Beyond Naked trailer released today

Documentary Data wrangling demystified, part III: Organizing for the Edit in FCPX

In part I of this post about data wrangling a feature-length documentary, we covered protecting your footage. In part II, we took a look at documentary film storage requirements. Today I’ll explain how we organized our footage in preparation for editing in Final Cut Pro X.

Here’s an overview of the workflow we used during production to get footage off our cards, stored safely, and organized for retrieval. Note that this is a dual-system workflow – we always recorded audio separately from video, requiring us to sync clips later in post in a workflow that I’ve previously covered.

1. Copy contents of video SD card into a new folder located within the project’s “Footage” folder (using naming convention below).
2. Copy contents of audio SD card as above into project’s “Audio” folder.

We stored the media on our Drobo Pro, a raid-like system that protects data in case of a drive failure.

Folder Structure for Organizing Media. The foundation of our organizational work begins at the Finder level, with a simple but powerful folder naming convention:

“YYYY-MM-DD two to four keywords”

Here’s a partial snapshot of our film’s audio folder:

You’ll notice that some dates have more than one folder. We created a new folder for each shoot, which helped immeasurably to quickly find footage later in the project.

The nice thing about using this date format as a prefix to tagging is that your folders will always sort in order. If you put the tags first, that wouldn’t be the case. And adding two to four keyword tags that succinctly describe the shoot allowed us instantly identify the contents.

3. Stills, if any, are copied into “Stills” folder, using same naming convention.
4. Back up data onto another hard drive which is stored at another location.

Item 4 is the hardest bit to keep up. In practice we tended to copy and move the files offsite at milestones in the project – after a particularly big shoot, about midway, after wrapping, etc.

In hindsight, our biggest workflow mistake was neglecting to view dailies. Most often, we would simply skim through footage after a shoot to ensure it was looking OK. But we never made time to properly review dailies. We figured we’d do that when it came time to edit. And that was a mistake.

One of our lavs developed a short halfway through production, and we never discovered the problem until post. Everything recorded in the second half of production with this mic sounded tinny. It required heroic EQ work to make it usable. Luckily we were paranoid and almost always recorded with a lav AND a boom mic.

Further, I wish we had begun to edit a few sequences together soon after shooting, instead of months later. That would have helped us discover whether we were covering scenes well enough to cut them together easily. Instead, we had to learn all of this the hard way months later when we finally got down to serious editing. Too often we discovered that we didn’t shoot enough b-roll (people without their lips moving, or just their hands, or ANYTHING that we could cut away to) to build the dialog easily.

Prepping for editing in Final Cut Pro X The day we wrapped production was the day Apple shipped Final Cut Pro X. We dove right in and never looked back. But it was difficult at first to understand Apple’s new “Event” and “Project” terminology.

I initially thought that it made the most sense to create one monolithic Event, and import the entire film into it. Wrong! Final Cut loads all open Events and Projects into memory, so everything slows to a crawl if too many clips are open concurrently. It’s best to have as few Events and Projects as possible open at a time.

So what we ended up doing, which worked very well, was to create an Event structure that mirrored our folder structure almost exactly. We created a new Event for every shoot, titled YYYY-MM-DD plus two or three descriptive keywords. So after import, like so:

Importing and organizing into FCPX is not trivial when you’re talking more than 4 terabytes of footage. It took us about a month and a half of work to get all of our footage moved over from raw storage and organized the way we wanted them in FCPX Events. Seriously, it was a LOT of work. It wasn’t as simple as hitting the “import” button.

To Proxy or not to Proxy? Proxy media is 1/4 resolution ProRes files, which FCPX can create for you on import. With FCPX, it’s a dead-simple process to create and use proxy media. When importing, just check the “proxy” box.

It takes quite awhile to generate proxy media, though, so with serious amounts of footage, be prepared for some lengthy transcode times. With Final Cut Pro X, you can be doing other things at the same time, albeit a bit sluggishly.

I would argue that it’s almost essential to use proxy media on a feature-length project, because you’ll likely need to have many Events open at a time. And proxy will give you the ability to open many more than you would with full resolution media. Luckily, it’s easy to switch back and forth between proxy and full resolution at any time. Press cmd-, to call up preferences, select Playback, and choose “Proxy.” We didn’t have to switch back to Original Media again until we were ready to start creating assemblies.

After making proxies, our next step, and the most tedious and time-consuming part of our workflow, was audio syncing. I’ve outlined our audio syncing process and it worked very well, but it added a lot of time to the process. I really wish Final Cut Pro X had a way of batch syncing audio automatically. You can use PluralEyes, but I’m not crazy about the mess it leaves behind. It requires a lot of cleanup if you like to maintain, as I do, a clean separation between media and projects. So I prefer DualEyes.

