This is Part 2 of a series of video tutorials on how to use Kinemac 3D Animation software for Mac OSX. View Part 1 Here.
Direct Download (QuickTime)
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I put together a mashup of Final Cut Pro basic tutorial videos from YouTube. Learn how to become a video editor extraordinaire in these free how-to videos. Chroma keying, green screen, basic editing, audio for video, and more!
Video player is below the fold. Enjoy!
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This is Part 1 of a series of video tutorials on how to use Kinemac 3D Animation software for Mac OSX. View Part 2 Here.
Direct Download (QuickTime)
Full Transcript Below the Fold
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This video is a tutorial on Screencasting secrets - how to make a great screen capture or screencast presentations on your Mac.
Direct Download (QuickTime)
Full transcript below the fold -
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We just officially released our HiLo Media Press Release:
Hilo Media: A New Kind of Production Company for a New Age of Web Marketing
Two distinguished multimedia producers join forces to provide new solutions for the emerging world of viral marketing and product videos for the web.
Asheville, NC (PRWEB) June 26, 2008 – Video producers Joseph Nilo and Chuck Heilig have recognized that traditional video production is becoming a thing of the past. “Dwindling are the days of six-figure budgets in the corporate video space,” said Joseph Nilo. “We’re witnessing a revolution in online video content, which opens up so many doors for online content producers.” Nilo and Heilig have merged their successful production companies to form HiLo Media. This new company specializes in the creation of affordable web marketing videos with impact often without ever shooting any video.
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I often get asked what sort of software and gear I own, use and recommend. I just added a page to this website showing my gear and some of the DV and HD cameras I have experience with and recommend:
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In my never ending quest to have zero free time, I’ve officially launched another company / collaboration - HiLo Media.
After some collaborations with a fellow very familiar to Mac Pro Podcast subscribers . . . Chuck Heilig — we decided to launch a niche company that creates viral web videos out of company’s marketing materials. If you’re sharp, you’ll see how we decided on a name.
We did some cool product videos for Philips USA and Digital Lifestyle Outfitters (see them at our website) and we’re currently working with perennial Mac favorites Elgato.
Wish us luck! Here is our overview video . . .
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www.HDCameraLensGuide.com Enables Broadcast and Professional Videographers to Select the Correct HD Lens for Their Camera and Application
(Great Neck, New York–February 19, 2008) As High Definition video (HD) becomes the standard for broadcast and professional videographers, as well as a wide range of filmmakers, manufacturers are introducing a growing array of HD cameras that range from economical camcorders to high-end digital cinematography solutions.
This proliferation of camera models is prompting increasing questions among users as to which HD lens is best for their particular camera and production application.
“Choosing the right lens is essential to maximizing HD camera performance and capturing the unique content that is increasingly demanded by today’s broadcasters, cable networks, film studios, and other program providers,” comments Bob Lipp, a marketing executive with years of experience in the broadcast industry. “As HD camera selections increase for every production segment, choosing the right HD lens for your production requirements becomes ever-more crucial.”
Now, a new online resource, www.HDCameraLensGuide.com, has the answers you need to maximize the performance of your HD camera for any of seven different production applications.
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Great article from the always-great KenStone.net about creating proper SD footage from the new Sony XDCam EX1. A good read whether you own the camera or not, and are interested in HD / SD workflows.
Whenever a new technology hits the market there are always teething problems. In the case of new video cameras there are often new formats and codecs to work with. Does your NLE of choice have the new codecs and is it capable of handling the different flavors of the new codecs, frame rate, color space, frame size, progressive or interlaced, SD or HD, etc. Even when your NLE has been updated to accommodate these new technologies, problems can still arise, because users are trying finding their way, working to find the best approach to integrate it into their workflow.
[From Outputting Standard Definition in FCP from the Sony XDCam EX1 ]
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Apple has a page available to help troubleshoot the (problematic at best) Compressor that we’ve all grown to love/hate. The most exciting adventure is the last step — Remove and Reinstall Compressor, which has you searching the depths of your system for all of Compressor and Qmaster’s little droppings. I’ve done this more times than I’d wish to remember.
