Heh. But today a friend of mine called and asked:

What do I buy if I want the most crazy wipes out there for Final Cut Pro?

Fair enough. He makes a children’s program, so he DOES need them. It’s part of the deal to make wacky transitions every 6 seconds.

So I made a list of some interesting things:

The Final Cut Pro wipes list

GeniusDV has a tutorial called “Utilizing Gradient Wipes in Final Cut Pro”. It shows how to use a matte image as source for crazy wipes in FCP.

CHV Electronics has a collection of plugins for FCP. One of them is called “The AlphaWipe-collection V1.0″. I have never tried it, but it looks like you get a lot for your $.

CGM also has lots of FCP plugins, and many of them have crazy transitions. Have a look at the demo movies (links are on the top of the page).

Mattias in Sweden makes a great bundle of free FCP plugins. You can download them at mattias.nu. They are not wipes, but they are free and should go into any FCP setup. Donate him some Paypal $ if you use them!

Digital Heaven in UK has some great quality FCP plugins. I use the DH_Subtitle – a subtitle plugin myself. And when it comes to transitions they have the nice DH_WhipPan. The plugins are cheap, and they are great quality.

And finally: Toolfarm has a list of FCP plugins that does transitions.

Do you have any suggestions? Things that actually work?

I think the new version of Motion will be Motion on steroids. Apple will put lots of the stuff Shake can do inside Motion, and now also include the great color tools from Final Touch. I’m not even sure they will continue FinalTouch as separate product. It depends whether they manage to get a work flow for colorists inside Motion.

Yesterday Apple showed their biggest upgrade of Final Cut Pro ever; the Final Cut Studio 2. With new versions of abot everything (except Livetype).

Let me start off with the single most important thing to me as a video editor: Open Format Timeline. With this new feature in FCP, I can drop all my most used video formats in the same timeline… (drum roll) with no rendering!. I’m going to save hours and hours just with this feature. All these formats are supported by this feature:

FinalTouch = Color

Apple bought FinalTouch last autumn, and now they are throwing it into Final Cut Studio 2 – for free! Yes, it’s part of the package. Either you pay $1299 for the a new package, or $499 to upgrade from Final Cut Studio, or $699 from any previous version of FCP – including version 1 from 1999. That’s a very good deal. Applause for Apple, who have sold more then 800,000 copies of Final Cut Pro so far, and will sell tons more with this upgrade.

Have a look at the new features of FinalTouch, now called Color.

I’ll have a full rundown of all important new features of the new Final Cut Studio 2 package soon.

Special invited guests saw the NBA All-star game in 3D HD on February 18th, and now attendees to the NAB exhibition in Las Vegas, get to see the game and hear about the advanced technology behind it.

“Thomp”, at NowPublic saw the All-star game. And is convinced this is the new thing:

…made me feel like I paid 6,000 dollars to sit among the stars on the floor of the hardwood court. The up close FUSION 3D HD action made me forget I was miles away in a theater wearing 3D glasses and the sound was to as if I sitting at courtside. I felt I was so close that when Jay-Z bent over to whisper to Beyonce, I wanted to tap his shoulder and say she with me! Action seemed so close that when a loose ball flew in to the crowd, several people in the theatre (including me) put our hands out to catch it!

He also has some thoughts on the future of the system:

In summary I can see this technology being a big hit in the future especially to the common folk like me who can not pay the large sums of money to partake in these events live. PACE should not limit itself to major sports events like the Super Bowl or the NBA. This technology can be used to see high priced concerts or highly publicized Las Vegas shows. This can be another viable revenue stream for artist and promoters. Instead of booking a plane and hotel ticket, you can jump in your car, drive to your local IMAX Theater and save a couple of thousand dollars.

And – saving the planet while having a great time, I might add.

How is it done?

The technology behind this is exciting. James Cameron is shooting both his forthcoming movies with the same 3D cameras. The $200 million “Avatar” (2008) and the movie adaption of the manga series “Battle Angel Alita”, called “Battle Angel” (2009), are both shot in 3D HD. Cameron and Vince Pace are the founders of Pace 3D technologies that makes the special versions of the camera. Vince Pace is also director of photography, second unit on both movies.

The cameras are customized versions of the US$115,000 Sony HDC-950, in a specially designed rig. The camera sensors are placed 70mm apart to capture left-eye and right-eye imagery seperately. Pace is also developing the camera system to include the newer Sony HDC-1500 HD cameras.

