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Monthly Archives: July 2010
Setting a “Poster Frame” for Clips and Why You Would Want To
There’s a neat functionality in the Browser that allows you to see “thumbnails” (“poster frames”) for each clip in your Browser and it has a very cool scrubbing feature to boot. To enable this, right-click on any Browser column header and toggle on the “Thumbnails” column and you will now see the thumbnails. Pretty cool, [...]
Posted in FCP Ninja Level 1 Comment
A Modest Browser Nicety For Log & Cap Tasks
Depending on your personal preferences, today’s simple shortcut might be worth remembering for whenever you are ingesting content. When you begin a log and cap or log and transfer operation, hit OPT B to set up the “logging” Browser column layout:
This will arrange the columns with the most useful information to the far left side [...]
Posted in FCP 101 Stuff 1 Comment
The Sweet “Log Clip” Workflow [UPDATED]
In another post, I talked about using SHIFT C to “capture now” and I discussed the scenarios where that was appropriate. I also alluded to the fact that, if you have lots of “takes” or repetitive material where you will only actually need to ingest some of the footage, you might prefer to “log” clips [...]
Posted in Intermediate 3 Comments
Access Log & Capture or Log & Transfer
Following on with yesterday’s post about using SHIFT C to “capture now,” it’s worthwhile to review the commands for initiating a tape or solid state media capture. Whenever you have to initiate a Log and Capture from a tape deck or attached video camera in FCP, simply hit CMD 8:
Just add SHIFT for Log and [...]
Posted in FCP 101 Stuff 1 Comment
Make “Capture Now” Just a Little More “Now”
If you cap a lot of tapes (and I still do), perhaps, like me, you often simply start the tape rolling and hit “Capture Now” to ingest everything and you sort out the bodies later in the Browser. This is especially useful when capping tapes that are comprised of many clips due to broken timecode.
Capture [...]
Posted in Intermediate 1 Comment
Toggle Range Check
When you’re finishing an edit it’s important to make sure that your luminance levels are “legal.” This ensures that your brightest whites won’t be “hot” and cause problems in a broadcast scenario (and that really applies to any video that might be shown on a consumer TV even if it’s not being broadcast per se).
Most [...]
Posted in Intermediate 3 Comments
A Nearly Archaic Shortcut?
Post production guru, commentator and all-around nice guy Philip Hodgetts recently declared in his excellent blog that “tape is dead” (or, more accurately, he said “deadish” but he promised that it was getting deader all the time). Although I have lots of work that still comes in on tape (I get DVCAM and HDV from [...]
Posted in FCP 101 Stuff 1 Comment
A Set of Shortcuts Designed Only For Use By Robots
OK, here’s an interesting group of shortcuts that allows you to play clips forward or backward in various speeds. If you hit CTRL F7, your clip plays normally. Hit CTRL F8 through CTRL F12 and your clip plays faster and faster with each successive CTRL F-key. That’s 6 forward speeds. Hit CTRL F6 and you [...]
Posted in Customization, Intermediate Leave a comment
Match Frame: The Perfect Keyboard Shortcut
Here’s one of the greats: the Match Frame functionality. Let’s say you have a clip on the timeline and you want to quickly pull up the source clip from which it was taken in the Viewer. Perhaps you want to use another clip that you know is in the same piece of footage or you [...]
Posted in Intermediate 1 Comment
Creating a New Project Shortcut Should Be Easy to Remember