QuickTip: Audio Mixing in the Timeline

One more Final Cut quick tip today guys!

You probably know that you can fade audio tracks in or out by adding a "Fade" effect to your clips in the timeline.  But you can do the same thing much quicker by using Clip Overlays and Keyframes.

You can turn on Clip Overlays by pressing the Toggle Clip Overlays button underneath the timeline.  The keyboard shortcut for this is ALT and W.  When you turn this option on, Final Cut puts a pink line over the audio tracks.  The pink line is a volume control for the sound clip measured in Decibels (dB).  Pulling the line down with the mouse will make the whole clip quieter and pushing it up will make it louder.  Even better, you can also adjust the volume of parts of the clip by adding keyframes to split the line into sections.

To add keyframes to the volume, turn on Clip Overlays then select the Pen tool from the tool box by clicking on the icon at the bottom -- it looks just like the Pen tool icon in Photoshop.  The quickest way to activate the Pen tool is to press the P key.  Switch back to the normal mouse pointer by pressing A for Arrow.  If you hold down the Pen icon you'll see that there are actually three versions of the tool.  For now you'll only need the standard Pen but once you've mastered that, play around with the others to see what they do.

Once you have the Pen activated, just click on the pink Clip Overlay line to add keyframes.  If you want a fade in or fade out, you'll need at least two keyframes -- one to set the clip's normal playback volume and one to turn the volume down to silence.  When you're measuring volume in Decibels, silence isn't Zero like you might expect.  Instead silence is defined as minus Infinity Decibels.  Put two keyframes near the end or begining of the sound clip then press A to turn the Arrow tool back on so you can pull the line up or down.  Moving the line sections nearest to the ends of the clip down to -inf dB (minus Infinity) will create a Fade-In or Fade-Out Effect.  You should see that the line makes a smooth curve from the playback volume down to silence.  This gives the best sounding fade effect, but you can set this to go in a straight line if you want.

Fade-In and Fade-Out added to a clip by using Keyframes in the Timeline

QuickTip: Timeline Overlays

Hi again,

Here's a very quick tip for customizing the timeline in Final Cut.

You can show your video and audio clips visually in the timeline by using the Timeline Layout Menu.  Click on the small, right pointing arrow below the timeline to open the Layout Menu.  The top two options are off by default.  "Show Audio Waveforms" will draw the sound waves in the green audio tracks.  This gives a really quick visual guide to spot things like audio peaks.  "Show Video Filmstrip" will add still frames along the whole video track giving a quick way to spot where the action is.  It can sometimes make the edits hard to see though so you'll probably want to switch it off occasionally.

Turning on both options makes the timeline look like this:

QuickTip: Resize Final Cut's Timeline

Here's another quick tip for Final Cut that will make all your editing work easier.

While you're editing your movies, you'll spend most of your time working with Final Cut's Sequence Timeline.  By default, the timeline shows you the minimum you need to edit your clips and sound track, but there is a lot more information that can be shown.

The basic timeline looks like this:

Along the bottom of the timeline window are some really small buttons which control the display

Timeline Track Height

 This little panel controls the size of the video and audio tracks in the timeline.  Selecting the different sized boxes makes the tracks taller or smaller.  You can also press the SHIFT and T keys to cycle through the different track height settings.



Clicking the tallest box makes the timeline look like this:

You can zoom into the timeline to focus on a  few shots or zoom out to get an overview of the whole sequence.  There are few ways to zoom.  First, you can use the Zoom Slider control at the bottom of the timeline.  Moving the small grey pointer to the right zooms out, showing you more of the edit and moving to the left zooms in to focus on a shorter time period.

Zoom Slider

There are also keyboard shortcuts for the same thing.  Pressing the CMD key and = together zooms in while CMD and - will zoom out.  If you have a Mac laptop, you can zoom in and out by doing a two finger 'pinch' gesture on the trackpad just like on an iPad or iPhone.


Zooming in completely lets you see individual frames of video which is really useful if you have an 'orphan' frame left between clips caused by a messy edit.  Final Cut draws a dark grey highlight over the time code strip of the timeline representing one frame right next to the play head like this:

The final way you can zoom in and out of the timeline is to use the tags at each end of the window sliding bar at the bottom of the timeline.  Pulling the tags apart stretches the sliding bar showing more you more of your edit (zoom out).  Pushing them together does the opposite.

Window Slider: Use Left and Right Tab to Zoom In and Out

Art Of The Title

If anyone needs any inspiration for their film titles, check out ArtoftheTitle.com one of the best film related sites you'll see.  They have full breakdowns of the title sequences of some of the most famous and less well known films including work by Saul Bass and Kyle Cooper.

Another great site for title design is watchthetitles.com

Enjoy!

