Post Production

A broadcast commercial workflow that will make you go “Snausages!”

Posted by Michael

S’nerd (super nerd) that I am, I find this workflow to be really exciting. This method allows you to merge jam-synced second-source audio metadata (logged on-set by the sound recordist) with your video footage. If timecode is properly synchronized between sources, you can sync the sound to the picture AND merge the metadata in under 15 minutes. In this tutorial, I’m also making multiclips from the day’s shoot.

3rd party apps used in this vid, which I highly recommend for use with FCP X:

Intelligent Assistance Sync-N-Link X

X2Pro Audio Convert

Sound Devices Wave Agent (free)

One app I didn’t use in this workflow that I also recommend is Shot Notes X. It’s a really smart new utility that allows you to merge script notes with your shot footage. We tested using Shot Notes in conjunction with Sync N Link at NAB and, I’m happy to say, they all works brilliantly together.

NAB 2014 Post-Wrapup-Diary or “How to Attempt to Become a Greek Demogod”

Posted by Michael

What a crazy, insane, amazing week I had at NAB. I flew in last Saturday morning. Thanks to Alexis Van Hurkman’s recommendation, I stayed at Treasure Island. While there was no pirate theme in the room (bummer!), the rooms were comfortable and the rate was really affordable. It was perfectly located for my daily walk to the FCPWORKS private demo suite, where I spent the week showing off my work in FCP X.

Once settled, I walked over to the Wynn hotel’s buffet and stuffed my gullet along with Sam Mestman and his dad Steve (hi, Steve!). A few hours later, we were off and running, setting up this slick suite on the 26th floor of the Wynn.

FCPWORKS Suite view at the Wynn

Forty-eight hours, one Quantum SAN and nine Mac Pro/iMac edit stations later, Sam, Darren Roark and I were ready to start demoing.

On Sunday, Scott Simmons from Pro Video Coalition showed up to interview us. Can you tell I was a bit awe struck?

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Sometimes, the editor gets to speak…

Posted by Michael

Huell in Poppies

Here’s an interview I did with a local radio station last weekend at the premiere of a documentary about Huell Howser. Huell is a bit of a California icon for those not from The Golden State. I edited about 500 shows with him during the 8 years we worked together. Part of what got me the job was showing off real time color correction in FCP 4.5.

Well, 10 years later, I’ll be demoing real time color correction and lots more cool stuff in FCP X for FCPWORKS next week at NAB. Hope to see some of you there! Sign up for appointments here. 

Come visit FCPWORKS and me at NAB!

Posted by Michael

Wynn_FCPWORKS_Las_Vegas

NAB is going to be very exciting this year with all the 4K products surely to be announced. I’ll be demoing a smörgåsbord of FCP X workflows with FCPWORKS at the Wynn next week. The sign-up info can be found HERE. http://www.fcpworks.com/nab-final-cut-pro-x-demo-suite/

Along with fellow FCP X gurus Philip Hodgetts, Sam Mestman, and Darren Roarke, we’ll be demoing broadcast, doc, news, & feature film workflows in the suite. Look forward to seeing you there!

Color Correcting in FCP X Webinar

Posted by Michael

It’s been a busy couple of weeks over here at the Garbershop. I finished my video about Mt. Zion Cemetery, which I shot last year. I’ve been working again at Discovery Agency using FCP X. And I have also been cutting two jobs over at my office, a promotional video that I shot for a friend who is a patent attorney and VAM for Showtime.

On top of that, I’ve been scripting and rehearsing my next webinar for Moviola, which will focus on color correction in FCP X. It will be done in four parts. I will explain the color correction capabilities from an editor’s perspective, starting with the basics and working up to some more complicated shots. It’s all very practical, real world stuff. I use footage from actual jobs that I’ve cut over the past few months. No demo trickery here!

