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.

———-

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.

Example
This is an example of a filenaming convention I enforced on my assistants and PAs for a video game review series.

————————-

Filenames will be in this format.

Game-S[season #]E[episode #]-[Game name]-[Type of footage]-[Shot #]-[description]
Filenames should always use leading zeros. eg (EP01 NOT EP1)

For example

Game-S02E04-Rock Band-Gameplay-05-Drum Tutorial (Say it ain’t so)
Game-S02E09-MGS4-Interview-08-Matt Jones talks about engine
Game-S02E14-Halo4-B roll-13-Master Chief mascot at E3

TYPES OF FOOTAGE
Essentially the types of footage depend on the nature of the segment.

For Reviews the types of footage are

1. Gameplay
2. Music
3. SFX
4. Commentary (only for sports games)
5. VO

For Interviews, they are

1. B roll
2. Interview
3. VO

SHOT NUMBER

The numbers before the description eg(05-Drum Tutorial in the above example) are not as important for interviews captured from tape
as I can refer to timecode on the tape to see the sequence of events.

The reason I need it for gameplay or any footage we capture wild without timecode/device control is so I know the sequence of gameplay
rather than trying to guess if COD5-snow stage is before or after COD5-Helicopter stage.

If the files are

Game-S02E15-COD5-06-Snow Stage
Game-S02E15-COD5-12-Helicopter Stage

I don’t need to guess.

MULTIPLE SEGMENTS WITH SAME GAME

If we are doing multiple segments on the same game over an episode,
we will give the individual segments names and label it into the Game name.

Game-S02E21-Halo4 History-Gameplay-04-Halo3 FMV
Game-S02E21-Halo4 Technology-Interview-Jonty Barnes on new co-op features.

————————-

Rationale

We have become very used to organizing our files in context using folders.

However, when you take these files out of the directory structure,
their filenames are not useful and do not help you identify
which project they are from or indeed what types of files they are.

With organized filenames, you can use spotlight to search your media drives without having to sift through hundreds of false positives.
(instead of searching for “VO”, you can look for Game-S02E45-VO, and not have to scroll through every other VO you’ve ever ingested.)

This is most evident when you media-manage a project in FCP,
and your painstakingly created bin structure is lost as all linked media files are placed in a single bin with a flat directory structure.

Also, finding all the files in a project is significantly easier.

If I wanted to find only the B Roll footage of Rockband in for example, it’s just

This finds all Rockband B Roll but excludes the interviews, VO, etc.

This applies for any type of footage if the filenames are standardized for this in mind.

Playing Nicely with others

Why don’t I use the comments/labelling in FCP to make these distinctions in the types of files?

Files are often transferred to other departments like graphics or audio and sent back to us when the work on them is done.
So all the metadata and comments that we add in FCP to a ingested or imported file may or may not be interpreted by the software that your audio post house or graphics department uses.

In addition, naming these files makes it easy for them to find and forces them to conform to your filenaming system.

For example, you may send your audio-post house a file for a job you’re doing for a bank, let’s say ABN Amro.

They might send the file back as “ABN Amro Project FINAL AudioMix.aiff”, especially if they’ve only ever done one mix for an ABN AMRO project.
But what happens if you have more than one job for the same client?

If you send the file as “ABN Amro-TVC-CashFast Credit Banking-Final Online”, your audio-post house is more likely to use an adaptation of that filename like
“ABN Amro-TVC-CashFast Credit Banking-Final Online with AudioMixDown” and it won’t get mixed up with your ABN Amro Corporate Video.

Creating templates

Having these standardized filenames becomes very useful when you deal with an episodic series.
As each episode progresses, some creative decisions may be taken that will be maintained throughout the remainder of the series.

These then have to be updated into the template project so all future episodes follow this standard.
But it’s a pain to have to make changes to your current episode while updating a template project to reflect these changes in the future.
Take heart, there is an easier way.

Look out for more on how you can use the power of standardized filenames to easily maintain episodic templates
in my next article “Be replaceable, have a life.”

In that article, I’ll go in detail about steps you can take to hand over a job to another editor with minimal fuss
and how you can help him get up to speed as fast you can can walk out the door.

