It took me FOREVER to find what IRE stood for. I could not remember for the life of me. I knew it had something to do with Radio Engineers, but the “I”… After Google failed miserably, I turned to the FCP manual. And there it was:

IRE (Institute of Radio Engineers)  - Also refers to an analog video signal unit of
measurement for luma, established by the Institute of Radio Engineers.

The IRE level is indicated on the waveform monitor.

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A coworker a mine sent me a link to Kanye West’s “Homecoming” video and asked if I could recreate this effect and how easy is it to do. Its nothing complicated and seemed pretty easy. So I pulled open Final Cut and started hackin’ away at footage from a music video shoot here in our studio. All the footage was shot DVCPro HD on the HVX-200 against a green screen.

I keyed out the green, dropped a color matte behind the footage and applied a luma travel matte to the studio footage. This didn’t get me too far. I swapped the two tracks and applied the travel matte to the footage this time…. and Whallla! I was seeing the above track matted by the keyed footage below it. However, only the lightest areas of the footage were showing through. I changed to a alpha travel matte. While this completely matted the image based on the outline of the keyed footage, I still wasn’t getting any depth like in Kanye’s video.

Knowing that a luma travel matte working on the idea of brightness (or amount of white) in an image, I decided to add a 3-way color corrector to the studio footage. I then boosted the whites and mids most of the way up. I turned to blacks up slightly as well. Sure enough, there it was. I could throw anything on that top track, set its composite mode to “Travel Matte - Luma” and I’d have the effect. I moved both tracks to V2 and V3 and put another color matte on V1 to recreate the background.

I looked at this composition closely and realized…. I just created the iPod commercial effect. Has apple really been using a technique that was this simple. Granted when Apple does it, they have flying partials, moving cameras and a host of other elements to control, but the base effect was this? Awesome! While the effect can only properly be done by the post people working with Apple, I thought it was pretty sweet to mimic the effect in shop here.

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Over the past couple of weeks I have been working tirelessly on export settings for a new web show that will be using a flash encode on a huge 800px wide player. Not many sites out there are running video at 800px wide for obvious reasons. But it will be attempted if not done. The show is looking to advance how people see web video and the quality they see it at. Not an easy feat when you want to run it as big as they do.

Unfortunately, I’m not able to say what the show is called, what its about, who is working on it or anything else surrounding it. However, the interest here is on the player and the video. Blip.tv is a major supplier of web video all over the web. Many people use Blip to distribute their content to their site, iTunes and other venues across the net. Wallstrip.com uses blip and embeds Blip’s player in their site. The concept is similar for the new show.

When you submit video to Blip, they reencode your video at their (less the great) Flash setting, rendering even the cleanest of source files, looking very “YouTubey.” After many conversations with Blip, Wallstrip’s web producer told me that if you submit your own Flash file to them, they will not reencode it. Amazing! This means that you can get a file looking the way you want it, and Blip will post it as they get it.

Excellent, right? Well, almost. In the tests I have run, I found several issues with Flash files that you may not expect if you have been working with QuickTime files. Flash encoded files are more processor intensive than other files, therefore the “max bandwidth” setting can’t be as high as it could with other files. I usually encode *.mov files for the web around 1200 or 1500 kbps which results in a good looking QT files that is playable everywhere. The Flash files we were working on here (800 x 450px) on the other hand bog down even the newest of macs at 1000 kbps. Now you may have a sweet looking file, but 1/2 your viewers will not be able to watch it.

Our solution, lower the bandwidth (about 800kpbs), up the key framing (7), and make the audio mono at 64kbps. This resulted in a (not as good but still) great looking file that didn’t kill every machine we tested it on. It took us about a week and 40 to 50 files to finally find the right combination. As a general rule, do a lot of tests - it will take time, but once you find what you are looking for, it will be well worth it. Also, save every setting you use on a file - name the file the same as you name the saved setting so you can pair them up again later.

As we all know, web video is fun, fresh and exciting to work on, but doing it well, and producing a quality product is the challenge. Happy encoding.

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Saving time when you are editing can create some more opportunities for you later on in a post workflow. Now I know this is news to everyone out there, but its true. I’m going to briefly provide 7 tips I find useful getting through a cut in FCP. You may be aware of some of these – maybe I can shed some light on them.

1) Get Organized – From the moment you import, ingest, digitize… bring any footage in to FCP, log it. Give each clip a unique filename and log note. Filenames could be as simple as the name of the project and a series of numbers following it. Then I like to use the log note to be more specific about the clip. Writing exactly what might appear in the clip. There are many other fields to take advantage of in the log and capture/transfer window. I will say, logging P2 media from a P2 card or a fire store is quite time consuming… I like to import all the footage I need, as is, with the weird filenames give to each clip by the camera. I have built and Automator Action to batch rename all the clips I ingested. After doing that, you will have to re-import them into FCP. Once the footage is back in, then go through your footage and place log notes with the clips. Now this may seem like a lot to go through, but until Apple provides us a better way of batch ingesting media, this is the solution I have developed.

2) Button Bars – Button bars are relatively new to FCP, but they are powerful little buttons nevertheless. You may know where they are, but not know how to modify or use them. From the “Tools” menu, choose “Button Bar.” From here you can search for may keyboard shortcuts, menu commands, filters and other operations. Drag the commands/buttons into the bars above the browser, viewer, and timeline. Each of those places you can load up buttons that are specific for that window. This personally is one of my favorite tips to share with users. You can save button layouts by right clicking the button bar are choosing Save. Load them the same way.

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