Creative Workflow Hacks

There was a recent thread on the ae list about backup and archiving. For a large organization like Primal Screen, it’s still really hard to beat tape backup for compact physical storage and cost per gigabyte, but for individuals it’s really common to use optical media for backup.

An equally common question is, “What media should I use?”. There are a ton of manufacturers, OEM’s, and generic media on spindles. Luckily, Patrick McFarland has done most of the research for you in his article How To Choose CD/DVD Archival Media. He gives a history of different flavors of optical media and recommendations on which flavor to use as well as specific manufacturers he recommends. Very useful stuff. Hopefully, he’ll take the time to breakdown his recommendations on Blu-ray and HD-DVD once the dust settles there.

I try really hard to be platform agnostic in the work that I do. When somebody feels more comfortable with a given tool or piece of hardware, productivity gains are likely to dwarf the costs of acquisition and support. That said, I’ve always been a bit of an Apple fan boy. Recently, I’ve also started to do some programming in Apple’s Cocoa environment and, despite the fairly steep initial learning curve, I’ve been amazed at how quickly a single developer can develop useful tools on the platform.

So, I was primed to enjoy the Apple Leopard tech talk as it rolled its way through the last stop of a 9 city North American tour. I can’t go into a lot of detail because of the NDA, but I left really inspired by the tools that will shortly be available. Apple’s frameworks make it really easy to develop compelling applications where they do so much of the work for you and the developer is able to concentrate on the parts that make the application interesting for his or her niche.

I also think it’s likely if you’re supporting Mac environments that you should plan on quick adoption of Leopard. There are some really compelling technologies that will be Leopard only and my gut says that a lot of must-have applications will start to appear that will require a Leopard install. Apple has traditionally had a quick adoption curve, especially compared to the folks toiling away in Redmond, but I bet it will be an even quicker ramp up with this release.

Phillip Hodgetts writes an exhaustive overview of Final Cut XML at kenstone.net. Phillip covers an overview of XML, some currently shipping products that support Final Cut XML, and speculates on future applications of the standard. It’s a really good read and a great overview for anybody hoping to get their head around the possibilities of Final Cut XML.
(via capria.tv)

When asked to recommend an After Effects book, I’m quick to reach for Adobe After Effects 7.0 Studio Techniques by Mark Christiansen. Mark has a really in depth knowledge of After Effects and is a master at explaining difficult concepts in an in-depth, but approachable manner. So, I was excited to see that he has started a blog called flowseeker.

Mark writes…

This space will contain thoughts on matters relating to my book - digital cinema and visual effects compositing in particular - as well as whatever other miscellany takes hold. Paradoxically, it’s the way that writing these monologues/blogs puts people more in touch with other people that compels me to do it. By all means, especially if you liked the book, let me know what you want to hear more about. …

I’m really looking forward to following what Mark has to say. I’m sure it will be insightful, just like his book.

Have you ever had a bunch of Quicktime movies or Image files that you needed to lay out in Final Cut Pro? Maybe you’re making an element tape for delivery to a client, or prepping a bunch of lower thirds and titles for your program.

I find myself doing this kind of thing all of the time, and they all follow a certain set of rules. Something like, each element should be at 5 second intervals with a minimum of 5 seconds between each element, rinse and repeat. If you’re like me, you grab all of your elements throw them in a timeline and do the Carpal tunnel inducing dance of the up/down arrows. There has to be an easier way right?

Well, with Final Cut XML, there really is an easier way. Element Drop is a super simple drag and drop application that lays out a Final Cut timeline of Quicktime movies or Images. Drag and drop a bunch of elements on the application and Final Cut Pro is launched and each element is layed out in a timeline based on user preferences. Chapter Markers can be included for super easy approval DVD’s (Tutorial to come).

There are a lot features like Auto-filled Slates, Automated Log Generation and Timeline Database Integration that I can see adding, and I’d love to hear feedback on features as well as bugs. Element Drop only works in OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and above and should work with Final Cut 4.5 and above. The application uses Spotlight metadata to identify files, so in this version you will need to drop elements from indexed volumes, I’m considering using file extensions to identify files as a fail safe in future versions.

UPDATE 01.15.2007

Thanks for all the initial feedback it’s been very helpful. There turned out to be a couple of show stopper bugs related to sorting, drop frame calculations and file discovery that I am currently working out. I’ve updated the expired beta, but at this point it is more of a tech demo of the direction I’d like to see the utility follow than a useful tool. Feel free to download it and report bugs and features. I’m also working on a detailed bug list so you can see limitations.