———-

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.

How to approach binding keyboard shortcuts (and useful non default bound keys)

There are many opposing views on keyboard shortcuts.
Everyone has a preferred configuration so there’s no point quibbling about which is right.

Some people try to get their config as similar to avid as possible.
A person that takes over the station immediately after finds this out quickly
when they try to mark clip with x and finds their in to out ripple deleted.

My preference and approach when I started on FCP was to use the default config for a while before adding my own custom keys.
There’s no pointing spending half an hour setting keyboard shortcuts for an application I hadn’t used.

I used FCP for a few weeks before starting to add commands that I used with some regularity.

Here are some commands that are not bound by FCP by default that I recommend you bind. my bound keys follow, just as a suggestion

Find the find tool

The FCP find tool is one of the biggest timesavers of the software.
It’s perfect for finding the media/effect/part of timeline you need.

There’s a reason I bind my deselect key to cmd d.

The find tool searches from the selected file on the browser/effects palette/timeline.
Deselecting forces it to search from the top.

Basically it’s a rapid fire movement of holding cmd then hitting
3df for files in the timeline (See my previous article for useful applications of this)
4df for files in the browser
5df for effects in the effects palette
6df for effects in the favorites palette

This helps most if you know exactly what you are looking for.

So for gaussian blur, instead of opening the effects palette, expanding the blur folder and double clicking gaussian blur it’s
cmd 5df (open effects palette, deselect, open find dialog)
gaus (use a unique part of the full name of effect you need)
enter
the effect you want is then highlighted.

If you want the Chroma Keyer, you might put “chroma” as your search term
but this will bring up chroma key transitions first and you’ll have to scroll down.

It’s more effective to use “keyer”

Here are some phrases for commonly used effects to skip similar situations
gaus gaussian blur
keye chroma keyer
3- 3-way color corrector
flicke flicker filter
spill spill suppressor
interl interlace flicker

This, of course, varies depending on the 3rd party effects you have installed.

To get around this, you can favourite all the effects you absolutely always use
and search your favourites instead with
cmd 6df %phrase enter

Changing durations of files but retaining keyframes across new duration

We’ve all been there before.
We’ve painstaking used the motion tab to make a file move/crop/rotate on a motion path to perfection and now it needs to be 16 frames longer/shorter.

Instead of opening the motion tab and dragging keyframes around, copy the current file, extend/shorten it,
then paste motion/distort/crop attributes with the scale attribute times checkbox checked.

Changing motion effect to fit to fill without affecting sync

Whenever I had to speed effect a clip to fit to a duration, I used to create a new video layer,
move the file up, lock all others, change speed effect, unlock, move file back down, delete video layer.
Now, I’ve realized how slow that was after I starting doing it this way.

Make Favourites your favourite tool

As mentioned earlier, I have my most used audio filters, motion paths (for resizing anamorphically stretched footage and correcting it with respect to a graphic crawler)
transitions and effects saved in my favorites. You can search them as suggested above, but what if you have a very specific set that you use all the time?

As you can see from my favorites folder I number them sequentially and bind my keyboard keys to be a modifier combination and the numpad.

This is because the # of the effect is based on creation order and I name the plugins based on that so I remember which number corresponds to which shortcut.
I create it based on frequency of use and over time it becomes second nature.
This makes all my favourite filters, motion paths a keypress away.

So I know instinctively that my motion path to fit anamorphically stretched footage into a gfx donut is ctrl opt 2 for example.
The modifiers for the filters used ctrl are for video, ctrl opt for motion path and ctrl shift for audio filters.

Autosave Duration

Hopefully, there’s been something in the article above that you’ve never used before and it has been useful to you in some way.

If you’re working faster, that means if FCP crashes 29 minutes after your last autosave and you left the autosave duration at its default value of 30 mins,
you’ve lost a lot more work that you need to do again, and that’s terribly demoralizing.

It’s slightly irritating to be interrupted every 5 minutes by an autosave
but less irritating than redoing that complicated key, secondary color correction, multicam cut from 29 minutes ago.

———-

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.

