Category Archives: Editing

Luck? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Luck!

“Wow, you are lucky to be working on such great projects” is the type of statement that sounds like nails on a chalkboard to some editors. I am not one of those editors, but I understand not wanting to have … Continue reading

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Politics of a cut

There is a saying in editing that you must be willing to ‘slay your babies’.  In other words, you must be willing to cut out very good (or even great) material that you love if that material does not serve … Continue reading

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Migrating away from FCP 7 is not always simple

I know many people are surprised that FCP 7 (a.k.a. FCP Legend in some circles) is still so widely used (myself included) two years after Apple killed it, but maybe we shouldn’t be.  There’s the universal ‘if it ain’t broke, … Continue reading

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Which NLE should students learn?

An interesting thread about which NLE is best for students to learn  popped up over at the Creative COW and I decided to summarize my thoughts on it here. Since the goal is to introduce students to the art of editing I … Continue reading

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Difference between frame rate and timecode.

There are lots of head-scratchers in the world of video and I don’t think many are more perplexing than fractional frame rates and drop frame vs non-drop timecode.  I won’t get into the technical history of why frame rates like 29.97, 23.98, … Continue reading

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Return of the Pizza Box?

The recent, um, ‘upgrade’ to the Mac Pro followed by the unconfirmed leak (which was later confirmed) about real upgrades possibly coming to the Mac Pro next year got me thinking again about what a totally redesigned Mac Pro could look like. My theory is … Continue reading

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FCP 7 Media Manager and custom sequence settings

Although FCP’s Media Manager function was pretty dicey in the past (it was commonly called the “Media Mangler”) it achieved ‘reliable’ status by the time FCP 7 came out.  It does still have some limitations though.  For one, you can’t … Continue reading

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Rolling with the punches and doing your home work

A large part of workflow development is adapting to new problems as they come up.  Even the best made plans can quickly spiral towards catastrophe if just a single link in the chain breaks.  This happened to me not too … Continue reading

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Transcripts are awesome

Just in case you missed the title of this post I’ll repeat, transcriptions are awesome. They can be read faster than the source material can be watched. They can be keyword searched. They can be emailed to anyone and read … Continue reading

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Don’t up-rez footage in FCP

On a number of occasions I’ve seen, or read about, people dropping SD clips into HD timelines in FCP and just letting the program automatically scale the SD footage up to HD. While quick and convenient it doesn’t generate very … Continue reading

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