NBA used six Sony cameras to capture the All-star game:

These camera feeds were distributed via fiber to a portable HD fly-pack system (provided by Bexel) in the arena that included a Sony MVS 8000A switcher and an EVS XT[2] server.

The Sony switcher includes a feature that allowed the director to aggregate multiple camera feeds and lock them together. The director then switched the multicamera production as he would a typical game broadcast; but, to get the full 3-D effect, he often held on shots longer than usual. Instant replays and graphics were also presented in 3-D, using the EVS server.

The output of the switcher (two uncompressed HD signals at about 3Gb/s) was sent to the Mandalay Bay ballrooms via fiber cabling. The larger ballroom was set up in a stadium-seating configuration, on risers to give the full effect. The smaller space was standing room only. Images were displayed with two stacked Sony SXRD 4K projectors in each room on 47ft and 30ft screens. The projectors were fitted with a special polarizing filter supplied by 3-D specialists Real D. Audience members wore special polarizing glasses to get the full 3-D effect.

Sports and concerts

Both Marilyn Manson and Gwen Stefani has used this new technology for music videos, and Universal Music Group’s Interscope Record has signed a deal with Pace to use the technology for concerts. Expect to see Dr. Dre, Eminem, U2, Gwen Stefani, 50 Cent, Sheryl Crow and Pussycat Dolls doing their things in 3D at your local cinema soon.

That is, if your local movie theatre can show 3D. Only 700 of 37 000 US movie theatres have 3D projection screens (I have not been able to numbers for the rest of the world). But Sony do of course want to change that:

“We are ready to roll into any theater with the two-projector system.”

…said John Kaloukian, director of Sony Electronics’ professional display group to Reuters (note: Some Reuters articles only stay up for three weeks so this link may go dead after some time).

Most of 700 movie screens with 3D projection, are delivered by Real D, which even has a blog with interesting articles like this one about “Composing for Stereo: The Filmmaker’s Point of View”:

The other concern I call the strength of the stereoscopic image. That is determined by two interrelated factors. One of them is completely new to the stereoscopic cinema, and has no direct counterpart in the planar cinema – and that is the distance between the spacing of the cameras or the camera lenses. Whether we’re shooting live action, or we’re in a CGI virtual space, the distance between the camera’s lenses is a critical factor. We’re going to call whatever we’re shooting with a stereo camera. A stereo camera, unlike a conventional camera, captures two perspective viewpoints. So we’re not going to refer to stereoscopic cameras. We’re going to call it a stereoscopic camera, and we’re going to say it has two lenses – a left lens and a right lens.

The distance or the spacing between the two lenses is called the interaxial spacing – that is, the distance between the lens axes. If you think about it, if the lenses are superimposed – in other words, if the axes had zero spacing – you’re shooting a planar movie. The farther apart the lenses go, the deeper the image looks. The use of this control is closely related to the focal length you use. Wide angle lenses tend to stress perspective, because objects that are closer to the lens appear to be proportionately larger, and the background appears to be smaller. The stereoscopic depth sense, which is technically known as stereopsis, is weighted or scaled by extra-stereoscopic cues – that is, by non-stereoscopic or monocular cues. One of the strongest of these is perspective – and perspective is often determined by the choice of focal length. So it turns out that with wide angle lenses you can use a reduced interaxial, and for telephoto lenses you can use a larger interaxial.

New tools = New ways of thinking! This also may be technology that take people back to the cinemas. If you have a 50″ plasma/LCD screen at home, a blu-ray or HD-DVD player, a great chair and your kitchen nearby – why go to a movie theatre? With 3D HD you have a new reason, as I don’t think there will be a home version of Sony SXRD 4K projectors anytime soon. Not to mention the players delivering the actual movies.

Editing?

I’m curious, how do you edit this? HD with two seperate cameras, one for each eye? What are your options for post processing? Do you need special software or do you edit in “normal” tools like FCP or Avid systems? Feel free to comment below if you know!

Update

Camcorderinfo.com made a video from the Sony/NBA event at NAB, as seen below (you may have to click through to brilliantdays.com/3d-hd too see the video if you read this in a newsreader).

The first one is Xsan tuner, that comes with Xsan:

Speed is calculated to 186 MB/second.

We use DeckLink Extreme HD cards in the Macs (10 bits uncompressed SDI). Blackmagic also has their own test tool for disk speeds, the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test:

Now, the same disks show 136 MB/second.

