UPDATED – Oct. 3

I was recently at a Final Cut Pro user group meeting where the screen you see here was discussed.  (You can find this for yourself by opening Final Cut Pro and going to Sequence > Settings > Video Processing tab.)

Since one of the other Final Cut experts and I had a difference of opinion on what this did, I thought I’d contact Apple to get the true scoop.

Anyway, one of the folks on the Final Cut team was kind enough to write back. However, what they sent me was wrong — they provided the right answer to the wrong question. So, to correct this, here’s the correct use of this setting.

This controls the quality of rendering of effects in the Motion tab inside Final Cut. According to the Final Cut manual, when set to Fastest, this option performs fast, low-quality motion transformations on your clips. This option improves rendering time, so it is useful when you are sketching out motion effects. When set to Normal this option uses standard scaling and transformation algorithms and yields medium-quality results compared to the other options. When set to Best, this option performs very high-quality motion transformations on your clips. Use this option for final rendering before output or export.

However, if you change the rotation setting in the Motion tab, all rendering is done at fastest quality, regardless of how this popup menu is set.

I’m sorry that the original information I received was incorrect.

Quite often I’m asked by readers if I have a MySpace page where they can visit us. So after discussing it with my team, we decided to expand our Internet presence and join the world of social networking! Kristi, our director of marketing, has taken on the challenge of keeping this current.

As a complement to our website, the MySpace page keeps you up-to-date with all of the exciting things we have going on, as well, it wll periodically have video features, offer special discounts to our subscribers, and allow you to further network with editors and filmmakers around the world.

Be sure to check us out, add us as your friend, and say hello!

www.myspace.com/larryjordanbiz

See you online!

As part of my weekly podcast – Digital Production BuZZ – I get to interview some truly interesting people. Sometimes, when I prerecord these interviews, I get more material than I can use for the show.

This was the case last night when I interviewed Rob Sheeley, President of Vaddio, a manufacturer and distributor of robotic cameras. When I was doing daily production, robotic cameras were large, clunky, VERY expensive, and not particularly useful.

However, when Rob told me that fully remote-controllable cameras could cost as little as $8,000, be put in places that a human operator could not work, and have a broadcast-quality image, I was very impressed.

Part of the interview that I needed to cut for time, though, was his description of the recent evolution of the industry, which I found very interesting. So, I thought I would post it here so you could listen to it as well.

Click here to play Rob Sheely’s soundbite. (TRT: 1:20 — 648 KB QuickTime file)

You can hear the entire interview, starting tonight, at www.digitalproductionbuzz.com.

At IBC (International Broadcasting Convention) in Amsterdam earlier this month, Paul Saccone from Apple Inc. presented a technology preview of upcoming features for Final Cut Studio.

Since I could not attend IBC and Apple rarely talks about future products, I contacted Paul and asked him to summarize what he presented so I could share it with you. Here is his reply.

We did a Technology Preview of an upcoming version of Final Cut Studio. I mentioned our intent to support AVCCAM from Panasonic (we’ll support AVCCAM devices – the 150 family – and the metadata extensions Panasonic has defined).

Then I demonstrated some improved support for RED. You will be able to take Redcode RAW files (4K) and edit them in FCP. FCP will do an on-the-fly decode to 2K for editing. When you pass them to Color, it’s still working on the same 4K source files (but in a 2K project, of course). We now support Redcode RAW controls to the Primary In room in Color. This is roughly the equivalent of having the RAW fine-tuning controls we provide in Aperture for dSLR users. You have an incredible amount of latitude to adjust things like gamma, temperature, exposure, etc. All in a way that does not affect the image quality. From Color, you can render out a 2K project (DPX files for film out, ProRes for mastering back to tape, etc.).

The beauty of it is that you don’t need to do any conversions on capture, and you now have RAW controls for image adjustments. Oh, and we preserve all of the Red metadata throughout the workflow too, of course.

The one thing Paul stopped short of announcing was WHEN these new features would be available. Still, its nice to have something specific to look forward to.

Several months ago, Adobe gave us special access to the unreleased software in Production Premium CS4. Now that Adobe has released it, we can share what we’ve learned with you.

I have retooled our workshop: “Integrating Adobe Products in a Final Cut Workflow” to showcase some of this new software. New products include: On Location CS4, specifically designed to improve image quality during production, new After Effects CS4 integration, the new Photoshop CS4 interface, Blu-ray Disc burning in Encore CS4 and the amazing new speech-to-text transcription ability in Soundbooth CS4.

This new release has significant benefits to video editors – especially in being able to find video based upon what is said in it.  I’m looking forward to showing you how all this works.

Click here to register for a seminar in a city near you!

The folks at NVidia invited the guys from MythBusters (Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage) to explain the differences between a CPU and a GPU.

NVidia also gave them an unlimited budget.

If you’ve been wondering what the difference is.. and want to see what true creativity can do when not restrained by such mundane things as common sense or budgets, check out this video.

While someone needs to teach NVidia how to compress video for the web — I mean 154 MB for a nine minute SD video would get any competent compressionist fired, the video is well worth watching if you have the time to download it.

Click here to view it.

IBC (the International Broadcasting Convention) in Amsterdam has been the source of a variety of exciting announcements that I want to bring to your attention. (Thanks to Ben King for doing the legwork and filing this report.)

