peysha on Jul 30, 2008 at 3:40:01 pm

Hey Dustin,

Thanks for your entry on automator.
Have you ever heard of anyone making an interface with automator, so that for instance you could trigger your mac to perform an automator function remotely?

Thanks

Mark

————

There are a couple of ways to achieve this.
First of all, you need to build a workflow of the script that you want to execute.

This won’t be easy because you want to make sure it runs regardless of the situation the computer you’re running it on is currently in.

The best test of this is to restart and see if it runs correctly from a fresh boot.
This might even mean including commands to start FCP, etc.

Now the part you’re interested in is how to trigger the script remotely.
First of all you need to have remote access to the computer.
If you have a static IP, this is easier.
You only need to VNC, or login to your fileshare through your IP.

However if you have a dynamically assigned IP, you can use a VPN or have your router forward your ip to a DNS for you to access. I recommend the VPN route, I use hamachix for this, it’s as easy as setting up an IM client.

You can trigger the script by creating a workflow that searches a folder on your hard disk for files of a specific name.

For example, you could share your documents folder and have the automator “Find Finder Items” action look for filenames that contain “Export”

If you login to your fileshare remotely and create a text file in that folder named Export, it’ll trigger the Automator workflow to run. Then it’s just a matter of placing the actions you want run, after the “Find Finder Items” action.There are many ways to trigger an Automator script remotely, but I would say, focus on getting the script running locally without a hitch first, before you consider remote triggering.

Standardized filenaming conventions (What we can learn from Bittorrent)

Get Fast FAST

Be Replaceable, Have A Life

The following post is also being reversioned into a print article for the Creative Cow Magazine.

Working with Video Game Footage

That’s the reason the posting here has dried up somewhat, this blog will be more of an opinion/tech geek out space and I will link to my tutorials on Creative Cow from here.

Thanks for the patience and check out my 3 articles in the latest issue of the Creative Cow Newsletter.

Just yesterday, I left a long export of a quicktime movie to go with a Video DVD that needed to be burnt of the file. Instead of waiting around for it to complete and burn the DVD thereafter, I opened Toast, left the file open dialog on the folder where the file was being exported and logged in to my VPN via hamachi.

From home, using hamachi as my VPN tunnel, I used Chicken of the VNC to control the office PowerMac running Vine Server. This allowed me to set the DVD encode and burn to go from home and be ready to be delivered when I get into the office.

I once VNCed into work to make changes to an edit while my director was at the machine and he quit FCP in a panic thinking it was some kind of virus when he saw the mouse cursor moving and making changes to the cut.

I called him, told him what I was doing, laughed at him for a while, and used Quicksilver to display in large letters “Ghost in the machine” on the station after that. Quicksilver, by the way is the very first thing I install on any mac. Great application launcher and look out for a tutorial on getting the most out of it soon.

Other great apps to make your life easier are Billable for invoicing, Buddi for simple budgeting and accounting, Celtx for pre-production, writing and organization, Clonetool Hatchery for harddisk cloning, Data Rescue 2 for every harddisk that Diskwarrior can’t save, Little Snitch to firewall your vulnerable network, Flock is my new favorite browser, iBackup to backup your settings, IceClean to keep your system zippy, Kext Helper to install your drivers, Pacifist to install your packages, Peerguardian to protect you from snooping network intrusion from the MPAA and RIAA.

Anyway, the Geforce 8800 GT seems to have an issue with support Quartz Extreme only on my secondary display.

My system profiler essentially shows Quartz Extreme as Supported on Display 1 and Not Supported on Display 2. When Mirroring is turned on, both displays exhibit the same symptom that made me first check the card, windows being dragged in the display in question moved jerkily and caused an increase in CPU usage.

FCP still runs though, but to play it safe I’ve placed both the Canvas and Viewer on the Quartz Enabled screen. Attempting to use NVinject and Natit drivers to supercede the default Nvidia drivers had no effect.

Anyone else on a Geforce 8800GT with similar problems? If you’re receiving a system with this configuration, check it carefully before the vendor leaves. I hope my case is an anomaly but FCP seems to work for now so I’m sticking with it until Apple or Nvidia reverts with a solution.

——–

Update:Installing latest version of Kona’s Drivers 5.1 NDD Drivers resolves the issue. Probably caused by hardware conflict between AJA display output with the secondary display.

Tags: FCP, hardware, MacPro

It only does quarter screen PIP, but it’s free and beats manually doing it in the motion tab.

http://web.mac.com/piero.fiorani/PieroF_FCE_Effect/Quarter_PIP.html

Here are some other useful free plugins available.

stibs’s

Too Much Too Soon Free Plugins

50 point Bezier Matte

Andy’s Plugins for Final Cut Pro

Digital Heaven’s Grid and Guides

I’m sure there are heaps more that I’ve missed so drop me a comment if there are any other gems that you know of.