Which one to trust? BlackMagic make dead solid products, but on this one I hope their tools show the wrong results…

If you need to test your drives for speed, whether you use BlackMagic cards or not, download the DeckLink drivers for Mac OS X or Windows XP, and you’ll get the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test application when you install it. If you don’t need the actual drivers, just “hide away” the app, and uninstall the drivers again.

Xsan tuner can be downloaded from Apple.com.

Why a difference?

Do you have any idea why the two apps show different speeds? 136 MB/second up to 186 MB/second is almost two more streams of uncompressed video in realtime. Less rendering, more done.

Aperture solves that, and so far I’m very happy about the 1.5 version.

And just the other day I was putting “figure out how to export lots of pictures from Aperture to FCP quick and easy” in my todo-list. Then comes “Aperture to Final Cut Pro” from Connected Flow. Check. Great work, Fraser! There’s a dead-easy manual online and the price is nice (read: Free).

Also check out the excellent Flickrexport for iPhoto and Aperture.

Final Print is a standalone application which prints a list of markers from a Final Cut Pro sequence. This provides a very useful workflow enhancement when handing off a project to someone else for further work.

Excellent little application from Digital Heaven. I also recommend their Final cut Pro plugins, of which I own DH_SubTitle. It does what it says: Make subtitles. (I’m so lucky that I live in an European country where we DO NOT DUB foreign movies, but subtitle them. Going to movies in other European countries (or watching other European channels) is a total nightmare. Dubbing ruins movies…)

Now, back to subject. Digital Heaven is run by talented Martin Baker, who also has made the VideoSpace widget, a widget all video editors should have on their Dashboard.

I’m finishing a major upgrade (way, way too long in coming) and starting to look for new ways to make the filters bigger, faster and better.

He also want’s you to help with the new filters, so if you have some answers on these questions…

• Which filters do you use most?
• What formats are you working in? (SD, HD, HDV, DVCPRO, Red, etc)
• How did you first learn about Joe’s Filters?
• What other plugins do you use?
• What kinds of new tools would you like to see? (existing things done better, or things that haven’t been done yet)

His e-mail is in the sidebar, bottom right at joesfilters.com.

I use lots of Joe’s Filters in Final Cut Pro, on almost all projects. I can highly recommend them. They are great value for your money, and you can try them out before buying.

For $95 you get…

Joe’s Levels
Joe’s Sampled Color Levels
Joe’s Saturation & Colorize
Joe’s Simple Saturation
Joe’s Threshold & Posterize
Joe’s Bevel & Emboss
Joe’s Drop Shadow
Joe’s Inner Shadow
Joe’s Channel Blur
Joe’s Diffuser
Joe’s Motion Blur
Joe’s Generators
Joe’s Ellipse
Joe’s Shapes
Joe’s Color Noise
Joe’s Levels Noise
Joe’s Noise Reducer
Joe’s Saturation Noise
Joe’s Soft Stuff
Joe’s Soft Ellipse
Joe’s Soft Gradients
Joe’s Soft Shapes
Joe’s Soft Spot
Joe’s Color Glow
Joe’s Flexi-Smear
Joe’s Gradients
Joe’s Maximizer
Joe’s Pixelizer
Joe’s Frame Rate Adjuster
Joe’s Time Bender
Joe’s Broadcast Legalizer
Joe’s De-Interlacer
Joe’s Field Blender
Joe’s Field Fixer
Joe’s Multi-Frame Blender
Joe’s Y/C Corrector

The Power Of Video Editing Video – video powered by Metacafe

Related on brilliantdays: How to make special effects in movies

With Xsan cataloging using Proximity artbox and project level integration between artbox and Final Cut Pro, users are able to acheive streamlined collaborative workflow.

Artbox has partnered with all the big names in the video production industry: Apple, ENPS, Avid, Chyron, Discreet, Grass Valley, Omneon, Quantel and Sony.

This is a perfect match for Apple, and I’m sure they’ll develop Artbox into an ever better product. Apple don’t even need to change the name – “Apple Artbox” sounds just as good as the other names in their pro video portfolio.

(Screenshot: Artbox asset management)

Have a look at the screen shots or the tutorial video.

I guess you could send large files to a client with some of the many services that lets you do that: Upload huge files. But Xprove focuses on viewing and commenting on clips. Clips can have different states; “active”, “approved”, “archived”, “offline”. This is typically what a client might see at her end:

It’s a free 30-day test period. After that prices are from $15 to $40 a month for the different plans, depending on bandwidth and storage. If you’re not sure which plan covers your needs, try the nifty calculator to find out.

