Stump the Gurus
Up first was, as usual, Stump the Gurus where this month in addition to our regular gurus, Ken Stone and Andrew Balis, we brought in special guest Jeff Bernstein of Digital DeskTop Consulting to help keep anyone from winning raffle tickets.
Some of the questions asked and answered were:

Q.) I've got a G4 with one and half Gigs of ram and FCP is acting up and dropping frames.
A.) This is a known issue. Turn off the Audio meter or take out 512 MBs of ram to cure problem.
Q.) I have a 16:9 sequence I want to Pan and Scan in 4:3. How do I do that.
A.) Easiest way is to nest the 16:9 project into a 4:3 project and go from there using key frames.
Q.) Can I bring Real Players audio files into FCP?
A.) Real files are propriety in nature so there is no way to export them to QuickTime or AIFF. Best thing to do in the future for downloadable audio files is to make QT your Default player. Un-install QT and re-install and when it asks you if you want QT to be your default, answer yes.
Q.) Does FCP have a "dupe detection" feature like Avid?
A.) No, unless you get Film Logic which can create dupe lists
Q.) I want to open my multi track audio project into some Audio app. What's good?
A.) Deck 3 from Bias-inc via OMF digi translator export. Or, of course, Pro Tools
Q.) The volume on my audio is low. How can I get the audio boost without floor noise.
A) Copy the audio track below itself 3 or 4 times. That'll usually do it
Q.) How can I get copyright DVD material off a DVD.
A,)Well, it's illegal even if it's going to be used for non profit use. So, even though there IS a way to do it, we can't talk about it.
Q.) I'm trying to re-link my media in 1.2.5 but am having trouble re linking multiple items at the same time.
A.) Select everything in browser (In 2.0 just select offline items). you want to re link and make sure little box in re link window is checked . Then do the same thing for the items in the timeline.Gotta do both
Q.) I recorded audio on a Dat recorder separately. How do I sync it up to my video to make one file
A.) audio clip underneath video clip as normal. Find your sync point and then hit Command-L to link the Video and Audio Tracks

Steve Martin Tip/Trick of the month
Regular cast member Steve Martin was up next and in addition to his usual Tip/Trick of the month announced the PowerStart Guide 2.0 which will ship August 6 and is available here at the lafcpug store.
This month Steve gave us a how2 on choosing the correct codec when exporting video and graphics for the web.
Select your clip for export and go to the FILE menu and select Export. Now you have a choice here. FCP Movie or QuickTime. Steve decided to use QuickTime to prepare the clip before bringing it into Cleaner. Click on Options and under settings choose one of the many options. For this exercise Steve choose Photo-jpeg because of it's small file size and very high quality. Animation and NONE are other options but their file sizes are large and quality not as good.Apple -DV does not do a very good job according to Steve so stay away from it. Also if you find a bunch of Radius codecs in the list, immediately shut down FCP and go to your extensions folder and trash them. Steve recommends choosing "current file size and let Cleaner size it down for you. Forget about filters as an option. Choose 48khz as your audio settings and let Cleaner crunch it down. Make sure you match frame rate which is usually 29.97. Use BEST in the Quality settings
So Steve rendered out both a photo-jpg export and a Apple DV export and showed us the difference. Colors were MUCH richer in the photo-jpg and its file size was 18MBs at 3MBs per second.
He then showed the Animation export which looked as good as the photo-jpg but was a whopping 200MBs in size. So the bottom line when preparing your clip for export into Cleaner especially if it contains graphics, is choose photo-jpg as your codec.

Brian and Rose Wilson - Show and Tell
Next up was Brian and Rose Wilson with their very funny "mock commercial" called "Niagra: The Sex Pill for the Younger Generation" which told the story of a young man who "couldn't get it up with a crane" until he found the cure to his problem, the wonder drug Niagra.
Shot on DV and edited in FCP it got a number of laughs and snickers from the over 40 section of the audience as well as those in their late teens. A fast cut, expertly narrated short with an excellent group of actors it is the perfect commercial for the late night crowd who can't get enough of the Reggae lady and her psychic powers.
Brian and Rose then raffled off one dose of Niagra with water to wash it down with. Unfortunately no one wanted to admit to their number so we forced it upon an innocent audience member. Fun stuff.

