Hey, teachers! Read How to Present While People are Twittering. See what some presenters – they’re teachers too – are doing. Use these tools to increase engagement, and your students can learn more. Technology in the hands of your students is a good thing. Go with it.
Larry Jordan is the real thing. (That’s him to the left.) His Monthly Final Cut Studio Newsletter always have lots of very useful tips for n00bs to veteran editors. I’ve linked to him several times before.
His latest has a head-slapping simple tip on quickly and easily finding keyboard shortcuts. 
In Final Cut, go to the Tools menu and choose Button List. The list comes up in a window with a disclosure triangle for each of the menus… so okay, you could go to the menus to find that. What’s excellent is the list is searchable. Type W to find all the shortcuts that use that letter; it’s a great way to make your editing go more quickly and learn the (daunting) FCP interface. Thanks, Larry!
Piero Fiorani is apparently a generous soul who gifts us with many plugins, generators, and filters for both Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express, Apple’s excellent video editing applications.
I needed a quick and easy way to create a digital countdown clock, and his Counter Display did the trick, being both flexible and easy to use.
Final Cut supports FXScript, a scripting language for adding or tweaking video filters and effects. Piero is but one of a number of scripters and programmers adding to the number of great resources for video editors using Final Cut. Thanks, Piero.
Thanks to Macintouch for pointing this morning to the update of Audacity, the terrific free audio editor and recorder. Podcasters, video producers, journalists, and independent musicians all over the world use it every day. It’s a great tool that keeps getting better. Put on your school’s computers for your students to play with. It’s free, useful, and fun.
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.
Alex Gollner’s site of Final Cut Pro tips and plugins, including mattes, transitions, and some scrolling text tools that look very useful. Free.
Macintouch this morning points to Thomas Tempelmann’s Find Any File application—
Contrary to Spotlight, it does not use a database but instead uses the file system driver’s fast search operations.This lets you search for file properties such as name, dates, size, etc., but not for file content (use Spotlight for that)!
Find Any File can find files that Spotlight doesn’t, e.g. those inside bundles and packages and in inside folders that are excluded from Spotlight search (i.e. system files).
And Find Any File is fast. Not always as fast as Spotlight, but faster than other, similar file search tools you might find for the Mac.
I need something like this. Good to find it.
Why did Textile italicize the two middle paragraphs in the block quote above?
Ten Tips For A Better Final Cut Pro Experience « digitalfilms
Advanced tips from an experienced editor. Found while looking for information about Media Manager as I’m thinking about moving an older complex project on a handful of external drives to the internals of the new edit system. Seems best to leave well enough alone and just finish this darn thing.
Andrew Balis answers his own question, at great length, and to the benefit of us all, in Am I Rendering And Viewing At The Best Quality With FCP?
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.