The Tenth Annual San Francisco FCPUG SuperMeet is this coming Friday, January 28. Tickets are on sale now for $15 with $20 tickets at the door. As always there’s quite an agenda for this SuperMeet including a number of actual Final Cut Studio presentations! One of those is a presentation by the makers of the hilarious I The ProRes Maker music video. And there will be presentations on 3D and Smoke on Mac among others. Of course the world famous raffle is taking place  once again with over $47,000 in prizes. One of those prizes is an AJA Ki Pro Mini so if it’s actually shipping by then the winner may be one of the first owners!

All the information you might need to know about attending the the Tenth Annual San Francisco FCPUG SuperMeet is available at the SuperMeet webpage. Looks like it’s going to be a fun show.

The other item available this week only is a superbundle that FilmmakingWebinars.com has put together with all five DSLR filmmaking webinars they’ve produced thus far. This is $50 for five webinars and includes the  5 on-demand webinars, bonus material, podcast interviews as well as project and media files for trying out what was learned.

The 5 topics include the Production Reality Check, Post Workflows (which was my particular webinar), Color Grading Workflows, Audio Techniques Production and Post and DSLR Stabilizing Techniques.

This is a one-of-a-kind bundle so if you’re new to DSLR filmmaking the price of $50 really can’t be beat for the sheer volume of material you’ll get for that price. But hurry as this sale is only good through 1-29-2011.

If you’re heading to Amsterdam for IBC 2010 then you’ve probably got your plans well underway. This will be one of the big events for editors and post-production professionals as the 3rd Annual Amsterdam FCPUG SuperMeet will take place at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky. The particular SuperMeet looks interesting as you read over the agenda as it says “yes, FCS fans, there will be plenty of Final Cut Studio magic on stage as we intend to devote an entire half of the show to Final Cut Studio.” My how times and products have changed as a Final Cut Pro User Group SuperMeet specifically mentions that part of the show will be dedicated to Final Cut Studio! While that’s expected I would be most looking forward to the Smoke on Mac and DaVinci Resolve for Mac that will be featured as part of the show. Add Avid to that list and you can indeed see how focus has shifted at these events … and for the better IMHO.

Get the full agenda and rundown of the event at the official SuperMeet page. You can also check out the huge list of prizes to be given out at the raffle including 3 copies of DaVinci Resolve Mac and a ton of Blackmagic hardware. If you’re lucky you can win some good stuff. Here’s the details:

• Where? – The Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky
  Winter Garden and Grand Ballroom
  Dam 9. 1012 JS Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
  Click HERE for map.
  
• When? – Sunday 12.9.2010 – 19:00 – 23:00 (Doors open 16:30)
  
• How Much? – €15.00 General Admission and €10.00 for Students (€20.00 at door)
  Includes 2 raffle tickets per person. Tickets go on sale 1.7.2010
• Any raffle prizes? – Of course. €2.00 per raffle ticket or 3 for €5.00
  
• Who should attend? – Everyone who wants to learn more about Final Cut Studio, digital filmmaking and meet others who may know more than you do.
  
• Food and Drink? - Food (free) and Cash Bars will be available to enjoy a few cocktails!

You got less than a week to get tickets for the next FCP User Group SuperMeet. This one is February 5 in San Francisco. It will be at the Robertson Auditorium with doors opening at 3:30 pm for the “Digital Showcase” and the show beginning at 7:00. Just looking at the event’s website it looks like there’s a great list of raffle prizes … as always. This one includes a Canon 5D Mark II, AJA Ki Pro, Adobe CS4 (!), Avid Media Composer 4 (!!) and several BlackMagic cards among a lot of other great goodies. Prizes aren’t the only thing on the schedule and this agenda looks to be a strong one:

* Smoke on Mac OSX – Alexandre Domingue
* “Destroy Me” – Jordan Livingston (music vid)
* AJA KiPro – Jon Thorn
* Best Workflow for Canon File-Based Cameras – Joe Bogacz
* Motion 4 Does 3D – Mark Spencer
* The Idea behind IDEO’s Living Climate Change – Matt Silverman
* The New Speed Tools in FCP 7 – Kevin Monahan
* Hand Held Hollywood – Taz Goldstein
* And MORE

Both the Smoke demo and the Canon workflow should be of interest to many. I would say to click here and sign up for some free workshops but most are sold out. As of this writing 2 aren’t so click here anyway and try to get them or to see what you might be missing. Grab your tickets before they are all gone.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have a Tangent Wave in my edit suite for the last month for testing and review. It’s a very pleasant unit to use and will totally change your opinion of Apple Color. Click over to the Editblog on PVC and give the review a look.

