I asked Rick, and his response is that “we do use Plural Eyes, but it doesn’t work well when syncing two separate audio sources such as a wireless and a shot gun mic, especially when the subject with the lav is far away from the camera.”

It’s certainly great software, and a good option to try, but has been problematic in less-than-ideal situations like we often find in the field. We do use it successfully all the time for studio interviews though. Like we said – find out what works best for you and go with it!

I’ll add my unsolicited advice here:
“I personally do not like to record sound separately. There’s a couple reasons. It takes a lot of time to sync up in post …”

Try Plural Eyes!

I have pretty much had the exact same experience. The program keeps crashing on me and loosing files… ?

I wouldn’t rely on FCPX in its current state. I am heading back to FCP7 as well + thinking about making the switch to Adobe Premier.

In i FCPX really like the new tagging system, the background rendering and the keyboard shortcuts in .. but I find the audio skimming very annoying along with the magnetic timeline and all the Imovie-look-alike-tools for newbies.

It is very sad for FCP… and for all who relied on this program.

I haven’t used adobes editing software in about ten years ever since I mad the switch from building my own pcs to buying powerful macs. I loved the switch.

Now, someone point me in the dirction of a FCP keyboard layout for premiere. I want the file. I don’t want to have to edit it. Help!!!!!

Important to note though, if I had to produce from an assignment or a contract, I would still use FCP 7. I am willing to take chances on my own production but not on a client’s job.

Why not use Premier? Because FCPX will kick Premier butt once it mature.

While I get that FCP X required a ground up build, waiting for it to become as full featured and stable as FCP 7 is a hard pill to swallow.

I think you bring up an important point about the way FCP X saves. While the program is open you have unlimited undos (command z), but once the program is closed, all those undoes are gone. Aside form the autosave, that’s not really different from FCP 7.

The problem is that there’s no autosave vault, so going back to a previous version isn’t possible unless you’ve versioned projects (formerly sequences). Of course that doesn’t help if you’ve done a bunch of work in the Event Library.

Hopefully Lion will help out with that.

Being a native 64bit app, along with other improvements would seem to be a no brainer for anyone editing on a MAC.

Just an observation.

Snow Leopard gives us Auto Save but that’s not how it was designed. It was designed for auto save + versioning. The last one is a core Lion feature, working similar to time machine. It basically gives you a version history and you can go back to each version of your project.

I consider this problem solved next week. You can also duplicate projects, which is similar to manual saving.

I expect the first Final Cut Pro update at the moment Lion is available in the app store. I am confident it was finished 3 weeks ago already, just waiting for Lion to be released. Let’s hope they fixed some major bugs in the meantime so we get to use a more stable app next wednesday.

Apple has made 2 big mistakes- they overestimated the worth of FCPX and underestimated the value of the FCS3 apps. They are now paying the price for those miscalculations as most editors walk out the door to Adobe or Avid. In the long run, I don’t thinks Apple even cares. And that’s sad.

I think the thing that scares me as much as FCPX not saving correctly is the possibility of accidentally saving a change you didn’t mean to save. For example, accidentally changing a whole series of clips and closing the program before you realize the mistake. I noticed this happened when I was assigning keywords. I somehow pressed some keyboard shortcuts that rearranged what I was working on and had to figure out what edits I’d accidentally made.

Personally, I’d like to see auto-save be a preference you can turn on or off. I’m sure there will be many more horror stories until the bugs are worked out.

@larryphoto

Thank you very much for sharing this work.

Kind regards,
Zac

Pans, zooms, and dissolves are time-eaters. They can fill your visual sequence while the audio plays. I think that’s why I’ve used it in the past and I believe it’s one of the reasons people do today.

It gives me great appreciation for how much content one must have for a short multimedia piece, and how multimedia will eat still images like popcorn: by the bucketful. It’s changed my shooting style in the field, and certainly my editing.

Of course, at day’s end you have the assets you have. Hopefully they’re the right ones, and enough of them.

Thanks for the tutelage!

Great post Eric!

As far as I know there is no simple solution for changing subtitle size. You can’t paste the attribute like you can for drop shadow. Your best bet is to export the XML, change it, then reimport.

See the comments at the bottom of this forum question on creative cow:

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1093741

Anthony — I’ve wondered the same about scaling for different outputs. I think that no matter how you slice it, the look of the text suffers if you try to build your text to be visible and legible for both 1080/720 presentation and a 1/4-size web preview.

One solution that may work for you:
(1) Keep text within “title-safe” borders” and size as desired for full-quality output. Keep all text objects on the same track for ease.
(2) Copy all text objects and place in a new sequence with same settings.
(3) Nest the new sequence on its own track in your sequence.
(4) Turn on “Image and Wireframe” in the Canvas to allow you to scale the text sequence track, until the text reacher the edges of the video. You wouldn’t normally want to scale text objects, but since it’s a preview, it should work!

Thanks for the tutorial, MS!

Have you developed an easy way to adjust subtitle sizes for different uses? For example, if I am editing at HD res but intend to output a full-res and a 1/4 res “web” version, the same subtitles will not work because they become too small in the reduced resolution file.

Thank you.