I hate to bash Compressor, for when it works, it works well. But when it doesn’t, it’s very frustrating (especially when needing to make a DVD for a 5 PM FedEx shipment).
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I came across this file while looking at my Libsyn backend. Man, they hang on to everything! I can’t believe that we used to do a show this robust every week (for no pay!). I particularly like this episode because Dan gets on camera for a segment and the outtakes at the end are particularly amusing.Mac Pro Podcast 17 - from December 2005 from Joseph Nilo / Nilo Media on Vimeo.
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Another great Final Cut Pro Quick Tip from Genius DV:
Ever wonder what the color circle with the arrow in when you get to a color selection decision in Final Cut Pro. It is called the Hue Direction Control. What it does is control the direction a change in color will take if you key frame a color change. For example if you need to go from yellow to blue, and the Hue Direction Control was indicating a counter clockwise arrow, the yellow would turn green then go from green to blue. On the other hand if the clockwise arrow was showing the yellow would turn orange, then red, then purple, then blue.
[From Hue Direction Control in Final Cut Pro - Final Cut Studio, Avid, Adobe, and Video Streaming Training ]
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We reported recently about P2 cards now shipping with HVX-200 Cameras, now (troublesome) P2 management just got seemingly easier. I found this blog post recently:
This is just awesome, Calibrated Software has a bunch of new plug-ins on tap that make it possible to work with MXF and DVCPRO HD codecs. This will streamline P2 workflow for both Mac and Windows users, as well as make it easier to move DVCPRO HD material to a PC. I promise a detailed review soon. The codecs cost $49 each. Here’s the info . . .
[Read More at New Plugins for Broader DVCPRO HD and P2 Support | Resources | Final Cut Help]
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Here’s a quick tip on Audio Mixdown in Final Cut Pro that I found on the Final Cut Help blog.
When outputting material to tape, an Audio Mixdown feature was a recommended precaution to ensure you didn’t drop frames. Choose Sequence > Render Only > Mixdown (or press Command + Option + R).
You can also map this as a button, and place it into the Timeline button bar.
[From Audio Mixdown … Where Are You? | Weekly Tip | Final Cut Help]
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I read about a great new and exciting (to me, at least) product from Gridiron Software called Flow. It has not yet been released, but it has won a “Best of Show” award at this past MacWorld 2008. Here is a great description of the product, but I recommend watching the overview video here:
“Flow is a revolutionary approach to digital content management that dramatically simplifies the design process for creative professionals working on graphic design, web and video projects. Flow automatically tracks your work from idea to end result and manages your assets and applications for your most complex projects- all without changing the way you work.”
I’ve signed up for the beta and will report back when I get my hands on this great software. I must mention that I’d first come in contact with Gridiron Software with their awesome project Nucleo Pro, which speeds up rendering in applications like Adobe’s After Effects, and other 3D rendering apps.
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I found this great read over at Rougly Drafted Magazine, giving a great alternative viewpoint to the rumors that Apple might be selling its Pro Apps suite to a third party. A further interesting tidbit is the list below of the past release schedule at NAB’s gone by:
NAB 2000 Final Cut Pro 1.2.5 with support for 16:9 video format and native YUV color space, Matrox real time video cards.
NAB 2001 Final Cut Pro support for more real-time DV hardware from Pinnacle, Canopus and Matrox.
