Ten - Seriously 40

Just finished editing for 'Roving Productions' on their "Ten - Seriously 40" sunday night special. The show was a mix of clips and interview and great fun to work on. The show also gave me a chance to check out Final Cut Pro 5 and to test my Plug-in's on the new version. The good news is the plug-in's now work under the 10-bit renderer and I also got to use them on the colour grading of the show.

I also got a chance to try Final Cut Pro's multiclip function for live/pre-recorded camera angle switching on the hosting segments with Rove and Bert. The secret to multiclip seems to be a well organised log and capture and matching time codes. It did work a treat though and felt like editing rather than switching. The show rated well (8th most watched in Melbourne for the week) with an audience of around 450,000.

Final Cut Pro Plug-in's

Ok folks - you asked for it. There are a couple of things that have bugged me about Final Cut Pro. The main one was a lack of an easy way to vignette a shot. So I present to you my easy vignette plug-in.

Just download the zip file from here and copy the contents of the zip into:

Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins

The plug-in then appears in the 'color correction' effects tab. Have a play - I may post a tutorial at a later date, but don't count on it.

It comes with no warranty or money back guarantees.. It has not been tested with Final Cut Pro 5 and doesn't work with the 32-bit render option (blame Apple). But it has been used on TV shows for channel 7 & 10 as well as a fair few commercials - so it can't be that bad.

There is also the 'Facelight' plug-in which is a fast way to make under-exposed faces look prettier. But more on that later.

Download Marcus's Final Cut Pro Plug-in's

The Glenmoore sound job

Just finished assisting Geoff Hitchins on the SBSi short feature 'The Glenmoore Job' (Previously called 'The Mentone Club'). Cut on Lightworks (I love Lightworks now) with the audio conformed from the DIVA source using Final Cut Pro and Spherico's excellent program 'BWF2XML'. This little tool turns Diva's BWF files to multi-track audio files for Final Cut with timecode. The conform would have been much more painful without it. Many thanks also to Andreas the programmer of the easy to use, but hard to pronounce 'BWF2XML' who fixed our issues overnight. The film itself is a cracker and looks gorgeous thanks to DOP Lanni.