The Editblog

The 2009 NAB SuperMeet is on April 21, just over a week away, so if you haven’t gotten your tickets yet then the time to buy it now. You don’t want to miss the show which includes presentations on both technology and the art of editing and filmmaking as well. Plus there’s the famous raffle that is up to $70,000 worth of prizes? JVC has announced “Something SuperSecret” for the raffle as well. Could it be one of their native QuickTime shooting cameras? No one knows for sure so you’ll just have to head to Vegas next week to find out. 

I spoke with Michael Horton, the LAFCPUG guru and Digital Production Buzz co-host himself recently and asked him a number of questions about the SuperMeet:

How long has the LAFCPUP been hosting the SuperMeet at NAB?

Lafcpug doesn’t host the SuperMeet. Myself and Daniel Berube of the Boston Final Cut Pro User Group are co-producers of this event and part of a larger
network of FCP UGs from around the world that is called the Final Cut Pro User Group Network. Lafcpug is just a part of the SuperMeet experience like all other UGs. In no way does it host the event.

Is the SuperMeet an actual extension of the NAB conference or is just held in conjunction with the conference?

It is held in conjunction and in no way affiliated at all with NAB. Same thing when we do this event along side Macworld and IBC. We choose to do it this way because many FCS users are already there and SuperMeets serve as a social gathering spot as well as a place to go and learn.

How has the SuperMeet grown over the years?

This is the 8th year we have been doing it at NAB, Macworld and just last year, IBC in Amsterdam. We have gone from a tiny room at the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas attracting about 200 people, to giant ballrooms attracting more than 1000 people. Our first meet in San Francisco was at a Dentists office.

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By now you’ve heard that the 8th Annual Macworld FCPUG SuperMeet is this Wednesday, January 7 at 7PM  at the Robertson Auditorium, Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. I spoke with Michael Horton yesterday and there’s still tickets available (though they might not be for long since these things usually sell out) so get your tickets here. It looks like there’s a lot of great raffle prizes including a FireStore FS-5 100GB
Portable DTE Recorder, a Matrox MXO2 for Mac, a GlideCam4000 Pro and lots of software … plus “300 Eco friendly reusable ‘goodie’ bags stuffed with over $200 worth of stuff will handed out to first 300  paid ticket holders through the door.” I’m most intrigued by this: Craig Yanagi of JVC will announce the world’s first acquisition product developed especially for Final Cut post production. Come and be a part of this historic event. While that will be exciting to see what they have I kind of look at that as a small clue that maybe JVC knows something about the future of Final Cut Pro that us mere mortals do not. That there is a future and the Pro Apps aren’t for sale. I can’t imagine that JVC would develop a product only for FCP if there wasn’t a guaranteed future with the product. And since is says “Apple: The latest on Final Cut Studio” on the event website maybe we will get a taste of that future at the event! (Not bloody likely) Since this is the last MacWorld with Apple’s participation it may be the last MacWorld Supermeet! If you are going to the event and are part of the editing and post Twitter group then please tweet from the event to let us know what is going on.

Do you ever wonder how long a Compressor encode might take? I finally figured this out the other day…

If you open the Batch Monitor and click the info button on the currently running encode:

You get an information window. Right there in the window is a Time Remaining entry!

This was probably located in the manual somewhere but who has time to read those things?

Editblog reader Ben De Rydt has written an article called Will Someone Please Kill Soundtrack Pro? A title like that leaves no question as to what Ben thinks of the application. I don’t use Soundtrack Pro a who lot and when I do use it I generally use it for clean-up of an audio file or very simple mixes. One feature that was great in theory was Soundtrack Pro’s new ability to track changes in an edit and conform those changed in your mix. This feature doesn’t seem to work well for Ben:

This time, I did nothing in Final Cut Pro but sending the result immediately back to Soundtrack Pro. You might have guessed: I had to approve all 200 clips on tracks 1-4 again.

Truth be told I don’t pay a lot of attention to Soundtrack Pro so I kind of liked reading this rant just to see what another user’s experience has been. Anyone else have anything to add about their experiences with STP?

