DV for Teachers

My NECC Workshop Links for Final Cut Pro

DV for Teachers

Here you are.

Download a Final Cut Pro Keyboard Chart and easily learn one of the best time-saving aspects of this great program.

2-pop – The Digital Filmmaker’s Resource Site
The best site for DV so far.

A complete college-level course in video production from CyberCollege. Completely thorough and free free free.

The Little QuickTime Page
Great for tips and updates on QuickTime and programs based on it or related to it… like Final Cut Pro.

DV-List YahooGroups Archive
Where a world-wide community of DV pros discuss techniques and technology, but welcome newbies with grace and generosity. No kidding – no sincere question will be turned away.

dvcreators.net
Great teachers – if you can go to their 3-day workshops, you’ll learn as much as your brain can hold.

Desktop Video – About.com
A portal of sorts, but a good one because it’s run by actual people! Good site for links and suggestions – newbies should look around here to learn terminology and some technical basics.

LAFCPUG – L.A.’s Final Cut Pro Users Group
Where the pros at moviemaking’s ground zero – Los Angeles – gather to swap wit and wisdom and share it with the rest of us via this very friendly site.

Here’s the Final Cut Forum at the World Wide Users Group. Another good discussion resource.

DV Guys
These guys offer lots of free tips and “digitricks” in QuickTime movie format. Very cool, very effective.

Postforum’s Final Cut Pro Forum
A forum about postproduction, focusing on Final Cut. Another good source to look for guidance.
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I’ve got just three working days left to complete the presentation for my Final Cut Pro workshop at NECC next week, so likely no updates until that’s over. I do plan to report as much as I can from the conference, particularly concerning how the workshop went, what other video events and news come from the conference, and what Steve Jobs has to say in the conference-opening keynote on Monday morning.——-

Ken Stone, FCP and Photoshop guru, does it again with a step-by-step procedural (I guess that’s redundant, but I’m going with it) explaining how to export to the web direct from Final Cut Pro, using its built-in QuickTime Pro tools.

Take a look around Ken’s very own FCP site for other tips too.——-

A followup to the last few posts regarding Final Cut Pro: do not forget, fellow educators, the incredible low price of FCP for us: $249, a full 75% discount off the regular price. This makes FCP arguably the best deal in a non-linear editing program; and if you’re buying an entire system, this discount helps keep Mac-based edit systems outrageously competitive.

2-pop continues to provide some of the best online 3rd-party support for hardware or software I’ve ever seen. Monday’s article covering media management in Final Cut provides excellent advice and procedures for keeping your files in good order:

Media management is the process of managing the assets of your project: captured media and project files. More specifically, media management affects how your media is handled, organized, copied, trimmed and backed up. Finding media, determining whether media has been used or not, whether it is online or offline and removing unwanted media are all aspects of media management.

Thanks to Ken Stone and Andrew Balis, FCP Gurus extraordinaire.
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Digital Media Net reviews Final Cut Pro – another Windows user falls in love.——-

More on Final Cut Pro and FCP’s Heart, QuickTime

One of the gurus at 2-pop, Charles Roberts of Fitchburg State College (a.k.a. “Chawla”), has posted a solid step-by-step article on setting up Final Cut Pro in an educational setting:

What follows is a suggested method of project set-up for an NTSC FireWire Final Cut Pro editing station. It was developed in a busy multi-user college editing lab. It is a system for ensuring that individual projects are properly configured and that each student’s work is safe and secure in a lab where many hands pass over one FCP station everyday. Many of the exhortations included are specifically there to ensure that while you work, you are not demolishing another editor’s work. As such, if you are the only one utilizing your station, some of the material may seem paranoid or irrelevant. Rest assured that such techniques will not HARM the single user, although some concerns may be overstated for the single user.

Learn What QuickTime Can Do
If you’re not working with Final Cut Pro, QuickTime Pro is an immensely powerful video and multimedia editing and creation tool that’s usable on Windows and Mac and has capabilities way beyond the mere playback offered by Windows Media and Real.

