Now.

Direct Actors for Improv

Home Film School Student has a conversation with an actress about being directed in a scene where she ab-libbed quite a bit (and they wanted her too). The content of this video is valuable if you encourage actors to improv during a scene (this may be more helpful for them, actually), but my favorite parts of this video are meta. Such as the dude asking “are we ready to go” at the beginning, and this “bored camera guy” shot.

I’m trippin! Check out the videos here.

The Beeping! The Beeping!

For the first little while I worked with Final Cut Pro I had no clue why some audio would beep on the timeline and need to be rendered while others did not. Turns out it could be a few reasons, and Genius DV has laid them out in a handy little post.

For your health.

IndyMogul Really Wants You To Make a Slider

Zach from Backyard Effects and IndyMogul will stop at nothing to get you to make his $20 slider. Nothing.

Nothing.

Partner with YouTube Instructions from a YouTube Video

Did I just blow your mind? Maybe this video will. From FilmmakerIQ.

DiY is basically going to apply. Basically.

Young Man Reading a Newspaper While Yawning Tracking Shots with Smooth Jazz

That wasn’t the case before, and still isn’t the case in many production environments. You see, more often than not, we modern editors are doing something without even noticing: we’re combining offline and online editing. Essentially, it used to be that you captured much smaller, lower quality versions of files, and edited those. That was offline. Then, you’d send your edit to another department (or do it yourself) and they would do the online editing, meaning they would put in the full quality files from the source tapes, color correct, etc.

Now, you probably capture at full HD and edit at full HD because our computers can handle it. It’s simpler, and for a smaller operation, it makes sense.

But even though we’re editing in different ways, the fundamentals under the hood are still the same.

Numbers Under the Hood

For this example, I’m going to use Final Cut Pro.

Let’s say you have a 45 minute tape of HD footage, and you capture it into FCP, end to end. Now, that tape is file on your hard drive, sitting in a folder. Go to your project assets folder, and you can check it out and even play it from the finder.

However, go into Final Cut, and you can chop it up, move it around, color correct it, and mess with the audio. After all that, you can go back and still find your 45 minute file, just sitting there, not touched.

The reason for this is Final Cut is a non-destructive editor. It’s not actually touching your captured files at all, it’s just referencing them and creating data about the different editing decisions you’ve made. A cut on this tape at this time, placed on the timeline here, with this filter and this data. That’s all it needs to know, really, and then it plays it back.

When you get down to it, editing is all about numbers: timecode and other data referencing tapes. Those tapes just happen to be sitting in digital form on your hard drive. That’s why your Final Cut Pro project file is always so small. It’s just data – the files are elsewhere.

Could I Get That In a List?

It makes sense then, that since you can export a video file from Final Cut (where it pulls together all that data and mixes the video together into a file), you can export a version of just the data. This is called an Edit Decision List, or EDL.

EDLs are a list of every editing decision for an entire project, in sequence. Theoretically, if you lose your entire project, if you have the EDL, you can rebuild the edit. Pretty crazy.

Now, like many things on the computer, there are many types of formats that all vary slightly (thanks, computers), but most EDLs share the same basic data from the classic CMX EDL format:

Event Number:  Just a sequential number. Primary key, for my database people.

Source ID: ID for the video or media source. Some programs place limits on this in terms of length.

Edit Mode: Is this decision on video track 1 (V1) or audio track 1 (A1) or both (VA1) or maybe another combo? That goes here, and the format in which it is denoted varies.

Transition Type: C for Cut, D for Dissolve. You get the idea, and you also get the frame numbers in there for dissolves. These also vary and are not standardized.

Source in/Source Out: Timecode of where you are taking the video from the original source.

Record in/Record Out: Timecode of where the video you took appears on the tape or timeline.

For example, here is a CMX-format EDL for a very short, basic video with straight cuts:

You can also get a much more complicated version:

As you can see, in Final Cut, there are a lot of EDL options to choose from. Which ones you use (and which ones you use on any program) depends on the needs of the project. The person who needs the EDL will usually be able to tell you what kind of settings they need on the export. What you need to know is that EDLs exist, and in many cases are essential to the production workflow.

Panel is:

Adam (@adamfairholm)

Doug (@thedougmovement)

Lance (@omegabane)

Picks

Lance Scary Cow

Doug PASS

Adam Evernote

Podcast Stuff:

Shaun’s Video:

The video Lance mentions:

Bros Icing Bros

File Link:

http://www.diy-filmmaking.com/podcast_files/ep8_bros_icing_lance.m4a

UPDATE: FCP Daily has pointed out that this has been denied by Apple.