NAB 2002 DVD Studio Pro 1.5
NAB 2003 Final Cut Pro 4, LiveType, Soundtrack, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro 2, Shake 3.5
NAB 2004 Final Cut Pro HD, Motion, DVD Studio Pro 3
NAB 2005 Final Cut Studio, Motion 2
NAB 2006 Shake 4.1, 500,000 Final Cut users
NAB 2007 Final Cut Studio 2, Color, Motion 3, Final Cut Server. 800,000 Final Cut users[From Is Apple Shedding its Final Cut Pro Apps at NAB? — RoughlyDrafted Magazine]
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Direct Download (QuickTime H.264 “iPod” setting)
View at Yahoo, Google, Revver, DailyMotion or Blip.tv
Media Manager Overview
I realized recently that nobody ever talks about one of the most powerful tools in Final Cut Pro– the Media Manager. Click the above link to view a video tutorial on the subject.
Here’s a quick overview on how to properly use the Media Manager:
Right Click on any sequence in your bin and choose “Media Manager”. The tool will pop up and give you information about your sequence and options for what to do with it. From top to bottom:
Summary
Any changes you make to the options below will be reflected in this handy text summary at the top.
Original
This shows you the amount of media used by this sequence. Note that there might be lines breaking up the media usage across any multiple drives you might have. Render files will also be reflected here as a different color.
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Perian is a swiss-army knife QuickTime plugin (hence their friendly little icon) that allows playback of many non-native codecs in QuickTime.
The latest update touts the following fixes / additions:
Perian allows playback of files like:
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I found this great tip from David over at MacSparky.com:
Hitting the built in volume buttons on your Mac is great for quickly raising or lowering your volume but what about when you want to lower or raise the volume just a little bit. Once again Apple has a solution that they don’t tell anyone about.
Hit the following key combination ….
Shift + Option + Volume up/down
Now you have four clicks per volume notch. Note that if you are doing this on a laptop you may also need to hold down the function key depending on how your keyboard is set up. So the next time your significant other/roomate/neighbor/local peace officer ask you to turn it down, you can … barely.
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I was going to blog about this, but Don McAllister beat me to it:
Some breaking news!!
One of my favourite Mac podcasts has been off line since October last year, and that’s the Mac Roundtable. Joseph, Adam, Steve and Tim did a great job in bring mac news and opinions to the community, but due to logistical reasons, it was always difficult to bring a show together. I guested on the show a couple of times and it was great fun.
Over at Macworld this year, a few of us Mac podcasters got together socially and we had a ball hanging out and just chatting about lots of Mac stuff. We really did hit it off well as a group.
It was only after Macworld had finished that we all got back home when it was suggested that, seeing as we had such a good time chatting, why not continue our chats, record it as a podcast and put it out there!
As we’re such good friends with the Mac Roundtable guys, we thought it only common courtesy to let them know of our thoughts and the upshot is that they thought it was a great idea, but why not combine forces and just expand the Mac Roundtable line up.
So I’m delighted to say, that’s what we’ve done!
The new Mac Roundtable panel consists of the original members:
Adam Christianson - Maccast
Steve Stanger - The MacAttack
Joseph Nilo - The MacMediaCast
Tim Verpoorten - The Mac Review Cast
but the extended line up now also includes:Don McAllister - ScreenCastsOnline
Victor Cajiao - Typical Mac User
Allison Sheridan - Nosillacast Podcast
David Sparks - MacSparky
Katie Floyd - The MacCore
Jonathan Cost - MacTips Daily
all as regular panel members.Now obviously, all the members won’t appear on every show but know we should be able to bring you a much more varied and regular show with a bigger pool of resources.
The first show of the re-launched Mac Roundtable has just been published and you can listen here or even better, subscribe to the podcast in iTunes
I hope you enjoy this first show with some of the new line up and thanks to the Mac Roundtable guys for welcoming us with open arms!
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[From Reference Movies | Weekly Tip | Final Cut Help]
Need to save some space? Reference movies allow you to work with your video clips or
sequence files in other applications. Think of a reference movie as a pointer back to the
original media, a lot like a link on a web page
Learn More
Reference movies are a great way to quickly move your Final Cut Pro movie to another application for encoding — any app that supports QuickTime files will accept QuickTime reference files (Compressor, VisualHub, Sorenson Squeeze, etc.)