First, Adobe continued it’s careful rollout of CS4 news by showcasing a speech to text conversion facility inside Soundbooth that literally transcribes the footage. Adobe’s rollout of the entire CS4 line next Tuesday looks increasingly exciting. (By the way, there are rumors going around the web that the CS4 announcements are pretty tame. I think, from a video point of view, that will not be the case. We shall see.)

Second, Apple announced native support for RED files in an upcoming version of Final Cut Pro. (Currently, RED files are transcoded into ProRes for editing.)  The report we have from IBC was that Apple said this update would be out in “the next couple of months.”

Third, JVC and Sony are partnering to jointly support XDCAM EX and SxS.  This is the first time someone other than Sony supported these formats. Could this be the beginning of both a video recording and storage format that producers could count on working the same between different camera vendors?  We’ve taken this for granted for years in standard-definition, only to discover that almost no HD formats – especially HDV – play nicely together.

Fourth, Ikonoscop launches the smallest HD camera which records in RAW images at full HD resolution.

Fifth, Digital Heaven announces Loader, a new application to make loading elements into Final Cut Pro easier.

Matrox is now, finally, shipping the MXO2 – an all-in-one, PCIe-connected box for capturing, monitoring, and outputting SD and HD signals.

CalDigit is shipping a new, high-performance RAID.

And a French company, called “Soft Lights,” is demoing studio lights that can be controlled from your computer. No more climbing ladders.

We’ll have a complete report from Ben King, Michael Horton, and Dan Berube in this week’s Digital Production BuZZ, and I’ll have an audio file of it posted to my website later in the week.  

Lots of fascinating things to come – life continues to be exciting!

Jesse sent me a note asking:

I am writing to see if anyone would be able to direct me to a tutorial online about creating opening sequences (like 20/20 style news openings) in Final Cut Pro or Motion (or another program, but preferably those two). The actual style is essentially logos flying around with animated visual effects in the background.

So I thought I’d share this with everyone. An outstanding resource for Motion tutorials is Mark Spencer’s www.applemotion.net. I’ve been a fan of Mark’s work for a long while and now you know about it, too.

Take a look if you haven’t visited recently.

Today, SmartSound released Sonicfire Pro 5 – a free upgrade to their already extremely useful music software.

I’ve been using SmartSound products since about 1997 and have always enjoyed the flexibility they gave me in creating interesting and compelling music of any arbitrary length.

However, I fell off the wagon a while back with the release of version 4, with its weirdly named “mood-mapping” feature.  I didn’t understand it and didn’t see a reason to upgrade.

A few months ago, Brian Dickman, SmartSound’s VP of Sales and Marketing, met with me to discuss ways we could work together and I shared with him some of my reservations about the software. (SmartSound’s royalty-free music library has always been excellent, with a wide variety of tunes spanning almost 200 albums – and growing by 3-4 CDs a month.)

Over the months our conversations continued until, about three weeks ago, Brian asked me to record new on-line tutorials for the up-coming release of version 5 of their software. This gave me a great opportunity to play with the software and discover some of its subtler features. Over the last two weeks, I’ve recorded ten different tutorials on the software, which runs the same on both Mac and Windows systems.

My goodness!  If you haven’t looked at SmartSound recently, you need to check out Sonicfire Pro 5. It does some amazing things with music amazingly well. Just as Apple’s Soundtrack Pro broke new ground in allowing us to change the tempo of a loop without changing its pitch, and vice-versa, SmartSound has taken music modification to entirely new heights.

They simplified the initial interface to allow you to create music quickly and easily, without resorting to a timeline. You can create exciting music – with a beginning, middle and an end – at any arbitrary length. You can set keyframes and change instrumentation in the middle of a song. You can have the software automatically determine the best tempo to match your video. And, in a feature that left my jaw on the floor, you can grab a timing keyframe and change the entire structure of the music to match your video by simply dragging a keyframe.

With hundreds of music titles to choose from, software that allows you to modify music in an unlimited number of variations, and an ease of use that makes working with music fun, the latest version of SmartSound Sonicfire Pro 5 is stunning. Best of all, the upgrade is free.

We began our PowerUP with Final Cut Studio seminars this last week — in fact, I’m writing this from the Denver International Airport as I’m traveling to Dallas and Washington DC this week to continue our tour.

In spite of the fact it takes me away from home for a fair chunk of time, I really like teaching these seminars. We spend about six months planning them, figuring out what cities to go to, what to cover, and assembling all the different elements that go into each of our events.

As I create the content we cover in each session, I work hard to provide up-to-date material that is hard to find anywhere else. Specific information you can put to work immediately.  Apple has a great series of classroom-based courses that cover Final Cut Studio and a solid team of instructors to teach it. My seminars, though, are something different.  We focus on areas where our industry is changing almost hourly — HD, for example — or illustrating how to use software from Apple and Adobe, where no single vendor’s courseware adequately covers the workflow. My goal is to pick-up where books and magazines leave off – with information that is more timely, more detailed, and presented in an engaging, entertaining way.

In teaching these sessions, what’s important to me is answering your questions, showing how things work, and explaining how to avoid problems.  I also enjoy meeting with everyone that attends and discovering all the different ways that we use video to tell stories.

If you can spare the time, I invite you to attend a seminar in your area. Its an opportunity to learn new techniques, discover problems to avoid, and learn ways to grow your business. Even more important, its a chance to spend time with fellow editors, asking questions, trading stories, and learning together.

Click here to learn more about my seminars. I’d love to see you there!