I highly recommend checking it out if you have the time. You’ll need to sign up in advance to watch it live on March 3rd. Or you can catch it after the fact, but they charge a small amount for it (which I do get a small percentage of, so please purchase or rent it if you can!).

You can register here:

http://moviola.com/webinars/color-correcting-in-final-cut-pro-x/Hero-Master-1

My mini-doc, “A Cemetery Remembered” is now online!

Posted by Michael

I’m pleased to present my latest short-form documentary, “A Cemetery Remembered.” As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, this was a passion project of mine that I started last summer in 2013. I read an article in the L.A. Times which recounted the story of Mt. Zion Cemetery. It is located in East Los Angeles and had fallen into disrepair. Because of the story in the Times, a grassroots campaign was started by a local rabbi to restore it.

I pitched the story around to a couple of people, but realized that this was a project that I needed to pursue on my own. Well, sort of on my own. I enlisted the help of my amazing fiancé/producer (prodancé? fian-ducer?), Tina Nguyen, to help me out on the shoot and the edit.

We shot over the course of one day with the following equipment:

  • Panasonic GH2
  • Sanken COS-11D
  • Rode VideoMic Pro
  • Roland R-26 Field Recorder
  • LED 900 light
  • Kessler Pocket Jib Traveler
  • GoPro (footage was not used in the final piece)
  • Gripper 3025 suction cup car mount. Used with the GH2.
  • My home-made shoulder rig (AKA, The Spider)

I edited the piece in FCP X so that I could use it as a test bed for a larger documentary or other non-narrative piece. I’m happy to say that FCP passed the test.

X is great for this kind of project. And this project had it all: synced dailies from non-jam synced second source audio, multiclips, footage from different codecs, DSLR video, proxies, extreme color correction with lots of power windows and tracking, camera stabilization. I was even working off of a portable bus-powered $120 Buffalo Thunderbolt HD and moved between two systems.

I started the project late last year in 10.0.8 and then upgraded to 10.1 in December. The new Library-based system works extremely well. I finally feel that my hard drives, and consequently my own brain cells, are organized.

Backing up is simple and effective. I employed the use of Timeline Snapshots as daily backups of my sequences in addition to FCP’s built-in system of backing up (which, thankfully, I never had to use). The camera footage was backed up on a larger RAID.

Because of working on projects like this over the past year, I now feel 110% comfortable in the magnetic timeline. I can work as fast, if not faster, than 7. The key here is to create the dialogue audio bed first (the radio cut), then add music and b-roll. The radio cut generally drives the story and the music and b-roll support it.

Once everything is generally worked out in the timeline, the fine detail work begins. It’s then very easy to move sections and soundbites around without causing music which resides later in the timeline to go out of sync.

On this project, I would change the clip connection point of music generally to the second shot, since the first shot would have been an outgoing shot of the previous scene. When you get used to the magnetic timeline you start to think about relationships between clips. In doing so, you begin to think about story as opposed to what clip goes on what track.

Cemetery Remembered Timeline

X still has its issues and there are most certainly some major areas waiting for improvement. My two biggest request are as follows. I hope that Apple comes up with a way to organize audio clips based on roles. I’d also like to see a way to move the active clip indicator (that little white dot on top of clips) up and down so that you can edit with the keyboard more effectively in secondary storylines. There are also general responsiveness and playback issues that need to be fixed.

The good news is that, with the 10.1 update, I can clearly see Apple’s direction here and it’s all good. There is very little I cannot do with the app. Where there are problem areas in the software, I now have solid workarounds. We have clearly moved well beyond the days where I couldn’t work due to bugs. I’m now experiencing the opposite. I have so much control over the footage that I didn’t know where to stop!

All-in-all this was a great experience and I look forward to using the knowledge I gained on this short-form piece on longer projects.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Uncommon Library, who donated all the music tracks heard in this video. Their music can be licensed at uncommonlibrary.com. Please check them out and license some music from them!

More info on the restoration can be found at restoremtzion.com.

