Blog Archives

Beat is a free Mac app for media creators where you develop the story, plan the production, long form or short, then, on the shoot day, Beat has all the information you need on set, including a dynamic shot list and production timer. Here’s an interview with Joao Lutz, its creator, to learn more.

Editor Client Engine helps you find work faster by giving freelance video editors one place to decide who to target, build a stronger offer, evaluate prospects, create personalized outreach and follow ups, handle replies, and keep opportunities organized. I interviewed CEO Highness Kiwia to learn more.

Jason Bache founded Nerds Limited back in 2009. Recently, to support his daily podcast, he challenged himself to build a broadcast-quality studio that fits into two Pelican cases and delivers the same experience as a permanent studio. Here’s what he created.

PostProAnalytics (PPA) is a Mac-based application for automatically analyzing working hours and project activities in DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere Pro, and After Effects (more applications are coming soon). Its focus is on the business side of editing.

ShadowTag reads and writes every major audio metadata standard — ID3v2, Vorbis Comments, MP4 atoms, BEXT, iXML, XMP, and UCS (Universal Category System) — in a single application, and organizes files into playlists without moving or duplicating them on disk. Here’s news about the latest version.

ReelNotes is a stand-alone app that “is a media logging and note-taking workspace for filmmakers, editors, researchers, journalists, students, podcasters. It supports all Mac-based NLEs. Here’s an interview with its developer, Hassan Amini, to explain how it works and who it’s for.

Where do AI-powered tools fit in managing media? This question was sparked by a MediaValet article that I think misses the mark. Here are two different perspectives on where AI fits best.

Clip Sweeper is a macOS app that finds the unused footage in your Premiere or Resolve projects and helps you reclaim that drive space without the fear of deleting the wrong thing. Learn more here.

Recently, Ahmed Qady sent me two tools that he uses in his company (QOMY). The first is a way to organize media and related assets before production starts, and the second is a checklist used to catch mistakes just before a project is delivered.

Sequence is a native macOS app that combines on-device transcription, text-based editing, audio cleanup, globally indexed search, and finally the hand-off to Final Cut Pro. Larry Jordan interviews James Setton, CEO, to learn more.

Digital media skills for students are no longer supplementary. The question is where do students get their skills. Apple Creator Studio, for all its imperfections, is an answer to that question.

In this short video, Larry Jordan answers a common question: How should I optimize my Mac to get the best performance in video editing. Larry also discusses how much RAM you need for video editing.

Here are detailed instructions on how to optimize storage and media for editing large projects in Apple Final Cut Pro.

This session started with a question from a reader: “I’ve heard about markers in Premiere for a long time, but I never bothered to use them. What are they, how are they used, and what are the benefits?” This was such a great question that Larry Jordan answered it in last week’s webinar.

Last week’s release of Adobe Premiere 25.6 contained a stunning new feature: Media Intelligence-assisted search. In this short video demo, Larry Jordan shows how this new search feature works and what makes it so powerful.

An amazing new feature Adobe added to Premiere 25.6 is content-sensitive search using Media Intelligence. Search on visuals, audio, text, metadata or all four. Here’s how it works.

Trimming is where the real magic happens in editing. It adjusts where two clips touch. Generally, you can drag the edges of a clip to change where an edit occurs, but Final Cut provides a wide variety of other tools that make trimming faster and, most often, more accurate. Larry Jordan demos how these work.

In this short video, Larry Jordan shows how to optimize preference settings, which options to choose, and what they do. He also explains the settings in the Media Import window, which can make a major difference in how easily you work with the media you are importing into your project.

A common support question that Larry Jordan gets is how to work with media in Final Cut Pro. In this short video, Larry Jordan provides a background on where to store media, which format to use, when to optimize it and other media questions.

This illustrates different workflows for transferring media between DaVinci Resolve and Axle AI, a popular media asset management system. It also provides recommendations on working with metadata.

Bill Clough is a retired journalist, having spent 60 years behind a viewfinder, a microphone or a keyboard. He’s developed two acronyms to prevent problems during production and post.

Whether you love it, hate it, or simply accept it as “the way things are,” vertical video is everywhere – especially on social media. In this short video excerpt, Larry Jordan shows how to create vertical video projects in Apple Final Cut Pro 11.

This illustrates different workflows for transferring media between Adobe Premiere Pro and Axle AI, a popular media asset management system. It also provides recommendations on which will work best.

