| Feature:
Macworld 2006 Round Up |
January, 2006
MACWORLD
FCPUG SUPERMEET 2006 featuring Walter Murch
Click pic for large View
Main event photography:
Michael Pliskin, www.pliskindesigns.com
Photo Panoramas: NeoTron Design, www.neotrondesign.com
Slide Show photos of the event can be
found HERE
 Click HERE
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An Evening with Walter Murch took place at the Club
Mezzanine in San Francisco during Macworld Conference
and Expo, on January 12, 2006.
The video features the legendary Walter
Murch, a three time Academy Award winning Editor and Final
Cut Pro user who has worked as a sound designer, film editor,
writer and/or director on feature films such as JARHEAD,
COLD MOUNTAIN, THE ENGLISH PATIENT, THE CONVERSATION, GHOST,
APOCALYPSE NOW and many more.
Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes
Requires QuickTime Player 7.0.4 or better.
Special thanks go to Pixelcorps for taping the podcast
and to Kevin Monahan for editing and encoding.
Other photos supplied by user
group members.
By Loren
S. Miller
Co-produced by the major User Groups
from Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago,
the FCP User Group SuperMeet was a special event sold
out weeks in advance, drawing over 700 attendees, held as last
year at Mezzanine
Club a few blocks from the show.
Line to get into the SuperMeet stretched
a long city block just prior to the doors opening.
The usual array of solid sponsors such
as AJA, Automatic
Duck (the real one), FileMaker,
Panasonic
(for the excellent projector), Focal
Press and Peachpit
Press, GenArts, Silverado Systems,
ProMax, Flip4Mac,
Bogen Imaging, LaCie, Blackmagic-design,
Jungle Software,
Frame Forge 3D, Focus Enhancements, Lowel were parked on the mezzanine
itself, a nice layout.
Conducted masterfully as always by LAFCPUG
chairman Michael Horton, there were useful demos of the
HVX
200 camcorder by CHIFCPUG's Gary Adcock and Jeff
Merrit, followed by Apple guys Alec Little and Phil
Jackson revealing Soundtrack
Pro's strengths.
We got a look at the future FCP upgrade
path.
This slide tells the story. Final Cut
Pro is no longer available for purchase as an individual application;
you'll be able to upgrade your current edition to FCP Studio
at a reasonable cost, depending on how new your version. None
of the component apps in Studio, (retailing at $1300.00 total),
such as Motion, Soundtrack Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Compressor or
Cinema Tools is available separately. The newest versions of
these will be revealed in the Spring at NAB.
Apple wants you to employ an all-in-one
solution. Since they don't own Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator,
or the new After Effects 7, this is unlikely to be completely
satisfying to everybody, but all the components are handsome,
powerful, and easy to use. For instance, Soundtrack Pro should
not be confused with the original Soundtrack, since it now sports
audio processing similar to SoundSoap Pro. MIDI-controlled foley
for quick track spot effects like footsteps, body movements,
etc is still not in, but what else could they add?
After an intermission, LAFCPUG's chair
Michael Horton introduced "rockstar editor"
Walter Murch, and the crowd agreed with applause. Walter
took the stage with his PowerBook.
He opened with an interesting note that
his career really began only a couple blocks away from the club,
so the venue was special for him.
Walter is a veteran in the industry going
back to the early 70's, collaborating with USC student filmmakers
George Lucas on THX
1138, Francis Coppola on The
Rain People, and performed both sound design (a term he coined)
and picture co-editing with Richard Chen on The
Conversation, a classic, very much an audio puzzle, starring
Gene Hackman as a haunted and obsessive electronic eavesdropper.
Walter is the only editor to win dual Oscars for both picture
and sound editing, on The
English Patient, and the first editor to employ Final Cut
Pro (4 workstations plus laptops!) on a major studio feature,
Cold
Mountain, assisted by Sean Cullen.
His book In
The Blink of an Eye is a slim masterpiece in which he outlines
most of his editing theory. The book Behind
the Seen by Charles Koppelman is a luxurious exploration
of Walter's and Sean's FCP work on Cold Mountain. Both recommended
reading.
Walter showed alternate cuts of sequences
from Jarhead, an extremely intense war movie directed
by Sam Mendes, and Walter's most recent work on Final Cut Pro.
The scenes he demonstrated were suggested interpretations for
the director's consideration. Those which don't appear in the
film will be included in the DVD "extras" when released.
To our amusement, he then showed a sequence
from Raging Bull,
Martin Scorcese's powerful biodrama edited by Thelma
Schoonmaker, which Walter first used in a class overseas.
He noted certain scenes had been flopped, apparently to "improve"
the eyelines between characters. This became a mystery; the flips
do not exist in the actual release, although he seemed to feel
it a useful enhancement, and he surmised it was done during overseas
telecine by a creative student filmmaker.
He followed up with a good Q&A session,
and graciously did significant overtime by pulling the super-raffle
tickets, calling out things like "White, blue edge, 890230"
in a booming deep voice, and eliciting great emotion with each
call - especially sheiks of joy from winners.
Walter genuinely seemed to enjoy the
deserved adulation. He looked comfortable among those of his
own hive. He was one of the last to leave the hall.
All agreed it was an evening well spent,
and a MacWorld Expo highlight.
copyright©2006 loren miller
LAFCPUG/BOSFCPUG member Loren S. Miller
is an award winning editor, filmmaker, digital media writer,
and KeyGuide™ developer. Reach him anytime at lormiller@mindspring.com
and buy his KeyGuides at www.neotrondesign.com.
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