Visions in my noggin.

Posted by Michael

In some of the quick tips I’ve been posting recently, you might have noticed that I was using the same footage of a man talking in a graveyard. I know it’s not exactly the peachiest of footage to be using for tutorial footage. 

Screen Shot 2014-02-06 at 9.02.40 AM

The footage is from a short docu piece that I’m working on about a local cemetery that’s in really bad shape. I read a story about it in the L.A. Times early last summer. Visuals of an ailing cemetery falling apart in the center of East Los Angeles started popping up in my mind. I could see the finished piece in my head even though I hadn’t gone to the location.

Usually, when images start popping up in my noggin, I know that I’m on to something and that I need to explore the possibility of setting up the shoot. So, I called the man responsible for the restoration of the cemetery and we agreed on a date to record the interview and b-roll.

That shoot happened eight long months go. In the interim, I’d like to say that “life happened.” But the truth is that sometimes it’s very hard for me to edit my own material. I see the mistakes, mostly. I have a feeling I’m not the only person in the history of the moving image who feels this way.

And so I had a realization the other day which helped me get through the edit. For the filmmaker/editor, the work is ultimately a subtractive process. It involves taking a bunch of “stuff” and removing extra “stuff.” In doing so, the gaps appear. This is when you don’t have everything you want. The project then begins to feel like a block of swiss cheese. You do whatever you can do to fill those holes – be it with b-roll, stills, VO, music, you name it.

However, the experience for the viewer is additive. They have never seen the material before. All the information is new and (hopefully) it is being experienced in real time. While mistakes and holes in the piece are usually easy to spot, the full breadth of what is missing will not likely be known.

In the best case scenario, as shooter and editor, I’ve done better than my best to plug the cheese and cut together the best story possible, given the footage. But other times, I know that it’s OK to let the mistakes show up, as long as it supports the story. Admittedly I have a few moments like that in the cemetery piece.

This cuts to the heart of the reason why I go after a passion project whenever I have the time. Shooting keeps me honed in on the production process. I also feel that, as an editor, I need to get out on set more often to see what’s happening. It’s very easy for editors to get stuck in the bay, frustrated when getting tossed a block of swiss cheese. What we don’t experience are the realities of life getting in the way of making everything perfect on set.

In my opinion, editing should start in the camera or even before the shoot (with good planning). With logging data already able to be applied to footage as it’s being recorded or very shortly thereafter, now is a very exciting time to be an editor. The thing is, the editors know what they need best – not the camera manufacturers. Now is a very important time for the editors’ voices to be heard.

If there’s a way to transfer logging information on set then onto the footage at faster-than-ever rates, this will decrease the amount of time the editor needs to prep the footage. I see this as a good thing, because it allows the editor to begin working with a sorted library of material, almost instantly searchable.

I’m being purposefully vague about what these processes will be to get the footage logged before it gets to the editor because I don’t really know what will be invented next. But I am putting a lot of thought into it. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, some of these tools are almost ready for primetime.

It’s going to be a very exciting couple of years. I think we’re going to see production and post merge in ways never before experienced.

 

Snapshots in my mind.

Posted by Michael

On my current project, I’m exploring the new snapshots feature in FCP 10.1.1. It’s one of those features that, at first, seems like a small addition. But in practical usage, I’m finding that it’s a huge shift in how I think about versioning.

In FCP 7 and prior, I would duplicate timelines to create versions. When too many timelines were in my project, I would duplicate the project if it had grown too large. Then I’d trash old versions to decrease the file size and move forward.

In previous versions of FCP X, I would duplicate the timeline and append a v2, v3, v4, and so on at the end of each day or notes pass. On the next day I’d continue on with the duped and updated version. Dupes represented both archives AND new versions.

But with 10.1, things are a flipped around. Here’s a graphical explanation of the switch.

Versioning Method (past versions of FCP):

Versioning method

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