A note about this workflow. If we had been on FCPX from the beginning of our film, this process would have been much smoother, because we would have been doing this import > transcode > audio sync process daily, instead of facing it all at once at the end. I definitely recommend making this a part of your dailies ritual it time allows.

The most significant improvement for Final Cut Pro X to add, from my feature-length perspective, would be to make it possible to load an entire film all at once. I simply couldn’t do it with my hardware (3.4 GHz Intel Core i7 2011 iMac, 16GB ram, AMD Radeon 2 gig graphics card). Attempting it just displays the spinning beach ball. I’ve since tried it on my new 2012 MacBook Pro, on which I can just get the entire film to load. Even then, it’s too sluggish to make it practical. But it makes me suspect that Apple’s playing the long game with FCPX – by the time next year’s Macs are released, the hardware may well have caught up with the software on this, allowing FCPX to work acceptably well feature film situations.

As a result of this, we spent a stupid amount of time over the life of the project just moving Event and Project folders back and forth between Final Cut Events and Final Cut Events – Hidden folders. Each time, we had to restart FCPX. Tick, tick, tick…

It wasn’t until the very end, when I was audio mixing the film, that I discovered Event Manager X, a $5 utility that makes this process relatively effortless by allowing you to create lists of Projects associated with Events. It let’s you move them and restart FCPX with a single click. If you’re cutting your feature doc on FCPX, this app is indispensable.

Getting organized inside of Final Cut Pro X With everything imported, audio synced, and proxified, a final step remains: adding metadata. Final Cut Pro X provides a two incredibly powerful ways of organizing footage: Smart Folders and Keywords.

Smart Folders

Our first step is to create smart folders that split our media into types: audio only, video only and sync video. Smart folders are just standing searches, or filters, that allow you to display everything that matches your query. When you create a smart folder, you can specify what you’re looking for. In the case of our Audio only example, it looks like this:

For our Events, we generally wanted to be working on sync video when we got down to editing, because that was the best sound. But sometimes we had video for which there was no audio recorded separately. It’s easy to set up a Smart Folder that will tell you at a glance which files are which, by adding additional qualifiers to the search:

You can take this pretty far, but we found that for most Events, we could find everything we needed with just three or four smart folders.

Event structure for sharing Projects between editors As the project took shape over time, we shared Project files back and forth between two editors, my partner Lisa and I. We discovered that it’s very important to “lock” Events and add the inevitable new media that become necessary during post (such as sound effects, archival footage, archival stills, etc) to a new Event, rather than adding them to existing Events. That’s because if they’re added to existing Events, it’s too hard to keep track of who has the most current Event. Then, when you share a Project, you don’t know if there will be missing media when the other editor opens it.

Our solution was to create an Event called “BN Additional Footage” and another called “BN Music and SFX.” We added all the new files to the appropriate folder, and then whenever we shared a Project, we included just these two Events to ensure no missing media. This made Project sharing much more manageable.

Keywords

Keywords are the second most powerful way to organize footage in FCPX. I reach for Keywords whenever I can’t figure out a way to do it with a Smart Folder. For example, this shoot was rather long, and consisted of five different “scenes”, as follows:

Tagging each part of the shoot with a descriptive keyword gave me a way to instantly find only those clips. I tend to use Keywords to break apart Events into chunks like this. My partner, Lisa, tends to use them to identify her favorites, and clips that would make good b-roll. You can use Keywords however you like.

Favorites The last step of getting organized might actually be considered the first step of editing: making favorites. My process for this involved standing at a desk, with my finger hovering over the “i” and “o” keys, as I played back the footage. Whenever I saw or heard something that looked promising, I’d make a selection and press the “f” key to mark it as a favorite.

To make it possible to find your favorite later, it’s essential to add a text descriptor. I add mine by typing it into the “notes” field, which I reposition to display just to the right of the “name” field in the Event Browser (click and drag on the field to move it).

If the favorite is extra special, I use a simple notation I learned from Werner Herzog at Rogue Film School. Herzog has a notebook open on his lap when reviewing footage. When he sees a favorite, he writes down the timecode, with some brief descriptive notes. If thinks it’s pretty good, he adds a * with it. If he likes it a lot, he puts two, **. Finally, for footage that he “would have lived in vain if it doesn’t make it into the film,” he puts ***. I do the same, substituting the notebook with FCPX’s notes field.

So there you have it: what worked for us. Yet there are many different ways to accomplish the same thing in Final Cut Pro X. What’s your favorite organizational technique?