As mentioned in an earlier post or two, I hate Apple’s Compressor. Not because it doesn’t compress well but because it suddenly stops working and will not submit a batch to be processed. The earlier version would see errors like: unable to connect to background processes. The current version (v.3.0.x running under Leopard) might produce this one: Unable to submit to queue. Please restart your computer or verify your Compressor installation is correct. Maybe this hasn’t happened to you. Consider yourself lucky as there’s a lengthy fix from Apple that doesn’t always work.

After having this happen for the 5th time I did a lot of research on how to repair the problem. I’ve tried Apple’s troubleshooting guide only to have it not work on 2 occasions. The easiest fix, a terminal command, didn’t work for me after the upgrade to Final Cut Studio 2 with Compressor 3. What did finally work? A combination of the Apple troubleshooting guide, a reply in this thread and a little application called Pacifist.

First, I did what Apple suggested in the troubleshooting guide: confirm versions and computer’s name in Sharing, delete user preferences and repair permissions. Then comes the process of removing Compressor, Qmaster, the Batch Monitor and all of their supporting files. I say all of them as there are a lot of files to be removed including a number of files in hidden folders. If I knew how to write applications I might write one that automated this process because it takes a while. It also asks you to trash Motion as well, so I did. Then instead of a normal reinstall from the Final Cut Studio disks I skipped over to a step found in this support forum thread suggested by a user named Jason Toth. It uses Pacifist to look in the installer package on the FCS install disk and selectively install just what you need:

From the support forum thread:

Download PACIFIST.

1) Insert your FCS 2 Disk
2) Open up Pacifist
3) In Pacifist… open the FCS 2 install package
4) Once opened find… “Contents of AppleQmaster” select it
5) Click the install icon in the upper left… it will verify the files
6) Once verify completes install BUT make sure you use the REPLACE button
7) Once completed do the same thing for the “Contents of Compressor” Package
Open up the compressor application then close compressor
9) Use software update to get compressor to version 3.0.1
10) Grab a beer.

I did what was suggested with a couple of exceptions:

I twirled down the Content of MotionGroup package and selected only the Contents of Motion.pkg and not the 7.8 gigs of Motion content as that is already on the drive. I then selected the Contents of Compressor and Contents of AppleQmaster and hit Install. As mentioned in the forum reply, when prompted by Pacifist I had it “replace” instead of just install the contents just to make sure it wiped everything out once and for all. Once you get rolling it’s a quick install as everything is on the first install DVD. You do have to do the DVD-swap-dance when you tell Pacifist to first open the package by inserting each Final Cut Studio DVD and letting Pacifist read the disk but it is a quicker install that I experienced when doing it the “normal” way. Once the install was done I did a software update to get to Compressor 3.0.2 and viola:

Will it work forever? Will it break next time I click the mouse button? Who knows. I’ve had to reboot a couple of times as well as a shut down when a storm came through and as of this writing it’s still working. Let’s hope this fixes it once and for all. If it doesn’t I’ve always got the address for Episode Pro. Or Squeeze. Or BitVice. Or MPEG Streamclip. Or VisualHub.

Does that say 14 hours?

Yessssssssssssssssssss it does.

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A lot of users I’ve come across are unaware that when you export a Final Cut Pro timeline for encoding in Compressor every cut and/or transition will force an I frame to allow for better encoding. To see this at work and check to make sure you have these markers, export your Quicktime from Final Cut Pro and choose Markers > DVD Studio Pro Markers.

After export, drag the Quicktime into the Compressor batch window. Double click the media to bring up the Preview window if it is not there. If you have Chapter markers or Compression markers they will be shown as the default setting has them active.

Next, click the marker pop-up menu and choose Show Edit/Cut Markers.

Then look at the timeline under the preview image pane. You should see many more markers than those displayed before. Edit/Cut markers are green. It will depend on how many edits you have made in the timeline (as you can see from the window below, my hour long show had many cuts) as to have many markers you see.

It is a little unruly with the Edit/Cut markers displayed but I like to turn them on just to check that they are there before encoding. You never know when you accidentally forgot a setting on export.

For more details on Compression and Chapters Markers in general, read this article on Ken Stone’s (great) Final Cut Pro site. Happy encoding!