creatica

creattica-shrunk

I just found creatica, an excellent web site for you artists out there. Not only does it link to inspirational design, but it includes links to free templates, textures, patterns, css.

This site is very cool, and worth checking out.

John DeMaio at Production Apprentice back to Avid

Production Apprentice has an excellent article on moving back from Final Cut Pro 7 to AVID Media Composer. He likes the move and really gets back into using trim mode, which is barely used on FCP 7, though still likes some things about FCP 7.

I feel about the same, I still like certain things about FCP 7 better, but now that it is EOL, it is time to really to get back into Media Composer, though I am also really enjoy Premiere Pro quite a bit.

Scroll Wheel in Premier Pro

Adobe has a good tech article on scrolling in Premier Pro. This is functionality that seems strange to me, so I thought I would post it.

I am sure anyone who has tried premiere pro sees that scrolling with a mouse in Premiere Pro moves you down the timeline and doesn’t reveal tracks, but you can still scroll by hovering over the scroll bars and using the wheel, and it can also zoom the timeline if you hold down the option key (though I would like to see a setting to change the scrolling behavior from right to left to up and down).

Scott Simons at Studio Daily on FCP Road Blocks

Scott Simmons at Studio Daily has an interesting article on some Road Blocks in FCP X. This goes with Olivier Peters recent article over at digitalfilms, which I posted about before.

Of course I agree with all, though maybe not in the same order.

It does really blow me away that there is no live timeline scrolling in FCP X. This was a feature that FCP 7 really did need, and AVID has had for a long time.

And the fact that you can set an in and out in a clip, then click on another clip, and when you go back the points are gone had better be a bug, because that is so not a usuful feature.

Adobe Media Encoder

I got in video encoding years back, before I became a professional editor, when I was working at Warner Bros. Online, and have always kept up with it, though for a long time I have used Compressor as my program of choice, mainly because I already had it and it worked really well.

After using Adobe Media Encoder I wonder how I stayed with Compressor so long. Media Encoder has one feature that makes it so much better than any other media encoder out there. To encode a sequence from either Premiere Pro or After Effects, you just open the Project and select the sequences you want in Media Encoder, no exporting a quicktime or giving up your program to edit. You can let Media Encoder do it from the Project! THIS IS HUGE! How did I ever live without out? I have no idea, but I won’t in the future!

THANK YOU ADOBE!!

digitalfilms on FCP X Roadblocks

digitalfilms has an excellent article on FCP X roadblocks. I agree with all of them, but one particularly as it is my favorite tool in FCP.

Track tool. This plays a huge part in how I edit and something I really loved in FCP over Media Composer. I use it to move clips downstream to open a space on the timeline to work. If I want to do the same in FCP X, I either have to insert a placeholder (essentially the OLD Avid way of working) or select a number of clips (also the OLD Avid way). Not very effective when you have an hour-long timeline. Another reason to use the track tool is to select all the clips to the right in order to apply common effects.



I really don’t get these people that are fervently defending FCP X.

I know I have said this before, but to me it is not just incomplete, and you can’t call it a beta( because if it was a beta they would still be supporting FCP 7, while they worked out the kinks of FCP X), it is actually broken. The basic paradigm of the timeline that you cannot organize is broken. Some of the new features could be interesting and powerful, but as additional features, not as the only features. And I never want a timeline that I cannot organize unless it is has zero graphics or overlays, and even then I like to organize my tracks.

And while I could see a usefulness to being able to scrub where the mouse head is, like the AVID timeline, it should be able to turn off and on (I know you can turn it off in FCP X, but then you can’t scrub in clips in the viewer either, which doesn’t work).

And what exactly does Apple want us to do on jobs where we need a FCP 7 license? I am on one right now? How do we get one? E-bay, they are going for much more than $1000, and you don’t even know how legal they are?!?!