I’ve had the pleasure, over the last few months, of working with Smartsound to develop a new plug-in for Final Cut Pro that greatly simplifies the process of adding music to your Final Cut projects. But they wouldn’t let me talk about it until they announced it.

Today they announced it.

So, here’s what it does:

In Final Cut, set an In and an Out – or you can use Soundtrack markers – you then send your file to Smartsound. It reads those markers and automatically determines the duration between the markers. You select the music you want from their library and Smartsound conforms it to the duration you specified. Save the music and send it back to Final Cut where it is automatically placed exactly where you marked it on your timeline.

I’ve been using SmartSound since 1997 and have always enjoyed how it creates custom-length music.

Recently, I discovered their multi-track music, which gives me the ability to change the actual instrument mix of each piece of music I create.

And, now, with this new plug-in, adding music to any of my Final Cut projects becomes really, really fast.

I expect this to be released shortly, in the meantime, you can learn more about Smartsound here.

I’ve been a fan of Tom Meegan’s work for a long time — especially when he wrote about it for Edit Well. He principally works at the high-end of broadcast television.

Anyway, after my review of Telestream’s Pipeline in the current edition of my monthly Final Cut newsletter, Tom sent me the following, which I thought you might also be interested in.

NOTE: EVS is a high-end, real-time, random-access video playback system that is principally used in live sports events.

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Just read your review of the Pipeline with great interest. Excellent!

Here is a heads up about what EVS is up to with FCP integration. They have the FCP playback while recording feature dialed in pretty well using ProRes for HD and IMX 50 for SD. We did this over a gigabit network using a Dell managed switch, and some expertise and advise from Small Tree Communications. We had five FCP stations (three mac pros and two laptops) on the network with the EVS all working on ProRes files and it worked very well.

I provided the FCP Mac Pro systems and Martijn Swart with EVS provided the expertise to get the EVS (DOS and Windows based) playing nicely with our Apple gear. Basically we had one share point that everyone joined as SMB rather than AFP, and we were good to go. One laptop was owned by one of our editors who used it to do file based captures while he continued to edit on the Mac Pro, and the other laptop was owned by our Director, who would help out with editing tasks as well as produced daily internet features for FIBT.com.

We used the streaming feature (ability to edit in FCP while recording) to turn around up to seven one hour packaged shows for NBC/Universal while producing almost ten hours of live multi-camera content each weekend.

The editor would string the shows out based on a format during the live broadcast, so when the producer came into edit after the international feed went off the air, the bulk of the show was done. All that was left was to add finishing touches. Once we started live shows, one of the Mac Pros was dedicated to turning these shows around and spitting them out to Digital Beta so we could uplink the shows, and have a hard copy back-up.

I’m pretty sure this is working on the Avid side as well. I was at XGames working FCP, but we were a bit Balkanized compared to the Avid station where most of the craft editing was happening. FCP stations were being used to stream line last minute edits in the live trucks.

Both the FCP integration with EVS and the fact that we had five FCP station working on ProRes at once over gigabit ethernet were were pretty cool. I know you have a lot of things to cover at NAB, but a visit to Small Tree Communications to talk to them about how they are making this work over gigabit ethernet, and EVS to talk about how they are making things so easy with FCP, might be worth your while.

I’m not under any kind of contract with either of these companies, I’m just a happy customer of Small Tree, and a very happy operator of EVS products since 1998.

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Brad Hagen sent me the following announcement:

This Wednesday, MCAI presents four experts to address the critical needs of high-end HD Production: Do you really need a DITech? How important is on-set color correction? What are the hidden issues of tapeless workflow? Do I need the expense of a video village? And is guerilla HD possible? Bring all your questions to this important meeting!

This MCAI panel includes experts in all aspects of HD. Their practical experience in shooting (and troubleshooting) and posting native 2K and 4K formats, as well as many other formats, will give you a comprehensive insight into the high end of Hi Def Production.