Documentary data wrangling demystified, Part II: Choosing storage

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In this multi-part post, I share how we managed digital media on a feature-length documentary project. In Part I – Securing Your Footage, I covered how to prevent data loss. Let’s continue today with a look at primary storage for a tapeless workflow. Next time, I’ll cover organizing your media for editing in Final Cut Pro X.

Primary storage. On a documentary, it’s typical to shoot for a long time before production wraps. In our film Beyond Naked, two years elapsed from first shot till locked picture (nearly a year in production, and more than a year in post). The amount of resulting footage can easily surpass that of a narrative film. So if you’re making a doc, you’re likely to have some serious data demands.

On my first short film a few years back, I solved storage problems by simply filling up individual external hard drives. Then I’d back them up by mirroring them to other drives. The problem with this approach is that it’s a pain to perform this backup every time you add new media, and so like anything that’s a pain, you end up putting it off. Before you know it, it’s been weeks since you backed up. So when a drive fails, you’re really going to be screwed. And as the old data wrangler saying goes, “it’s not whether a drive will fail, but when.”

So forget primary storage on individual hard drives. As a first line of resistance against data loss, you MUST be able to replace a defective drive without losing anything. That means selecting a RAID. Or something like it. (For a thorough discussion of RAID types as they apply to video editing, check out this post by Larry Jordan.)

Throughout the production of Beyond Naked, we used a Drobo Pro for our primary storage. It uses a proprietary RAID-like system (called “Beyond RAID”) that has some advantages over traditional RAIDs. By default, it’s configured so that if one drive fails, you can replace it without any data loss. You can even configure them so that two drives can fail simultaneously. The tradeoff is that you get less storage space.

Drobos are also hot swappable, so recovering from a drive failure is as simple as pulling the failed drive, and shoving in a new one. Everything will magically pick up right where you left it (although it takes a few hours of read/write time before the recovery is complete). During production, our Drobo experienced a massive failure that prevented it from booting up. It was heart-stopping, but all we had to do was remove all of the hard drives, and send the unit back to Drobo. Even though it was a few months out of warranty, Drobo sent us a replacement Drobo Pro, no questions asked. When it arrived, we very carefully plugged the drives back in, held our breath, and turned the power on. The lights blinked on, red at first, then green. Good to go.

Another benefit of Drobos is that they can handle any type and size of SATA drive you can fit into them, including SATA 3. So as drives get bigger, faster and more affordable, you can replace smaller ones with bigger ones (if you have an older Drobo, a firmware upgrade is required to recognize drives larger than 2TB). We started with 4TB of storage on our Drobo when we purchased it in 2009, and today it’s grown to 16TB. We’ve still got plenty of room to expand.

But there is a major down side to using Drobo Pro: it’s slow. Really slow. Despite being advertised as connecting at up to 100MB/sec via gigabit ethernet, I have found this connection to be totally unstable. Using it invariably causes my 2011 iMac (as well as my previous Macbook Pro) to freeze and require a force-reboot. Repeated support tickets to Drobo have yet to resolve the issue.

So for Drobo Pro, Firewire 800 is the fastest connection I can count on. Here’s what that means on my editing suite:

Unfortunately, that’s nowhere near fast enough to edit HD video. As a safe place for simply storing media, though, it works fine.

If I were purchasing a primary storage today, I would stay far away from any system that didn’t support a Thunderbolt connection. If you want a recommendation, I would heartily recommend the Pegasus Promise R6, after the great experience we’ve had with our Pegasus R4, which I’ll elaborate on shortly).

Storage for Editing. By coincidence, the day we wrapped principle photography on our film was the same day that Apple released Final Cut Pro X. As a frustrated Final Cut 7 user, I made a snap decision to switch. I don’t regret that decision for a minute, despite all the venom that oozed from the professional editing community. FCPX has given me (an artist, not an engineer) god-like powers to skim through mountains of data, and has put wings on my editing. Still, there were challenges.

It turns out that in order to live up to its billing, FCPX demands fast everything (a newer computer, a Thunderbolt connection, and zippy drives). We couldn’t afford to purchase a Thunderbolt RAID that would hold all 4.5 terabytes of original media for the film, but we did scrape together enough cash from our remaining Kickstarter funds to purchase a 4TB RAID.

Calculating storage space. This raised a question: If we used FCPX to create proxy media for us, would the entire film fit on a 4TB RAID with enough free space left over for editing?

