Post Production Tips & Tricks

A new piece of software from Nexidia and AV3 called "get" allows users to quickly search all their media based on actual spoken words within their content, rather than just Finder level data or FCP metadata. Once results are found, they can be used by FCP in the edit. "get" actually searches ANY content that exists on any locally attached media drive, regardless of whether the files have ever been used in any FCP project.

When presented with the hundreds or thousands of sounds in a typical SFX library, it's easy to become overwhelmed. To make it easier to parse the sounds as well as what I might use them for, I typically group them into roughly four categories - hits, events, ambiences, and rhythmic sounds. Here are some ideas on how to use these various types of sounds in a composition.

I thought it would be worth listing some of the paid FCP tools that I think have a place in many editor's toolboxes as well. Many I own. Others I have only used. A couple I have either seen in other editor's workflows or I have heard such good things about them I wanted to include them in the list.

I'm looking for some plugins or tools to enhance my productions. I mainly use Final Cut Pro and was wondering if there are any free or low cost alternatives to make my videos look better. Answer: Here are 14 of the best you may want to add to your editing tool arsenal:

What exactly is YUV when talking about video? Well, it's a way of breaking the brightness and colors in the image down into numbers, and it's a little different from RGB

In the video space, there's always a lot of talk about these number ratios - 4:4:4, or 4:2:2, or 4:1:1, but what exactly do they mean?

Creating the "OK Go" Effect in Motion ... trail of frames ...

Jason Levine teaches us how to animate Lower Thirds in Adobe Photoshop and then use that PSD in Premiere Pro and After Effects CS4.

Mass Animation is a group I stumbled across on Facebook when I first got interested in the idea of collaborative creative output - in essence this was an animated short film, powered by Intel, that outsources the animation of a film to a network of contributors. Skeptical when I first read about it the results seem spectacular (see clip above) and is as polished and professional as any animation I have seen.

"For some fantastic articles on editing go to the Editors Guild Magazine site. Interviews, tips and more. " It was followed by this link: http://snipurl.com/rmai5. That link takes you to the Motion Picture Editors Guild webpage of current and past issues of Editors Guild magazine. There's currently issues going as far back as when the mag was just a newsletter in 1994. Click the cover to get a list of contents and then click the link to read the article, that simple. There's no fee and not even a sign-up process.

this amazing video that shows how the BBC series Life was able to achieve an amazing plant growing shots for the episode "Plants." It involves multiple time-lapse tracking shots in the wild as well as the same shots recreated on blue-screen in the studio. All shot with a DSLR and brought together in the all-powerful After Effects.

a fantastic trick from fellow Motion Guru Patrick Sheffield's new book How to Cheat in Motion that lets you adjust different parts of your Motion template - but directly inside Final Cut Pro. This is a great tip for anyone who works with Master Templates in Final Cut Pro.

The most basic idea of color correcting is that you are making colors correct, which is to say that you are making objects on the screen appear to be the colors that we know them to be.

Motion graphics artists frequently need to match colors of design elements to colors of imported graphics, such as corporate logos. If you've tried to do this in Motion, you may have discovered a slight mismatch in the colors, which is frankly unacceptable. Here's a short video demonstrating the issue and a way to fix it.

I recently saw a question about how to create an outline around a graphic in Motion. It's not as easy as I thought it would be, but it's not too difficult either. Here's a method that is quick and flexible.

Here's a quick tip on how to reverse a keyframed animation, in particular for a shape style preset which doesn't reveal its keyframes to you in the normal manner. In addition, we'll look at how extend or shrink the timing of a keyframed animation with a special little tool in the Keyframe Editor.

The days of cobbling together a database to track shots, assets and progress are numbered. Although nowadays it has become common for many post-production projects to be managed with Basecamp, it's an application hardly specialized to our industry. Two web based tools currently in late beta anticipate the needs of post production more directly. Shotgun has been adopted at large facilities around the world and will be profiled separately; this article focuses on ShotRunner, and my own experiences using it as a visual effects supervisor on a pair of feature films.

"Why should I care if my critical evaluation HD monitor in my editing suite is calibrated for ITU Rec.709 if my client's monitor won't be?" In this short article, you'll find out what ITU Rec.709 is, and get an adaptation of my answer

VALUE FOR YOUR DOLLAR This is a no brainer, as the card, with all it's features, formats and extras sells for an unbelievable low price of $995 US, which is an awesome deal, considering the Kona 3 from AJA retails for $2999 US. PROS * Simple to install, simple to use * Handles all the formats and connections you could possibly need * Excellent support across multiple applications * Can't go wrong for $995 CONS * No SDI Timecode support * Breakout cable is about 6 inches long (12-18 inches would have been helpful) Final Say - Even with no SDI T/C, it's still a great capture card for the price

Here is a very simple way that I've developed to minimize relinking or reconnecting. If you are working on a project with another editor (or anyone who is using the same media as you in an FCP project), you need to make sure everyone has the media on the exact same path. This starts with the drive name. Whenever working with multiple edit systems, make sure the drives that contain your project's media are named exactly the same thing on both systems. If the path to your media is: /Volumes/Media/Final Cut Pro Documents/Capture Scratch/Project then they need to have it in the exact same place.