Crash Test Trailer wins a Gold Empixx Award

I’m happy to announce that the book trailer I made for “The Outsider’s Guide to the CrashTest Nation” by Rho Mack has won a Gold Empixx award.

The Empixx Awards may not be the Emmys, but I’m still proud to be recognized by other professionals.

BackToTheEdit.com – Non-Editing Essentials for Video Editors

Chances are, your passion for video editing centers around story telling. And, chances are that you find yourself doing less actual story telling than you’d like.

One day, I realized that I was working at a company with “Editing” in the company name, that my business card said “Editor”, but I was spending much less than half my time at work actually editing.

In looking at what I was actually doing as a professional editor, I realized I had picked up a lot of tricks for getting done with the menial tasks. These tricks helped me get back to the edit, and get back to story telling.

I’ve started to share these tips, tricks, and hacks with others, at my new site, Back to the Edit. Check it out, pass it around, and let me know if there are any parts of your job as an editor that you’d like to see sped up.

New Demo Reel Up

I have posted my Summer 2011 Reel, with all kinds of fun graphics and shots that show a bit of my aesthetic side.

I am happy to be back on the market as a freelancer, and while I’ve stayed busy so far, I realized a new reel would keep the work flowing in. I’d love to hear what you think!

Book Trailer for “Crash Test”

“The Outsider’s Guide to the CrashTest Nation” is a young adult book for non-readers, by Rho Mack.

I worked with the author to capture the playfulness, mystery, and suspense of the novel in a book trailer she could use to market the book, including a Kickstarter campaign to fund the book’s art.

I made heavy use of Motion’s emitters for the clouds and various rains.

This was done on a tight budget, so I did things like use my iPhone as the mic, and used my laptop as a green screen.

Shoots that require taking bites of donuts are fine by me.

Fading to black correctly

One of the first things I learned at my first internship was how to properly dissolve with multiple layers of footage. I began to notice incorrect dissolves in the wild, and it still drives me crazy, 5 years later. To me, it’s a sign of a sloppy edit.

There are several signs that a composited image is being dissolved incorrectly. First, you can see through things that should be solid. Second, white parts of the image seem to lag behind everything else in the race to black, causing a glowing effect.

Here’s an example- I’m green screening this lovely woman over her company’s logo and a beautiful background.

Here’s my layers- Background on the bottom, then the logo, and then the woman.

It’s all good- until I need to fade in and out. The sloppy way is to simply put dissolves on each individual track.

Quick and easy, right? Maybe, but you end up with a fade that looks like this-

Suddenly, the talent has a red moustache from the logo. She has also turned into a ghost, letting the background shine through her. The white in the logo seems to glow abnormally. Sure, this all happens in less than a second- but it is enough to ruin the idea that the talent is actually in front of the background. You can pull the best key in the world- but if you do this, it reveals the fact that it’s all fake.

So how do you do it correctly? There are two ways. My preferred way is to add slug to a track above the rest, and fade it in or out.

This keeps everything properly composited, in the correct visual order.

Another method is to nest the layers, and then fade the nest in and out. Again, this keeps everything in the proper order.

Here is a loop of the wrong way to dissolve:

And the correct way to dissolve:

Customize the FCP Help Menu

Say you have an in-house manual that details organization, storage, archival, all that nitty-gritty. Or maybe you have a style guide for a particular client. Or perhaps you’re the system administrator, and want everyone to have quick access to your contact info in case something goes wrong. Or, you are a prof, and have a syllabus that you want all your

These are all very helpful things to have, but if an editor can’t find them, what’s the use? Why not add them to the Final Cut Pro help menu?

Note- this is serious, under the hood stuff. Don’t do this unless you are very comfortable, and have all necessary permission from your boss, system administrator, professor, and spiritual adviser. Keep a backup of FCP, just in case something goes wrong.

Also, I’m still on FCP6, so I can’t guarantee this works in later versions.

To start, copy Final Cut Pro.app from your Applications folder to the Desktop. On your desktop, rename it to “FCP HACK.app”. We will work on the hack version, to make sure we don’t permanently mess anything up.

Right click “FCP Hack.app”, and choose “Show Package Contents”. This puts you inside of the Final Cut application. Navigate to Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Final Cut Pro Help/. Open up HelpMenu.plist in a text editor- TextEdit will work, but I prefer TextWrangler.

The Help Menu in Final Cut pulls from this XML file (actually, a PLIST file, which is like XML, but isn’t actually valid XML). Each menu item is between “” and “”. To add an entry to the list, simply copy an entire section (including the starting “” and the ending “”) and paste it where you want it to go. Replace the necessary strings, and you’ll be good to go.

Here’s the full entry for the “Final Cut Pro Support” menu item, that open up the support web page.

<dict>
<key>Title</key>
<string>Final Cut Pro Support</string>
<key>URL</key>
<string>http://www.apple.com/support/finalcutpro/</string>
</dict>

The format is a key, and then a string. Basically, this sets the “Title” key to “Final Cut Pro Support” and

Here is the full entry for the New Features menu item.

<dict>
<key>Path</key>
<string>New Features.pdf</string>
<key>Title</key>
<string>New Features</string>
</dict>

To add a new file, put it in the “Final Cut Pro Help” folder. Change the path string to the file name. You can also link to any file or application on the system, by putting the absolute path to the file in the path string. For instance, if the file is on the desktop, you can change the path to “/Users/username/Desktop/filename.jpg”. Note that “~/Desktop/filename.jpg” will not work. Also, note that if the computer has multiple users, make sure that all the users have permission to view the file.

To put in a divider line, put in the following code- “”.

Once you are done editing the file, save it, and launch FCP Hack.app. Test out your new menu options. Here is my menu, with links to my Web site, and to open Final Cut Server.

If everything is working as it should, you can rename the application to Final Cut Pro.app, and place it in the Applications folder. I would suggest backing up the original program, just in case anything goes wrong.

A side note- I don’t know if this hack would survive an upgrade, but my guess is that it probably won’t.

FXPlug Intro Video

One of the major benefits of Final Cut is a robust developer community, with lots of plugins. I started messing around with plugins about 3 years ago, starting with FXScript. FXScript is very simple, and allows you to write the plugins right in Final Cut. However, it’s not very powerful, and likely won’t be supported in FCP X.

The next step for plugin development is FXPlug, which has been around for awhile. By now, most major for-sale plugin developers are using FXPlug. FXPlug works in Motion and Final Cut, and supports both software and hardware rendering.

I’ve been working on learning FXPlug, and have found a lot less documentation than what was available with FXScript (which wasn’t much). FXPlug definitely has a much higher learning curve, which I think affects the type of community support.

I recently found this overview of FXPlug by Darrin Cardani, an Apple developer. It’s from 2007, and not great quality, but it is by far the best introduction and overview of the SDK that I have found. If you are familiar with Objective C, this quickly shows you the basics of FXPlug.

You can watch the video from Toolfarm.com here.