[G]ain an understanding of the basic tracks architecture of QuickTime. Once you have this insight into the inner workings of QuickTime, you can understand its power and flexibility.

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An Informative Review of Final Cut Pro

Dean Mermell of ZDNet News has a brief but solid review of Apple’s Final Cut Pro. He notes important improvements and some shortfalls, listing new features and (unlike some reviewers) explaining their benefits.

Some highlights of interest to teachers and lab admins:

Although some people will still find the program’s many, many options intimidating, the new Easy Setup feature makes getting up and running with Final Cut easier than setting up an iMac’s Internet connection.

Restore Workspace lets users save their window positions and project settings for each individual project, which is extremely beneficial to those folks who are sharing machines and working on different projects.

His summary:

It’s
our opinion that Final Cut Pro 2.0 is the smartest video-editing program available for less than $10,000, and, retailing at one-tenth of that price, an incredible value.

For educators, it sells for $249—1/25th of that price, which makes it unbeatable.——-

Making DVDs? I’m not ready yet

A professor active in SIGGRAPH asked me to compile a series of clips showcasing examples of computer animation for their upcoming conference. She would have liked to have the clips on a DVD, but the new burners are so new and in such high demand that some dealers are charging above MSRP for them. Further, I don’t want to climb that learning curve right now.

What could be so difficult? Here’s an indication: on the Apple Store page for DVD Studio Pro, their DVD authoring software, under the “Support” heading is the following:

Purchase AppleCare Professional SupportLine & Tools available in the Applestore front page AppleCare area. It is an annual subscription for one (1) primary contact and one (1) backup contact that includes priority toll-free telephone access to senior technical support representatives, and one (1) comprehensive set of diagnostic, system software recovery, and Technician Training tools. This product also provides access to special web site for technical information and software downloads.

If they offer such extensive support options, I’m thinking that I’ll need those support options… and I don’t need that much work to make one DVD when a good old CD with QuickTime will do. I’ll happily wait for others to blaze that trail for me (and wait for version 2.0 of the software!)——-

More about Visual Storytelling

Successful videos require effective visual communication. Think of it as a language we’ve all learned to “hear” (i.e. see) from infancy, but few of us learn to “speak” it (i.e., make or edit film or video). Adam Wilt, whom I linked to last week, ruminates on this and other topics in a series of posts to the DV-List Archive that begins here. Well worth reading.

One place to start consciously learning the visual language is by watching commercials. Yes, commercials. What other film form tells a story in 30 to 60 seconds? Try watching with the sound off while noticing when and how the shots change, and then think about why the editor did it that way. Finally, think about how those editing decisions affect the way you understand the commercial. Use that “Mute” button and start enjoying commercials again!

Here’s another place to start thinking in video terms, but it’s more involved: an entire college-level course in television production, all free on the web: Television Production—A Comprehensive On-line Cybertext in Studio and Field Production, by Ron Whittaker, Ph.D.
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Competition in the Pro Editing Ranks

Salon posts a valuable article about the rise of Apple’s Final Cut Pro as a tool for professional editors, and its increasing competition with Avid for users.

Like too many articles about competing technologies, it’s framed as OR rather than AND. There’s room for both Avid and Final Cut Pro, of course, though for most educators not preparing students for a career in Hollywood post-production, Avid is too expensive and specialized. Most educators aren’t going to use Panavision cameras either.

The key in this article for educators is this: Final Cut is one of a number of tools that make professional-quality results available to non-professionals. Image-editing applications from Adobe , Macromedia, and Corel do the same with still images. For video, Final Cut has good competition from Adobe’s Premiere, Media 100’s Cinestream (formerly EditDV), Canopus, and others (not to mention iMovie). The bottom line: there are lots of good apps to use for different skill levels. The one constant among them all is the need to master visual storytelling. More on that tomorrow.——-