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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In our latest technology purchase, our shop has bought a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card for our MacPro. We’re hoping to capture off our DVR and use news footage for our shows. After deboxing the B&H shipping box, I discovered the product in a box that seemed to be way to small! I knew the PCI-Express card was small, but man, it was much smaller than expected. Inside, you will find the card, a CD and a small tri-fold quick install guide. The full 35 page manual is on the CD (way to be green!).

After carefully reading the install instruction and reading up on PCI slot choices, I popped open the MacPro and dropped the card into slot #2. Blackmagic’s site mentions that you may be prompted to adjust performance to the slots, but after powering up, I wasn’t prompted. Granted this is the only other card in the machine besides our ATI (ehh) video card.

After installing the software there wasn’t a noticeable difference in the performance of the computer, heck there wasn’t even any outward difference in starting FCP, Color or any of the other apps. However, FCP now has more easy setups, and more options under external video monitoring. I connected our 9″ Sony production monitor via the component out (NTSC out) of the card. Instantly, after setting the Video Output in FCP to Intensity NTSC, the monitor showed video. Amazing! Beyond FCP, I then became interested in if Color would also broadcast to this monitor in the same way. I fired up color, and bam! I had an external monitor for color correcting in Color! Sweet! At $350, this card was becoming a GREAT investment.

We currently don’t have a HDMI monitor in the shop, but I’m pulling for a low end small HDMI TV (about $500). Stay tuned as I will be testing the capture capabilities of this card. But if its as easy as setting up an external monitor, I’ll be highly recommending this product to anyone with a MacPro.

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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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In this ever-changing universe that is the internet, video has become a key feature to many web 2.0 sites. Many sites have popped up in the last couple years in the YouTube vein, producing and hosting mash-up style videos as well as Saturday Night Live-esk skits and shorts. Many producers are looking to the web their primary or sole distribution plan for their original content. Even with TV channels such as CurrentTV it is far easier to distribute yourself. However, the trick is gathering followers and having regular viewers.

While I’m wouldn’t be the best source for information about finding followers, I maybe able to provide some insight into producing video for the web. “What’s the difference between producing video for the web?” Well, honestly, not a whole lot – however, there are a couple of key points I want to share.

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