The new iPhone was released yesterday, along with the much awaited App Store. Now, without going through the tedium of jailbreaking your iPhone or (in my case) your iPod Touch, you can install third party applications.
Over at The Editblog, Scott Simmons had some ideas for filmmaking applications for the iPhone. One of his ideas was a Final Cut Pro remote, similar to the iRemote for iTunes. It would allow you to control playback remotely.
You’ll need to install VNSea or TouchPad, both of which have not been added to the App Store yet (sorry). VNSea seems to work a lot better for me. Both use the VNC protocol, so you’ll need to set up Screen Sharing in your System Prefs. I also had to set up my router to handle it. Here’s a video tutorial on how to set it up.
Once you’re all set up and are connected, launch Final Cut Pro, and set the Video Playback to Digital Cinema Preview Main. Hit CMD- F12 to turn on All Frames. The video should be full screen. Now, bring up the keyboard on your iPhone in the VNC program, and go to town. J,K,L keys are good for playback. Set markers with M. Also useful will be I and O for setting the in and out points. Key combinations with shift also seem to work.
So once a VNC viewer comes out in the App Store, definitely try it out. Or don’t upgrade, and jailbreak it, and try it there.
Good idea, Scott!
UPDATE: Although I have not tried this program, Mocha VNC has appeared in the iTunes App Store. It is $5.99, but there is also a free Lite version. I assume both will be adequate for controlling FCP.
Very hot idea – no idea how I’d use it, but great nonetheless. It would be cool if something like Remote Buddy would support it (which gives you a custom UI for controlling it).
All credit for the idea goes to Scott Simmons over at the Edit Blog.
But it appears that Remote Buddy should be able to do this- any program that has the ability to type on the computer with FCP can do this. It’s basically using the iPhone as an external keypad.
Thanks for this info James … this looks like a nice start to something that might have promise in the future, as long as there are folks like yourself smart enough to figure it out for dummies like me!!