This is hugely exciting—video professionals using digital SLR cameras to shoot very high quality hi-def video on a surprisingly affordable budget. Not cheap, but still startling quality for the price. Please read this article and consider the possibilities. Make sure to watch the first linked video, and remember that was recorded with available light. Very very impressive.
Macworld’s Chris Breen offers valuable info in Converting AVCHD files for iMovie. The lack of direct support for AVCHD in out-of-the-box iMovie stinks though. Camcorder manufacturers often include Windows-only conversion utilities, and one commenter suggests installing them using VirtualBox, a free Windows operating system virtual machine. That’s a lot of hassle for an increasingly common video format that will rapidly become ubiquitous.
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!)
Another clear, screenshot-packed tutorial from the fine Ken Stone Final Cut Pro site.
Final Cut Pro offers some very powerful tools in its video scopes, not only to ensure that our finished projects are ‘Broadcast Safe’, but they are also critical when ‘Color Grading’ our footage to give it a desired ‘look’. To the uninitiated, the scopes can be very intimidating, even the terms ‘Broadcast Safe’ and ‘Color Grading’ can send some into hiding. But I promise you that this does need to be the case. Once you understand how the scopes work you will find that you will use them on a regular basis and to great advantage.
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
Studio Daily’s Lonzell Watson posts a very clear tutorial for editing a demo reel or music video timed to the beats of the music track. While it’s useful for those purposes, it’s also a terrific beginner’s intro to the Final Cut interface. Lonzell also introduces several essential keyboard shortcuts, as well as the Roll and Slip tools. Good stuff.
Lonzell Watson’s Edit to the Beat in Final Cut Pro, from Studio Daily.
There are so many types of HD compression it can be confusing, so thanks to Ken Stone for this listing of Sony’s formats wit links to drivers.
I didn’t even know Movie Maker was missing features. We still have XP on our lab PCs, so we don’t have the latest Movie Maker. I don’t configure the PCs in our labs—so glad someone else has that enviable job—but I teach workshops on Windows Movie Maker. 
The newer versions have lost functions I take for granted, most importantly capture from DV via Firewire. We’ve just gotten some Flip cameras for student use, but most of our cameras are still DV-tape-based, and we have DV decks on 11 workstations. My usual browse of Lifehacker brought this portable version of Windows Movie Maker to my attention yesterday:
Based on version 2.1 of Windows Movie Maker, Portable Windows Movie Maker not only lets you use the missing features on Vista and Windows 7 systems, but it includes the missing transitions and effects from Windows XP, as well as several additional features to boot. Portable and stand-alone, you can use it when you need removed features, like analog capture, without messing with your current version of Windows Movie Maker.
Via Lifehacker which was via Download Squad which was via instant fundas which was via dvrexster who gives credit to winmatrix.