If you’re using Xprove and have any comments, I’d love to hear what you think!

Now, let’s add things up here:

• Apple has said that Shake is not to be updated.
• Apple has bought Silicon Color and the Final Touch color correction app
• Motion never became the killer app Apple wanted it to be

Motion is way cool, but I’m not sure that most Final Cut Users have discovered it yet. As I written before; I think the new version of Motion will be Motion on steroids. Apple will put lots of the stuff Shake can do inside Motion, and now also include the great color tools from Final Touch. I’m not even sure they will continue FinalTouch as separate product. It depends whether they manage to get a work flow for colorists inside Motion.

So getting better color correction in Final Cut Pro and Motion is reason number one for buying Silicon Color. Number two isn’t that obvious but I’m sure it’s a just as big reason for Apple: Aperture. Put the color tools of FinalTouch inside Aperture, add the realtime engines of Motion and finally the Core Image and (the new) Core Animation.html of OS X 10.5. What do you get? A app for processing photos that can compete with Photoshop. And lots more.

Steve Jobs loves photos. I don’t know whether he’s a photographer himself, but search for “Steve Jobs keynotes” on Google Video or YouTube, and watch when he demonstrates iPhoto. Always great photos, always quality. I’m sure Aperture – already an amazing application – will take giant steps forward with the color tools from FinalTouch added in the 2.0 version.

Kate Winslet about to get her left foot removed.

Notice the cool sound effects…

One picture every third day for 20 years is about 2 000 pictures. 66 seconds in NTSC, about 80 in PAL. I’m looking forward to see the first one…

Matt explains at Digg how he did it:

I plugged the digital camera (power) in to the wall socket, placed the camera on some books on the dresser, and then used to some other books (always the same ones) to square the bottom books / camera up with the dresser so that it was always in the same position…it was actually a two person job. Because you are right, we ended up bumping it (no matter how careful we were) and needing to take the camera down because sometimes we’d know folks would be coming over and might see the camera set up (we hadn’t told folks at this point) and either figure out Carlin was pregnant.

We basically dedicated the camera to sit there for this project. I used my old SLR to take normal photos and later on the digital video camera we bought could also take decent stills.

Eirik did something similiar some time ago, just with the view outside his window.

Update A Digg user tells that this has been done before – in the 1998 short movie “7 seconds to Sophie” watch on Atom films), and even used in the beginning of the movie Amélie. Still: This is Matt’s wife and HIS daughter growing in there. What a lovely memory to keep.

…trash, backup and refresh your Final Cut Pro preferences with the click of a button. Can be used with all Mac OS X compatible versions of Final Cut Pro (version 3.x thru 5.1).

(via The TV Weasel)

28 chapters is – or rather will be – a movie with 28 parts (“chapters”) that will be made by 28 different people or groups from around the world. The story is developed along the way, but will progress more or less in the same way as a regular short movie will, even though the actors and setting will change every 30-45 second. That is: Even though the actors and setting change every chapter, the story of the movie continues like nothing had changed.

28 chapters is one continious movie with 28 actors playing the same main caracter in 28 different locations around the world made by 28 different moviemakers.

As of today, six chapters are finished. So you can still have your 45 seconds of fame.

Question: What is the difference between Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Avid’s Media Composer?

Answer: None.

Not at least when it comes to creating first-class, professional results in a timely manner. They both get the job done on-budget and on-time.

But when it comes to how we approach our projects or how we interact with the software itself, there are some meaningful differences. I generally classify these differences into two types: Big picture and Smaller stuff.

But I would think it could be just as useful if you take pictures with normal cameras too (still and video), and need stabilization.

And if it doesn’t help, build your own Steadicam for $14.

If you need to do calculations from timecode to lenghts on film…

…there is the new TC Studio from Spherico. It’s very under testing, so use at own risk. And don’t be surprised if the download link dies.

Update: Another timecode calculator .

(Siemens press picture).

“The original concept of the 50 meter (in diameter) target was to build it out of concrete. However, due to our location [on a delta near Tarragon, Spain] being environmentally protected, it was impossible to have this built. We decided to use two different colors of gravel instead.” Says Directors Alex and Martin of Partizan.

