Diana's Top 10 Final Cut Pro 7 Features #5: Speed Changes By Diana Weynand Whether or not you have used the Final Cut Pro speed functions, you're sure to love the new speed changes. Simple-yet elegant and powerful. You will be able to change speed in your clips easily and with a lot of flexibility. ...Read More »

AVCHD Essentials: get, play, edit and convert AVCHD video on Mac By WIKI AVCHD is a high definition (HD) digital video camera recorder format recording 1080i and 720p signals onto MiniDVD discs, MiniDV tape, Hard Drive, and digital camera Memory Cards. AVCHD recordings made on MiniDVD discs can be played back on some Blu-ray disc players, however, AVCHD with a .M2TS and .MTS file extension can not be played back on standard DVD players and most portable players. This tutorial will explain how to get AVCHD video off HD camcorder to Mac, how to play, edit and convert AVCHD video on Mac, including Snow Leopard. ...Read More »

CUT + RUN ENJOYS THE XBOX 360 EXPERIENCE WITH NEW CAMPAIGN BY DIRECTOR STEVE COPE Cut + Run recently collaborated with production company Rattling Stick and agency McCann Erickson London on the new campaign for the Xbox 360 platform. ...Read More »

Diana's Top 10 Final Cut Pro 7 Features #6 - Apple ProRes Formats By Diana Weynand Apple ProRes is not new to Final Cut Pro 7. It was introduced in Final Cut Pro 6. But with FCP 7, the ProRes family has been expanded to include 3 new-and extremely useful-formats. ...Read More »

Speeding Premiere Pro CS4's H.264 Encoding with NVIDIA QuadroFX and Elemental Accelerator By John Virata High definition video editing and HD video encoding are two of the hardware intensive tasks that can be done with a computer. It takes a lot of power to complete these types of jobs, oftentimes rendering your computer limited in functionality while it encodes video. NVIDIA's Quadro line of graphics cards can help to speed up H.264/AVC encoding in Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 with an assist from Elemental Technologies' Elemental Accelerator. ...Read More »

Final Cut Pro freebies for a better edit experience By Mike Jones It seems no matter how mature and complex creative software tools become, particularly non-linear editing systems, there always seem to be the extra things you find yourself wishing for. The technology trickle-down effect has seen enormous changes over the past decade where the tools that were once the sole domain of high-end turn-key systems - with appropriate astronomical price-tags - are now stock standard. ...Read More »

Diana's Top 10 Final Cut Pro 7 Features #7 - Improved Markers By Diana Weynand You know those little post-it note pads that come in multiple colors? Ok, admit it now. Do you ever color-code your notes? Maybe yellow notes are financial, pink ones are hot to-do items. Well with Final Cut Pro 7, you can now use color to label your markers in a very similar way. There are several other marker improvements as well. ...Read More »

Adding Audio Hardware Meters to Sony Vegas Pro By Jeffrey P. Fisher There's no doubt that watching volume levels with your audio- and video-centric projects is important. The digital audio world has a top limit --- 0 dBFS --- that you can't exceed. But screen real estate is often at a premium when working in the Vegas NLE. Sure you can pop the Audio Mixer and/or Mixing Console over to a secondary monitor, but that's often filled up with audio/video effects, waveform/vectorscope monitor, and even full-screen previews. ...Read More »

Diana's Top 10 FCP 7 Features #8 - iChat Theater Preview By Diana Weynand In the past, if you wanted to share some portion of your work with another set of eyes, it was a somewhat time-consuming business of exporting a QuickTime file or transferring a sequence or a portion of a sequence to another drive or server for someone else to access. That's no longer the case. Welcome to iChat Theater Preview-the quick and easy way to share and discuss your sequence with someone down the hall or around the world in real time. ...Read More »

Tonal Sets Uplifting Mood For A&E's Recovery Project Campaign Following the success of the Emmy-winning series "Intervention," A&E has created The Recovery Project, a multimedia and community based outreach program designed to raise awareness about addiction and how it is treatable and recovery is possible. A key component to the project are two moving TV spots featuring a powerful, anthemic score composed by Alex Lasarenko, Creative Director of music/sound design house Tonal. ...Read More »

Sorenson Squeeze 6 By Kevin McAuliffe These days, it seems as though every company has an application for taking your edited files and processing them for the web, and many of those applications are included with the editing bundle you purchased. Adobe has Adobe's Media Encoder, Final Cut Studio has Compressor, and there are the standalone applications such as Episode, and even QuickTime can do it as well. ...Read More »

Creating Effective Reflections in Sony Vegas Pro By Jeffrey P. Fisher Here's how to add a mirror reflection that makes your titles and logos stand out. It's quick and easy inside Sony Vegas Pro and it looks great. ...Read More »

Diana's Top 10 Final Cut Pro 7 Features #9 - The Timecode Viewer By Diana Weynand Look at the image below. Something new has been added in FCP 7. It's the Timecode Viewer, a floating time code window, which will really come in handy as you share your screen or sequence with others. And taking notes by jotting down time code as you view your footage has never been easier. ...Read More »

Diana's Top 10 FCP 7 Features: #10 - Color Coding Tabs By Diana Weynand The ability to utilize the operating system's color-coding capabilities for organizing and easily identifying bins, clips and sequences has been a standard feature in earlier versions of the software. However, Final Cut Pro 7 now raises the bar by implementing the color-coding of bins, clips and sequences to their respective tabs in the Timeline, Canvas and Browser windows. ...Read More »

Coremelt Complete V2 By Kevin McAuliffe You can never have enough plug-ins. Trust me, as an editor/graphic designer you always have clients that want something "cool," but have really no idea what they are looking for, so you end up finding yourself going through the plug-ins on your system to try and put something together to really "wow" them, your plug-in collection needs to have three traits. ...Read More »

Australian conservationist and adventurer Malcolm Douglas By David Hague Conservationist, adventurer and raconteur Malcolm Douglas is well known to most Australians and many overseas via his Channel 7 films on Australia and the stunning Kimberley in particular. David Hague took a spin through Broome recently and caught up with Malcolm for a chat. ...Read More »

Sony Vegas Pro Split Screen Previews By Jeffrey P. Fisher Every software application seems to have at least one tool that is both a blessing and curse. For many NLEs it's a ripple edit mode that is one part super-terrific and other part the dastardly evil-doer that wreaks havoc on your timeline. ...Read More »

Third Party Plug-Ins/Apps For Final Cut Pro By Heath McKnight Time for another edition of my third party plug-ins and software apps for Final Cut Pro (FCP). This time around, I take a look at the powerful and easy-to-use (with a ton of codec options) iFunia Video Converter Pro, FxFactory 2.1 and idustrial revolution's Volumetrix 2 transitions, and FxFactory 2.1 and DVShade's EasyLooks 2.5 and LiveToon 1.0. ...Read More »

Pegasys, Inc.'s TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress with Leadtek SpursEngine Hardware accelerator By John Virata TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress is a video encoder application along the lines of Sorenson Squeeze, Apple's Compressor, and Adobe's Media Encoder. It has been around for quite a while, but doesn't seem to get the press that the other tools get, despite the output quality being very good. The application offers support for NVIDIA's CUDA technology as well as Leadtek's SpursEngine hardware accelerator. ...Read More »

Team Creates Excitement For The "Boys Of Summer" Furthering its relationship with ESPN, Washington, D.C.-based TEAM (www.teamgroup.tv) developed a series of 31, 45 second program teases for the cable channel's airing of the 63rd Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA. ...Read More »