Final Cut Pro X First Impressions or “FCP, I Hope You Feel Better Soon”

With the major changes in Apple's new version of Final Cut Pro X, we've had a lot of people asking if MediaStorm is making the switch, and what we think of the program. This essay is the first in a series of MediaStorm producers responding to FCP X. Apple giveth and Apple taketh away. And with the release of Final Cut Pro X, Apple did a lot of both. Among the missing (at least for the moment): the ability to import FCP 7 projects. the ability to export only a portion of your project multicam support the auto-save vault And on and on.  To be fair, Apple recently promised to reintroduce absent functionality in future versions. It’s still painful to work with an incomplete toolset, particularly given that the toolset was doing pretty darn well just last week. Yes, FCP X is a 1.0 release but Apple is not new to this…

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MediaStorm Guide to Crossfades

In my last post, 10 More Ways to Improve Your Multimedia Right Now, I wrote: Delete all dissolves between images...The eye sees cuts. When we look from one object to another, we see a blink. We don’t see one object then dissolve to another. A reader responded with a comparison: "Our eyes don’t see shallow depth-of-field [either], but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use shallow DOF when appropriate." I agree. So before I discuss when it's appropriate to dissolve between pictures, let's quickly revisit why doing so usually doesn't work. The problem is that crossfades create an unexpected middle image. In most cases, this intermediate picture, a combination of two hopefully strong ones, is both messy and confusing. There's no particular meaning to be gleaned from this superimposition. Now, repeat this between every image over the course of a three- to five-minute project, and it's not hard to see how exhausting it…

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MediaStorm’s 10 More Ways to Improve Your Multimedia Right Now

As a followup to a previous post, here are ten more ways to improve your work right now, no matter how challenging your original assets may be. Make edits with purpose. Always ask why you are making an edit at a particular place. Is the cut motivated by action? A musical beat? A pause in narration? If you don't have a reason, you need to find a new location for your edit. Every edit must be motivated. When editing your visuals, don't cut in the middle of a word. Doing so is confusing. Edit between words, or even better, edit according to written grammar: at a comma, a period, or to emphasize a word. Cutting after words like because and however is also effective. Edit rhythmically. Make the first cut at the beginning of a spoken phrase. Time the first phrase so it ends right before a musical beat. Cut to another…

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MediaStorm’s Guide to Using Subtitles

Sometimes the most difficult challenge regarding subtitles is deciding whether to use them or not. Subtitles present obvious aesthetic challenges—from inevitably covering the most important part of an image to turning a visual experience into a written one. If at all possible, avoid them; the obvious exception being when someone speaks a language other than that of the intended audience. Then subtitles are essential. So how do you know if you need English subtitles for someone speaking English? It’s often difficult for a producer to make this call. After listening to the same clips again and again, we learn a speaker’s cadence and nuances and they become clearer to us. Probably the best method to make this determination is to play your project for a group of people who haven’t seen it yet and see if they can understand the narration without subtitles. With fresh ears, they’ll quickly let you know if…

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MediaStorm’s Guide to Using Apple’s ProRes 422 Codec

One of the questions I'm asked most frequently about Final Cut is, "When do I use Apple's ProRes 422 codec?" To tackle this question it's first necessary to understand a few things about codecs. Shooting video is a very intensive digital capture process. It requires cameras to capture lots of information in a short amount of time. To handle so much raw data, most cameras need to compress what they capture. A codec is essentially a compression scheme, a way to encapsulate so much material into a containable format. Standard DV footage, for instance, uses a compression scheme referred to as the DV codec. Similarly, HD footage -- 1080i60, 1080p, etc. -- uses the HDV codec. Codec takes its name from “encoder” and “decoder” since your computer must now decode the encoded file during playback. When you create a new sequence in Final Cut, you are building what will become a new…

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