You guessed it, there’s an app for that. The best one is called Katadata. AJA Datacalc also works, but with a more rudimentary UI. The beauty of Katadata is that you can select your camera type, and options narrow immediately to those supported by your camera, making the menus much easier to navigate. The app also automatically adds multiple shoot info, and offers the option to email the results of your calculation. Katadata costs $4.99 in the App Store.

We calculated that after converting to proxy, we could fit the entire project into about 2.5 terabytes of proxy footage. So with the last of our Kickstarter funds, we purchased a Pegasus Promise R4 (the only Thunderbolt drive manufacturer actually shipping drives at the time) and set about the task of importing and organizing our footage for editing within FCPX. I’ll cover how we handled that task in part III of this post.

The Pegasus R4 turned out to be amazing for us. Just take a look at the performance we’re getting with ours today, with the project finished editing, and the drive way more than 3/4 full:

An important aside: avoid letting your drives grow beyond 3/4 full for best editing performance. Hard drives require some headroom in order to perform at their peak. Things can really slow down as a drive approaches getting full, so just be keenly aware of that and never let your editing storage drives get too full.

Another Pegasus R4 plus is that it’s relatively small, about the size of a toaster. At least, as long as this drive was parked on my desk, it seemed small. But after a month of daily packing it up and transporting it to my co-editor’s place for work, it began to seem rather large. The cardboard box that it shipped in began to fall apart, and I searched in vain for a Pelican case that would neatly contain it for secure travel. I looked everywhere, and discovered they don’t make one.

As an aside, if you’re thinking “I’ll just use my internal hard drive for editing storage,” that probably won’t work. On all but the newest computers with SSD drives or Apple’s new Fusion drives, an internal drive’s bus connection is slower than it will be via an external connection like ESATA or Thunderbolt. You’re better off using external storage for another reason, too: inevitably at some stage of the film, you will need to take your media with you (to a colorist like John Davidson or an audio mixing facility, for example). However, if you have a 2012 iMac, you might want to forget everything I just said and use your screaming fast Fusion drive to edit on, as long as you’re backing up regularly.

Fast, portable storage. As we got deeper and deeper into editing, Lisa and I needed to share files more and more often. We opted for Lacie 2big 4TB Thunderbolt drives. The most economical place to purchase them, we found, is MacMall, which routinely sells refurbished ones for under $300. We got two of them. We were initially reluctant to buy refurbished drives, but our budget constraints forced our hand, and they have performed flawlessly. You can fit one into a Pelican 1400, with room for the Thunderbolt cable stowed in the top lid under the foam, with the power cable off to the side below.

Because we wanted maximum performance, we left them at Raid level 0, their default. Which yields this:

At RAID 0, if one of the drives fails, you lose everything on the drive. But as long as you remember this is editing storage – not primary storage – it’s less scary. If something fails, you don’t lose footage – just the work you’ve done in editing it. So of course, regular backups are absolutely critical. It would be far more secure to set these drives to RAID level 1, but this results in significantly slower editing response times in FCPX. And I’ve found that if I have to wait for my hard drives when I’m editing, I get distracted, and pulled out of “the zone.” So we committed RAID 0 and to making regular backups.

Storing in more than one location. Having all the original media stored on the Drobo meant our footage was safe if one hard drive failed. But what if the house caught on fire? It’s a common-sense good idea to have your film media in two places just in case. We couldn’t afford to buy a second Drobo. So we simply filled up a bunch of older 1 and 2TB Lacie drives from our previous project. We copied all our original media onto these, and put them in a box in Lisa’s closet. Offsite backup – check.

Is this archival? No, but… for our purpose, it doesn’t need to be. Studies show that disconnected hard drives in storage lose about 1 percent of their data-holding capacity per year. But experts say that you can safely store data for 2-5 years without danger. So as a good, short-term solution, it works. Just don’t put them in a drawer and forget about them, or you may be sorry in 10 or 15 years.

Ultra-portable storage. One final note about storage. When I was in the UK over the holidays last year, I took the film (proxy only) with me on a single Lacie 2Big Lacie, intending to do first pass sound mix and color correction on my MacBook Pro. I realized after I arrived that I had forgotten about 1/4 of the files! Altogether they totaled about 600 gigs. Way too much to transfer over the sketchy internet connection at the place I was staying.

So Lisa, back home in Seattle, simply loaded the missing files onto a USB 3 2TB WD My Passport for Mac portable external hard drive. It is so tiny it fit into a DHL envelope. The cost of shipping from Seattle to England ($100) was almost as much as the cost of the drive ($150).

WD claims the drive is “ulta fast,” but even on my MacBook Pro 2012, with USB 3, it clocks modestly compared to Thunderbolt:

We will be tasking this drive with doing on-set file backups on many of our shoots in the coming year.

