Ken Stone offers another screenshot-rich tutorial opening up some intricacies of Final Cut Studio. This time it’s Compressor 3.5 Basics. I’m still using 3.0.5, and a cranky unreliable crash-prone beast it is, but I don’t want to upgrade with several projects still incomplete. I hope to upgrade by January though. (January! Only 38 days away! Yikes!)
I didn’t know about these nice tricks.
They’re from Jeff Carlson, author of Peachpit’s iMovie ‘09 and iDVD for Mac OS X Visual QuickStart Guide. Well done.
Digital Media Net’s Heath McKnight explains how and why to set up a Qmaster Cluster for use with Compressor. I assumed it only worked on networked computers, but you’ll need it if you have a multi-processor Mac—which is most Macs today. This is a good catch. Glad I found it.
Well, I am re-evaluting my opinion of the not-so-new “new” iMovie. I was so used to the older version, iMovie HD, which had been expanded but not fundamentally changed, since it was introduced in 1999 (Ten years? Yow).
Ken Stone, a source for so much great Final Cut information, posted the most complete one-page overview of iMovie I’ve ever seen. He loves it:
So why am I writing about iMovie 09 if I work in FCP? The answer is simple. At the demonstration I saw a number of features in iMovie 09, that I wished were in FCP and I wondered if there was a way to use iMovie 09 in conjunction with FCP, utilizing some of its features to supplement the FCP workflow, most importantly in the rough cut phase of editing, as ‘09’ has an amazing skimming/edit tool. iMovie also sports a new and modern tool for exact clip trimming, the Precision Editor, and it’s stunning. And, iMovie provides full Real Time playback, no rendering required, ever.
[...]
iMovie is very intuitive and easy to use, despite the fact that it has some very advanced features, features that it would be nice to see incorporated into Apple’s other editing application, Final Cut Pro. iMovie is a very modern editing application and it works in a much more visual way than editing applications that were first created over a decade ago. This graphical aspect of iMovie is more persuasive and powerful than one might first suspect. And don’t let the fact that iMovie ships in the iLife package and comes free on new Macs fool you, this is an amazingly modern and capable editing application.
This is not only a detailed examination of iMovie but a great and generous example of technical writing
I used to use iMovie much more often; now I do almost all my video editing in Final Cut Pro. Many in the college either use our small Mac lab for video and DVD creation or have their own Macs now. The new iLife, which incorporates iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, and more, has achieved hit a sweet spot in power and usability. It’s still not a piece of cake for those used to Windows, but it’s stable, flexible, and really easy. Read through this exhaustive review from uber-tech site Ars Technica for a solid learning experience whether you’re a Mac rookie or experienced user.
Ars Reviews iLife ‘09: making the cut with iMovie and iPhoto – Ars Technica.
There are alternatives to some of the paid apps they link to in this nice list of quick tips. Regrettably I don’t have time at the moment to link to them.Those aside, this is a good list for the Mac newbie, from TechRadar UK: 69 really useful OS X timesavers | News | TechRadar UK.
I’ve been on the Creative Cow email list for years now, and while The Creative Cow—Creative Communities of the World—deserves its popularity for providing support for the myriad video and multimedia development apps out there, it hasn’t always provided articles or tutorials that served my immediate needs. Today, though, I discovered their Final Cut Pro podcast and I’m bowled over at how the tutorials they’ve posted cover so many topics I’ve wanted help with: title animation in Motion, Photoshop-to-video, and more more more. I haven’t watched them all, so I can’t comment on their overall quality, but if they’re in the same league as their written tutorials then this is a valuable resource. Go for the Cow.
This introduction is “gentle” only in technical terms; Mark Pilgrim’s language can get quite salty, so if your school’s filters block four-letter words, you’ll need to read this at home. Nonetheless, the four part A Gentle Introduction to Video Encoding (part one, part two, part three, part four) is an excellent introduction to concepts, terminology, patent status, and limitations of the formats. It does not provide any instruction or tutorials, but those are widely available through the Google.
The knowledgable folks at TidBITS like the changes in the new iMovie ‘09”:http://db.tidbits.com/article/9984 announced yesterday at Macworld.
While looking for information about DV Expo (will they offer one on the east coast next spring or summer? Don’t know yet), I discovered EventDV, “The Event Videographer’s Resource.” On the Table of Contents page for the current (July 2008) issue, right at the top, is this tutorial: Cut Lines: Using Apple Keynote as a Motion Graphics Tool.
In this installment of Cut Lines, we’ll look at a growing trend among Final Cut users: utilizing Keynote as a quick-and-easy motion graphics tool. Everything you can do with graphics in Keynote can also be done in LiveType or Motion or directly in Final Cut Pro, and those larger apps can do much more than Keynote. The value in Keynote is that what it can do is really cool, really fast, and really easy. I’ve found I can do some graphical elements in Keynote faster and easier than I can in any of the Final Cut Studio (FCS) apps. Even with its limited abilities in this area, it’s still a valued part of my video graphics arsenal.
This is a really good idea! An easy video editor, really, if for making how-to tutorials to post on the web, too – this gets me thinkin’. Thanks to Ben Balser and EventDV for the tutorial.