Ron Margolis - Macworld NY Report
Next up was DV Guy Ron Margolis of Intelligent Media who gave us the low down on the cool "toys" that debuted at Macworld NY recently.
While no "Oh Wow" stuff was announced at the key note there was a couple of "Gotta Have One" Power Macs introduced. The 867 and the Dual 800 code named Quicksilver got on everyones Christmas list. With the increased processing power and Level 3 cache on the Dual 800 especially, there were a few drool cups passed out to some audience members.
The nVidia card now comes with all the Power Mac line including the 733.The high end PM includes "twin view" which separates the 64MBs of SDRAM into 2 parts thus enabling you to run 2 monitors from a single AGP slot. More info on this at Apples web site.
The SuperDrive was also shown by Ron which is included in the 867.
OSX.1 was also announced and will not ship until September but word is from Ron is that it is it MUCH faster and is close to being ready for Primetime. You can move the goofy dock around now. He also showed us a list of Applications close too or now shipping in OSX version. As for FCP and OSX marriage, that's a way off. Video is a whole different world.
The new iMac family got a processor boost and that's about it. It's up to 700MHz now for the high end machine.
Other devices Ron saw was the Canon XL1S which supports 2 new lenses as well as low light capability and better sound. Go to Canon to get more info.
LaCie introduced a 48GB FW drive capable of 35MB per second using "fast firewire."
Maya will be shipping with OSX this Sept so they say.
Last but not least was some cool apps debuted one of which was GroBoto which was developed with SuperCard. Also ToonBoom a cartoon creation app that looked very cool.
Not the most exciting MacWorld but was noteworthy for the new PMs which will be in the hands of many of you soon.

Robert Schuster - DV Gear you have never seen
Robert Schuster from Hollywood Studio Rentals was up next and brought out a bunch of DV Gear very few of us knew existed.
A few years back Robert foresaw the digital revolution coming and decided then to carry ONLY DV equipment in his rental shop. As a result he is considered one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet in terms of DV Gear for the Indy filmmaker. If he doesn't have it he will find it and/or make it for you and to prove it, he showed us some gear.
One was the Glidecam he had rigged so you wouldn't need to fool with those dang weights. He can get you up and using it like a pro in 30 minutes, he says. An assortment of "inexpensive" 4x4 Matte boxes which he is the only one in the country to carry was also shown. Nifty too. Sony now makes a tripod with a built in zoom device on the handle for a mere $179.00. Forget what the model number is but it's feels pretty darn rugged for a "cheap" tripod. And the zoom is very fluid as is the head.
Robert also brought in a prototype of a "pull focus device" for a PD 150. It should be available in about a month. There is one available now for the XL1. As a matter of fact if you are a DP and coming form the Film World, Robert has got a package that will make you feel like you never left your Panavision.
Other things Robert brought were a brand new 20 watt on-board camera light from Sony that works off the camera battery- plus a ton of other stuff to numerous to mention in this summary. He then brought the gear out to the lobby during the break and judging from the size of the crowd surrounding the stuff and the amount of saliva on the floor folks thought there was some cool toys to play with.

Kenny Blank - Show and Tell
Back with us after much too long an absence was actor/filmmaker Kenny Blank who showed what he has been up to lately.
A few months ago Kenny was commissioned to handle all the video elements and 4 short movies to be displayed on the giant screen backdrop for the current N'Sync tour. As usual he was given very little time to complete the task. Given the opportunity to shoot in 35 film, Kenny instead choose to shoot DVCam to save time in post production. He managed to shoot the shorts and 15 video elements in 3 days and cut most of it on his G4 Power Book. Yes, he had a 733 Mac with an Apple Cinema Display but if you know Kenny, he does most of his work on his trusty PB and GVD-900. And not always by choice. Anyway, 4 weeks after shooting, the entire thing was ready to go for the start of the tour. Kenny showed us one of the shorts he did titled "There was once Flowers"which was very much like the spoof that he presented to us last December called "Silent Movie." Except this time it flowed into a very sweet music video featuring the members of the band.
Shot with a DSR 500 Wide Screen which Kenny obviously loved and a crew of, well not many it was another excellent film by an expert story teller who loves his DV. Best line of the night: When Kenny told the production he wanted to shoot DV Cam instead of film to save time, they asked, "Well don't you need a Post Facility? Full crew? What DO you need?"
"Well", said Kenny. "An outlet. And some power would be good."
Kenny is getting ready to do the upcoming Brittany Spears tour. Of course he won't have much time to shoot it, or edit it so he'll bring his trusty PB and GV-D900 and get an outlet and some power and make magic once again. On High Def this time. Go figure.