OK, so we’ve got storage covered. Next question: How does one organize media for feature-length documentary film editing? I’ll address that in my next post.

Documentary data wrangling demystified, Part I: Securing your footage

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Our first day of shooting Beyond Naked dawned with great promise. On Dec. 21, 2010, the sun broke through a thin layer of clouds and climbed over Seattle’s Kite Hill, where I was waiting with my camera. I knew that in 6 months, on this spot, we would shoot the final climactic scene in the film. This morning, however, alone with the crows, I tilted my camera down into a puddle and captured a timelapse of reflected orange clouds that would eventually become the title shot in the film.

A few hours later, I shot another promising event. This one, however, would not make it into the film. In fact, no one would ever see it. That’s because, less than 24 hours into production, I had already begun to lose footage.

We had 3 shoots that day, which resulted in quite a few sd cards to keep track of. As I was offloading media, I probably mistook one of the full SD cards for an empty one. I didn’t even realize it was missing until weeks later, because we hadn’t created a “dailies” plan to review our footage as it was shot. If we had, we almost certainly could have recovered it. Even if we had formatted the cards, it would have been a simple matter to recover them before they were used again using inexpensive recovery software.

This was the first of many data wrangling lessons we learned while shooting what ended up to be 4 terabytes of media. In this mutli-part post, I’d like to share the relatively inexpensive but feature-film capable system we devised for storing, organizing, retrieving and editing our media. Our simple system took us all the way from initial import to finished film – without any more lost footage.

Securing the take. A secure workflow begins with securing your media. And organizing it. As a first step toward doing both, I purchased an SD card Pelican case designed to hold more cards than you’d likely ever use in a full day’s shooting. It resembles a book. On the left side, stored with labels facing up, I inserted formatted cards, ready for use. The right side started out empty. As the shoot progressed, I placed used media, label down, into the right side. This gave me a double safe way of keeping track of which cards contained footage awaiting import.

This system worked extremely well – except when I didn’t follow it. This is where I have to tell a brief, unflattering story about the one time I failed to use this system. While filming the most important scene in the film, the climax of the the parade, I was operating a steadicam in a sea of naked cyclists when my SD card ran out of space. I was so eager not to miss the action that I just popped open my media case, grabbed a fresh card, and shoved the full card into my left pocket. A little voice whispered “store it properly in the case.” I didn’t listen.

An hour later, in a euphoric moment atop Kite Hill at the completion of the ride, my cast and crew surprised me by chanting for me to get naked. As a show of solidarity, I caved. I whipped my pants off and danced a brief celebratory jig. As I pulled them back on again moments later, the little voice said. “Check your left pocket.” I reached in and a chill shot down my spine: it was empty.

I lost it. I heard myself yelling at everyone to back up as I desperately scanned the ground around me for the bright blue chip. Nothing. I knew instantly that the card could have fallen out a hundred places as I had jogged down the parade route. What are the odds I would find it? A tiny glimmer of hope – that it had flown out when I pulled off my pants – faded as I searched the muddy, wet ground crowded with naked people.

One of the stars of the film, Molly Meggyesy, was nearby and asked me what was wrong.

“I think I just lost the most important footage of the entire film.”

“I’m going to find it,” she said.

She took one decisive step, leaned over, and came up with it. “Here you go,” she said. “Is it OK?”

Unbelievably, it was.

I suppose the lesson here is that it’s best to keep your pants on when shooting a film. But I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. And I’ll pick up next time with Part II of this article, selecting primary storage for documentary film.

FxFactory Pro plugins for FCPX

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I was recently invited by Noise Industries to review their FX Factory Pro suite of visual effects for Final Cut Pro X. It’s an easy yes for me, since I purchased the $399 library last year and have used them in some way on most of my projects since. Full disclosure: I received a review license prior to posting this review, but I had already purchased the suite, so I’m not in any way being compensated for sharing my experience.

First, some clarification: when you install FxFactory Pro, what you’re actually installing is two things: a tool kind of like Apple’s App Store, in which you have access to other developer’s plug-ins from within a single app, and a suite of plug-ins called by the same name, FxFactory Pro.

Installing FX Factory Pro is painless and fast. However, by default, not only the FxFactory Pro plug-in, but all third-party plugins, are installed – probably a lot more than you want or need. Having more effects than you need not only clutters the interface, but I believe it can slow down your machine.

Update: Niclas from Noise Industries contacted me with this clarification: “Having many effects active will not “slow down you machine” in general.

It will affect the time Final Cut Pro X takes to startup after the effects are first installed, as Final Cut Pro X needs to build the “list” and register everything that’s new. These results are then chached, so the next time you launch Final Cut Pro X it will again startup quickly.

