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.

Add file types to Compressor Droplets

Compressor Droplets can be extremely helpful- but recently I ran into an annoying issue with them. You can’t just drop any file on to the droplet- this is a good thing if you accidentally drop, say a text document, on to the droplet. But it’s frustrating when you can’t drop something legitimate onto the droplet.

Why won't it let me drop?

I ran into this with .caf files, a perfectly legitimate audio file, that I knew Compressor could actually handle from past experience. Whenever I tried to drop a .caf file onto a droplet to convert it to a .aif, nothing would happen. I could open up the droplet, and drag in the .caf, but what’s the point of a droplet if you can’t drop?

It turns out there is a solution. Right click the droplet and choose “Show Package Contents”. A new Finder window will pop open with all the guts of the droplet. Open up the file “Contents/Resources/Info-Stomplet.plist” in a text editor. I prefer TextWrangler, but TextEdit should work.

Next, find the line that includes “CFBundleDocumentTypes”. Under that, it will have an “array” node, and then a “dict” node. Select from that to the next “dict”, about 13 lines. Copy that, and paste right before what you had selected. Edit it as follows-


<dict>
<key>CFBundleTypeExtensions</key>
<array>
<string>motn</string> // UPDATE to the file extension you want the Droplet to support
</array>
<key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
<string>Motion Project</string> // UPDATE to the name of the file type
<key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
<string>Viewer</string>
<key>LSTypeIsPackage</key> // REMOVE if not a package
<true/>  // REMOVE if not a package
<key>NSPersistentStoreTypeKey</key>
<string>Binary</string>
</dict>

Save the file. Now, open up the Terminal, which is located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app. Type “touch”, and then a space. Drag the droplet from the Finder into the Terminal. The command should now say something like “touch /Users/username/Desktop/droplet.app”. Hit enter. This command reminds the application to update.

You should now be able to drag other files on to the droplet.

See? Making movies is easy.

Note that this doesn’t mean that Compressor will actually be able to use the file. It only means that you can make the Droplet try to submit it. For instance, if you try to turn an AIFF into a image sequence, that won’t work.

An April Fool’s Joke for FCP

If you’re still looking for that perfect April Fool’s Day joke, this may be just the thing you are looking for.

Imagine this- your hapless assistant editor is editing away, la-de-da, when all of a sudden they come across an offline clip.

To do this- go to your Applications folder. Right click on Final Cut Pro.app, and choose “Show Package Contents”. A new window will appear, with the guts of Final Cut.

Navigate to Contents/Resources/English.lproj/, and find Localized.plist. Make a copy of this file somewhere- you will want to restore this to the original after the joke is over, and have a backup in case something goes wrong.

Find the line “DrawString(“Media Offline”, 0, -r[2].v/10, r[2].h/320*4, dest, kWhite, 1)”. You can change the “Media Offline” to anything you want.

You may also want to change the text size in the line above, “SetTextSize(48*r[2].h/320)”. Only change the “48″- the rest scales it so it looks the same across all formats.

Disclaimer- you are messing with the inner coding of your livelihood. Be careful. Keep a backup, and restore after the joke is done. Remember this may show up while a client is in the edit bay. Please don’t blame me if this all goes horribly wrong. Also, I know this works on FCP6, haven’t tried it out on 7. Let me know.

And yes, I realize this would be much cooler if it was for the unrendered effect. However, that code is apparently stored in “Localized.rsrc”. I attempted to change that file, and Final Cut refused to launch, and then launched without any labels on any of the windows. Below is the save dialog I was presented with. I was able to fix everything because I had a backup.

Let me know how it goes for you!

Quicktip on ProVideoCoalition

Scott Simmons is doing his 28 Days of Quicktips over at the ProVideoCoalition site. This year, he accepted reader submissions, and mine got in!

I export a ton of video to XDCAM Professional Discs at work (I think I’ve averaged 2 or 3 per day for the last year), and like any repetitive task, have tried to make it as quick as possible. One part of that I’ve covered here is exporting to XDCAM with correct timecode and audio channels.

This Quicktip covers another area of exporting, that can mean the difference between making your deadline and missing it.

Read the Quicktip here.

One note- this is on FCP 6, and I haven’t had a chance to see how it works on FCP 7.