9:15 p.m. No-o-o, I didn’t win, but a former student from my GSU teaching days did win it. He works at a local production and post house. Congratulations, Richard.
9:10 p.m. Eric is showing the Color Key tutorial from the Secrets of FCP CD. Nice lesson, good instructional design, useful tools for other effects effectively demonstrated. The crowd seems to like it. He’s also handing out raffle tickets for some kind of drawing – ooh, maybe I’ll win a prize!
9: 05 p.m. Cheap n Easy film look: nest your entire sequence, untarget the audio tracks, and layer the nest on top of itself. Add a 10 pixel gaussian blur to the bottom layer by control clicking on the bottom nest layer and opening it in the viewer, then on the top layer change the composite to Screen, tehn add a grain noise layer, change its composite to Soft Light and lower the opacity a good bit in the time line. Nest these layers, open in the viewer, and tweak the brightness and contrast in the viewer Filter tab to bring down the brightness that the other effects have added. Then you can put a wide-screen mask on it.
8:54 p.m. Now he’s demoing the Mondo Titles effect – very nice – from the dvcreators.net Secrets of Final Cup Pro 2 CD. Worth the price of (I think) $79.
8:50 p.m. Eric is rapidly going through an extreme sports action video editing demo, including how to Nest a multi-layer Photoshop file as an animated title sequence; the fit to fill command; some basic compositing of the animation over the action; the Lower Third Text Generator, with a nice Gradient background behind it, with a deft use of the Crop tool to size the gradient itself; and another Gradient, with a Luma Composite mode, to change the transparency of the gradient. Nice nice nice. I’ll try to write through the steps tomorrow and post them.
8:39 p.m. Eric’s demo begins.
8:37 p.m. Question on Importing MP3 files: a problem for some folks. Why convert to AIFF in QuickTime before importing into FCP? So you don’t have to mix down your audio after every change in the timeline.
[Can I just say here how fun it is to post in real time as these editors discuss real-time video editing? Now, back to our meeting]
8:29 p.m. If this is the only thing any of us get from tonight, do this for your FCP system: turn off every extraneous extension on your system to preserve resources for FCP – even the system clock!. Thanks Walter.
8:25 p.m. Discussion of the Matrox RT-Mac card, which does some of what the Pinnacle does, but is not suitable for uncompressed or SDI or other higher-data rate formats. That said, it’s nice for editors who only work in MiniDV or other “small” formats. I’ll need more specifics now to make sure I got that right, so caveat lector on this entry.
8:20 p.m. Now a quick demo of exporting ref movies from FCP to Cleaner or another compression app. The nub of it: do not check the “Make Movie Self-Contained” in the export dialogue box. Uncheck it. What you get is a Ref Movie file which is a pointer to your captured clips and appropriate render files which the compression app works with to make the final compressed movie file. Cool (I knew about this – I should have written it up before! Sorry!)
8:10 p.m. Check out trapcode.com for a good lighting effects plugin called Shine for only $79.
8:05 p.m.It’s the Pinnacle Cinewave with new RT drivers—in its final round of beta testing, he’s one of 20 beta testers worldwide— which runs beautifully with uncompressed video, SDI, HD, other formats and a confusing array of frame rates. Very happy, he says, and we’re the first in the Southeast to learn of it. Cool.
7:50 p.m. He-e-e-e-re’s Walter of D’arte Media (sp?) to announce Pinnacle RT solutions, about to emerge from beta to release. I’ll make sure to get the specifics asap.
7:50 p.m. The new User’s Group URL: www.d-film.com.
7:45 p.m. The inevitable FCP-Avid comparison.
7:42 p.m. Promised a demo of a brand-new—released today—real-time hardware product. We’ll see.
7:40 p.m. I just volunteered to do a TypeStyler demo at a future meeting.
7:25 p.m. I’m blogging live from the brand new Atlanta Final Cut Pro Users Group meeting. So far, just logistics and tentative discussions about future meetings and formats. Eric Schultheis of dvcreators.net will gived a presentation shortly.
The DV Expo next month should be a great conference for learning about every aspect of digital video—from desktop basics to sophisticated distribution strategies. The conference-at-a-glance shows many excellent workshops and keynotes. The emphasis is on business, but any savvy educator has much to learn. If you’re going, send me a brief report.
2-pop has a fine introduction to editing with Final Cut Pro called Slice and Dice. ——-