Phil Hodgetts - Preprocessing to reduce encoder stress
DV Companion and now Cleaner Companion (both available in the lafcpug store) author Phil Hodgetts was up next with a how2 called Preprocessing to reduce encoder stress. OK. lets talk about that. But before we do Phil made us all aware that there ARE rules for shooting your movie if you hope to have them look good on the web. Some of them are:
Keep the camera steady
Light well and control contrast
Keep a simple background
Frame tight
slow pace of editing
Phil likes to export out of FCP as a reference movie at highest quality. He likes to crop of f 10% of the edges of the clips borders saving 30% of total pixels. De-interlace unless you shot Progressive.
He then took us into Cleaner 5 for a quick examination of it's options. And oh my, there are lot of options as many of you Cleaner users know. The wizards do a great job more often tan not but know your options if you want a professional look to your movie you are sending out to the web. This is where the Cleaner Companion is invaluable. It shows you what is what before you do it saving a whole lot of time.
Philip left us with wise words to think upon;Encoding video is as much an art as editing. It is a earned process that is much more than tweaking. It begins with the camera and ends with practice and more practice.

Dan DiPaola - Sorenson Media
To continue the theme of encoding for the web who better to bring up next then none other than one of the countries foremost experts on compression/decompression, Dan DiPaola of Sorenson Media in Burbank CA.
If you do a lot of web surfing chances are you have seen some of the movie trailers that frequent the various sites including Apples own QuickTime site. They look good, don't they? They SOUND good, don't they? Well they probably were encoded over at Sorenson and Dan showed us how they do it.
Dan showed a Budweiser lizard commercial and said that bottom line is, throw away as much information as you can without sacrificing your story. In this example he cropped off 20% on the top and bottom and 10% on the sides and focus only on your hero. He also showed what is achieved when you put a QuickTime movie into Flash and have them work together. The file size was dramatically reduced.
What's the latest with Sorenson? Dan says the Pay for View at less than 1000k PEAK. So he showed us a trailer for 102 Dalmations with Surround Sound encoded with IMA audio and it was awesome.
Sorenson sends their videos through a noise reduction device that strips away any extraneous noise on the picture before they encode. They then use a "black" box with 1024 processors per pixel in a D1 frame to prepare the video in Real Time. Prepare, prepare, prepare is Dans mantra. Throw away as much info as you can.
I must mention that despite all the technical wizardry over at Sorenson Media they only charge us poor folks as low as $15.00 per minute to encode, plus they can build interactive interfaces to drop your movies into. And turn around with that "black" box is pretty dang fast. Amazing stuff going on over there.

At this time folks were so overloaded with information that some had to go outside to see if there was still an outside. Good time to take a break.

Keith Hatounian - Generic Media
Generic Media was up next with Keith Hatounian and if you don't know about Generic Media go to their web site and look around.
Most of the night has dealt with the complicated matter of encoding your video for web publishing. Well Generic Media, headed by QuickTime co creator Peter Hoddie does it all for you. You simply upload your movie to them and when someone wants to view your clip, Generic chooses the player that that person has on his/hers computer. None of that asking your viewer to download QuickTime or Real Player or Windows Media. Generic KNOWS what player is on the persons computer.
Unfortunately the theaters internet connection was down for the night and Keith was unable to demo Generics process. However, he WAS able to show us another one of Generics cool creations, the GMovieMaker. GMovie is software that allows you to encode and download your movie onto a Palm Pilot. Really cool.
Keith ran us through the process on encoding and it's as simple as the wizards in Cleaner with less options. If you can read English then you can use this app.
You can also beam your Palm movie to your firiends who have Palms. And the picture and sound is VERY respectable. Better than QuickTime 1.0
Keith will be back in a month or so when we get the internet connection working. You don't want to miss it.