My employer at that time had a G4 running FCP v1.2.

It was slow, unstable, crashed a lot, lacked realtime effects support and dissolves needed to be rendered.

Suffice to say, it failed to make much of an impression. It was an interesting mix of a NLE with some motion graphics capability but lacked many of features we have been spoiled with on the Avid.

In the interim, I worked on the Avid Meridien based systems and transitioned to the Adrenline when that line was EOLed. I became overly familiar with the Avid error messages to an embarrassing extent.I remember a producer quizzically looking at me when I started explaining to her about DRAGON Error messages, BUFFER OVERRUN and UNDERRUN codes.

Progress

During that time, under the auspices of Apple’s ProApps department, FCP improved. Enough for Walter Murch to decide that he could do Cold Mountain on it. Before that, Rules of Attraction, Full Frontal and The Ring had also been cut on it.

It was a necessary response from the company now that Avid had decided to migrate to Windows XP for the Adrenaline, Mojo series of Media Composer. Apple no longer had a video killer app solely available on the mac platform.

Apple had to get marketshare back somehow set that in motion by purchasing Keygrip from Macromedia and renaming it Final Cut Pro.

Apple’s G5 became the biggest dongle in the world for the new fastest growing NLE.

Avid’s regression

Avid still had a dominant installed userbase and felt no need to compete with Apple on the basis of their disruptive price point. DVXpress was deemed to be their equivalent product line, but the restriction of it’s maximum output resolution to DV25 without additional hardware meant that it’s usefulness would be restricted to the hobbyist/prosumer/budget/boutique production house.

Avid’s workflow for footage originating on tape is first class.

The media management tools, offline/online media reconnection all save us loads of time by storing it in the omf media database and enabling simple and mostly painless media management.

However, importing files to Avid, has always been a pain for the exact same reason.

Importing video files in particular is akin to pulling teeth. The files have to converted to omf media on import before they can be used.

If the current show I’m editing was done on the Avid, I would easily be converting up to 80% of my footage.

Also, the disruptive price point of FCP meant that a lot of boutique production houses were sprouting up. Final Cut Studio meant any one man operation with $2500 had the tools (not unnecessarily the skills) to compete with a production house with an Avid and graphics department.

This has resulted in the freelance editing market shifting from 80% Avid, 15% FCP, 5% others in 2002 to what seems to be a 70% FCP, 25% Avid, 5% others pie. (These numbers are obviously not scientifically gathered, it’s just me asking other freelancers the percentage of jobs they do on each platform.)

Apple’s complacency

Apple hasn’t really been pushing the boundaries of what FCP can achieve. The impression that Avid seems to have given up on competing with them for the budget/boutique user demographic seems to have left them free to their own devices. Both companies neglected to have a booth at NAB.

There are numerous bugs that have existed from the first version I used (v1.2) to this very day.

Particularly annoying are the edit to tape compression error, the keyframe editor redraw bug, inconsistent render file linkages and the fact that every point update breaks the project file.

I think the problem with FCP is that the Proapps team seems to find it cooler to add new features than fix existing bugs.

The Future

I hope Avid continues to try to compete with FCP.

Competition is necessary for innovation and I think the best work we’ve seen from both developers were when they were fighting for marketshare. It would be great if Quantel, Sony (Vegas/xpri), Media 100 got back into the mix. The key to FCP’s sudden increase in marketshare wasn’t Avid users throwing away their Meridien and Nitris Boxes. It was the multitude of new users investing in hardware/software that was no longer priced out of their reach.

This market is ever expanding and it would be a great pity, not to mention a missed opportunity, if other companies allowed Apple complete dominance of this space.

I keep with me on my portable harddisk, at all time these copies of FCP application files.

1. v5.0
2. v5.0.2
3. v5.1
4. v5.1.2
5. v5.1.4
6. v6.0
7. v6.0.1
8. v6.0.3

There are many reasons for doing so.

Recently, I encountered an error for FCP v6.0.2, which I covered in the end of this post (Be Replaceable, Have a Life).
Essentially, what I needed was to use v6.0.1 instead so that I wouldn’t keep losing my work due to corrupted project files and autosaves.

In addition, you might have people working on earlier versions of FCP that send you their project and you would definitely want to avoid “upgrading” their project file and preventing them from opening the file with your changes. XML export is getting better but some motion effects and transitions are still lost in the translation.

Keyboard Settings

This goes without saying. Look at this article (Get Fast FAST) for some recommendations on keyboard bindings, favorites and general efficiency hacks.

Window Layout

We’ve all got our preferences for our window layouts. Here are some of my recommendations.

Overlap the button bars of the viewer and canvas windows with the timeline
You need the vertical resolution of the timeline and you shouldn’t be using the buttons on the Viewer/Canvas.

Tear off the Effects tab from the Browser window.
It is annoying when you hit the command for either one and it’s the most recently activated tab that remains on top.

