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January 14, 2006

Macworld - Day 4 - Final Cut Studio (Con't)

By the time I got back to my hotel last night, I was too tired to update my blog. So here goes the post that I should have done yesterday.

For the past 2 days, I have been sitting in a very intensive Final Cut Studio Session lead by Steven Martin of Ripple Training. And I don't know if intensive is the right word for it, it was more like overwhelming. I have about 17 pages of notes that cover the 2 day session and there was a lot of time that I didn't take notes, (a) because the demos were so fascinating that I forgot to type notes and (2) some of the information was way beyond my grasp.

The first day started with the concept of Power Logging. There were a couple of good ideas of how to capture content from a source and tricks on how to get rid of the bad stuff with one quick pass. I now need to go home a practice a lot before I can adquently describe the method here, plus I don't know if I want to completly disclose of all my secerts. ;-)

Once we have video captured, then we can move onto editing. The next part of the session covered Editing, specifically the concept of 3-point edits. It was really cool to watch and learn about the different ways to do a 3-point edit within Final Cut. I think I now understand the concept and can work on my own. The session also covered Patching and the Slip and Slide Tools.

Next we moved on to Storyboard Editing. This can be accomplished in Final Cut Pro by first creating a new bin and looking at the Thumbnail View. Then organize the thumbnails in the desired order and drag and drop all the thumbnails at one time to the timeline. It's pretty cool to watch someone do it and a great timesaver.

I also learned about segment editing, which can be done right in the Timeline. It can be used to deleted unwanted items quickly by marking the stuff you don't want and using shift-delete to remove the unwanted material.

Multi-cam editing, time re-mapping (getting the Matrix Look), color correction, and secondary color correction (the Pleasantville Look) were also covered at a very high level. I can't wait to get home and actually play with these features.

And that basically covers day one. There was a lot of good information that hopefully I will remember when I really start working with video.

On day 2, we started covering the other tools.

included in Final Cut Studio, Motion, DVD Studio Pro, Soundtrack, and Compressor. Now, I have really been interested in Motion, especially since I love Live Type (and was able to figure it out myself). And after watching the demonstration of Motion, I feel that I will really have fun with Motion. It is very Live Type like with a lot of cool extra features including the ability to see and work in Real Time.

DVD Studio Pro was also covered at a very high level and I actually don't remember much about this topic from the class. Brain-Overload was beginning to set-in.

OK, so what was really cool and something I will never use, Green Screen editing. Unfortunately, in order to really do Green Screen Editing (or Chroma Magna Editing) easily in Final Cut, you need to buy a plug-in from DVD Garage that makes it much easier than using the tools available in Final Cut. Within a short period, Steve was able to complete a Green Screen edit a woman standing in front of a cave. It was sweet to watch.

The concept of nesting of tracks was also covered. A nest is basically a container of other sequences. Nesting allows the editor to one task on a set of tracks/media that have been nested together. It also makes it easier to work with longer movies with multiple tracks. Let's say you have a 90 Minute movie that you are trying to make. You can create 3 different sequences nest the tracks of the sequences and then drag the 3 nested sequences to the timeline to make the final movie. So basically, you will only have 3 segments within the 90 minute movie. Cool.

Now, at this point in the day I really started to space out and not completely understand the topics being covered. The rest of the afternoon covered Media Management, Soundtrack Pro, and Compressor. The Compressor discussion was when it got really geeky and I did not understand have of what was being said. I really need to read up and learn about different formats and compression rates. The nice thing is that Compression can complete multiple compressions on the same file using batch operations. There is also a setting that allows you to compress a small segment of the file so that you can verify that the compression looks good before compressing a 90 minute movie.

After sitting through 2 days of Final Cut Studio, I discovered that I do understand a lot of the concepts and that there is a wealth of stuff out there that I don't know. The good thing is the fact that I do have a couple of wedding videos that I still need to edit and the knowledge that I have now will make them look 100% better than if I had finished them before Macworld.s

Posted by crumrine at January 14, 2006 10:19 PM

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