UPDATE 01.22.2007

beta 3 Fixed file sorting problem, this makes the beta usable again. Still working on drop frame calculations and more robust file discovery.

UPDATE 02.06.2007

beta 4 Modernized interface with focus ring feedback. Need to fix: drop frame calculations and file discovery by extensions.

.zip archive of Element Drop

Please send beta feedback and bugs to dale(at)creative-workflow-hacks(dot)com.

The third beta of Element Drop will expire in 30 days

Lloyd Alvarez recently released his BG Renderer script for After Effects 7 which will work with both Mac and Windows. BG Renderer is a handy script for managing background rendering tasks including launching multiple instances if you have multiple CPU’s. Lloyd’s put a lot of work into this script and it shows.

If you’re looking for commercial software to get more bang for your rendering buck, take a look at Nucleo and Nucleo Pro from GridIron software.

As I take a chance to catch my breath after a bunch of big projects, I’ve been taking a look around to see what’s happening with other folks. While I was doing research I ran across the scripts, expressions and experiments at nabscripts.com. nabscripts is written in french so although I’ve noticed it in the past, it’s on my blogroll and nab is a regular poster at aenhancers, I haven’t dug into his (her?) site as much as I might normally.

Well, recently I ran across his collected scripts in english, and I must say they are a really nice set of scripts. I particularly like the auto orient camera script and createCylinder script. There are also a ton of utility scripts for making your every day life easier. The script collection section is also available in the original french. Nice work all around.

Apple has posted new sample code demonstrating some new Final Cut Pro interchange features. Including…

• AppleEvent commands to communicate with and control Final Cut Pro.
• QuickTime metadata to identify and process movie files.
• Version 3 of the Final Cut Pro XML Interchange Format to access and modify the contents of sequences in Final Cut Pro project files.

Once configured properly, MovieAssembler monitors a watch folder for newly copied media files, using ID tag(s) stored as metadata to specify if and where a particular media file should be inserted into a selected sequence. All of these operations, while performed in Final Cut Pro, are initiated and configured from the MovieAssembler application.

This is really good stuff. I’m just getting back to having time to explore FCP Interchange, and I’m having some pretty good results which I hope to demo here soon. I like the watch folder idea, which seems to match my thoughts that, at least in this version, these apple events are best suited to asynchronous work like chron jobs. My hope is that in the next version we get an FCP specific dictionary so we can interact real time with the FCP UI.

Have you ever been confronted with a browser full of material in Final Cut Pro that you were unfamilar with or needed to get reaquainted with? Something like this…

There are a lot of ways to refamiliarize yourself with the content. Open up clips in the viewer. Throw them in a sequence. Check out the Finders Quicktime preview. One method that I find quite handy is to use FCP’s Thumbnail scrub feature.

Read the rest of this entry »

Apple released Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 (pdf link) which addresses a lot of the problems that I’ve been running into lately. I want to take a bit of time to dig into the extensive bug fixes, and folks are already doing just that, but one change that I was not expecting really caught my eye. A new version of the Final Cut XML interchange format introduced some new elements.

The two that I find most interesting allow for management of metadata in QuickTime files and management of project components. I’ve only read the summaries and there could be some implementation gotchas, but what these appear to do is to open up a lot of the project management possibilites I’ve been hoping for in Final Cut Pro

If you develop a rich catalog of media and a strong database you should be able to build, replace and alter projects based on your workflow using elements like replaceiffound which replaces a target component if found. and addifnotfound which adds the imported component to the project provided the target component is not found. Combine that with adding and altering metadata in Quicktime files your workflow can really be enhanced. Obvious stuff like all files for a project as well as non-obvious, fuzzier ideas like all clips in a certain color range. Very cool. Time to dig in.

UPDATE: 09-27-2006 So, the glue that will hold this together is a set of 7 apple-events to use as an interchange between your custom app and FCP. Lots of possibilites. Download the sample app here.

SECOND UPDATE: 09-27-2006 Well, it looks like this gets us part of the way there. The apple-events seem to work nicely for sending to FCP, but it still doesn’t have an applescript dictionary which I think means we won’t be sending anything (like maybe the selected clips in a sequence) from FCP with this update. What that means is you’ll be able to do cool batch processing on the days work as a chron job and have lots of interesting data, but won’t be able to do things like space elements in a sequence unless I’m missing something. There are some private and undocumented data interchange protocols, but those require reverse engineering and are going to be out of the scope of your average power user or scripter.If anybody knows more please post a comment.