A lot has happened over the last month, but not too much of it has been so photogenic.  Our AV integrators spent a week or so here working on the Recording and Conferencing room setting up what is going to be a pretty impressive system in there.  Details are still being finalized, but you’ll be able to essentially pipe a series of input sources (camera, computers, Vaddio board, etc), to a series of output sources (TV, Panopto, web conferencing) with ease through a Crestron touch screen.  This will allow you to do things like create a live recording from the camera, while simultaneously capturing a keynote presentation from the mac, and then process it through DukeStream for distribution.  Or start a video conference and digitally share your whiteboard scribbles and computer screen.  Lots of possibilities.

Soundbooth pieces, awaiting assembly

As for the other two breakout rooms, they’re getting decked out quite nicely as well.  The Vocalbooth has been relocated from our previous lab to the new space and is looking quite spry in its new home.  A small but nice detail about the new installation is the fact that the booth is now sunk down below the access floor and now sits directly on the concrete slab below.  This will not only eliminate a tripping hazard of having to step up into the booth (and also allowed us to get rid of our ramp access), but it’s also going to be a bit more acoustically sound, without the possibility of vibrations coming through the access floor.

Video Editing room. Receiver and speakers just out of view. Laptop and coffee not included.

The video editing room (or as I’ve been calling it the last week or so, my “on-campus office”) is looking really great.  We got a custom desk to wrap around half of the room, and there is easily enough room for 3 or so to work together in here.  The standard iMac (see below for specs) is also connected to a 37″ television and a Yamaha AV receiver.  Sensitive video and audio work should be a dream to work on in here.

It still smells like New Computer Smell in here.

Last week, the room finally got some more photogenic upgrades in the form of furniture and new computers.  We set up all the desks in the main space, and then went to town unboxing a truckload of new computers and external monitors.  The centerpiece of the new setup is a 27″ iMac, with 3.4 GHz i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB solid state drive for the system, and a 1TB disk for storage.  And if the iMac’s 3,686,400 pixels weren’t quite enough for you, about half of the stations in the lab are also equipped with a 24″ secondary display.

Finally, I’ve been listening to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” all day today to celebrate the deconstruction of the temporary wall that has shrouded our space in mystery and dust for the last 2 months or so.  It’s incredibly exciting to be able to finally step back and look at the graphics from more than 2 feet away, and I couldn’t be happier about how it turned out.  Pictures won’t do justice, so you’ll just have to swing by.

We’re full-court press today and tomorrow to get some final details worked out, and I’m sure there will be some lingering issues that need to be addressed as we progress through the summer.  But I’m excited for everyone to see the lab, so come on over starting on Wednesday and check it out!

• Increase saturation, as this will bring out the colors and make them more vivid.
• You might find that dragging the little circle towards the other colors is slow; this is because these adjustments are meant to be small. Therefore, don’t drag the little circle too far away from the original center, unless you wanted the whole clip to appear green, etc.
• Color corrector does allow you to create some cool color effects, like those in the movie Payback with Mel Gibson. For those who haven’t seen it, the entire movie has a stylistic grayish-blue hue, which was intentionally done. If you want to do something like this, just drag the “Mids” and “Whites” circles to color extremes and your video will have that hue
• While you’re adjusting the colors, have the original clip open to see just how much you have changed the newer clip; having perspective on the before and after helps you achieve your desired effect.

The pictures below demonstrate one way to do this, and for this clip, I wanted to make the room seem more warm and inviting. Notice how the circles have moved very little from their origin. How much you adjust the colors really depends on the original clip’s appearance and what you want the final clip to look like. Film Grain (if needed)   I say to only use film grain if needed because the color corrector, when used properly, creates a cinematic look by itself, but if you are looking to be a bit old fashioned and want the clip to appear like it’s playing from film, we can use film grain. There are multiple ways to do this, but I find the quickest way is to use the “Noise” effect. You can find it under Effects>Video Generators>Render. The “Noise” effect works just like a clip; click and drag it onto your timeline. Stretch the ends of the effect so it covers the length of your other footage.     Once you’ve done that, double click on the effect in your timeline to open it in the viewer. Click on the “Motion” tab, and then click on the little triangle next to “Opacity”. You’ve probably noticed that, by adding the Noise effect, it just looked like static in the player. Once you lower the Opacity of the Noise effect, the static begins to disappear and look more like film grain. Lower opacity below 10, and try to stay in the 4 or 5 range, depending on how much grain you want. Anything above 10 makes interrupts the video itself.     Here’s an example of what Final Cut Pro can do

If you’re stuck with a low quality camera, but want professional quality looking clips, using Final Cut Pro is a great way to get there. Remember that it is all about the little adjustments. Once you’ve done that, you should now have a clip that looks more professional and cinematic than ever before!

