FCP Rescue: Here to save the day

FCP Rescue is an indispensable tool I’ve been using for years and I recommend for anyone using Final Cut Pro.  It makes the task of trashing and restoring your preferences easy and painless.  There are versions for FCP 4, 5 & 6 and yes it’s FREE!  Of course like any freeware, if you use it, consider a donation to developer Anders Holck.

Converting PAL to NTSC and NTSC to PAL in Final Cut Studio

Here’s a great tutorial from Macworld on PAL and NTSC conversions in Final Cut Studio using Compressor and Cinema Tools.  I’m going to try these methods tomorrow.  I saw pretty good results just letting Final Cut Pro do the conversion but it wasn’t perfect.  Will post my results once I’ve had the chance to try it.

Macworld | Send video abroad

Watch out for…..The Levelator!

Watch out Arnold…The Levelator is here.

Here’s a cool little app that will take your mixes, or other discreet tracks from Final Cut and levelate them.  Or in other words, it will even the dynamic range of your audio.  I think this is especially cool for those times when you can’t have Gerrard mix your work and you really want to even out some dialogue.  Export an aif file of the audio you want to affect, drop the file on to the Levelator app window and it automatically will create a new aif file with nice even audio levels. Download and try it for yourself!

The Levelator from The Conversations Network

Turn your letterboxed 4:3 files into 16:9

We all know how cool MPEG Streamclip is and how we couldn’t live without it.  But did you ever wonder what those settings for Zoom and X/Y were down at the bottom of the settings box?  Turns out if you know what you’re doing you can use those settings to crop the letterbox on a 4:3 file and output a 16:9 file.  Nice little trick if you ever need it.

Finishing projects 16×9 vs. 4×3

More and more of the work we do, especially pitches, rips etc. will be shown on LCD or Plasma screens. Since these screens are in a 16×9 format, it makes sense for us to consider this when starting a project.  So before starting an edit I would recommend trying to get the answer to the question, “What kind of screen will this be shown on?”.  This was recently the case for an Army project I worked on.

If you have a Hi-Def TV at home you’ll wince at the times you see all those 4×3 letterboxed commercials running on HD channels.  They look like a postage stamp lost in a mass of black screen.

That’s alot of black space.  So if your source material consists of lots of letterboxed 4×3 sources the result would be what you see above.  In a 16×9 sequence you could scale this video to fill the entire screen and not lose any picture.  

As far as regular fullscreen 4×3 content you may have only one choice and that is to keep it 4×3 and have pillar bars on the left and right.

If you were to scale this video to fill the screen you’d lose picture on the top and bottom.

Two other approaches to dealing with the black space with 4×3 footage is to put it the shot(s) on top of a upscaled and blured version of the same shot.  This is a common technique you see use with sports and news.

Or lastly, you can use any image or graphic to fill the black space.  You could even have something designed specifically for the project.  Here I just used a still of camouflage.

So don’t forget to ask the question where the finished video will play before you start the project.  It will save you headaches and also give you a better looking video in the end.

Ten Tips For A Better Final Cut Pro Experience

Ten Tips For A Better Final Cut Pro Experience

Here are some great tips.  I like the first one because it’s definitely something I didn’t know and will use from now on.  I’ve already re-mapped by keyboard.