Apple has just released the first maintenance update to the new Final Cut Studio Three version 2009 (or whatever it’s called). Check your software update if you are between projects. Or you can sign in here and download.

I’m desperate for an update to Compressor that address crashing. I’m having a lot of crashes (both with Compressor batches and Droplets) when I try and load large batches. It seems if I get above 15 – 20 clips I get a crash or a beach ball. On more than one machine. I’ve tried restarts and Compressor Repair. Upon a look at the Force Quit dialog box both Compressor and/or Droplet will not be responding.

I posed this very question to Twitter and got mixed answers. Here was a luck user with 50 and 100 clips. And then 40 – 50. There were also smaller numbers like 35 or a dozen or so. How many clips can you get into a Compressor batch at a time?

Today I posted a piece over at the Editblog on PVC of my first impression using the Tangent Wave on a few small grading sessions over the last couple of weeks. I really like using a control surface with Color.

The good folks over at Tangent Devices recently sent us one of their control surfaces for testing with Color; the Tangent Wave. After hooking it up and checking it out for an hour or so this afternoon I can say, without a doubt in my mind, that color grading (and using Apple Color in particular) without a control surface dedicated to color grading is like doing most any task with one hand tied behind your back. And that’s mainly from just using the trackballs and dials and not really digging deeper into all the keys and functionality. Stay tuned to the Editblog on PVC for more thoughts, impressions and a full review of the Tangent Wave.

OK Final Cut Pro users, if ever that was a SuperMeet you want to attend it’s got to be the Amsterdam version. Sure Las Vegas is great and it’s an NAB tradition to go to the Vegas version of the SuperMeet but haven’t we all been looking for a reason to go to Amsterdam? Damn, I wish I was going. To coincide with IBC this year’s Amsterdam SuperMeet takes place on Sunday, August 13 at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky. Tickets are very affordable and as always there will be free food, a cash bar and the world famous raffle. The raffle looks good and includes an AJA IO HD and … a Blackmagic Ultrascope! The agenda set thus far includes:

• How to do a Grade in Just 10 minutes with Color 1.5 – Simon Walker.
• Share the love: CS4 Production Premium; Author a Blu-Ray Disc -
• Blackmagic Design Presents “More Right Tools For the Job.”
• Show and Tell – To be Announced Soon
• JVC GY-HM 100/700 ProHD – Rick Young and Semir Nouri
• What You NEED to Know About FCP 7 – Michael Wohl
• Q&A/Feedback Interactive Discussion on the NEW Final Cut Studio.

While I  have to wonder what the Show and Tell will consist of I’m most intrigued by the last item on the agenda, the “Interactive Discussion on the NEW FCS.” Here’s the quote from the press release: “The organizers of the SuperMeet also intend to turn the show over to the audience for an interactive discussion with Final Cut Studio experts who will answer any and all questions on the new Final Cut Studio as well as listen to user feedback and feature requests for future versions of Final Cut Studio. This portion of the meeting will be videotaped and later put on the internet for the world to see.” That looks like it could be a fun segment for the audience. I well realize that type of forum could end up running all night long but a an expert panel and audience Q&A could generate some really great discussion. I hope it won’t turn into audience members trying to get free tech support but rather an intelligent discusion on Final Cut Studio’s +’s, -’s, and its future. I’d love to sit on a panel like that if nothing more than to be the FCP nay-sayer of the bunch and make sure is doesn’t turn into an FCP love-in! Don’t get me wrong, I love FCP but like any application it does have it’s problems. Hopefully Apple will have representatives taking notes. There’s just over a week to do so get your tickets while you still can.

We maybe I’m exaggerating about the Earth slightly tilting with the release of the new Final Cut Studio. It contains Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Soundtrack Pro 3, Color 1.5, Compressor 3.5 and DVD Studio Pro something as it didn’t get updated and is so old that I think it has a long, gray beard.

The Los Angeles FCP User Group has a good collection of links about the release. Of course there’s Apple’s own Final Cut Studio resources where they also have new Logic Studio updates and a new Final Cut Server. There’s training videos and books available a day after the release as well. Don’t believe the hype though that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I took a more critical look at the announced features on Studio Daily and Mike Jones probably summed it up better than anyone.

There was also a slew of Release Notes that came from Apple yesterday. My favorite has to be this one:

I’m so glad they cleared that up! By far the funniest blog post about the new FCS release was from Owen’s Photoblog titled How To Install Final Cut Studio 3. I like #3 in the process:

I’ll bite, I’ll be the sucker and try to do just that at some point over the weekend:

Last Day Dream from torbjon on Vimeo.