Technorati tags: Music

HDV, IMX and Multicam
The most important new feature in Final Cut Pro 5 is of course the support for HDV and IMX 50 Mbps. I’m sure quite a few will appreciate the new multicam editing – in realtime. The really smart thing about the Apple way to do multicam, is that you can link together up to 128 clips to one multicam clip! Should be enough for most purposes (I’ve heard that the finals in the FIFA World Cup Finals in France used 32 cameras). With so many clips, you could use it for other things than multicam. I could link together different versions of things I’ve made.

It’s now possible to capture up to 24 channels of audio simultaneous and support for MCP (Mackie Control Protocol).

RT Extreme
FCP 5 has something Apple calls “Dynamic RT Extreme”, which means that FCP switches quality on the output to be able to play RT what you throw at it. So if you play simple effects, teh output will be in full quality. When adding effects and tracks, FCP dynamically switches to lower quality, then back to highest quality when the water is smoother again. Clever!

I will eat this post if Final Cut Pro is the “latest version announced” the day after NAB, 22nd of April.

Here’s what I would like to see in FCP 5.0:

Move before import
I would like to see a checkbox somewhere when I’m importing something. When this is checked, files are moved to the current Capture scratch folder before importing. I’ve blogged about this before.

One click CD import
In the File menu I would like to see: Import drom audio CD. Then a iTunes-ish window pops up, where I check which tunes to import. Or listen to them. When clicking import, all files go to your projects folder in Capture scratch, inside a folder marked by CD name, artist etc (just like iTunes does).

One click Backup project
Put “Backup project” in a menu somewhere. Pick a sequence or several, and choose “Backup project”. It saves all files that can’t be batched. That is imported soundfiles from CDs, graphic files etc. But not things that came from tapes, those can be batched (batch digitize). FCP then collects all the files, reports if any are missing, and asks for a destination. And tell you to insert an empty DVD if you want to backup to DVD. The folder (or DVD) it then creates is called “(name of project) backup 040205″ by default but yoy can change it. It also puts a PDF-file with the names of the tapes needed to batch the sequence. That way, you can give the DVD to an assistant without FCP on his Mac, and he/she still will be able to find the tapes and put them at your desk.

iTunes and iPhoto tabs in Browser
I would like an iTunes tab in the Final Cut Pro browser. Just like we have “Effects”. When clicking this tab I see all my iTunes tracks, and also my playlists. This would be a HUGE timesaver, as we have all our audio effects in iTunes. With a iTunes Tab I could get to all the sound effects without using other software.

Same goes with iPhoto, even though it’s much more seldom I need photos in FCP.

Multiuser iTunes enviroment
This is not a Final Cut Pro wish, but adresses an important issue for FCP users working at bigger post houses or schhols where several stattions are connected through a fast network or a SAN. Let’s say you have 200 sound effects CDs that you want 10 FCP Macs to share. You insert every single one into iTunes on one Mac and import every track (in 48 KHz of course). Thanks to CDDB you don’t have to type all the names!

When all the sound effects are imported, and stored in a single folder on the SAN or network, go to every FCP Mac and import the whole folder again. Remember to check off that option that moves songs you import. The whole point is that the sounds should stay at the server/SAN.

OK, so now we have 10 FCP Macs with access to all our sound effects. The licence for this is of course ok. No stealing here.

Then, next week, you get 15 more CDs. You import them on the first Mac, then what? Then you have to do the same import again for all 10 Macs. No good.

iTunes is a great program for music and sound effects. Apple should make a version that lets an administrator update the library on several Macs from one central location. Not to steal or copy music illegally, but to make things easier for the companies that uses their other software, like Logic and Final Cut Pro.

It could be connected in some way to Apple Remote Desktop 2, or maybe XSAN. And only work on the same subnet. This would prevent it from being misused by people who just want to copy music between Macs.

What are your top wishes?

So the next time I want to import a file from a server somewhere, i don’t have to…

1. Switch to Finder
2. Locate the file on the server
3. Locate my projects Capture scratch folder in another window
4. Copy the file from the server to Capture scratch
5. Switch to Final Cut
6. Choose import file
7. Locate file and press OK

The checkbox would read “Move to Capture scratch before importing”. With it checked, Final Cut would move the file you are about to import, from wherever it is located, to the current Capture scratch folder of your project.

See also Final Cut Pro – the Larry way.

I will post about my top wishes for FCP 5 later.

Larry has published a book on FCP too; Final Cut Pro HD Hands-on Training (Hands on Training (H.O.T)). I highly recommend it and will post a review about it soon!