Posted by Jason on August 29th, 2008
I haven’t posted anything in a while. You may have noticed. To make myself feel better about my own blogging failure I thought I’d pass along a tip that the people at Creative Cow recently wrote about; key bindings.
It’s a $10 name for describing how to create your own keyboard shortcuts within Final Cut Pro. This can be a huge time saver. For example, to get started in Soundtrack Pro I normally have to right click (or control-click) on a sequence in the Browser, select Send To, then choose Soundtrack Pro Multitrack Project. Alternatively, one could bind the action to their very own fancy-shmancy keyboard shortcut and accomplish the same task in a fraction of a second. On my system, I have this action set to Option-Shift-S.
The process of actually editing these shortcuts is as simple as you might expect something in FCP to be (meh). Start by hitting Option-H to open the keyboard layout editor, then click on the little lock icon in the lower left to allow changes. From there you can have at it by choosing the key combination tabs along the top of the window, and searching for the desired command in the search area. Simply drag the command onto the key you want to bind it to.
Creative Cow lists a bunch of great shortcuts in their post, but I’d also suggest setting Render All to the letter Y. It’s a letter that’s not used by default for anything, and it’s something you’re probably going to be doing a lot of. Consider also binding Send to Color and Send to Motion to Option-Shift-C and Option-Shift-M, receptively.
The last thing you’re going to want to do is to save your layout (and if you really want to blow your own mind, you can even set a keyboard shortcut for that too!). From the menu bar choose Tools > Keyboard Layout > Save Keyboard Layout… and give it a name. Something like, “Jason’s Keyboard,” or, “Master of space and time” would do nicely.
And finally, if things get too crazy in there, you can always hit the reset button to get yourself back to the Apple-supplied shortcuts.
Posted by Jason on July 10th, 2008
This summer has been pretty crazy what with moving across the country and everything. I haven’t had the time to write about everything that I thought was interesting, so I thought about creating a linked list (no affiliation to this guy, of course) to catch up on what’s been going on around here.
- The real bombshell here, however, is that Meagan is going to be working with legendary, dragon-slaying designer Dan Cederholm, of SimpleBits fame. We’re all pretty excited about that, and I can’t wait to see what kind of mind-expanding creations these two come up with in the months to come.
- A week (to the day) after arriving in Salem, Meagan and I found ourselves attending the first ever gathering of The Build Guild. The Build Guild is a collection of web developers and designers from the greater Salem area, who meet to talk shop and eat some delicious Salem food. The first meeting was a lot of fun, thanks in a big way to the Guild’s founders, Marc Amos and Angelo Simeoni.
- A fews days prior to leaving Orlando, I wrote about my MacBook Pro having a logic board failure. After I got the computer back I decided to try and restore the system from my latest Time Machine backup. Something I wasn’t aware of is that Time Machine uses your computer’s MAC address to identify it for a backup. When that address changes (such as when you get a new logic board), you have to perform a bit of Unix voodoo to get it to work again. I found a great walk-through on the topic over at Mac OSX Hints. If you’re having a similar issue, this should straighten things out.
- I’m a big fan of The Edit Blog for it’s fantastic production-related content. On a recent post Scott linked to a post by a very frustrated filmmaker trying to work with Soundtrack Pro for audio mixing. He lists his grievances and calls for it’s immediate execution by Apple. I’ve had my share of frustrations with Soundtrack Pro, but I’ve never wished death upon it before. He makes some great points though. Definitely worth a read.
- Lastly, I’m going to bookend this post with another mention of moving. One of my new favorite blogs, Big Contrarian recently had a post about moving that I loved. Read it and subscribe immediately.
Posted by Jason on March 25th, 2008
Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
If you’re not already familiar with B&H I suspect you soon will be. For many it’s considered the Mecca of the imaging community. Countless travelers make the journey north every year, just to stand among the superior camera technology.
I once heard that at if you’re lucky, and if you’re standing in just the right spot, you’ll experience a feeling akin to euphoria. This, of course, comes directly before you realize you just dropped $1200 on a 70mm lens, at which point you begin to justify the purchase (and the journey) by calling it an investment, a smart business move, or simply blame it on mind-control.
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Posted by Jason on March 1st, 2008
The most publicized feature in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard can also be one of the most useful for your Final Cut Studio workfow. This, of course, is Time Machine.
My setup right now consists of two external hard drives. Both are 500GB FireWire 800 drives. One is for capture and all of the extra goodies that come with Final Cut Studio, and the other is for backup via Time Machine.
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Posted by Jason on February 22nd, 2008
Final Cut Pro is a huge application. It has loads of options, oodles of customizable features, and even a talking yak.
For real.
It also has something called Media Manager.
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