MP Freeze

Hi Guys,
Some of you have been having problems exporting your soundtrack from Final Cut.  If you've had issues with the sound freezing and stuttering in your Quicktime files, check to see if you've got any .mp3 files in your edit.  Final Cut really doesn't like editing mp3 sounds 'natively' ( i.e. without converting it to some other format first).

You should always use uncompressed sound in your Sequence.  Compressed formats such as mp3 cause lots of problems; for example, Final Cut has to render the file before it will play back slowing down the overall editing process, mp3's are often so compressed that the sound quality starts to suffer, and finally, lots of mp3's use variable bit rate encoding which can lead to timing and sync issues.

No professional editor would use mp3's on their soundtrack so you shouldn't either!  The same goes for other compressed formats such as OGG, AAC, or WMA.

Always use something like Soundtrack Pro or iTunes to convert your compressed files into AIFF files before you start editing in Final Cut.

Check the blog post about converting files to AIFF using Soundtrack Pro.  Your audio file settings should always match the settings of your Final Cut project.  For the DMW this will be set to: 16 bit integer, 48000 samples / second.

Happy Editing!

DaVinci Resolve Lite

BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve Lite has been installed in all the Digital Media Workshops.  If you are TVP or TVP Tech Arts student learning about colour correction, you can use any open access workstation to correct your footage or just spend time learning the software.  The Resolve manual and sample files are available in the folder /Users/Shared/Resolve

How to Key a Green Screen Shot With After Effects

Hi everyone!

Loads of you have been asking about shooting on green screen so here's a quick tutorial covering the basics of chroma keying with After Effects.  I'll be showing you how to 'pull a matte' from your green screen shot with Keylight, then replace the background with another still image or video.

First things first: setting up the project.
Open up After Effects and click on "New Composition" on the Welcome screen

On the Composition Settings window, set up the resolution and frame rate to match your video.  If you're using the JVC HM100 with our standard settings, you'll want to set this to HDV 1280 by 720 at 25 frames per second

After that click OK then import your video from the Film menu.

Next you will need to drag your video onto the viewer of your Composition.  You'll see an outline of the frame to help you line up the footage.

The box will snap to the edge of the Composition to make sure its centered properly.

Now the Comp is set up, you're ready to add a keying effect to the video.  Click open the Keying section of the Effects & Presets panel and find KeyLight (1.2)

Drag it onto your video strip in the timeline and let go.  You should get the Keylight controls appear on the left of the screen.

Find the setting called "Screen Color" and click on the eyedropper next to the Black colour swatch.  Use the dropper to select the green colour of the background.  You need to pick a part of the screen with an average green tone, not over-lit or under-lit and not too close to the foreground subject otherwise you'll risk picking an off green colour which doesn't match the actual colour of the backing.

It looks like nothing has happened, but if you go to the View setting and pick "Screen Matte" from the menu, you'll see the alpha matte you've just made from the green screen plate.

This grey-scale image is what will make your video semi-transparent.  Solid Black is completely transparent and lets the background show through,  Solid White is fully opaque and shows the foreground image.

There are a couple of problems with the matte right now.  Firstly there is some grey noise in the background especially in the corners.  This is going to make the green screen show through a bit and discolour the background.  Second, there are patches of grey on the actress particularly on her dress.  Remember, anything but solid white is going to be slightly transparent so in the final shot you'll see the background showing through her body.  To fix this, you'll need to increase the contrast of the matte image until the background is solid black and the actress' body is solid white.

Her shawl is trickier because its naturally transparent and needs to stay a shade of grey.

Keylight provides settings to control the matte's contrast.  Click on "Screen Matte" to open the controls, then click open "Clip Black" and "Clip White"

Increasing the Clip Black will start to 'eat away' at the noise in the background.  Turning down Clip White will start to fill in the grey regions of the dress.  Its REALLY important that you adjust the sliders by the absolute minimal amount that gives a good result.  If you over do it, you'll damage the matte image and end up with an ugly final composite.

Finally you should test the matte to check its giving good results.  The best way to do this is by putting a coloured solid behind your subject.  To add a solid, click on the matte image, then go to Layer -> New -> Solid

Make sure the size matches your original video resolution then pick a bright red with the colour swatch.

Click OK and the new Solid will appear on the timeline.  You may have to re-order it in the layer stack to get it behind the video by using the Layer -> Arrange menu.  Finally you'll need to set the View property of Keylight back to "Final Result".

Hopefully you should have a nice clean foreground subject on a solid red background.  If not, go back to Keylight and adjust the settings until you get a good, clean key.  Once you've done that, you can swap the Red Solid for a still image or video and you're done!

That's it for now.  If you're trying a green screen shot and get stuck any of the DMW technicians will be able to help you out.


"Govida Close" Green Screen Plates are copyright Hollywood Camera Work