Luminoir

Multiple Versions of FCP

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.

I thought you all might be interested to know how I’ve managed to use Automator’s new “Watch Me Do” feature to automate a rather complex sequence of events.

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.

If you’ve ever searched on a bittorrent search engine for a tv programme, you’ll notice their filenames are always in a certain format.

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.

Get Fast fast

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.

Being replaceable as an editor isn’t necessarily something everyone is comfortable with.

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.