Prepare a handover brief

This is a sample brief I prepared before I took 2 weeks off to get married.
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dhjkwk8t_16qv4xzg8
Google Docs is a pretty good tool for this, but you can use Zoho, Powerpoint or Keynote.

Creating Episodic Templates easily

If you can spare the time, read my article on the beauty of standardized filenaming before you proceed with this section.
Having these standardized filenames becomes very useful when you deal with an episodic series.

As each episode progresses, some creative decisions may be taken that will be maintained throughout the remainder of the series.
It is best to have these sequences saved so they are easily repeatable throughout the duration of the series.
These creative decisions thus have to be updated into a template project so all future episodes follow this standard.

But it’s a pain to have to make changes to your current episode while updating a template project to reflect these changes in the future.

If your project has all its filenames in this format, it’s simple to just hit cmd-f in the timeline, type “mytvshow-S03E04″, click find all.
All media specific to that episode will be highlighted. The other media which is generic (will remain the same week to week) remains unselected.

You can then “make offline” (shift-d) the clips and have a new template to start the next episode.

The reason I make the clips offline instead of deleting them is so that they retain motion, distort, crop, filters, etc
so you do not have to repetitively adjust the new files you are inserting to match a graphic doughnut, 16:9 box, etc.

It is much simpler to use “paste content” to replace the offline file with the current episode’s file.

Tune in to my next article to find out more about the power of the “find” function in FCP’s Browser,Effects Palette and Timeline.

Music

Make loops of your music and mark the points that cut together with markers.
This way, you can have a hard ‘in’ on the music, loop it as long as required, and cut out with a hard ‘out’ when the segment ends.

Sure beats fading it out.

There are some music libraries that give you short loopable files of their longer tracks. I never use them.
It’s generally better to take their long track and make that loopable in some way
so there is a progression and change in the music particularly if it will be on for long.

This depends a little on your sense of music timing and knowing how to count beats, but it sounds infinitely better.

Full Frame Graphic Transitions

When you have graphics transitions, use markers to indicate the points at which they are full frame so you can align your cut points to them.

Track Consistency

Be consistent with what you put on your video and audio tracks.

My full frame graphic transitions are always on the topmost track V8 or V9
unless they are meant to be within graphic doughnuts in which case they are on V5.

My main footage/B Roll is always on V1 unless it is cropped/keyed and has a background in which case it’ll be on V4.

With this track consistency, it makes it easier to do tasks throughout a sequence like

• running general ‘one light’ color corrections
• adding flicker filter to graphic files with fine lines
• adding broadcast safe only to shot footage which has not been legalized

In general, it makes it easier for the editor taking over to understand where things should go,
and he’ll put things in the right place so it won’t confuse you
when you have to take over the job when you get back.

Speed up project opening and saving

Make a seperate project for generic elements so your episode project only contains media from that episode and is thus smaller, easier to manage, and less likely to be affected by corrupt media.

Anticipate Problems

If your machine has been unstable or if the power trips in your office often,
let whoever takes over know so he/she can take measures to safeguard against any loss of data/work.

Example
I had problems with FCP v6.0.2 saving corrupted project files that gave the “this file is too new for this version of Final Cut Pro” error.

This error occurred in the same machine it was created in and even the autosave vault files gave the same error.
The project file could not be opened in 4 other machines.
I had to roll back through a day and a half of auto saves before I found one that was valid and could be opened.
My autosaves are 5 minutes apart and there weren’t big changes or large amounts of media imported in between.

Thus, I surmised that it was version 6.0.2 error as this had not occured in the previous few weeks I had worked on the project
and had only begun after a company mandated application upgrade. This problem has since been fixed in V6.0.3.

Fortunately, I had the v6.0.1 version of FCP in my portable hard disk.
I will talk more about the contents of this hard disk in a future article “FCP Toolkit“

I have these versions of FCP v5, 5.1, 5.1.2, 5.1.4, 6.0.1, 6.0.2 on my harddisk,
so that I can ‘downgrade’ the version of FCP I use anywhere if ever necessary, as it was in this circumstance.

I left a copy of the v6.0.1 application for the editor taking over me to use
by dragging the project file into the app file to open the project
using v6.0.2 instead and avoiding the corrupt project error.