Final Cut Pro X – What Now?

Final Cut Pro XAlong with Larry Jordan, Norman Hollyn, Michael Cioni, and Michael Kammes, I will be speaking on a panel at Keycode Media about the future of Post-Production in a Final Cut Pro X world on August 18th, 2011.  Hopefully we will be able to de-bunk some of the misconceptions about what FCP X is and its place in the greater realm of post.  Besides that , we should be addressing post from a  larger perspective, asking where are we going and how are we going to get there?

Make sure to register to view the event online or in person.  At least make sure to upload your thoughts and view the video.


 

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Qmaster Distributed Encoding on a SAN


A lot of people have set up their systems to utilize compressor’s Qmaster feature on their own system in order to use all available processor cores when encoding videos.

But what if you have multiple machines with access to file-level shared storage, like XSAN.   All client computers can have access and write access to the SAN simultaneously, so how can we utilize this fact to process distributed encoding tasks across multiple computers?

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Composite Modes in Final Cut Pro

Working with Composite Modes

Final Cut Pro composite modes determine how the brightness and color of one clip visually interact with those of another clip layered beneath it in a sequence. When you edit a clip into your sequence, it defaults to the Normal composite mode, meaning that it is a completely opaque layer that does not blend with the layers beneath.

How Composite Modes Affect Images

Composite modes mix colors from overlapping images together based on the brightness values within each color channel in an image. Every image consists of red, green, blue, and alpha channels (or one luma and two chroma channels in the case of Y′CBCR component video). Each individual channel contains a range of brightness values that defines the intensity of each pixel in the image that uses some of that color.

The effect that each composite mode has on objects that overlap in the Canvas depends on the range of color values within each object. The red, green, and blue channels (or Y′CBCR channels) within each overlapping pixel are mathematically combined to yield the final image.

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Digital Video YUV Color Space

The YʹCbCr Color Model

 

In the RGB color model, all three channels contribute to the perception of brightness. In the early 1950s, this was a problem when developing a three-channel color television system that would be compatible with existing black-and-white televisions. The solution was to encode a single channel that represented luminance—light intensity as perceived by humans—which existing black-and-white televisions could decode. Color televisions would receive the same luminance channel and two additional color channels that could be decoded back into RGB color for display.

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Wall Writers – Art in the Streets

Just finished up grading a documentary called Wall Writers for the Art in the Streets exhibit at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA directed by associate curator Roger Gastman.

More info on the exhibit from the MOCA website: Art in the Streets will showcase installations by 50 of the most dynamic artists from the graffiti and street art community, including Fab 5 Freddy (New York), Lee Quiñones (New York), Futura (New York), Margaret Kilgallen (San Francisco), Swoon (New York), Shepard Fairey (Los Angeles), Os Gemeos (São Paulo), and JR (Paris). MOCA’s exhibition will emphasize Los Angeles’s role in the evolution of graffiti and street art, with special sections dedicated to cholo graffiti and Dogtown skateboard culture. The exhibition will feature projects by influential local artists such as Craig R. Stecyk III, Chaz Bojórquez, Mister Cartoon, RETNA, SABER, REVOK, and RISK.

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Secondary Color Correction with After Effects

Recently, I graded a set of short documentary films by director Doug Pray for Stamp Films & Philips Electronics for the Wake Up The Town campaign.

The films were set in the town of  Longyearbyen, Norway and covered a study on the effects of the living in the Arctic Circle, where winter means almost four months of darkness.  Obviously, light was an important part of these films and there were a few shots that needed a bit of extra love when it came to the delicate balance of an underexposed shot maintaing the dusk/night look while still being able to see the subject.

I took these shots into After Effects to do a little secondary color correction in a simple but pretty cool way.

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Final Cut Pro 8

FCP 8
As posted at http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/22/new-final-cut-pro-is-real-and-its-spectacular-and-its-expected-spring-2011/

According our very own people familiar with the matter, a small group of video editors were on the Apple campus recently in order to preview the new version of video editing software, which is in the same space as Avid and Adobe Premiere. Apparently Apple is still putting the finishing touches on “the biggest overhaul to Final Cut Pro since the original version was created over 10 years ago” and wanted pro user feedback. Emphasis on “pro.”

Meanwhile, everyone is going crazy about the Supermeet reallocated to Apple.  And if you missed it too, Scott Simmons rant of a post at Studio Daily.

I believe the new FCP will be the biggest story of NAB, period.  Even though I can’t wait to hear what the surprise from RED is…  Stop hating on apple and wait to see what we get.

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Final Cut and After Effects round-tripping

FCP AEInterlacing is a technique developed for transmitting television signals using limited bandwidth. In an interlaced system, only half the number of horizontal lines for each frame of video are transmitted at a time. Because of the speed of transmission, the afterglow of displays, and the persistence of vision, the viewer perceives each frame in full resolution. All of the analog television standards use interlacing. Digital television standards include both interlaced and noninterlaced varieties. Typically, interlaced signals are generated from interlaced scanning, whereas noninterlaced signals are generated from progressive scanning.

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