the blog site of heath mcknight

Hellevator, starring Greg Nappo, is a short film written by comic book legend David Michelinie (Iron Man, Amazing Spider-Man, Superman), and directed by me, that we shot on the Panasonic HPX500 a little while back. It was shot completely against a green screen, and required all sorts of visual effects to bring to life. My long-time film collaborator Jeremiah Hall took care of all the VFX, using Adobe After Effects CS5.5, Photoshop CS5.1, Boris Continuum Complete 7, and Twixtor 5. Just a few days ago, he delivered the last clip, which I dropped into the cut, and now we’re moving onto sound FX and mixing, with the help of my long-time film partner Grant Balfour, who also composed the score.

In addition to the film being shot in 720p24 on the HPX500, we shot the background plates with a Nikon D200, Canon 60D and even an iPhone 4S, plus recorded voiceovers on a Sony HVR-V1u. I did the first cut, all green screen clips in Final Cut Pro legacy, but when Jeremiah first started delivering FX shots, I turned to Final Cut Pro X, and started from scratch — I didn’t use the excellent 7toX to bring in the old cut, I started fresh in FCP X. I had about 40% of the FX, so I used the green screen clips to create a new cut, and then I’d swap out finished clips as I received them. I’ll be using FCP X to mix the audio, and have laid the music onto my timeline.

Editing Hellevator in Final Cut Pro X

I’ll have a more in-depth article or set of articles on how we brought Hellevator to life once the film is done, along with clips or the entire finished movie. For now, check out our official Hellevator page.

This is really interesting… Editoid from iMageneering/Imagenharia in Brazil created an app that can help automate your editing in Final Cut Pro X, especially with reptitive editing like similar projects. It uses keywords to create templates, which will switch out footage for a new project via FCP X’s XML. Here is how it works:

1. At Final Cut Pro X’s project library, select a project and export its XML, saving it inside Editoid’s templates folder. Editiod watches that folder and automatically creates In and Out folders for each template.

2. Select a Final Cut Pro X Event and export its XML, saving it inside the In folder for the template to be used. Editoid watches all templates In folders and automatically creates a new Project XML for each Event XML in the folders.

3. Now, simply double-click the generated Project XML in the template’s Out folder and Final Cut Pro X will open it and show the generated edit.

Check out the Editoid quickstart guide; there’s a 30-day trial, and the cost is $149. Find out more at iMageneering’s site.

Hat tip: FCP.co and Ben Balser

I wasn’t at NAB, but the company I work for, Doddle, was. Here’s all the coverage from NAB 2012, including the surprise announcment of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. That one is a bit of a gamechanger, at least for Blackmagic Design, known mostly for their terrific capture/output/monitoring devices and DaVinci Resolve/Lite color correction software. Back to Final Cut Pro X posting shortly.

Apple released a “Final Cut Pro X In Action” page to showcase TV shows, movies, post-production houses and editors using FCP X for their projects. These include Dean Devlin and his team of editors using FCP X to cut the hit TNT show ‘Leverage,’ which is shot on the RED EPIC, leading New York City-based post-production company @radical.media has gone all FCP X and Apple spotlights editor Knut Hake, who edits hit Germany TV show ‘Danni Lowinski’ with FCP X. It also shoots on RED cameras. Read the profiles on Apple’s FCP X In Action page.

Apple has released the latest update to the revolutionary Final Cut Pro X, 10.0.4. It looks like a smaller update compared to 10.0.3, but still a good one that you should download via the Mac App Store. The update includes, according to Apple:

• Improves image quality and responsiveness of broadcast monitoring with compatible third-party PCIe and Thunderbolt I/O devices.
• Improves performance of multicam syncing and editing.
• Adds language support for Simplified Chinese.
• Adds a Share option for 1080p video on compatible iOS devices.

Assigns default audio channel setting for new projects to stereo.

• Includes multicam metadata in XML project export.
• Fixes an issue in which video superimposed over a background with an alpha channel could appear differently in Viewer before and after render.
• Fixes an issue that caused some titles to be rendered again after each application launch.

As usual, backup all your events and projects before updating to FCP X 10.0.4.