The Editblog

This installment is a tiny hardware adapter. Richard Harrington over at Photoshop for Video pointed out a great little firewire port converter. It plugs into a 9-pin firewire 800 port and give you a 6-pin firewire 400 port. I’ve got a number of 800 to 400 cables but I like the idea of this adapter as well. It’s the size of a double A battery. It’s $14.95 and I’m going to order 2. From the Sonnet website:

Which cable should I get? What length? Why bother?
Use your existing FireWire® 400 cables with this FireWire adapter from Sonnet to connect FireWire 400 devices to a FireWire 800 port, without going through the trouble of purchasing yet another cable. Just plug it in between a FireWire 800 port and a standard FireWire 400 cable’s 6-pin male connector (the other end of the FW400 cable plugs into your FireWire device). It can’t get any simpler.

Grab yours at the Sonnet Online Store.

Every once and a while you find a nice little gem off of user and support forums. Andy Mees is a frequent contributor to the Apple Final Cut Pro forums and he linked to his personal .mac site for a download of a little program called Get Markers. It’s a bare-bones application that accomplishes a very simple task: it gets and displays a list of markers from a Final Cut Pro edit sequence. It does this via an xml export on the edit sequence.

As you can see from the window above you get the marker name, the timecode where it is located in the edit, the duration of the marker if it is extended more than 1 frame and a line of comment information. This is a very handy app to have especially if you are working with a client that also has the same edit and media on their own FCP system. You can email a FCP project file with just the current sequence, they can reconnect the media and make notes, send it back and you can then export an xml of the edit and print those notes out. Get Markers will accept xml version 1 and 2 but errors when attempting to open a version 3. There is a little interface weirdness as you have to drag the corner of the default window and make the window bigger to see the button for a printer view. I’m guessing that Andy may have written this app himself. What a handy skill to have as an editor…. you need a helper utility then you can create it yourself! Thanks Andy for Get Markers. And there’s also a few Final Cut Pro plug-ins that he’s got up on his site as well.

Bitrate Calc is a “little utility that gives you the optimum bitrate for encoding video and audio for making DVD and DivX video discs. Simply enter the length of the video in hours, minutes, and seconds, choose your media type, select your audio bitrate, and click the Calculate button. That’s it!”

If you author a lot of dvds then you know there is that bit of math involved to get the bitrate just right. Like many useful tools for editors, they are about doing a bit less math and getting on with work. This utility does just that.

Straight from the RAILhead Design site, features include:

• Built-in version checking.
• Simple, clean, and clear interface.
• Supports DVD sizes, from DVD1 to DVD18.
• Supports audio bitrates from 64 to 1536.
• Displays breakdown of estimated audio and video sizes.
• Real-time custom video size-on-disc slider.
• 100% FREE!

Internet support forums are a great thing. You can find information, get help, do research, learn lots of nice tips and tricks as well as help other people. And sometimes someone offers up a free piece of software! A discussion thread in the Apple Final Cut Forum was started by a nice fellow named Caleb, pointing to a link to download a Dashboard Widget called Aspect. It can be used to take “popular ratios used in video and film and calculates any size you need based on the height or width and pixel aspect.” It’s not unlike the Aspect Ratio Calculator I linked to not long ago but it has a few more bells and whistles. Caleb states that he asked a friend to make the widget for him a few months ago and he wanted to pass it along to others. Thanks Caleb!

Grab the widget from this file hosting site by clicking the Download link at the top.

The data transfer rate of your hard drives is a very important thing when editing video. The higher the format (DV > SD > HD) you want to edit the faster drives that you need. DV Guru linked to a Studio Daily video of a short presentation where Final Cut Pro expert Larry Jordan does a simple and succinct job of explaining Firewire vs. SATA as well as transfer rates and all that kind of stuff.

After watching the video head over to Versiontracker and download freeware MBBench. It’s a little application that measures and displays a graph showing the data rate of the selected hard drives. It is easy to use and the only complaint I have is that it lists your drives by their cryptic “technical” name and not as they appear on the desktop so it might take a minute to figure out which drive is which, especially if you have many drives connected. There doesn’t seem to be much support information available but it is freeware. If anyone has any other drive speed utilities please post a link in the comments below as I’d love to check out others. So grab MBBench and weep as your Firewire 800 drives operate slooooly!

I wrote a post about The Levelator back in October. The full on version is now available. From the Gigavox Media website: “So what is The Levelator? It’s software that runs on Windows or OS X (universal binary) that adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file for variations from one speaker to the next, for example. It’s not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three. It’s much more than those tools, and it’s much simpler to use. The UI is dirt-simple: Drag-and-drop any WAV or AIFF file onto The Leveler’s application window, and a few moments later you’ll find a new version which just sounds better.” Man.. I sure wish Comcast could run all of their cable fees through this!!!!
I’ve used the pre-release version several times on some talking head interviews where the subject talked at many different volume levels. I’ve found it most handy after the picture is locked. I’ve exported the interviews in question, ran them through The Levelator and then cut them back in the edit. Full details and download of The Levelator here.

Video Toolshed is a website set up by a post production house in the Netherlands. I was reading over a blog at Avid.com and there was a link. To quote what they say on the site: “VideoToolShed was founded by Edit ‘B, a small post production boutique that has been working with digital video since 1994. Besides the video part we program multimedia, not only the tools you find here but a lot of (kids) games. During the last ten years we have developed our own software to help us solve a variety of problems. This site is a result of our efforts.”

Those results are a number of tools available for download. They include:

That is quite an impressive and handy list of tools for non-linear editors. I haven’t used any of them myself. I have played with the VideoMacro utility and can certainly see some uses for it. The utilities are for sale in euros so I’m not exactly how we would purchase them here in the states. Maybe they accept Paypal as I’ve purchased shareware sold in Euros through them.

Sebesky Tools

Sebesky Tools is a handy freeware conversion utility that has been around for a while. It is always worth a reminder as you might not need it very often but when you do it is probably very helpful. Whenever you need to convert anything to/from Avid to Final Cut Pro, Sebesky Tools can be handy. Here’s a summary of what the 5 utilities do:

• fcp2ale – converts batch lists exported from FCP to ALE shot logs which can be imported in Avid. This makes it possible to move bins containing clips from FCP to Avid.

• ale2fcp – Converts ALE shot logs, exported from Avid, to batch lists which can be imported in FCP. This makes it possible to move bins containing clips from Avid to FCP.

• Batch Add TC – Can add timecode and Source ID (reel name) to QuickTime files exported from Avid, reading timecode and reel name from a corresponding ALE file. This makes it possible to maintain timecode- and source information when moving media from Avid to FCP.

• bwf2qt – Converts Broadcast Wave Format (BWF) audio files to QuickTime and optionally extracts metadata and place it in a batch list that can be imported in FCP along with the QuickTime files.

• TC Player – Its possible to manually add and delete timecode and source information to QuickTime files.

An all things Avid/FCP toolbox. It should be noted that Sebsky Tools (nor does any other utility that I am aware of) does not automatically convert Avid OMF files to Quicktime or vice versa. Many people do no realize that while Avid can export Quicktimes it uses the proprietary OMF format (usually) for all media it creates. You can’t dig into Avid and expect to see or reconnect to those media files in Final Cut Pro without first converting them. It ain’t gonna happen. In that process you lose reel name and timecode. Not good for online. That’s where Sebsky Tools can work.

I have to say that I have actually never used the tools as I subscribe to the philosophy (and so far have always been able to live by it) that once a project begins in Avid or Final Cut Pro … stay there. Sure there are times when you can’t as is evidenced by the very existence of Sebsky Tools. It is available here where there is more detail on what the tool does. The makers are in Denmark so there’s some English errors on the page. But from those I know who used the tools, they work well. If you have any experience with Sebsky Tools post a comment below and tell the world how it went.

The Levelator is a handy little drag and drop tool that takes an audio file and attempts to level out the volume. A quote on the developer’s site says: “It’s not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three.” I read about the Levelator on a post at Jake Ludington’s Digital Lifestyle. He has posted a couple of before and after waveforms shots to visually show the difference that the program achieves. I did some tests on a project I am working on and it did do exactly what it says. Here’s a before and after sample:

aiff before Levelator 1.3 mb

aiff after Levelator 1.3 mb
I think that the overall result might raise the overall levels a bit too much (especially bringing up the background noise) for mission critical work but if you have a less critical instance where you need to smooth out volume levels then the tool could be quite helpful. Plus you can always bring the volume back down a bit in the final mix. It’s also nice that when you drop a file on to be converted it makes a new piece of media and doesn’t hurt the old one. And best of all .. it’s free. Check out the developer site here.

DIRECTORSNOTEBOOK.COM

Directors Notebook is an interesting piece of software for a filmmaker. It is what they call a digital “project notebook” that organizes information during pre-production, production, and post. From the website: “It’s like having a production assistant at your beck and call 24 hours a day to help you manage your projects and save time.”

I used this app years ago when it was an add on database to Filemaker Pro. It is now a stand alone application and has several different levels and versions depending on what you need that application to do. They even have a simple free version called Directors Boards that helps with the organizing and creation of storyboard from existing drawings, scans or photographs. If you are a filmmaker then it is worth checking out.

technorati tags:filmmaking, software, directing, storyboards, macintosh

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