St. Louis Final Cut Pro Users Group

NAB update 2012

admin — Tue, 01 May 2012 01:09:33 +0000

Imagine a dusty southwestern town in the desert. A town with saloons, gambling, brothels, shady men, wayward women and all sorts of wandering salesmen pitching their wares of snake oil and promises of a better life. Now throw in about 70,000 geeks, over 1500 vendors touting today’s cutting edge gear and a conference exhibition hall of 80 acres and you have the National Association of Broadcasters more commonly known as NAB.

Each year, the production community looks to this event for new innovations, big announcements and sore backs and legs. We try to not be distracted by the flashy demos, even flashier badge scanning sirens and look for those solutions that will make our lives easier and not break the bank.

NAB is an overload of information. You have access to the leading creative programmers, artists and engineers. Seriously, I was speaking with a Matrox rep about their compression card and he started to tell me about why he designed the card a certain way. I quickly realized that we are getting access to the people who are creating the product and this makes NAB quite valuable. There are seminars, conferences and training that can keep you busy from 7am to 7pm.

Each year attendees try to get a feel of the direction of technology as they walk from booth to booth. To help us with this, I have asked a few St. Louis production professionals who attended this year to tell us some of their favorite picks and thoughts.

Production

The production side was another year of large sensor cameras being introduced into the market. Canon with it’s C300 (~$15,000), Sony introduced two new large chip cameras both under $10,000, and of course the Red epic and scarlet have been the pace setter for pioneering big chips on the cheap. Lynn Hensel of Spot Creative Media said “I think that most of the cool stuff and updates were on the Post side of things. I did find out that Canon is releasing a new set of PL lenses with EF mounts later in 2012.” Blackmagic has also released a new video camera with 2.5K capabilities and as always a low BM price of $2995.

Scott Heugerich of Antidote said “I attended NAB to buy additional equipment for our Red Epic camera package. While there we decided on purchasing several products from Wooden Camera. They make very well thought out and reliable equipment to be used specifically with Red cameras. http://woodencamera.com/.”

Post-Production

The sexy side of NAB (if that can be said) is always found in the South Hall. This is where postproduction is found. Huge booths with experts showing how they have used the latest Adobe, Avid and Autodesk software in today’s motion pictures. Amidst the flashing of large LCD screens and competing sounds from each booth, Apple was nowhere to be found. Instead, the trend set by Autodesk Smoke seemed to hearken the future of editing. Everything you need, compositing, color correction and editing is built within the same application saving the time of round trips and retiming pieces to fit for a graphics composite. Quantel was another leader in pointing to the future of production with cloud editing. They showed that by even limiting their bandwidth to something as small as 512Kb, they could edit their footage in real-time and do this by anyone from anywhere in the world.

Many production houses are breaking from Final Cut Pro and researching new editing platforms, and the market seems to be adjusting to compete for this new audience. Scott Heugrich also stated, ”While at the show we were also very impressed with the upcoming release of Adobe CS6 Production Premium. We have been editing with Final Cut for the last 3 years and are considering a switch to Premier Pro because of its integration with After Effects. We feel Adobe has made great strides with Premier Pro over the last several years while Apple has languished a bit with Final Cut.”

Storage

And of course, after finishing with all of this wonderful 4K data and editing, you are going to need a place to store this. Another big topic this year was data management and storage. Unfortunately, Solid State Technology has not really moved foward too much and spinning drives for storage were still big. LTO tape seemed to still be the leader in final storage and archiving with LTO-5 (capacity of 1.5 TB per tape) the present standard and LTO-6 (capacity of 3.2 TB) slated to arrived this summer.

The exciting part is the hybrid nature of solutions where archiving and unarchiving are as simple as a drag and drop. At HEC-TV, we have been struggling with trying to keep our data backed up and archived and there were great solutions from single tape LTO machines to large dispenser style that would hold over a Petabyte of information.

Chris Collum of 1303 Systems said that NAB was “the year of Media Asset Management and storage. It seemed everywhere I went these two were everywhere. I talked with lots of people who needed ways to wrangle all of their media and who wanted workflow improvements from ingest to delivery.

Two of the hot items I saw were Isilon for shared storage. Isilon is a very smart scale out NAS with a lot of potential for the media space. The other item was MetaMAM. This was, in my opinion, the killer MAM at NAB. It’s based on open standards and the Vidispine middleware. It’s completely extensible. Your imagine is the limit to what it can do.”

All in all, NAB has plenty of things to do and learn. There are seminars, courses from today’s professionals and access to the creators of almost every product at NAB. However, the best thing to learn is when to say enough, leave those salesmen behind and wander the saloons and other distractions.

-Boyd Pickup

Free FCP X Workshops coming to the Apple Store!

admin — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 02:29:49 +0000

Thank you to Jason Pollock who found this article from the Apple store.

—————————

The Apple Store at West County will be offering (2) Final Cut Pro X workshops during the evening in March. Each workshop will run approximately 50-55 minutes and offer a general overview at some of the new key features and workflows of Final Cut Pro X. The workshops are set for March 15th and March 29th at 6:30pm. Anyone interested in attending should reserve a spot online atapple.com/westcounty or by using the Apple Store app on their iOS device. Attendance will be limited, so make your reservation soon!

Future of Production Posted!

admin — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:41:26 +0000

Hi Everyone,

Thank you for the wonderful turnout. We hope that this forum was a start in helping you understand where we might be headed in the future.