The pen tool works through a series of “anchor points,” which can be connected to form lines. In turn, these lines have a remarkable degree of flexibility and can create a whole variety of shapes. Let’s begin with a simple circle.

First, let’s create a new Illustrator file. Go to File > New. You can set the dimensions of your artboard to whatever you’d like. I’ll use a 5” x 5” square.

Once your blank canvas opens, you’ll want to select the pen tool. (It’s on the left hand bar and it looks like an ink pen.)  Alternately, you can use the keyboard shortcut and press p. Now, select a stroke and fill color, which will be the outline and fill colors of our circle.

To create an anchor point, click anywhere on the canvas, and a small blue dot will appear. Now, you can click anywhere else on the canvas to create another anchor point, and the two points will connect. Play around with this for a little while, and familiarize yourself with all the different ways the anchor points can connect.

Now that you are more comfortable with the pen tool, let’s get started on our circle. We can create a circle by manipulating and editing our anchor points to create curvature. This time, when you create an anchor point, don’t just click. Instead, hold down and drag the mouse button. This will create a curve, and the degree to which you drag the mouse button determines the level of curvature.

You can manipulate the anchor points with the direct selection tool (the white arrow in the toolbar to the left).  The blue lines emitting from each anchor point are called Bézier handles.  You can use these handles to further adjust the curvature and angle of your lines. It’ll take some practice, but this is essentially how you make smooth shapes in Illustrator. Here’s a useful infographic:

To delete an anchor point, just hover over it with the pen tool. A subtraction sign will appear underneath. Click on the point, and it will go away, and your shape will automatically adjust itself.

To add a point, you can go into the pen tool set and select the “add anchor point” tool. Click anywhere on the canvas or on a path and an anchor point will appear.

And that’s all there is to it! With these skills under your belt, the next thing to do is practice, practice, and practice. Here are some basic shapes to practice the pen tool with:

Note: Smooth points vs. corner points

Though this is not necessarily relevant for our introductory tutorial, it will be useful if you want to create more complex shapes with the pen tool.  When a curve passes through a smooth point, it forms a smooth curve. When the curve passes through a corner point, it forms an angle.  To convert a smooth point to a corner point, select it with the direct selection tool, then using the Convert Anchor Point tool (hidden in the pen tool palette) to grab one of the two ends of the Bézier handles.  Using this tool will ‘break’ the handle into two separately controllable parts, where each part represents the curve of the path entering or leaving the anchor point.

Assuming you have some basic experience with Final Cut, such as adding and adjusting filters, here you’ll learn how to create a simple yet effective eye reflection effect that just might launch your film career. Or at least make your mother proud.

We’ll start with two clips: a close-up shot of our actor’s eye, and the clip we want to transform into a reflection. That could a shot of another person’s face, a shot of a computer screen, whatever you can think of. I’ll use a clip of a pizza slice tumbling through the air. If you’re going to use this effect, you’ll probably want it to be slightly slow motion so you can milk the moment for all it is worth. Let’s take a look at the length of the clips.

The clip of the actor’s eye isn’t very long, because he had trouble with the proximity of the camera lens. You’ll want this to be a nice sharp extreme closeup, and as long of a take as possible (hopefully your talent will cooperate). You’ll also want the eye to be as stationary as possible, and this tutorial assumes that you’ve kept it close to stationary. To slow the clip down, I’ll just right-click on the clip, select “Change Speed”, and set the rate at 25%. This actually works perfectly, because the clip we are transforming into a reflection was shot with a high-speed camera at 120 frames per second and then automatically slowed down to 30 frames per second on the camera. Playing a regular 30fps clip back at a 25% rate will slow it down to about the same apparent speed. If both of your clips start out at normal 30fps, you can experiment with slowing them both down by the same amount.