Apple Insider had an interesting article yesterday about Final Cut Pro. Basically, Randy Ubillos, the man behind FCP and also the man behind the much-maligned iMovie ’09 is back at the helm of the Final Cut Studio team. Apparently, there is a makeover in the works that will bring Final Cut Pro to a more prosumer level, since Apple mainly sells Final Cut Express. There’s been some job postings for Senior UI positions, which are pretty interesting.

What does this mean for Final Cut and the pro apps? Seems like it’s too early to tell, but I think all Final Cut Pro users can agree that FCP needs an upgrade – both to 64 bit and to a new interface. It appears as though both of these will be addressed in the refresh.

I, for one, am a little wary of something that is more “prosumer” – will they leave out key features for professionals in fear that regular users will get confused? Will they make it too simple to be useful?

Time will only tell, but there may be a silver lining here. Since Apple is leaning more and more towards the consumer level products, we know that those products will be supported and frequently updated. If it means bringing more people into the Final Cut Pro Pro party to get more attention from Apple, I’m for it.

What do you think? Dark clouds on the horizon or maybe a dawning of a new age? Let us know in the comments.

If you are working in Final Cut Pro, you probably know how to create basic scrolling text credits (if you don’t, here’s a tutorial on that). You know the kind, where everything is centered and it just goes up. For many situations, this is fine, but there are some alternative methods to creating some more attractive credits in FCP.

Method #1: Raw Dog in FCP

After I just got done bad mouthing going with Final Cut Pro’s native title program, I’m here to offer it as a viable way to go for some basic credits.

The credit format that you are most likely used to is the center-aligned, gutter version – that is, titles on the left hand side, a gutter in the middle, and names on the right hand side. It’s a classic credit format.

Final Cut Pro actually has the ability to generate this built in. All you need to do is put an asterisk (*) where you want the gutter to be. So a line might go:

Catering * John Johnson Sr.

So if you have some basic title needs, and only really want a center-aligned gutter, FCP’s native function is a good solution.

Method #2: Use an FCP Plugin

Alex4d makes a great little plugin for Final Cut Pro that has more options than the default scrolling text generator. Some of the options are:

• More choices over fonts
• More heading syntax to choose from
• More animation control
• More choices over color

Depending on what you want to do with your credits, this plugin could do the trick. You can check out all the details here.

Method #3: Use Photoshop

This one was a surprise to me, but it makes sense. Photoshop allows you to create documents with a complicated layout, so if you have credits that require a complex layout with images and other little tidbits, you might want to consider this.

Check out this YouTube tutorial that give you the details:

—–

Do you have a preferred method or any tips on creating scrolling end credits in Final Cut Pro? Let us know in the comments!

In the mean time, here are some cool things around the web that caught our eye that may be useful or just fun:

DSLR Film Blog

I came across this blog in my research on DSLR filmmaking for this week’s podcast. (I had hoped that there was a blog dedicated to this, and I found one! I love it when the internet works like that.)

Anyways, the DSLR filmmaker blog is really great – its in-depth, technical, and gets you excited about DSLR filmmaking while at the same time bringing you the latest news on the technological advances in the DSLR world. They also highlight some DSLR short films and other DSLR-created media.

You can find this blog at www.dslrfilm.com. We highly recommend you check it out and add it to your favorite feed reader.

Make Sure You Don’t Have to Cope with the Loss of Loved Data

The good people at fcpdaily.com posted some great tips on autosaving in Final Cut Pro that I think need to be sung from the mountaintops. Check it out here.

Pay special attention to the message on sequences at the bottom of the post. I think it’s a great thing to go nuts with sequences – they are small in terms of data size, and they allow you to create really easy snapshots of your progress whether you have a client who will want to revert, or you are your own client. I like to create a daily sequence and name them with marks so they sounds cool. IE: Rough Cut Mark III – 021510

This Tutorial Guy Likes to Party

Am I right?

1. Canon 5D Mark II Audio Exposed – Boom Mic (juicedLink, Zoom H4n, Microtrack II, BeachTek) from P3Pictures on Vimeo.

That’s all we got going for now! Stay tuned to the site for some cool stuff coming up – our DSLR podcast + some great tech tutorials.

You may have been in this situation before – you’ve got your straight HD export from Final Cut Pro with the sequence settings, and it goes fine into Vimeo and just about everywhere else. But, upload it to YouTube, and it’s a mess. Low quality everything, and no HD option.