It will affect the speed of browsing through effects, simply because there are more there, and manipulating a larger list is more taxing.

It will however not affect rendering speed, or the speed of Final Cut Pro X in general.

Luckily, the FX Factory app makes it easy to manage which effects are installed. At any time, you can open the app and select which plugins you want to have enabled. You can add trial versions of plugins that you may want to try, too.

To disable unwanted plugins, and more, open preferences for the FxFactory app:

When I got ready to create the credit roll for our recently completed doc, Beyond Naked, for example, I went looking for a plugin to help with formatting text. I started my search on Google, and ended it on my FxFactory app, already installed on my computer, where it was a snap to enable Rolling Credits, a SugarFX plug-in. I ended up purchasing it and it saved me a lot of time in creating the credits for the film, looks great, and provided tons of options for display. But it’s technically not part of FX Factory Pro, so I’ll save a review of Rolling Credits for another post.

Since FXFactory Pro comes with 176 filters, generators and transitions, you may find yourself scratching your head when it comes time to find the one you need. Or maybe you’re not even sure what you’re looking for. That’s part of the fun of having an effects library – you can browse until you find something that catches your eye. But I don’t have time or patience to do that for long. Here’s what you do:

Open the FxFactory app, and click the “info” window.

You’ll get a complete listing of each of the 176 items in the suite.

Slide your mouse over the one you’re interested in, and you’ll find a help link, and in some cases, a video tutorial that shows you exactly how to use the tool.

Clicking help brings up a comprehensive description of the effect, transition or generator:

Clicking “tutorial” opens a YouTube page with a tutorial:

FxFactory has done a killer job of showing you how to get the most of this suite. You just have to know where to look. And in my experience, knowing how is the difference between thinking about doing something and actually doing it. I give FxFactory Pro major props for helping users get the most from their suite.

Meanwhile, back in Final Cut Pro X, you’ll find that the FxFactory installer has done a good job organizing things into three categories: Transitions, Effects, and Generators. Let’s take a look at each more closely.

Transitions:

Transitions are easy to overdo. But there are times where a clever transition can bring your edit to life. I found myself looking for a special way to open a promo video I recently cut for Seattle Interactive Conference (see below).

I needed a way to get into the piece that was glitchy and electronic. This is, after all, a tech conference. Inside FxFactory Pro I found Channel Switch, and it was perfect.

This transition, like most included in this suite, offers lots of options for customizing the look, timing, and other variables in the Inspector window. There are also presets that can be accessed inside the Viewer:

You an also save your own presets for later retrieval.

I used another transition in the SIC video, called Slice. This one has a techy, pixelated vibe that matched my content nicely.

Effects:

Early into this video for SIC, I wanted to briefly pixelate the entire screen to emphasize the speaker’s pointed question. I found the perfect tool to accomplish this among the dozens of effects in the FxFactory Pro suite, called Pixelate.

It does what it says, providing the ability to keyframe the application of the effect. So it was a snap to make the pixels appear suddenly and fade back into the normal display.

The many effects included in FxFactory are organized in your Effects Browser into the following categories:

Blur
Color Correction
Distort
Glow
Halftones
Sharpen
Stylize
Tiling
Video

The reason I purchased FxFactory was for one killer effect: Light Rays. It adds beautiful streaks of light that spread from the light areas of your frame into the dark areas. It works best when you have an image such as this one, where you’ve got a light source in the background and a dark frame in the foreground that contrasts with the light rays:

Generators:

About the only two I’ve found reason to use are the Banding-free Gradient and Timecode.

The gradient is, as it’s advertised, banding free, well, almost. You’ll need to play with your export quality and add diffusion and reduce sharpness to dial it in. Timecode is an improvement over the generator included with FCPX, but in the end it does the same thing: overlays timecode so that you can, for example, have a conversation with another editor you’re working with and be able to instantly reference and find the spot you’re looking for.

Two other broad categories of generators are included: pdf animator and slideshows. I tried out the slideshow and it works fine if you simply want to drop it on a large number of stills quickly. It has a rather unusual quirk in how it works: you drop the generator into the timeline as if it were a clip, then use the onscreen controls to choose a folder of images. This breaks the FCPX convention of storing all media in the Event library, and while that may seem convenient, I think I’d rather go to the effort of importing my stills into the Event Library, so I don’t have to wonder whether I’ve got all my media when sending a copy to another editor. You can still use it this way, but it would be easy to end up with stills scattered all over your system and on various hard drives using this generator.