Guests include: Ken Garff, Brad Hagen, James Mathers, and Todd Yates.

EVENT: MCAI Monthly Meeting

DATE: March 18th, 2009

TIME: 6:15 pm refreshments — 7:00 Program begins

LOCATION: Video Resources, Inc
Santa Ana, California 92705
(949) 261-7266

There is a fee involved. Click here to learn more.

Earlier today, I was reading some rumor sites speculating that Apple may be releasing a new version of Final Cut Studio at a media event on March 24.

I don’t think these rumors are true and wanted to share my thinking with you so you can decide yourself.

First, a very important point: Apple HAS NOT told me what they are doing. In fact, they have not even dropped any hints in my direction. If they had told me, it would violate our agreement for me to even tell you that I know what they are doing. I don’t know — this blog is simply my thinking about the situation Apple finds itself in.

Let’s look at where Final Cut stands today. The last major upgrade was two years ago, with a series of minor upgrades over the last 18 months. So, Final Cut is due for a significant upgrade sometime this year.

However, the current version of the operating system is 10.5.x. Apple has already announced that a brand new, optimized, OS 10.6 will be out this year. Why would Apple make a major release of Final Cut Studio to support an operating system that is about to be replaced? While no one knows when 10.6 will be released, March strikes me as a poor time when Apple could wait a couple of months and release it, with great fanfare, to all their developers at the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) later this spring. There’s nothing going on in March that is so compelling as to force Apple to release the OS early.

The new OS will have, according to Apple, an entirely re-engineered version of QuickTime (QuickTime X) in it. Since Final Cut and QuickTime have been conjoined since birth, this means that Apple would have to make two major FCS releases: one to support the version of QuickTime current in March, and a second major release to support QuickTime X released with OS 10.6. Apple is a huge company with vast development resources, but two major releases in the same year for Final Cut Studio don’t make any sense to me.

As well, two new features in OS X 10.6 are also relevant: 1. Snow Leopard will only run on Intel/Macs, and 2. It only uses Cocoa in its user interface. The impact of these two statements on Final Cut is profound.

First, because Final Cut runs on both PowerPC and Intel systems, it will need to be significantly tweaked to run Intel-only. Second, Final Cut’s user interface is written entirely (or darn near entirely) in Carbon, a soon-to-be-outdated programming language. Both of these statements mean that for the last couple of years, Apple’s developers have been very, VERY busy re-programming almost every line of code in the application to convert the application to support Cocoa and Intel. This is a HUGE project, affecting millions of lines of code. The process of getting the bugs out will be lengthy. To do all this work, simply to release a “temporary major release” in March doesn’t make sense.

So the reason I tend to think we won’t see a Final Cut Studio release in March — or April, for that matter — is that there is no benefit to Apple to release a new version of Final Cut until after the new version of Snow Leopard (10.6) is out. Releasing a new version now, means Apple would need to release a second major update in a couple of months.

While Apple has the ability to do this, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when trying to allocate development resources.

So, if you want my opinion of what is going to happen – AND REMEMBER, NO ONE HAS TOLD ME ANYTHING – I think we will see Snow Leopard in June and a shipping version of Final Cut Studio in July.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. As always, let me know what you think.

The road to a product review is rarely smooth, but a review that I’m currently working on was especially rocky – mostly due to me – but the back-story is interesting, so I thought I’d share it with you here.

Last December, I saw a demo of Telestream’s Pipeline and thought it interesting enough that I should cover it in my newsletter. So, I asked Telestream if they would send me an evaluation copy to look at.

Telestream graciously agreed and by mid-January, a gleaming new unit was sitting in my edit suite. However, Pipeline requires SDI video and all my video sources were either composite or S-Video — both analog.

Hmm…

So, I contacted some friends at Blackmagic Design and asked if they could lend me two of their new mini-converters which takes analog video and converts it to SDI.

After filling out the necessary forms, answering the usual twenty questions and waiting a couple of weeks, two brand-new mini-converters were sitting right next to the Pipeline hardware.

