prog | Entries tagged with final cut pro

Before taking a nap (yay) and then going to

dougo's for a game of Candamar (fun!) I threw a rough of the show together. When laid end-to-end, the clips I would like to use clock in at over 50 minutes, meaning I'll have to hack off around half of the total length for it to fit in its SCAT timeslot. And you know what? I don't want to do that, not when I believe that I have at least as many Internet viewers as TV ones. I originally conceived of this as an Internet-broadcast show and I think I still primarily think of it that way, even though I am so dependent on SCAT for its production right now.

One thing I can do, because Final Cut makes it simple to manage: create the long version for Internet distribution, and then branch it into a modified "TV cut" of the same show. These would exist as two different sequences within the same FCP project, pointing to the same media resources. I just might do this.

Meanwhile, back on the business end of the glass teat: I am considering canceling all my TV service, thenceforth simply downloading all the shows I'm recommended. With the exception of Stella, every show I discovered on my own in recent memory was subsequently recommended to me by a friend, so I don't fear that I'll miss anything.

And I have to say that TiVo's really not been coming through on recommending new stuff to me, not in a long time. More often than not, the shows it auto-records for me are shows (and sometimes even movies) that I've already seen and given high ratings to. This is dumb; what it should auto-record is shows and movies that I haven't rated, but which are highly rated by people who like the shows I do. What it does now is basically useless. Did it used to work better? I think so. I don't know what happened.

jtroutman has been saying "The Internet is my TiVo" for a while, but I've only recently acquired the personal bandwidth and storage capacity to make this a reasonable strategy for myself. And, boy, the more I think about this, the better an idea it seems. I'll sleep on it, before I do anything rash. But I know it would feel good to cut all that from my life.

Worked all day trying to get a really clever bluescreen backdrop idea to work. It's just not happening... the source footage just isn't cooperating, no matter how many sick matte-hacks I discover and apply. (I invented my own way, for example, to remove an arbitrary area from a clip's alpha channel, an operation that ended up being necessary for

mrmorse's bluejeans after all.) Sigh. I'll have to find an excuse to use the idea on a future show -- one where we'll come in with knowledge of how to set up a chroma-keyable shoot in the first place.

At least I learned a lot about FCP.

The footage looks OK without the effect, but it would be so much better with it. Sob, sob. Just let it go, jmac. OK.

Had a really good business meeting, our first since incorporating. With

jtroutman's help we started thinking about plausible numbers to put in the business plan. The unexpected thing is, the numbers are really actually very good. That is, as long as we keep a tiny overhead, we can turn a profit in fairly short order, if allowed to make several optimistic but not at all unreasonable or unfounded assumptions. That's pretty cool.

I have homework to do. I'm going to spend tomorrow not thinking about the show and doing this stuff instead. Honest.

That's about it for today.

A little more than halfway done with the Gameshelf edits, after two evenings of labor. Becoming really dangerous with FCP. I will tentatively declare that it seems to be worth every penny; so far every time I have thought "Gee, I bet there's a way to foo using bar," I have been able to look up bar in the online docs and find a "How to foo" subheading. That is, if I couldn't get the bar to foo itself just by dragging things around or poking through the command menus, which actually happens a lot.

There are also contextual menus on everything, which I like very much. Paired with the fact that there are non-contextual-menu ways to do anything there's a contextual menu command for. As well as a keyboard shortcut, a lot of the time. Very nicely done. And the manual is very well written, both the heavy print books and the searchable PDF version. I'm learning everything totally out of order, and it's cool with that. Like I said: dangerous.

Was able to get bluescreening to work. Sort of. It's too bad none of us at the shoot knew anything about bluescreening. Seeing on my computer where everything is going wrong is teaching me a lot about what to do next time. So, I'm not sure whether I'll try it this time for that intentional-cheese look, or just have

mrmorse and I remain in front of a wrinkled, unevenly lit blue curtain. After playing with it a lot last night I decided to put it off for last. (Confidential to mm: your blue jeans show up more white than blue, so your legs are safe from vanishment.)

I'm up 28 minutes prior to adding in most of the Shadows over Camelot footage or any of the titles or credits. After adding them I will be doomed to the painful task of carving out chunks until I can can bash it down to 30 minutes. (Maybe less... I have to write Rich@SCAT to ask what the drop-dead maximum length of a half-hour slot occupant is. I'll do that now.)

This is a ton of fun, more than I thought it would be. (Though it's exactly as time-consuming as I thought, if not worse.) Once this is done I am going to immediately schedule shoots to cover three more episodes or so, with casting calls posted to my "local gamers" filter as before. (If you don't think you're on this filter but ought to be, let me know.)

I used up my monthly ZipCar prepay for the first time. Good, good, I don't feel like I'm wasting my money on it anymore. (I drove a couple bucks over the line yesterday, and my account cycles tomorrow.)

Final Cut Pro is, so far, totally awesome, though I'm only partway into logging the ~8 hours of footage collected last weekend. And the manuals are very nicely written. I especially like that, when they introduce major new concepts, they sometimes break to outline an example workflow (starting at the shoot) that makes use of them. They also explicitly map FCP features and concepts to traditional film industry conventions whenever possible, so I feel like I'm getting a super-shorthand film-school education as a bonus. Neat stuff!

Something interesting I learned today: movies still use slates, with clappers. I really just assumed that they're a moviemaking icon that's been long since replaced by, I dunno, something more electronical. But, nope, the FCP instructions specifically tell you how to sync audio and video tracks (if you're working on a big-budget production that records either on separate equipment), and it involves mousing the tracks around until the visual of the clapper dropping and the clack! sound it makes are properly simultaneous, on your big expensive computer screen.

Boy, something about knowing that makes me happy.

My roster is almost full for Saturday's Gameshelf shoot; if I haven't contacted you about it already this week, and you wanted in, let me know ASAP. We have quorum as it is, though, including a camera volunteer.

If you have to miss it to your regret, I think there will be more shoots after this one. I'm feeling pretty good about the project (it's snugly filling my hobby slot now that Volity's been promoted to Actual Work), and I think I can see myself spinning it into a whole series, but time will tell. I'll have a much better idea after I actually construct an entire, multi-segment episode.

I got my copy of Final Cut Pro last week but I haven't fired it up yet. I don't really have anything to apply it to, anyway. That will change soon enough.

Thanks to the latest iTunes update, I've finally started listening to podcasts. They're great for commuting, or any other time I'm dooping around away from the computer. (Like a lot of people I can't work and listen to someone talking at the same time, unless I'm doing a rote task.)

My current subscription list (no links coz iTunes won't let my copy the URLs even though I can see them?! but they're all findable in the Music Store):

What's New in Fansubs, by daerr: Mr. d talks about fan-subtitled Japanese TV cartoon shows, available for download via BitTorrent. This show is the first podcast I actually knew about, because he told me about it. Rough start but immediately started getting better with later shows, and I like to think that this is in part because I called him to complain about the parts I didn't like, ha ha.
rserocki's audioblog, by rserocki: Ghost stories and coffee doggerel and reminiscences about things. He has a very distinct voice. Quietly mind-blowing, at least for me.
Gaming Steve: When I was searching for "video" in the Music Store, hoping to find podcasts about videomaking, I found 1000 shows about video games. I figured I may as well pick one up, and this one sounded the least annoying. And it's pretty good... this Steve guy is smart, articulate and experienced.
The Al Franken Show: A mishmash of interviews from random time periods of Al Franken's Air America radio show. The only one I've listened to so far was a pre-election bit with Barack Obama, which I didn't really want to hear, because: pre-election.
Electric Larryland: A show about A/V production by a seasoned professional with a mellow voice. I have listened to one show, where he interviewed a friend who ran a business that produced software-based music synthesizers. I didn't really know what they were talking about but they were pleasant to listen to, and sometimes interjected relevant music samples. I let it all just wash over me while I went grocery shopping. It was really nice.
iTunes New Music Tuesday: Sure, why not.
A Pixelriffic Podcast: Some dude talking about digital video. Haven't listened to it much yet.
GeekSpeak: The official podcast of boardgamegeek.com. Two guys riffing about tabletop games for an hour or two, often with guests; I've so far heard them with Reiner Knizia, Guido "Son of Klaus" Teuber, and the fellow who published "Time's Up". Their attitude is kind of grating at times, and the place smells a little boys-clubby, but it's still interesting.

I am almost surely gonna get myself a copy of Final Cut Pro before I start editing together the first real episode of The Gameshelf. I can get it for about 30 percent of its retail price through my .edu discount, making it still pretty expensive but cheap enough to be tempting... around the same cost as a brand-new just-released game console, maybe.

iMovie is a great piece of software, especially if you have a pile of footage and just need to make it look presentable. The trouble is, everything you make with it looks like it was made with iMovie... it's intentionally not very flexible. Final Cut is nothing but flexible, from what I'm led to believe, and also makes things like cuts between multiple video sources a snap, and apparently even helps with logging. It sounds to me like a much nicer fit for helping me achieve my mental image of what the show should look like. Even given the fact that I'm still a wriggling newbie at all of this, I think I've already hit a level of sophistication that's cumbersome to bear using only iStuff.

You know, I can't tell you what a kick in the pants this TV stuff is for me. it continues to offer just the right mix of novelty, challenge and intrinsic look-what-I-made reward to keep me going, even months after I've started getting seriously involved. In a lot of ways it's just what I needed. I think I'd been long overdue to break into a new creative medium. It's playing the same role that cartooning did for me 10 years ago, or computer programming 7 years ago.

It will be a challenge to continue balancing it with everything else goin' on, but I'm gonna try.

Heading into work now, which is crazy-early for me. I just happened to get up early this morning... shrug. I was outside to get my coffee and couldn't get over what a weird angle the sunlight was shining in at! Because it's not 11:30! La!

But the sooner I start, the sooner I can finish and start my weekend & Volity mode. I have ants in my pants plenty about getting some stuff done in that sphere, since I've been all talk for weeks now.

What's this "outside to get my coffee" business? Yes, I confess... I ate up my stockpile of coffee beans a while ago, and keep forgetting to get more, so I am back to my old routine until I can remember to pick up a bag next time I'm at Diesel.

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A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

That's awful high, Jason. That's awful high.

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