I think every editor will find that having a solid library of effects, though seldom used, is as indispensable has having a mouse to go with your keyboard. And FxFactory Pro, with it’s growing list of third-party party plugins and support resources, is a great place to start.

Event Manager X eases the pain of feature-length editing on Final Cut Pro X

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My partner Lisa and I have just emerged from a marathon two weeks of editing our feature-length documentary, Beyond Naked. Too much of that time, I am pained to say, was spent loading and unloading events and projects. Final Cut Pro X has issues after more than a dozen or so large events are loaded (our film drew on 2.5 terabytes of proxy media alone, so loading the entire film at once was completely out of the question).

Somehow we got through the incredibly tedious process of manually moving dozens of Event and Project folders back and forth each time we needed to work on a different sequence. Working this way gave me new respect for what it must have been like in the days when editors actually had to make physical cuts on real film, stored on countless reels.

As a quick aside to anyone snickering “I told you how much Final Cut Pro X sucks,” I will state that my confidence in FCPX remains unshaken. I have really only one other negative thing to say about FCPX in this entire project from start to finish, and I’ll save that for another post. But suffice it to say that I remain a huge fan of the creative power of FCPX. It gave wings to our imagination on this film.

We locked picture last week, and I headed to England, where I am now, for a family vacation, taking a proxy version of the film with me on a Lacie 2big Thunderbolt drive for audio mixing.

And here, without Lisa looking over my shoulder telling me which file I had loaded already and which one to load next, is where I finally threw up my hands and said “there’s got to be a better way.” I wish I had done this weeks ago. Because, as it turns out, there is a better way. It’s called Event Manager X, and it’s a magical $4.99 utility designed to do just one thing: load and unload events and projects for you.

Our film has 33 sequences (projects in FCPX terms) from opening sequence to credit roll. Each sequence has Events associated with it. Event Manager X allows me to create sets that associate Events with Projects. When I’m ready to work on a new project, I simply switch over to Event Manager X (EMX), select the project I want from a popup menu, then press the Move Events and Projects button. Without ever dragging a single folder, all the old events are put away, and the new ones are brought online, and FCPX is restarted so it can load them. I can’t overstate how beautiful this is.

Before we discovered EMX, we would have to have four windows open, and constantly drag events and projects back and forth between Final Cut Events and Final Cut Events – Parked, and between Final Cut Projects and Final Cut Projects – Parked. It’s amazing how many times we accidentally dropped files into the wrong place, occasionally even losing them. When you’re sleep deprived, and if you’ve ever completed a feature-length edit than you know what I’m talking about, you shouldn’t be expected to do that with 100 percent accuracy. In our experience, sometimes the difference between actually looking at a clip and not was thinking about how much work it would be to load it up. No longer.

Suddenly, instead of pushing folders of files around, I’m actually getting work done. Instead of juggling lists of event names in my head, I’m solving creative problems.

Someday soon, I hope that FCPX can automatically do this. Until then, there’s Event Manager X.

Bug behavior alert: There is a behavior in Event Manager X that causes the last item you’ve checked to become unchecked when you switch to another application while building sets. This is a problem if you are switching between FCPX and EMX to create sets. For example, if you start to create a set in EMX, than switch back to FCPX to see which events you need to add, the event you last selected becomes unselected when you switch back to EMX.

Workaround: Write down all the events you’ll need in the set in Text Edit, make sure the document fits on the screen beside your EMX window, then copy them all down at once without switching between the apps.

Update: Philip Hodgetts, the app’s creator, responds “this is planned behavior you’re falling foul of. In order to keep Event Manager X in “sync” with the Finder, it rescans the hard drives, and updates the interface, every time you switch back to Event Manger X.”

Bug alert 2: If for some reason your hard drive is disconnected while making a set (as happened to me when power unexpectedly went off at my brother-in-law’s place where I’m staying in the English countryside, where apparently this happens all the time), all projects and events managed by EMX will turn red and it won’t reconnect to the drive when it is plugged in later. Instead, it creates a new, empty set. This means you will lose all of the work you’ve done creating your sets (the popup menus will remain, but none of the events or projects they contain will be selected). I call this a major bug, because I had spent hours building my lists when it happened to me and I hard to start all over again.

Update: I discovered this bug is actually worse than I thought when power was cut for a second time to my hard drive AFTER I had rebuilt my lists. This time I fully expected that I would simply restart when power came back on, and everything would be jiggy. But no, no no. Oh no. Same thing as above: all my carefully built sets appeared in red, and nothing can reconnect them with the drive, even though it is now mounted. So here I am at 10:58pm rebuilding my EMX sets for a third time. Grrrr.