We plan this to be the first of many forums on a wide variety of topics and would like your input. Your involvement and feedback will help us grow our topics and help us bring information relavent to you. Please let us know if you have any thoughts or ideas. If you have ANY suggestions, please e-mail us at: info@stlfcpug.org or leave us a comment below.

Thank you once again,

Boyd

Future of Production Forum

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 01:21:04 +0000

The St. Louis Final Cut Pro Users Group has asked a group of experts to give their thoughts and answer questions about where they see hardware, software and production technology headed. We have chosen experts with extensive experience in the production industry, specialists who have worked as Apple employees, professional hardware and software installers for video facilities and professional editors.

Technology and the economy have changed the production environment drastically, and these changes over the past few years have created a fast-moving production environment that makes investment decisions in new equipment difficult.

On one hand, we are in exciting times with new cameras, faster computers and cheaper prices that seem to come on the market every week. These leaps in technology give us better tools to create higher quality products. On the other hand, hardware products and software programs are being discontinued, completely new products are appearing on the market and clients are expecting higher quality video at lower prices.

Apple is a great example of this new paradigm. They have stopped manufacturing certain hardware, quit supporting software and created a whole new editing platform that has the production community polarized about its functionality. It brings home the question: ”Where is production headed?”

Our goal is to make sense of this constantly shifting world of technology and get the opinion of experts whose job it is to forecast the changing market.

BJC Production Services has kindly partnered with us and provided a great venue for this event!

Important: There is limited space, so please RSVP to: Info@stlfcpug.org

What: The Future of Production Forum

When: Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Time: 6:30 – 8:00am

Where: BJC Production Services 600 South Taylor Drive St. Louis, MO 63110

Details: Snacks will be provided

Free Sound Effects

admin — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:00:34 +0000

Lately, in my editing, I feel as if I am exhausting my library of whooshes and sweep effects to sell a transition or some other video move. In an effort to create unique audio moods and effects and to gain some inspiration, I began searching the web for sound sources that sell effects and highlight how they make them.

In my search, I discovered a site called http://FreeSound.org. This is a sound community that shares sound effects and music. You are able to upload and, of course, download sound that other production artists have created to meet their need.

Here is the download link to the nice cinematic boom. CinematicBoom

Future of Editing Forum Update
Please watch for the Future of Editing Forum coming in January 2012. We have found a location to host it, and will be working on the details and experts. Have a great Holiday!

Boyd PIckup

Free Water Color Textures

admin — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:02:21 +0000

Free Water Color Textures

I was looking for some textures to use as backgrounds and found these great free textures. They have high resolution water color textures that would be great as back grounds for Photoshop, After Effects and Final Cut Pro. I have used these as mattes behind a few of my projects I have posted one on Vimeo.

You can download them here…….

http://lostandtaken.com/blog/2009/4/30/25-free-high-res-watercolor-textures.html

You can use photoshop or the “Multiply” transfer mode in Final Cut Pro to knockout the white background so it can composited more easily.

More to come…..

Automatic Duck Apps – Released for Free

admin — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 01:17:51 +0000

For those of you who work between editing platforms, and for those of you who I suspect will be comparing editing platforms in the near future, Automatic Duck has released its suite of software for free. This software (which cost $500 or more per module) is used to create an exchange between After Effects, Avid, FCP and other video editing platforms. Check it out and download from their website:

http://www.automaticduck.com/

The creators of this released a statement on their website saying the following:

“Over the years we’ve enjoyed improving the interchange between Avid, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Pro Tools, Smoke, Quantel and other AAF and OMF-friendly apps. We have enjoyed helping users improve their workflows and finish their productions more easily, and we’ve even enjoyed working with users to fix the occasional challenging bug and odd misbehavior. Not to mention at every trade show we had a great time meeting our many users from around the world.

We are very proud of the company we created and the products we lovingly crafted. But after 10 1/2 years the time has come for us to embark on new challenges and begin a new chapter in our lives. To that end Automatic Duck has partnered with Adobe Systems and will be working towards some excellent technology integration. I have joined Adobe as a full-time employee and Harry will be focusing on the technology integration as well as supporting other Automatic Duck partners.

Because we are so busy with these new projects we cannot provide the same level of support for our plug-ins that we used to, therefore we can’t in good conscience charge money for them. But we don’t want our popular tools to go unused if they are still useful to people. Therefore we have decided to make them available at no charge. Enjoy!

Thank you for the memories, we’ll see you around.

- Wes Plate & Harry Plate, co-founders of Automatic Duck”

New Organizational App

admin — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:11:14 +0000

I have been thinking about the best way to organize our data within the production house. How do you keep track of the data? How do you make sure that all editors are managing the folders and media the same way so that there is consistency? Here is a solution from Digital Rebellion that I have been testing to help keep continuity from every editor and project. Even as a one-person production house, this would be a great tool to keep everything ordered the same. That way, in the future, your projects will always be searchable in Spotlight.

The app is called Post Haste and I will link it here. It is a free download. It is also available in the app store.

FCP X Trial Download

admin — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 07:06:35 +0000

There is a 30 day trail of FCP X. Download it here. Greg Kopp and I are working through the new book for T3 recertification of FCP X, but more importantly, we are trying to see if it will work for our purposes. We will keep you updated as we work through the book. Also, send us your thoughts and questions about it or e-mail us.

info@stlfcpug.org