Our eye clip isn’t as sharp as I’d like, so I’ll drop a “Sharpen” video filter and experiment with its settings, settling on an amount of 25. It’s important to have a rather sharp eye shot so that you can match the reflection to it, and so that the sharp reflection video blends in with the rest of the shot.

Now we’ll move the reflection clip to the video track directly above our eye clip. We need to resize the overlaid clip, so we’ll enable “Image + Wireframe” in the Canvas.

Using the corner points of the wireframe display, scale the overlaid clip down so that the object of interest — here, the peak of the pizza’s parabola— is right in the center of the eye. Don’t worry about the motion of your actor’s head just yet.

Now let’s work on the look of the overlaid clip. Right-click on the clip in the timeline and set its “Composite Mode” to “Soft Light”. This should make your clip almost disappear from the Canvas, but you’ll notice that what you want to see— in this case, the tumbling pizza — is overlaid and blends in pretty well as a reflection already.

It might be too dark, though, so let’s add a simple “Brightness and Contrast (Bezier)” filter, found in the “Image Control” effects subfolder. Experiment with these settings to your heart’s content, but remember that your goal should be something approaching a natural reflection. Anything too bright will look unnatural, and the effect will be too obviously artificial.

To approximate the curved surface of the human eye, we’ll apply a “Fisheye” filter, found in the “Distort” section, to the overlaid clip and adjust its settings. Set “center” to about the center of your actor’s eye by selecting “center” under the fisheye filter settings and moving the red crosshairs in the Canvas. Then adjust the radius and amount settings to give a slight, well-spread-out curvature to the overlaid clip.

And now the most complicated part of this effect: the Eight-Point Garbage Matte filter, found in the “Matte” section. This filter will block out everything but the portion of the pizza clip we actually want to see. If we set the edges of the garbage matte to the edges of our actor’s eye, then the pizza will only be visible when it is in front of the eye. Our only problem here is that the actor couldn’t hold his head still, so his eye moves between each frame. That means that we’ll have to adjust the position of each of the points of the garbage matte for each frame. Think of it as frame-by-frame Photoshop.

Navigate to the first frame of the overlaid clip. Using the same button-then-adjust-the-crosshairs process that you used earlier to center the fisheye effect on your actor’s pupil, set each of the eight garbage matte points around the edge of the eye so that the overlaid clip only appears over the surface of the eye.

Now that we’ve set our garbage matte for the first frame, we need to add a new set of garbage matte points every few frames to account for the movement of our actor’s eye. We’ll do this by adding keyframes to the garbage matte filter.

Make sure you are still on the first frame of the overlaid clip. For each garbage matte point, click the little diamond shaped button to insert a keyframe. Do this for all eight points, then advance a few frames and drop another set of keyframes for all eight points. Then adjust the location of each garbage matte point if you need to. If the actor’s eye has moved, move with it. Keep repeating this keyframe-adjust process for every few frames of video. You may find it helpful to add a slight feather and/or smooth effect to make the edges of the garbage matte softer; these functions are built into the garbage matte filter, and I used levels of 15 and 27 respectively.

When you are done, you should be able to play back your sequence and see the overlaid video appear only inside the boundaries of your actor’s eye. It should look like a reflection. If anything appears out of line — part of the overlaid video spills off the surface of the eye, or the moving garbage matte points aren’t quite right — you can always go back and fine-tune the settings at each keyframe, or even add more keyframes if need be.

It’s often hard to follow a text tutorial for a somewhat complicated effect like this, so I’ve included the project file I used to create this tutorial so you can see how my garbage matte and keyframes are set up. Just download the .zip folder, unpack the archive, load the Final Cut project, and if you get a “Reconnect Media” error, just point Final Cut to the location where you’ve saved the project folder. Feel free to use my sample clips and project in any way you like.

If you have particular questions about this tutorial, I’d be happy to help you out via email at austin.powers@duke.edu.

More and more people are wanting to create their own websites, but, unfortunately, just aren’t quite sure where to start. Places like WordPress or Tumblr will let you create something quickly, but it’s often not what people are looking for. Luckily, for anyone with a NetID, Duke provides basic but usable web hosting that you can use to start your very own website (or store small files to share with people).

The first step is simply figuring out where your space is–all you need to know is your NetID. Your URL will be http://duke.edu/~yourNetID. I’m http://duke.edu/~mck16. It’s really that simple. Go ahead and check yours out. It should be delightfully empty. The next step is getting some content up there… but, how do we do that?

We’re going to use a very popular, easy-to-use standard called FTP (it stands for file transfer protocol, but that’s not important). What is important is that FTP let’s us take files from our own computers and upload them to a remote server (which, for us, is a Duke server). We’re going to be using the FTP client Cyberduck (http://cyberduck.ch/), a FTP client installed on all MPS Lab machines. Go ahead and open Cyberduck now (or download & install it first if you’re not on a lab machine). The default window should look something like below:

If it looks complicated, don’t worry, it’s actually pretty use to use. Our next step is to connect to the server–for this, we need five pieces of information:
1. The server URL. In our case, Duke’s server is login.oit.duke.edu.
2. The username we’re connecting as, which, for us, is your NetID.
3. The password for the username, which is your NetID password.
4. The port number we are connecting to on the server–we’re going to actually use SFTP, a variant of FTP that is a little more secure (think of the ‘S’ as standing for Secure). The default port number for SFTP, and the one we’ll be using, is 22.
5. The path we are requesting on the server. This part is a little tricky and very specific to the way Duke’s IT department sets up their servers. Our path will be formulated as /afs/acpub.duke.edu/users/firstLetter/secondLetter/fullNetID, where firstLetter is the first letter of your NetID, secondLetter is the second letter of your NetID, and, naturally, fullNetID is your full NetID. For example, if your NetID was abc12, the path would be /afs/acpub.duke.edu/users/a/b/abc12. Go ahead and figure your path out now, we’ll need it in the next step. My NetID is mck16, so I’m /afs/acpub.duke.edu/users/m/c/mck16.

Now, go ahead and click the “Open Connection” button in the top left corner of the main window, bringing up a dialog box that looks like below. You’ll also want to go ahead and click the circled arrow to bring down the “More Options” pane. The full screenshot is below:

We’ll need to change a few options for our connection. First, click the “FTP (File Transfer Protocol)” dropdown and select the “SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol Option)”–this tells Cyberduck that we want to use a secure connection. Then, put login.oit.duke.edu as your server, your NetID as your username, and your NetID password as your password. And be sure to uncheck “Anonymous Login”. Also, under the “More Options” pane, we’ll need to put in the path we formulated from above (mine was /afs/acpub.duke.edu/users/m/c/mck16). In the end, the dialog box should look something like this:

Once you’ve filled the five fields in, go ahead and click the “Connect” button. If you entered everything correctly, you should see something like this:

If not, you most likely entered your username or password wrong–re-type them and try again. What is important here is the listing of files below the toolbar. This shows you all the files you have on the server. If you’re like me, you’ve got all sorts of random stuff there, but you also might not have anything. For this tutorial, we’re going to be putting up a very, very simple webpage. And to do that, we need our files to be visible to the Internet. There’s a special folder for files like this, called “public_html”. Anything in the public_html folder can be viewed. For example, if we had a file named test.txt in /public_html, it would be accessed as http://www.duke.edu/~netID/test.txt.

We’ll be doing something very similar to that, only instead of a simple plain text file, we’ll use HTML. This tutorial doesn’t cover HTML in depth and is intended simply as a starting point to using the Duke-provided webspace. There are a ton of excellent HTML resources on the Internet though (and Duke offers Lynda.com web development tutorials free for NetID users!). So, double click on the “public_html” folder–there will most likely not be any files in your public_html folder, but that’s ok for now!

Now, open up any text editor and type the following in:
<html>
<head>
<title>My First Webpage</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hello, World!</h1>
<p>Welcome to my website!</p>
</body>
</html>
Then save the file as “index.html”. If you’re wondering why we chose to use “index.html”, it’s because “index” has a special meaning when it comes to websites and servers. Whenever you load a webpage, say Google or even Duke’s, the server looks for the “index” page and it is the first one to be displayed. So, if you went to http://duke.edu/~mck16, it would look for a file called index.html. Try it out–see http://duke.edu/~mck16 and http://duke.edu/~mck16/index.html. Should be the same thing!

Go ahead and switch back into Cyberduck. We have one last step–we need to upload our file to the server. To do this, go to “File -> Upload” (from the menubar on the top of the screen). This will bring up a standard file dialog box. Navigate to your saved “index.html” file and click “Upload”.

Cyberduck will handle the rest–your “index.html” file will be uploaded to the server and stored in your “public_html” folder. Now you have a very simple but very functional website of your own! Be sure to try it out! The next step is learning a little more about HTML and all the cool things you can do with that. The Spark has some great tutorials on HTML (see http://sites.duke.edu/oit-mps/?s=html) and I highly recommend http://lynda.com and http://www.w3schools.com/html/ as well. Good luck!

Ever see music videos that have multiple shots running on the screen in sections, playing different video clips at the same time? It’s called Multiclip; this great special effect can be used for music videos, or any other film-project of yours on Final Cut Pro 7.

The first step is to have your clips prepared, and dragged onto the timeline. We recommend editing your clips to your desired length before using Multiclip in order to make the process smoother. Once your clips have been dragged onto your timeline, it is now time to arrange them vertically. In order for Final Cut to play all four clips on the same screen, you must arrange the clips so that way they are on top of each other, layered vertically. It doesn’t matter which clip is on top or bottom, or even if they are perfectly aligned. As long as you drag them into a vertical line, you are set.

Now if you look at the screen above you will see that the clips are aligned vertically, and on the top right hand corner there is a pull-down menu that is open. Click on that outlined box and the menu will pop up, and you should chose ‘Image + Wireframe’.

Now if you look at your Viewer (the top-middle window), you will only be able to see one clip with a wire frame and that happens to be the top clip on your timeline. The other clips are actually just underneath it, because Final Cut has layered these films, just as they are layered in the timeline. In order to see all the clips you must resize the overlaying clips, and resize them so you can actually arrange them to all fit on the screen. With your cursor, grab the corner of the first layered wire-framed image and wait until you see a “+” sign pop up. When it does, you are then able to click, and stretch the size of the image; once minimized, you will be able to see the layers underneath, and you can continue to minimize the size of all the images until they are all visible on the screen. Note, you are only able to edit ALL of your images if you have your timeline “cursor” is on a spot in your timeline where all of your clips are layered on top of each other. For example, if I have four clips layered on my timeline, Multiclip can only arrange them all if I have my timeline cursor on the spot where all four clips are playing at the same time.

Now, this is where it gets tricky. Once you have arranged where you want the clips to be placed on the screen, you must arrange the duration of your clips. Some people like their clips to pop up sequentially, others want their clips to enter and exit their screen at the same time. Here is where you rearrange your individual clips so that they begin and end at your desired time,within your multiclip sequence. You will have to rearrange and render your clips often in order to achieve your desired Multiclip sequence, but the end result will undoubtably be a visually appealing film clip!

Although Final Cut Pro is not as powerful (and wasn’t designed to be) in the composite realm as software like Adobe After Effects, most filmmakers can achieve the basic result they desire using filters within Final Cut. This avoids messy exporting and outsourcing to the other slower programs, and saving valuable time that could be spent on Facebook.

First of all, there are a few different ways to key (read: blue screen, green screen, etc.) in final cut. They are found under Effects: Video Filters: Key. You can key based on light/dark (Luma Key) based on a simple color (Color Key) or a range of color (Chroma Key), or using a computer-determined combination of the two (Primatte RT).

You can even key something based on the differences between one frame and the next (Difference Matte). Essentially, keying means to get rid of a certain aspect of the frame to make it transparent. If there is no layer below it, it will appear black.

I will be teaching you Chroma Key, which is arguably the most versatile of the filters. Chroma key contains three image controls, three sliders, and three buttons.

The top image control (the rainbow) is the color that will be removed from the image. It can be adjusted manually by dragging the two sloped lines in and out, or dragging the color itself from side to side. If you use the eyedropper tool on the right, you can select a color in the frame of the video itself to key out. The “Sat” slider adjusts the range of saturation of the color. If it is bright green, for example, you want your slider towards the right. If it is a very pale or pastel green, you want the window to contain the area to the left. The “Luma” slider determines the brightness of the color. A color with lots of white will be towards the right (pastel) and lots of black (darker) will be toward the left. To key out all greens universally, make the saturation and luma windows almost as big as they can be. The edge thin slider is a way to slightly compress or expand your selection. Softening makes the line between colors softer for a smoother transition. Enhance adds a slightly colored halo around the key image to make it appear clearer. The trapezoid button inverts your selection, keeping everything that had originally been keyed out. Happy keying!

Photoshop is an amazing and sometimes overwhelming program.  There often seem to be multiple paths we can take to reach the same desired result.  No one way is right or wrong but its good to have a variety of options.  Here’s an alternative to using the Brightness/Contrast adjustment tool that will give you more control over how contrast is added to your image. In the end you’ll have a more more nuanced image.

Adding a high contrast layer is an essential step when doing high quality photo printing, but it is also a good general image enhancement, no matter what you’re outputting for.  You should do this step after adjusting your Color/Tone, Curves or Levels.  Initially this may seem like a complicated process, but the steps below show you how to record your every move, enabling you to repeat the process with the stroke of one key.

In the Windows menu select Actions.

Within the Actions window click the ‘Create new action’ icon.

A ‘New Action’ dialogue box will appear allowing you to name it and create a new keyboard shortcut for it.  I’ve named my action ‘High Contrast Layer’ and assigned it the Shift+F6 shortcut.  Click ‘Record’ when all information is entered.

Next, duplicate your background layer, either in the Layer menu or window.

In the Filter menu scroll down and select Unsharp Mask.

Within the Unsharp Mask dialogue box move the sliders to the follow values: Amount 50, Radius 200, Threshold 3.

In the Layers window click on the Opacity drop down menu and slide/adjust the amount to 30%.  Use this amount as a general setting, but some images will need a bit more or less opacity.  After this step your image should look complete.

Back in the Actions window press the stop icon to finish recording your action.

Now, you can repeat this process easily with the keyboard shortcut you created.

Written by Austin Powers

Color correction is often overlooked in the rush to finish a video project. Aside from fixing color flaws in the source footage, such as white balance mismatch between cameras, color correction can be used for artistic effect—even video from a Flip can look (somewhat) like a Hollywood movie with the right color correction. Final Cut Pro 7 offers powerful built-in color correction tools, but if you want to experiment with a professional-level color correction system, Apple’s Color is worth a shot.

As part of the Final Cut Studio 3 suite, Color works almost seamlessly with Final Cut Pro. Here’s how to take an edited sequence from Final Cut to Color and back again.

Preparing your Sequence

Once you are finished editing a sequence in Final Cut, select that sequence in the browser. Here, the sequence is called “Hallway Crowding”. Right-click the sequence, and click “Send To>Color”.

Final Cut will ask you to name the new Color project. It’s usually helpful to give it the same name as the sequence.

Working in Color

If you are starting Color for the first time, the program asks you to choose a location for its media and render directories. Keeping this directory inside your Final Cut project folder–wherever you are keeping the other media for your project—is a good idea.

Once Color opens, you will notice that your entire Final Cut sequence has been imported as one timeline of edited video. The Color timeline even retains the timecode of your Final Cut project.

I’ll go ahead and apply some Color FX to each video clip. Color offers a lot of flexibility, from these pre-built effects to complicated secondary color correction or selective color replacement. There are lots of great Color tutorials on the internet, including step-by-step instructions for achieving a particular “Hollywood Look”. It’s a powerful piece of software.

When you are done adjusting all of your clips, you need to render them in Color. You can do this one-by-one as you are working, but to make sure everything is rendered before you go back to Final Cut, it’s good to render this way once your project is finished:

Under the “Render Queue” tab, click “Add Unrendered”. This automatically adds any clips in the timeline that are not already rendered to the render queue.

All unrendered clips should have an orange bar above them in the timeline to indicate that they are unrendered, and a yellow bar under them to indicate they have been added to the render queue.

Once the clips have been added, click “Start Render” and watch Color work its way though each clip.

Getting back to Final Cut

Once everything is rendered, it’s time to go back to Final Cut. Select “File>Send To>Final Cut Pro”

You’ll automatically be switched over to Final Cut Pro, where a new sequence is being imported. It will show up as “Project name (from Color)”. Depending on what effects you had applied before sending your sequence to Color, you may have to re-render some of your clips within Final Cut. One clip in my sequence, for example, needs to be re-analyzed for motion stabilization.

That’s the whole trip from Final Cut to Color and back again. It’s not too complicated, and worth a shot if you want to experiment with color correction beyond the built-in tools Final Cut offers. Color is a really neat and capable tool, and it can give your piece the smooth, professional look everyone wants.

To begin, it is crucial to understand what all the different sorts of files are.   In the MPS, the programs we use are nondestructive.  That means that the original media files are never touched.  Rather, the program uses a project file that contains the instructions for how to handle your media files to produce your movie.  The project says, for example, “put x file here, and cut x amount of footage out.”  This means you need both the media files – your footage, sounds, and still images – and your project file, to put everything together.  Some programs (Final Cut Pro 7, Premiere) also need to render that data to make it playable.  Rendering is the process of applying your project’s instructions to your media files to create a temporary movie you can play back.  These programs will create additional rendering files, but you don’t really need to worry about them, as you can always re-render your footage on your new machine.  You’ll only want to transfer the render files if you’ll have to spend a long time rendering your footage.

Final Cut Pro 7

FCP7 is easy to work with.  Just move the Final Cut project and all the media you used in it to the new computer and you’re good to go.  If the location of the media files changes in the process – for example, if “movie.avi” was originally in “Documents” and now it’s on the desktop – you’ll get a “disconnected media” error message and the disconnected files will have a red slash through them.  This just means that the file location changed and FCP7 doesn’t know where it is.  To tell it where the file now is, right click on the file in the media browser and click “reconnect media.”   Then, find the new location and connect the file.

FCP7 does have rendering files, so if you move your project and the associated files without moving the render files from your scratch disks, you’ll have to re-render it.  If you want to avoid re-rendering it, go into your scratch disks and move its contents into the scratch disks on the new computer.  Your scratch disks are by default located under Document/Final Cut Pro Documents, but you can change the location under File>System Settings>Scratch Disks.  Make sure you move the files into the appropriate locations, e.g. files from the “audio render files” folder on the old computer should go into the “audio render files” folder on the new computer.

Premiere

Premiere works a lot of like FCP7.  You can just move your project file and all your media files to the new computer.  You should get the same “disconnected media” error message if the location of a file has changed, and you can reconnect the file by right clicking on the file in selecting “Link Media.”  Then, find the new location and connect the file.

Premiere also uses render files, which can found in your scratch disks.  You can change the location of your scratch disks, but by default they are under Documents/Adobe/Premiere Pro/5.5.  Move the relevant render files located under “Abode Premiere Pro Preview Files” if you need them.

iMovie

iMovie uses a different file system from FCP7 and Premiere.  iMovie saves your files automatically and does not need to render files.  Additionally, when you import media into iMovie, it creates a copy in its own files, organized according to which event you’ve imported the file under.  Thus, you will need both your iMovie project file and the iMovie events that you’ve used in order to get your project to play properly.

iMovie also has fixed expectations of where its events and projects files will be, so it is imperative that when you move your events and projects to the new computer, you put them back into the place that iMovie expects them to be.  iMovie creates two folders on your computer under the “Movies” folder:  “iMovie Projects” and “iMovie Events.”  You need your project from the projects folder and the events you’ve used from the events folder.  Move these to the new computer and drop them into the “iMovie Projects” and “iMovie Events” folder, respectively, on the new computer.  If those folders don’t exist yet, just open iMovie and create a new project and a new events, and the program will create those folders for you.

Note, however, that only video files can be placed in iMovie events.  Audio files and still images will be taken from wherever they are located on the disk, and once imported, you cannot reconnect those files as you can with FCP7 and Premiere. The best way to move them is to keep them in the same location.  If you imported a song through iTunes, transfer the song to the new computer and put it back into iTunes.  If you imported it from the desktop, transfer the file to the new computer and drop it back onto the desktop.  The important thing is to write down where the file is located and put it back where iMovie expects it to be.

Final Cut Pro X

FCPX is nearly identical in its file structure to iMovie.  The program creates two folders under your “Movies” folders: “Final Cut Projects” and “Final Cut Events.”  Just as above, move your project file from the projects folder on the old computer to the projects folder on the new computer, and likewise move the events you need from the events folder on the old computer to the events folder on the new computer.   Like iMovie, FCPX expects all its files to be in those fixed locations, so it is imperative that all the media files you use are in the proper events under the “Final Cut Events” folder.  In contrast to iMovie, FCPX will put a copy of all your media files – no matter whether they’re video, audio, or others – into your events folder.  Thus, when you move your events folder, you will move all the necessary files.  All of FCPX’s render files are also contained within your events folder.