Further update: Gregory Clarke of Assisted Learning adds this (a bit of a kluge, but a way to save some of the retyping):

Basically the set you’ve made is keeping the file paths for the wrong volume now it’s been connected again. It occurs to me though that the Sets database is just a text file, so you could carefully find/replace the wrong volume name with the right one.

In your user’s Library/Application Support/Assisted Editing folder is a file called Event Manager Sets.yml. Open that in a text editor and you’ll see the contents. The item labelled “name:” is the set name, and “array:” is the baths to the Event or Project folders.

Good Shape; flawed design

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When I was shooting in Alaska a few weeks ago, I did a lot of long-lens shooting with a follow focus.

I took a critical piece of equipment with me, without which everything wobbles out of focus at the slightest touch. Here it is:

It’s a Shape Lens Support, and it does a brilliant job of holding long lenses steady while shooting and focusing. One thing I discovered: when using with long glass such as my Nikon 300mm f/4 and with a Canon 70-200 f/2.8 zoom, it’s essential to place the support at the every tip of the lens, rather than at midpoint. The follow focus has to be placed in the middle between the two points of contact – between the lens support at the lens mount. Otherwise it doesn’t work at all.

One thing that happens on documentary shoots where you’re dragging gear around all day is that anything that can come loose generally will. This Shape lens support looks well designed – solid metal. But it’s significant flaw is that if the black tightening knob the holds the vertical bar comes loose, there is nothing to prevent the whole thing from unwinding and falling apart. That’s what happened to mine when I was standing on grated deck. I heard the clank and watched the parts drop through the metal grid of the deck and disappear into the Cook Inlet. Bummer.

Luckily it happened toward the end of the shoot. When I got home, I sent an email to the folks at Shape asking if they could sell me the replacement parts. They did one better: they shipping me the part for free.

How’s that for classy?

I’m not a fan of this particular design, but I am a fan of Shape’s customer service. And I look forward to trying more of their gear in the future.

New work with Jason Silva

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I had an opportunity to meet Jason Silva after he delivered the keynote at this year’s Seattle Interactive Conference. His enthusiasm for his ideas is absolutely contagious. Jason told me he liked the sound design of our SIC 2012 teaser video so much, that he wanted me to cut his next “cinematic espresso shot.” What’s not to love about someone in love with bold ideas?

The results of our collaboration are now complete, and judging by the number of views (more than 5,000 plays in the first three days) it could well become the most popular video I’ve had a hand in making yet.

This was pretty much an editor’s dream gig: an open-ended opportunity to freely interpret huge ideas with awesome stock footage (most of it from shutterstock.com) and sound effects (most from Sound Ideas – a great company from my old stomping grounds in Richmond Hill, Canada). I even managed to sneak in one of my own shots. Can you guess which one?

Gearing up for Blackmagic Cinema Camera with SSD dock

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One of the nice things about the Blackmagic Cinema Camera taking forever to ship is that it’s allowed me time to slowly acquire the additional tech that this beast requires to run. The big one, of course, is SSD drives. I picked up a SanDisk Extreme 480GB (SDSSDX-480G-G25
) drive on Black Friday for $285, a smokin’ deal for a card that retails for around $350.

Reports from those lucky enough to have the camera already reveal that in it’s current version, there’s no way to get footage to offload from the camera directly. Hopefully this will be addressed by a future firmware update. For now, at least, this means we’ll need to mount the card into an external case of some kind to offload footage. As far as I can find, no one yet makes anything as simple as a CF card reader for these devices. But I discovered one manufacturer who makes something pretty close: The Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt adapter. It’s relatively cheap at a hundred bucks, and I can attest that it works fine with at least one of the drives on Blackmagic’s approved list, the aforementioned SanDisk Extreme SSD 480k. With a little work, I’ve discovered it can get the job done nicely.

There’s a slight problem with this drive combo: it doesn’t work when plugged directly into a 2011 MacBook Pro. Apparently the portable macs Thunderbolt port doesn’t supply enough power (it works fine with my 2011 iMac). The good news, though, is that it DOES work when plugged into the Thunderbolt port of our externally powered Lacie 2big Thunderbolt drive. And that is how we intend to use it in the field: to offload files directly to the Lacie. So we’re good. But it won’t work if you intend to lay off directly to your MacBook’s internal drive.

If you insert the disk bare, which is what you want to do when swapping cards in and out of the Blackmagic Camera, there is a gap under the card, which could be dangerous because it causes the connection to bend and it might ultimately break with use. To fix, I took a stack of business cards, and taped them down. You’ll have to use trial and error to pick the exact number to fill the space perfectly. Like so: