Videocracy Blog

As I’ve written about in the past, I’m a fan of Netflix…
and it seems two major announcements were made this week, first is that Netflix on demand, which is their online viewing service for those who have an unlimited account with Netflix, will now be able to watch them on the Mac, utilizing the program Silverlight…

The second bit of news for Netflix is that they will now be partnering with Tivo and you will be able to watch Netflix on Demand movies through your Tivo…

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20081030/wr_nm/us_tivo_netflix

Well, as you may have read previously… I LOVE keyboard shortcuts, and I LOVE sharing them here…

I could go and read all the shortcuts, but I find that the best way to learn them, is to stumble across them, in order to make them part of my workflow, I have to stumble across them, say “Huh… that’s cool” and then start using them.

I know I learned all of them once upon a time, all at one time… but you know, that’s a lot of information all at once… so either it’s gonna be an “Ah hah” moment or, as I said above, a “That’s cool” moment…

Today’s is a “That’s Cool” moment…

I discovered that when using an Instant Messenger program, or even Firefox, hitting CMD-(#) i.e. CMD-3 will switch to the 3rd tab in the browser or IM Window… (I know this is probably fundamental… but it’s new to me, which is great).

Well just out of curiosity I did the same thing in Final Cut Pro… thinking that it would switch between the different project sequences I had open… and instead it activated different windows (Broswer, Canvas, Viewer, Timeline)… So I find that CMD-1 activates the viewer, CMD-2 activates the Canvas, CMD-3 Activates the Timeline, and CMD-4 activates the Browser…

Pretty Cool huh… another thing that I learned is that if you activate it, and then hit that same command again, it opens/closes that window… so in case you want to peak underneath… just hit that shortcut again.

I look foward to the next Tip I can share…

incidentally… if you got www.LarryJordan.biz, Larry offers a Final Cut Pro daily…

So this one seems fundamental… but it’s something that I often overlook.

When I work in Final Cut Pro, I will often times lay my clips out on the timeline, with a lot of space in between each clip, and then I begin to add transitions and effects. When I work this way, I am often moving clips from far down the timeline, all the way to the front of the timeline… meaning the end of the edited clips end at 2 minutes, and I have a clip placed at 4 minutes… and I need to bring it down to the 2 minute mark on the timeline. Phew… I don’t know of that made sense but… I hope it does.

Here’s what I usually do to move it…
- Zoom out of the timeline so I can see the end of the edited sequence, and the clip I want to move at the same time… With snapping on, I put the scrubber bar at the end of the edited sequence. And then I select the clip I want to move, click and hold and drag it down the timeline until it snaps to the scrubber…

That works, but here’s an alternative.

- Zoom out of the timeline so You can see the end of the edited sequence, and the clip you want to move at the same time… With snapping on, put the scrubber bar at the end of the edited sequence. Then select the clip you want to move… NOW here’s the difference… Delete it. That’d right CMD-X… Okay yes that’s really the cut command. Now without moving anything or doing anything paste it… CMD-V. It will paste right where you want it…

Again, like I said… this is completely fundamental… but it’s often a shortcut I forget to use… and that’s why I wanted to share it…

So I learned, or in this case re-learned a shortcut in Final Cut Pro…

Extend Edit… very simply, if you want to make the clip on the timeline longer, or shorter, position the scrubber however longer or shorter you want the clip to be, and then hit “e” this will make the clip longer or shorter, and it eliminates having to click the trim edit point and drag it to the new length.

Keep in mind, you have to have the trim edit point selected in order to do this…

So I had my first experience with the digital TV tuners yesterday… I helped my grandparents install three boxes at their lake house… now first thing I should mention, is that for years we have been getting bad reception from the arial antennae… some stations came in clear, some came in fuzzy… some didnt’ come in at all… and I know from years of visiting the lake house, that you just had to ignore it if you wanted to be entertained…

Well, as I joked “There’s no more need to put tinfoil on your TV Antennae.” (remember those days?)

The box was easy to install, I had to do some figuring out how to do the VCR and the Antennae, but with the use of a 2 ways splitter I managed to make it work…

So the picture is crystal clear… and we picked up stations that we weren’t picking up before, like CBS 58 in Milwaukee…

plus not to mention the .1 .2 .3 stations, one that I found particularly interesting and amusing is the traffic camera… it shows you the traffic throughout Milwaukee… and there is a computer speech program reading the reports…

My grandfather kept saying “We don’t even need cable!” And it seems he’s partially right… we were getting so many stations that there is something to watch on any of them…

A few drawbacks that I saw though were blocky pixelation sometimes, particularly when you go to the station. I can only hope it doesn’t get worse in bad weather…

Also, the lag time for the station to come in was about 10 seconds… you had to stare at a black screen for that amount of time… I don’t think that’s pretty exceptable for channel surfers…

But it did tell you what program was on when you got to the station, which was nice, i did like that feature…

It’s an interesting change in TV history…

No I’m not talking about the Robert Altman movie…

I’m talking about Keyboard shortcuts for Final Cut pro…

As I advance in my usage of FCP, I start to discover some tricks and shortcuts so you dont’ have to go through countless menus just to do one thing.  I’ve always been a big fan of keyboard shortcuts, as I never liked navigating around with a mouse…

Here are a couple new ones that I learned in the last few days…

This first one I learned on Sunday from a Audio Editor…
Control – Minus (-) or Control – Plus (+) — This raises or lowers the volume of an audio track without having to open it up in the viewer. You must have that audio file selected on the timeline in order for it to work…

The next two I was aware of, but I could never get them to work…
By setting your default transition, and then clicking on the trim edit point of the clip in the timeline, you can hit CMD-T and it will place that edit there for you. For example I use a dissolve as my default transition. Now this doesn’t necessarily work with an audio transition, as far as I can tell… but if you save the audio transition as a “favorite” you can place it by doing the same thing and then pressing Control-Shift-(#) if you have 5 favorites it assigns each one a number… in this case it’s Control-Shift-3.

The last one I figured out is pretty rudimentary… I can’t believe I didnt’ think of it before. At the end of one clip I want to put a 15 frame black spot before bringing in the next clip. So what I was doing is snapping the scrubber to the outgoing clip, and then tap my arrow keys 15 times. And then snap the incoming clip to the scrubber bar. What I realized I can do, is snap the scrubber bar to the outgoing clip, and then just punch in +15 and it moves the scrubber 15 frames forward. Of course this doesn’t work if you have anything else selected, so you simply click anywhere to deselect anything that might have been selected.

I’m sure I’ll learn more… and when I do… I’ll share them.

Take a look at this, it’s on Canon’s website… this film was shot entirely using the Canon Digital EOS 5D Mark II, which is a DSLR Still camera, using the video function.

Has anyone had a chance to see Slacker Uprising yet?

Check out these lights that you can control using your laptop, PDA, or iPhone…

No getting up on ladders….

here.

Here’s a look at Adobe Creative Suite CS4, some new changes that look pretty interesting, including a text to speech transcription recognition software…

The only program that I use on a regular basis is Photoshop, so I’m more interested in a CS4 upgrade to that, and I’ve never been a big fan of Adobe Premiere… or any of the video/audio sound editing software that Adobe comes out with…

Which is too bad cause their design sweet is great, and Flash (which they acquired from Macromedia) is a great and powerful program.

More here at this article…here.