This illustrates different workflows for transferring media between Apple Final Cut Pro and Axle AI, a popular media asset management system. It also provides recommendations on which will work best.

Unlike any other NLE, there are two ways that media can be stored and referenced by Apple Final Cut Pro: Inside or outside the library. This tutorial explains how to move media, and provides a fast, emergency method to access media locked in a library.

Mark Townsend, Studio Technologies, highlights their latest offerings at IBC 2025.

Gary Rosen, VP of Global Sales for Pliant Technologies, showcases their latest products at IBX 2025.

Michael Cioni, CEO of Strada, comments on the impact of AI on media today.

Dr. Marc Batschkus, Director of Business Development at Archiware showcases what’s new from them at the show.

Larry O’Connor, CEO of OWC, shares his thoughts on the current impact of AI on media technology.

Michael Cioni, CEO of Strada, explains what’s new from Strada at IBC 2025.

While Fusion can do lots of amazing things, it also has a learning curve that goes straight up. In this short video excerpt from his webinar, Larry Jordan introduces the Fusion interface, moves a clip from the Edit page into the Fusion page, then add a simple embedded text title into the clip.

Creating favorites of titles and clips to share between projects is easy in DaVinci Resolve 20. Except… the entire process is hidden by default. Here’s how to create favorites for your own projects.

In this short video, Larry Jordan illustrates the differences between duplicating a project and creating a snapshot. There are CLEAR differences and one big winner.

This is a flat-out amazing interview and photographs! Philip Grossman is a documentarian, cinematographer, technology consultant.. and absolutely fearless. His documentaries inside Chernobyl and Fukushima won international praise. Here he discusses his gear, his technique, and his thoughts on media itself.

In this age of smartphones with incredible cameras, it is easy to take high-quality images for granted. But when working with older film prints or slides, quality is not a given; especially for images shot by non-professionals. In this tutorial, I show how to adjust scanner settings to rescue images and make them look great.

Media Intelligence is new with Premiere Pro 2025. It searches “for your perfect shot using language based on imagery, spoken words, or content with embedded metadata like shoot date, location, or camera type, all at the same time.” Here’s how it works.

Sigh… the worst just happened. Your Premiere Pro project is corrupt and won’t open. Now what? There are a number of options you can use to restore your project and get back to work quickly, as Larry Jordan explains.

We are shooting more media than ever, distributing it in more ways than ever, and continually returning to our archives for new material to feed to social media long after the original event is done and gone. I asked Sam Bogoch, CEO of Axle AI, what questions we should ask in choosing a media asset manager.

“Most video editors are broke by choice,” Brian Alves posted on LinkedIn. “Why?, he continued, because “they panic when it’s time to price.” Here are some pricing tips from my business seminars that can help you make more money on your next project

Axle AI is a media asset manager (MAM) that runs on Mac, Windows and Linux computers. In this short video, Larry Jordan showcases the features of Axle AI and how a MAM can extend the power of video editing software like Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, or DaVinci Resolve.

You buy Media Asset Management (MAM) software to extend how your current video editing tool finds and tracks media. But there are a lot of options in the market today. Here, Larry Jordan presents some key questions you need to ask when deciding what to get.

This short video, presented by Larry Jordan, describes what Media Asset Management (MAM) software does, how Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve currently handle media, and how a MAM can extend what they do.

Siamack is new to Final Cut and struggling to organize her media. In this video, I provide a variety of organizational tools she can use, with a special emphasis on keywords.

Adobe is adding “Media Intelligence” to Adobe Premiere. What is this new video search tool? What are its limitations? And how will this impact the thriving market for media asset management software? This includes an interview with Max Lund, CEO of Jumper.io.

Paul asks: “Is there a way to always import files into a Final Cut Pro library by default?” The answer is that storing files in the library IS the default, but it is easy to change accidentally. Here’s how to reset and verify your storage locations.

Most of the preference settings in Adobe Premiere Pro are fine. But, not all of them. In this short video, Larry Jordan shows which preferences you need to change to improve performance.

Recently, I made a mistake that destroyed all my existing projects. Here’s what I did, and here’s what I learned: how to archive projects, how to restore from backups and where to set the initial Resolve Project Library.

Templates are simply customized project files for Premiere or Audition that are saved to a specific location, then accessed whenever you create a new project. These can significantly speed your workflow when you are creating similar projects over and over.

In this interview, Larry Jordan and Andrew Takacs discuss the remote production tools QuickLink provides, why they are needed, how they are used, and their new integration with collaborative software like Skype and Teams.