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.

Since moving to Salem I’ve been working on an idea to create video snapshots about some of the cool things I’ve seen here. This video highlights the The Build Guild, a meetup for people in the web industry, and is the first in (what will become) a series of similar snapshots.

Unfortunately, I was a little off my game when I shot this and as a result the audio suffered greatly. Sorry about that.

I shot another set of ads for the wonderful guys of Rails Envy recently, and the first four are now available as your nerdy entertainment for the week.

We shot the ads against a white wall in tiny apartment with surprisingly solid results. I was able to blow out the rear wall enough to cover up the textured paint, and later I dropped a green screen behind our Burt Reynolds look-a-like. Trying to do any kind of chroma keying with MiniDV footage is always going to be problematic, but since this was produced to be viewed (mostly) on the web, the lower quality of the key wasn’t a huge issue.

The software I used to pull the key is a handy little plugin called dvMatte Pro 3, which specializes in keying DV footage. I wrote more about this little gem here. I know I’ve said this before, but it’s become an indispensable tool for a lot of the work I’ve done recently. Really great stuff.

These ads are always a lot of fun to work on, and I thank the Envy guys for the opportunity to work on a project like this.

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.

I previously mentioned how using Final Cut Studio’s Media Manager can be useful while needing to stay mobile. Another option is to use Time Machine to store your current, but not quite active, projects for later while you focus on what needs to get done immediately.

Here’s how it works. When you import your tape go ahead and capture it right to your laptop’s internal drive, instead of your external. I usually keep about 30GB free for this kind of thing, but that sort of flexibility may vary wildly depending on you and your lifestyle.

Once the capture is complete let Time Machine grab it. If it’s something you anticipate working on immediately, go for it. If not, delete it from your internal drive and move on to something else. Time Machine will save it for later, and since it’s always going to be captured under Final Cut Pro Documents > Capture Scratch, you’ll know exactly where to look for it.

I recently did a lot of work for a Web-based promotional company that required juggling five projects simultaneously. Three of which were awaiting final approval, but the other two hadn’t been started. I trashed the first three projects after ensuring a successful backup, and just kept on trucking. When the time came to burn the projects to disks I trashed the current projects, restored the old files, burned the discs, trashed them again, and restored the projects on which I was currently working.

This sort of workflow can take some time to get used to. Deleting your source files is kind of a big no-no in the world of non-linear editing. So it’s not going to be for everybody. Especially if you’re a bit squeamish. But if you find yourself in a pinch, this is a useful technique that’ll keep your workflow moving even when working with limited hard drive space.

We don’t know what we are.

We also haven’t had a new show out in a while, but that’s another story altogether. Anyway, I went ahead and took one of our recent episodes over to the Enzian, a film house that screens local filmmaker’s work at monthly film slams. From what I understand the barrier to entry into these slams is pretty low. That being said, we were probably lucky to sneak into the running with our (probably highly offensive) episode, Superhero.

Superhero from Jason Hawkins on Vimeo.

Superhero was actually originally shot as part of Apple’s Insomnia Film Festival, a 24-hour film competition open to students. It’s also a response to NBC’s Heroes, which includes a character (Isaac) that requires the use of heroin to activate his super powers. An interesting premise to be sure, but we wondered what it might be like if other people had similar… limitations. And what those limitations might be. And what that might mean for those close to that person.

So there it is. Enjoy the show, and if you’re in the Orlando area this Sunday at 1pm, we’d appreciate the support.

A few months back I decided it would be neat to have a tape logging system that I could take with me while I was out shooting something. I took some time to get into Ruby on Rails, and eventually Tapes was born.

Tapes is free, iPhone compatible, and works pretty well on EDGE (so far anyway). I hope you like it, but more than that, I hope you find it useful.

I’m open to comments and suggestions about how to improve Tapes, if you feel like giving some feedback. You can always email me at jason [at] makefilmwork [dot] com.

Who knows… it might be your suggestion that ends up in a future update! And that’s exciting right? RIGHT?

From shooting until completion it took about a week.

Twice a year the residents of Orlando, FL convene in the parking lot of a coffee shop to buy, sell, and trade their homemade wares. Local bands perform while visitors browse colorful tents, or relax in the giant balloon pool. Basically it’s amazing. No video can do it justice. You should just go.

I’m really excited about this because I felt like I really had a chance to make a difference here in the Orlando community. I wanted people to feel excited about their town, specifically about BarCamp; even one that already happened.

Before I started working on this there were two goals I had in mind. The first was to make something people would want to share with their friends. The second was to shame all other BarCamp videos.

Nothing against the other BarCamps (or their videos, even). I just wanted everybody to know that Orlando is not just going to sit idle while the world does its collective thing. We’re in the conversations now, and there’s some pretty great stuff going on here. It’s time everybody else knew that.

Right now I feel like Orlando is saying, “What’s up, World? We should hang out sometime.” So you better damn-well make sure you’ve got time in your schedule for us. Because we’ll keep calling. And not just to confirm your hotel reservations.

So here you go; part seven of nine in the series: Ruby on Rails vs. Django

Originally this episode was at about 35 minutes, but people don’t really want to see 30+ minutes of your van breaking down. Go figure.

Anyway, here’s Episode 1 of Adventure! Boston.

Today I’m putting up the new site in place of the old one. I suppose that’s a bit of an understatement, since the “old one” was basically a one page link to my email address. Hopefully you find this new site a bit more useful. Or informative. Or entertaining. Or all of those things.

The Rails Envy guys are also premiering the new Get a Mac parody ads we put together recently. You can digg the ads, if you’d like, or just give us your feedback on YouTube. We really wanted to answer some of the criticism brought on by the first round of ads. Or maybe we just wanted to try and piss a few more people off. I guess that’s up for you to decide.

Anyway, have a poke around. Hopefully you find everything is in order. I’ll be updating this space with every video project I work on from here on in, so keep an eye out for all that goodness. Below you’ll find the first of the new Rails Envy Ads. It’s about the .NET framework, where we made the assumption that all .NET programmers are probably closet alcoholics. Enjoy.