This is a little frustrating, but it can be resolved. We tried out a number of settings and found that the following created the best results.

1. Use Export for Quicktime Conversion

I think Compressor is overkill in this situation.

2. Choose the Quicktime Movie Format

3. Set the Codec to Mpeg 4

Click on Options, then Settings under Video, and you’ll get the following window. You can choose from a variety of “Compression Options” or codecs, but YouTube seems to really like MPEG4. So let’s go with it!

Note: YouTube’s offical docs say H.264, but in our experience, that leads to tears.

4. Set the Quality to Best

On the same window, go ahead and set the quality level to “Best”

5. Set the Audio Format to AAC

On the general Options window, click Settings under Sound and you’ll get an options window. Change the format to AAC, and the quality to “Best”.

That’s it! You’re videos should come out lookin’ beautiful.

Got any other tips or tricks for FCP export to YouTube? Let us know in the comments!

Note: This may be the same settings used in some other tutorials, since there are a lot out there, but this is what we came up with some trial and error and reading some other tips. In short, this is the recipe that works for us.

We here at DiY Filmmaking have starting our own podcast – it was really fun to record, and we’ll be doing these on a regular basis. The panel is:

Adam Fairholm: @adamfairholm
Doug Klinger: @thedougmovement
Lance Johnson: @omegabane

Here is the audio file:

Episode #1: E-Bumpin’

We’re submitting this to iTunes, so we’ll see how this goes. After we post this and get the WordPress RSS feed for podcasts down, we’ll post it on the side bar to the right.

We  had a little bit of trouble with an echo at the end, but we’ll get those first time technical snafus out of the way for episode 2.

Picks of the week this week are:

Lance: Macbook Pro
Doug: Scriviner
Adam: Film Festival Secrets

We also talk about Final Cut Pro, FCP Daily, Vanish Productions, and Sony Vegas Pro.

See you next episode!

If you are a key pecker you know who you are. You love editing almost entirely by key commands, and probably started on an Avid system. Key in and out points, key into the timeline – key everything. Key peckers see the video timeline and see something that is manipulated with keystrokes point by point.

But then there are the touchers, and I have to say I’m in this group. These are the ones who see a timeline and want to move it around and re-arrange the elements via a visual interface. The timeline is something fluid, and although there are some key commands involved with the left hand, the right hand is all about the motion.

My question is though: why are all of you touchers still using a mouse?

Mice are clumsy, and although they are what you are familiar with, they leave a lot to be desired when you are looking to really interact with a user interface on a natural level.

Go into any design house, and you’ll see a lot of grey, flat surfaces everywhere. These are known as Wacom tablets (pronounced “Whack’em”), and they are basically an alternative input device that uses a digital pen.

Anyone who edits graphics on a serious level uses one, and it’s my opinion that anyone that edits video on a serious level should have one too (sans the Avid users).

Basically, you slide the stylus (digital pen) across the tablet, and move the cursor. Very simple concept, but it does take a lot of getting used to. If you’re like most people, you’ve held a pen in your hand for writing and a mouse in your hand for computing your whole life. Mixing the two won’t be easy, but it pays off.

How? A Wacom tablet with a pen allows you to access the interface of a video editor very quickly and efficiently. You can move around clips on the timeline, adjust levels, and touch tiny buttons all over the screen very quickly – and very accurately. You are no longer mousing around and clicking here and there slowly and deliberately. You are really manipulating the program in a fluid way, and that can really make a difference in the speed and quality of your editing.

Bonus: Wacoms come with a mouse that is very comfortable and uses the tablet surface for when you don’t need the pen stylus.

There are other companies that make tablets like these, but Wacom is the industry standard. Although you can get a knock off for cheaper, I really recommend going with a real Wacom and saving the trouble of another kind breaking or not functioning properly.

There are also a lot of different type of Wacoms. I prefer the Intuos3, 6×8. It’s the perfect size for Final Cut, and really gets the job done well.

If you are a big toucher, I highly recommend dropping some cash on these and seeing where one can take you.

However, if you are a Final Cut user, and you know you’re way around the program pretty well, check out the FCP Daily blog. I have been a Final Cut Pro user 6 years and found a ton of great tips that I am definitely putting to use. There are also a lot of great free resources you’d probably miss otherwise.

Be aware that this is not an ideal place to start for beginning Final Cut Pro users. We’ll be posting some basic tutorials in the coming few days for those interested in learning the ropes.

So Final Cut Pro power users, put this in your feed reader and starting impressing women with these sweet tips.