(Hint: Drag windows by holding cmd shift clicking them. You won’t need to use the titlebar and can drag them clicking on any part of the window.

Have your audio mixer readily available for mixing
Mix by recording keyframes and always have a clear indication of the your audio level settings on playback.

Save your settings with the particular monitor setup in the filename
For example, Dual-20′ Cinema Display x 2.fcwnl or Dual-LG22LWT & Phillips L17WGT.fcwnl

Create a custom Column Layout

Have only the information you need for your particular workflow.
Eliminate the irrelevant columns so everything that is in the window is useful to you.

Save a project with all your favorites

Keep your favorite motion path templates,effects,transitions and audio plugins in a project and save them on your thumbdrive to import them wherever you go.

It’s pretty useful for repetitive tasks like the one I’m doing now which is replacing a set of 4 pictures in a simple animated sequence.

The steps executed are as follows.

• opening the inserted picture’s properties page,
• copying each picture’s filename (which has been strictly standardized for the execution of the next step, for more details check my post on standardized filenaming conventions)
• pasting it into LiveType
• stripping away the .jpg to make it a “title” (ie Alexandre Pato.jpg becomes Alexandre Pato)
• saving as the same filename but replacing .jpg with .ipr,
• returning to FCP, importing the newly created LiveType file
• inserting it into the graphic sequence
• repositioning and proceeding to the next item.

Because of certain ways that FCP works it is sometimes necessary to have certain conditions in place before the scripts work (eg auto-select tracks are toggled by cmd-numpad0).

There is no absolute deselect or select, so if a sequence has all, none or some auto-select tracks enabled, you do not know how the shortcut cmd-numpad0 will react, either selecting all or deselecting all. In my case, I made it such that all working sequences had all auto select track disabled.

That said, it opens a vast array of options which I think is very exciting in an incredibly nerdy way.

Here is a full list of the commands automated in this script.

Note that certain commands are not bound by default and my recommended non-default FCP keyboard binds are listed more completely in Get Fast FAST

Prerequisites

• Playhead on first frame of first image
• Image sequence with 4 images to be inserted placed directly after it
• Each nested sequence has image to be replaced selected

The cycle repeats with the next image but selecting a different track in the image sequence.

This process takes 8 minutes 26 seconds for Automator to execute. I only take about 3, but with more than 80 of these to do, it is very tedious. I scripted it to do about 12 episodes at once, then left to do other errands.

The hard part creating an automated workflow is that even your pauses are recorded. You can’t take too long to think about the next step, or you’ll have to manually edit the pause duration after the record.

Also, you sometimes need to pause longer so the software can catch to the steps executed, eg. opening a complex sequence, moving from a single video layer section to one that has many layers, etc.

Building custom workflows yourself isn’t complicated. You just need to be clear the exact steps required.

Part of the reason for this, is that programs like TvShows, ted (Torrent Episode Downloader),
and others rely upon standardized filenames to find and automatically download these torrents as soon as they’re released.

What the uploaders and programmers understand very well is that a strongly standardized filenaming convention makes
searching for these files and recognizing when they have been released significantly easier for the software.

Let’s say you are looking for the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica. The latest file is Battlestar.Galactica.S04E04.Escape.Velocity.HDTV.XviD-FQM.[VTV]

As all episodic torrents use a very similar filenaming convention to identify the exact episode of a particular series,
the software only needs to find “battlestar galactica” followed by S(number)E(number).

Once it has ascertained that this is the latest episode by checking that the Season and Episode numbers are indeed the latest available,
it recognizes it as the latest file and downloads it.

As you can see in the above filename even information such as the
Episode Name, Resolution, Compression Codec, Compression Profile and the encoding group is contained in the filename.

In turn, this can be used to our advantage as content creators to organize the vast amount of files we have to deal with in our work.
This allows us to take advantage of spotlight and FCP’s find function in the bins and timeline.

The rest of this article is here on Creative Cow.

Let’s get one thing straight.

Being fast does not make you a good editor.
There are certain situations in which speed is the premium, either due to deadlines, workload or budget,
but in the long run, being fast isn’t quite enough.

Bearing that in mind, speed is still an important part of your arsenal.

What gets you on your way is mastering your tools
so that you have the quickest translation of what you see in your mind
to what you execute to the cut.

This tutorial won’t cover the more obvious basics of getting faster in FCP,
I think there’s plenty out there that covers that.

Hopefully, there are enough tricks here that even the old dogs haven’t used before.

The rest of this article is here on Creative Cow.

This is especially the case if the industry is very competitive where you are
and there are far more editors than jobs available.

However, after many years of being on 24/7 troubleshooting duty and being unable to take leave or even fall sick,
it becomes very important to be able to handover your duties for your own sanity and personal life.

Sometimes, you realize that the world doesn’t fall apart because you’re not there and that’s a good thing.

The rest of this article is here on Creative Cow.