David Jackson Willis - Show and Tell
David Jackson Willis was up next with his Film "The Disappearing Girl Trick" which recently played to critical acclaim at the Seattle Film Festival and the DGA here in Hollywood. And no wonder.
It's a movie that answers the question, where do Magicians Assistants go after they are made to disappear. Well, I'm not going to tell you. You are going to have to see it for yourself. Click HERE.
Written and directed by David, and produced in association with the Filmmakers Alliance and beautifully photographed by Jay Holden, the film was shot on 35MM film and telecined to Beta SP with window TC burn in. David then cut the film on Final Cut. Now here is where it gets fun. Because of budget considerations David hand wrote the Key TC to give to the negative cutter thus avoiding the expense of MatchBack software. He upgraded to 2.0 during the project to get OMF capability with no problems. Sound was sweetened in Pro Tools and the result was a damn fine movie. I have to mention the cast here as David surely knows how to pull good performances from his actors, or he just knows how to cast well and keep quiet. Either way, this was one good group of actors. Susan Egan, Paul Gutrecht, Bruce Gold, Aimee Eckhardt, and LLoyd Battista were all wonderful.

Jim Tierney - Digital Anarchy
Jim Tierney of Digital Anarchy was up next with his extremely cool text element package, Elements of Anarchy. Jim is somewhat legendary for his AE plug ins but now FCP has got them and they are must haves if you want to do fine background text elements like Matrix or those gazillions of commercials you see on TV.
Elements of Anarchy is broken down into 3 separate parts:
Text Matrix: a particle system that moves streams of text around in any direction much like the opening shot in the Matrix where all the zeros and ones were raining down. But it will do much more than that lemme tell ya.
Text Grid: With Text Grid, you can create a grid of randomly generated, or your own supplied characters or numbers. You can mix and match and make some bigger of smaller than others. The possibilities are endless here.
Screen Text: A seemingly very easy was to create an endless amount of crawls including the Star Wars one.
This is definitely a package worth looking into as it not only allows simple creation of very cool text elements within FCP, but is priced right too. $79.00

David George - Show and Tell
David George was up next with his new Video titled 'S Wonderful which was, well really wonderful. With this great song how could it not be.
Given the late hour and the fact that many folks were at that time checking for a pulse, it was a very pleasant way to end the night. Shot on DV by David and Pons Marr with guitar by David, it was the simple tale of a man (David) singing to the camera intercut with beautiful images and sweeping camera moves. The vocals, sung by David, were recorded directly into the camera mic, and quite frankly it sounded...wonderful. And looked wonderful too.

World famous Raffle
World famous Raffle was up next to end this marathon evening and the following prizes donated by some very generous people were given away.

DV CreatorsHat: DVCreators.net
2 CD/DVD Label packages - Meritline
Cool Pad - lafcpug
Sorenson Broadcaster - lafcpug
2 Final Draft or Final Draft AV Gift certificates - Final Draft
One time on site Visit from Runway - Runway
Promax T-shirt - Promax
Creative Cow T-shirt - CreativeCow.net
Elements of Anarchy - Digital Anarchy
2 Digital Anarchy T-shirts - Digital Anarchy
6 FCP Keyboard Key Charts - Neotron Design
2 Kenstone.net T-shirts - Kenstone.net

Man, what a night.
The following people deserve special thanks so thanks go to Chris Coe and Doug Lindeman for taking tickets. Ken Stone for taking Pics. Dan Brockett for taping the show. Ross Jones for being the AV guru. Cawan Starks for bring a new G4 867 to play with. Paul Balbirny of the LA Film School for putting up with us, and of course, Promax for footing the bill and a big hug to Runway for feeding us.

See ya Aug 22 when we try once more to get it right

Michael Horton
"HeadCutter"