This tutorial shows you how to create a glowing lantern effect in Final Cut Pro using the Light-rays Glow filter and some video generators. It isn’t fine art, but this will show you how to create some amazing effects, easily, on your own system.Easy, I thought… use Light Rays.
A reader writes that his 10-year-old daughter is interested in editing and wants to know the best gear to buy and how to get trained in FCP. This is a great question, but the wrong question. This article explains that it isn’t the gear, its her interest. Fan that first, then buy gear second. You can read how here.
As we gear up for the 2010 NAB Show – where the Digital Production Buzz is the Official Podcast of the event – I thought you’d be interested in the gear we are using and how we are using it. Next month, I’ll report on what we did.
Garbage mattes are a fast way to exclude portions of a frame that you don’t want the viewer to see. This article shows an example of using garbage mattes to hide light stands in a music video.
I discovered this technique to be very useful when I want to make a shot-by-shot comparison between an existing movie and a sequence.
Gamma settings control the gray-scale midpoint. The reason this is significant is that Macs, video, and Windows all use slightly different settings. This means that video that looks good on one system, may look washed out or too dark on others. Snow Leopard, however, has changed the rules. In this article, I explain what gamma is, how to use it, and where to set it.
How do you capture the screens from a game. There are a number of screen capture utilities on the market. This article explains which works best on the Mac for capturing a game.
Three of the most powerful keyboard shortcuts in Final Cut Pro are blocked because OS X uses the same three keys differently. This article shows you how to remap the OS shortcuts to release the power in Final Cut.
The world of HD is awash in incompatible formats. Worse, it has eight different frame rates. And selecting the wrong frame rate in After Effects can make your video uneditable in Final Cut Pro. This article explains what you need to know.
Flip cameras, and other inexpensive devices, capture footage in a variety of unusual formats. This article explains what you need to know to work with it inside Final Cut Pro.
Trying to decide what hard drive to buy? This article explains the differences between FireWire and SATA, and how to select the one that’s right for you.
This technique shows you how to get the most from your FireWire drives, from partitioning through formatting to daisy-chaining.
Here’s a secret technique that allows you to add the default transition to any number of selected clips in the timeline — all at the same time!
A quick technique to use when you need to find a specific clip.
Over the last few versions, Apple has added new options in Final Cut Pro that make finding clips a lot easier. In this Technique, I want to show you what some of them are. Whether you are looking for clips in the Viewer, the Browser, or the Timeline, here are some very cool, and little known, techniques.
This technique describes an interesting effect combining a traveling matte and a pond ripple filter which allows you to color an effect as it moves across the screen.
One of the biggest challenges editors face is getting organized at the start of a project, then staying organized during a project. Here is a collection of tips and techniques from a variety of readers than can give you the system you need to get on top of your project.
By default, Final Cut only displays one field of video – this makes images much easier to view while editing. But, sometimes, you need to see both fields. This very, very short article explains exactly what you need to know.
“Interlacing” is a term that confuses many people. This article explains what it is, how to work with it, and how to remove it in both video and stills.
Video is hard enough to understand. Throw in fields, frames, field order, and interlacing and it’s enough to make you cry. In this article, I explain what you need to know to successfully navigate around the land mines.