The reference file is a smaller version that points to its media & render files on your machine. A caveat — if you move or delete any of these render or media files, your reference movie will be dead, and you’ll get strange & irritating errors in QuickTime and in your encoding application.
If disk space and / or time are in endless supply for you, or if you’d like to make a final archive-able version of your movie, make it self-contained.
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[From Studio Daily Blog » 16GB P2 card now included with HVX200]
Panasonic is now generously including a 16GB P2 card with every HVX200 purchase, a $900 value. Effective December 1, 2007, this offer requires no mail-ins or anything of the sort: all HVX200 cameras include the card in box, along with a copy of Barry Green’s The HVX Book, also a very nice inclusion. Swanky. Now you can get to shooting immediately out of box, and have a very refined clue about what you’re doing, to boot.
This is great news - P2 format is the main way to shoot something other than DV on the HVX-200 (DVC-Pro or DVC-Pro HD) and it’s always been quite expensive as a solution. As astute Mac Mediacast viewers know, we shoot all podcasts on the HVX-200 and give it a hearty thumbs up!
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We are not as divided as our politics would suggest.
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I found a great article over at Genius DV about sequence settings in Final Cut Pro and how that affects export quality:
Have you ever noticed that when working in Final Cut Pro with DV media, graphics and titles often have a poor quality look? There are two major reasons for this.
#1 DV media uses a 4:1:1 color space
#2 DV media is compressed, roughly 5:1
They go on to talk about changing your sequence settings to something higher quality, like Animation codec. I would add that the DV-NTSC setting not only smashes down your color space because of its codec, but also lessens the quality of your text & graphics because of interlacing. If you are never going to show your video on a standard television / DVD, I would skip the DV-NTSC codec entirely. This is one of the secrets to great-looking web videos and screencasts.
Technorati Tags: apple, DIY, encoding, final cut pro, howto, mac, Motion, multimedia, podcasting, tutorial, video
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I’m sure by now everyone has heard of the drama surrounding the Quicktime 7.4 update and the havoc it causes with After Effects renders. If you have upgraded and need to downgrade then here are a few direct links to standalone Quicktime installers that I leave booked marked as it is sometimes hard to find them. Look closely at the name of the link as the version number is listed there in the link.
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime731forleopard.html
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime731fortiger.html
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime731forpanther.html
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime72formac.html
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime716formac.html
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime652formac.html
Technorati Tags: apple, encoding, filmmaking, final cut pro, leopard, mac, osx, quicktime, tip, video
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This is a great tip from friend of the Mac Mediacast Brian Gary over at the most awesome-est website, KenStone.net:
QuickTime is the engine that runs most (if not all) media related applications on the Mac, with Final Cut Studio being a prime example. You tend to hear often, “If QuickTime can open the file then you can work with it in Final Cut.” That’s because it’s QuickTime that’s doing all the heavy lifting with the codecs that enable it to play and manipulate all the digital files.
QuickTime has gone through many iterations–as of this writing it’s in version 7.4. But a scarcely documented feature was added around QuickTime version 7.1.6 that is quite handy: The ability to display the actual timecode of a clip, not just the running counter.
Technorati Tags: apple, DIY, encoding, filmmaking, final cut pro, mac, multimedia, osx, quicktime, software, tip, video
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I am a huge fan of the Boris products and I don’t think I could live without my Continuum Complete 4 for Final Cut Pro. Here is a great review / overview of the new version of Boris’s suite of filters & effects. Yes, the review is centered around Avid and After Effects, but the plugins have the same functionality in Final Cut Pro.
From Boris Continuum Complete AVX 5 @ Creative Cow.net
Article Focus:
Emmy Award-winning editor Vivek Narayan takes a closer look at the latest version of Boris Continuum Complete, a comprehensive set of filters and effects for leading NLEs as well as After Effects. Although it works largely the same in all hosts, Vivek digs deepest into BCC operating inside Avid. He finds that the 180 filters here more than give others a run for their money: it beats out some of the industry’s favorites. See why he calls buying BCC AVX 5 “a no-brainer.”Having made a career predominantly on Avid NLEs, I have come to rely on their stability and ability to share assets seamlessly over networks. But when it is time to get creative, the industry standard has often left me frustrated with its sparse effect palette.