Except…

Pipeline requires OS X 10.5, and I’m still running on OS 10.4.11. This was a problem. Long-time readers of my newsletter know that my basic philosophy is that if your editing system is running properly, don’t upgrade.

While it is true that upgrading to OS X 10.5 does not provide any new features to Final Cut Studio, an upgrade would allow me greater access to third-party products.

There are three OS X 10.5 products that, individually, are almost enough to make me upgrade. Together, they finally tipped me over the edge. These are: Telestream’s Pipeline and ScreenFlow, and Noise Industries: FXFactory.

I’ll be writing about Telestream’s Pipeline in my next newsletter, coming out next week. (Click here to subscribe.) I’ll be writing about the other two in an upcoming issue.

So, I decided the time had come to, finally, upgrade to OS X 10.5. But when?

I had all the hardware, but I was about to head out of town for a three week road trip in the UK doing seminars. This struck me as a bad time to upgrade – never demo newly installed software in front of 200 people. Unpleasant things have been known to happen.

So, it wasn’t until this week – about three months after I started this whole process – that I was finally able to upgrade one system to OS X 10.5. (By the way, I did an Archive and Install, and everything worked great — except email, which took a phone call to Apple to resolve.)

Whew!

I’m looking forward to sharing what I’ve learned about Pipeline in my next newsletter. If you haven’t signed up yet, please do so. Its free and will be emailed directly to you as soon as I finish getting it written.

I had an interesting “learning” experience this week that I wanted to share with you.

At the end of each of my seminars, and most of my classes for that matter, I hand out a survey to everyone attending. This gives me immediate feedback on what they liked, or what they want improved; with lots and lots of suggestions on what I should cover next.

Since everyone is still in the room, I get these two-page paper forms back from just about everyone. It takes a few minutes at the end, but basically is not a problem.

On my recent trip to the UK, knowing that our seminar attendance was going to set records, we decided that we wouldn’t bother toting a lot of paper forms with us, instead, once I got back in the office, we would email the survey to everyone that attended.

While this seemed like a good idea at the time, we had some problems, which is why I’m sharing this with you now.

We modified our standard two-page survey for the UK seminars and created a PDF with it. Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing with Acrobat PDF forms and discovered that Acrobat has some very nice tracking and tabulation software built into it, which makes sending and gathering PDF-based data very easy.

Our UK seminars struck me as a great time to test the technology. We told folks attending our seminars that we would be emailing them a survey, and some other goodies, so they would not be surprised when it arrived.

I did a test run with the people in my office and everything worked great – the PDFs emailed perfectly, the forms were filled out, sent back and tabulated automatically. Very cool.

Then, I sent them to all our UK attendees. At this point, things broke down.

What I did not realize, until I got dozens and dozens of emails were three key facts:
1. Email addresses change constantly.
1. Forms don’t work if you open them on a Mac using Preview. Forms require Acrobat.
2. Forms require recent versions of Acrobat, which many people don’t have.

We held our UK seminars less than three weeks ago, but in that time easily 15-20% of our audience (in this case mostly college kids) had changed email addresses.

Then, more than half opened the forms in Preview, which doesn’t support form data well and lacks the crucial “Submit” button, which emails the completed form back to me. This meant that I was flooded with emails about how to send back a form with no submit button. Or how to save a form. Or how to complete the form.

In short, instead of getting a nearly 100% response, I’ll feel lucky if we can get 10%. Far, far less than I was expecting.

Acrobat is hugely useful in a wide variety of ways within our company — I can’t imagine living without it. However, because virtually everyone attending one of my seminars uses a Mac, and because the Mac defaults to opening Acrobat documents in Preview, this means that most people trying to complete the survey are not going to be successful. And I don’t have the time to answer hundreds of emailed tech support questions about my survey.

The upshot of this is that, next time, we will either bring paper surveys or use a web-based survey engine, like SurveyMonkey, to get the answers we need.