Enter Boris Continuum Complete AVX, a comprehensive collection of plug-ins that promises to upgrade the Avid experience, transforming the editor into an enterprising effects and compositing solution. BCC AVX 5 offers 180 highly customizable effects, including 10 brand new effects and a whole new category.
Since this is my first review of any BCC product, I approached it as a first look at some of its most interesting and useful features. First, it ships bundled with every copy of Media Composer, so if you have a recent version of Media Composer, you already own BCC AVX, whether you like it or not. Second, BCC’s feature set blurs the line between Xpress Pro and Media Composer on some fronts. All right, it’s time for the test drive.
Technorati Tags: apple, DIY, encoding, filmmaking, final cut pro, HD, howto, mac, multimedia, product review, software, tutorial, video
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From Genius DV:
DVD Studio Pro allows the menu buton of your DVD player to have various control depending on what area of the DVD you are navigating from. A common mistake is to set Menu1 up as a short first play movie, but leave the overall disc control of the menu button to go to that menu, causing the viewer to have to watch the first play movie every time the menu button is pressed.
In the Outiline of a DVD Studio Pro project, select the Disc icon (at the very top), which as long as you have saved your project, will display the project name. Once the Disc has been selected, move your attention to the inspector, specifically the menu button destination. In most cases you will want to route the control of this button to the main menu, but you can certainly select anything you want.
Technorati Tags: apple, dvd, dvd studio pro, encoding, final cut pro, howto, mac, Motion, multimedia, osx, software, tip, tutorial, video
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Drop Frame vs. Non-Drop Frame rate
I have been asked many times to explain the difference between Drop Frame and Non-Drop Frame. I found a fairly detailed explanation the will hopefully help you understand the difference. US TVs display 29.97 frames a second. When NTSC was defined, they found out there were some problems with the video signal carrier fequency running at 30 frames per second (fps). So they decided to shift things by 1/1000 to 29.97 fps which is 0.999 of 30 fps.
The two of the more commonly used combinations of time display settings are 30 fps drop-frame timecode and 30 fps non-drop-frame timecode. When the frame rate is a non-integer number, as is the case with the NTSC frame rate of 29.97 frames per second . . . a compromise of one sort or another must be made in displaying time. Either the time display can accurately show clock time (after one hour, the time display shows 1:00:00:00) or the time display can be continuously numbered (frame n is always followed by frame n + 1, modulo the number of frames per second). Drop-frame timecode does the former; non-drop-frame timecode does the latter. In the case of NTSC 30 fps drop-frame timecode, two frame numbers are skipped for each minute, except for every tenth minute. Drop-frame timecode is conventionally indicated by separating the time units with semicolons. The most common case for which drop-frame versus non-drop-frame timecode is relevant is 29.97 fps NTSC, but it also applies to 23.976 fps and 59.94 fps.
Technorati Tags: final cut pro, multimedia, tutorial, video
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Great tip from GeniusDV:
Much of the Library of production elements that are used in Motion, can be brought right into Final Cut Pro. My workflow often takes me into Motion to do a simple composite with something from the Motion Library, and then one day it hit me to just drag what I needed right into my Final Cut timeline. Many of the items are not able to be brought directly into Final Cut, but many can. Any of the Quicktime movies, or still images can be brought right into Final Cut. The route you must take to get to many of the elements is long, and if you don’t use it often you may forget the route. A good practice is to drag the Motion folder to the side bar. Doing this will allow you to click on the shortcut that will take you right to the folder containing all of the production elements you may want to use.
Technorati Tags: apple, DIY, filmmaking, final cut pro, howto, mac, Motion, multimedia, osx, tip, tutorial, video
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