Quintessential Studios' Weblog

Arrived VERY early to the 8th Annual Macworld FCPUG SuperMeet.  They didn’t stop you from hanging out inside the building, so I went in and hung out and watched the vendors setting up their tables and finished my Vente Soy Vanilla Creme/Steamer.

At first, I had some internet access, so I did some emailing, twittering, etc.  Later it no longer worked and I had forgotten to charge my Treo, so twittering was minimal during the show.

I sat in the lounge area and rested.  Little did I know, but there was a super star presenter hanging in the same area.  An unassuming character but later I would find out, quite a dynamic presenter and AWESOME animator.  The fantastic M Dot Strange.

On the way in, I met Dan Berube of the Boston Final Cut Pro Users Group.

Waiting around, I saw Norman Hollyn (buy this book) and he and I chatted a bit beforehand.  I also ran into “thedrige” from twitter, who said he’d be there too.

Also got to talking with a Santa Cruz pod-caster from Futuremedia who did Obama rally podcasts. Funny guy.

Then we had to line up for our goodie bags and I swear I saw Iris B. there.

During the show, I was lucky enough to sit next to Norm and we both twittered updates of the show but he kicked my butt because he 1) had an iPhone and 2) didn’t have a low battery. In fact, check his twitters out by doing a Twitter Search on #FCPUG, he’s “schnittman”.

The first presenter was Blackmagicdesign who previewed their new DeckLink Studio and DeckLink SDI card for the Mac Pro. That DeckLink Studio is a pretty neat and at $695, quite a steal!

Next up was Christine Steele, who is a kick-ass editor and she gave good tips and tricks for editing in Final Cut Pro.

Bruce Nazarian talks about burning Blu-ray on the DVD using Toast 9 or 10.

Then Craig Yanagi of JVC announces their secret acquisition product: GY-HM100 a very light-weight (3 pounds) camera that shoots onto SDHC cards in native QT files. Craig was quite excited about his announcement. He should be as he was presenting for the President of JVC who was in the audience as well. But the crowd, especially me, seemed mostly unimpressed but sure wanted to know the price point on this little baby. Answer, under $4,000. It’s like a mini HVX200 that you don’t have to log and transfer footage on. The format is actually xdcam-ex. wrapped with QT.

And I’m thinking, “Who cares about ingesting or not? WE are EDITORS, we get paid to do that and you are presenting to editors.” (well more like a bunch of indie filmmakers really). I still would have to buy a card reader! While JVC worked closely with Apple on this, I feel it was 1) unveiled to the wrong audience (although it was nice to be the first), 2) too little, too late and 3) not making me want my Scarlet any less.

Then Apple gets up and and demos how fast it is to edit and then right on to how cool RED is! Ouch! “Thanks Apple!” “No problem JVC! Now get out of the way!” Yikes!

Then the break. And I’m thinking, “Cool! Now the raffle” But wait! There’s part two and THEN the raffle.

Part II

Eric Escobar: “Plug-Ins Won’t Save You”. Great presentation on planning out your characters and shots and the “Looks” involved. Check his blog here: http://prepshootpost.blogspot.com/ or his website: http://kontentfilms.com/

Yun Suh: Clips from the documentary film “City of Borders”. Very good thoughts on the editing and film making process.

Then, oh hey! it’s that guy in the lounge, he must have a show and tell to give and he came all early and nervous and stuff….

Boom-bastic! Here’s M Dot Strange!!! Funny guy! 3d is cool, z-space is totally cool. “Boning models” and the whole thing! Then he shows us some of his projects! Fuck (<- I throw that expletive in because it's not m dot strange with out one!) yeah! Hella cool! The old guys sitting behind me are holding their ears and saying, "I hope this isn't representative of the future generation". Sorry old man, it is!

Check his wrex at YouTube.

And now the raffle!

Holy shiza there was a lot of stuff. I didn’t get any but I did get my eco-friendly bag and an Aperture2 book. And an Automatic Duck key chain! (That’s a joke for all the LAFCPUG peeps but it’s true!)

My SuperBag Swag (all bags varied):
8-1/2″ x 11″ Apple training notepad
BBC Motion Gallery sticky note notepad
Artbeats Resource Disc
Larry Jordan & Associates “Almost 30 pf Larry’s Favorite Final Cut Pro Keyboard Shortcuts” mouse pad
ZIO PRO Presents Final Cut Pro 6 DVD (90 minutes, 11 Lessons)
Apple Pro Training Series Aperture 2 book
Apple pen
Larry Jordan & Associates pen
MacProVideo.com 25% off card
MammothHD.com Free HD clip coupon
CSB School of Broadcasting 20% discount card on training
The Foundry 20% discount on Keylight or Furnace plug-ins
pond5.com 25% off on footage
Weynand Training International discount on Apple Pro Training Series Final Cut Pro 6 book for $35.75
and additional discounts on training and tutoring
Focus enhancements 5% off at VideoGuys.com
Peachpit 35% off of two new New Riders books, Edit Well and The Lean Forward Moment (44.95-35%=29.22)
20% Apple Training discount
and…
an Automatic Duck Keychain/bottle opener.

Swag at tables:
Adobe cell phone sock
GenArts lazer pen

I originally posted this as a reply to a Creative Cow Forum post but figured I’d share this bit here as well:

I’d like to add an option that might help some people. Use a PC laptop that has a PCMCIA card slot and 1394 port and an external firewire hard drive as an intermediary between your P2 camera and your final editing Mac tower.

The workflow goes like this. Insert the P2 card into the PC’s card slot. Copy the P2 cards (in their entirety, as I’m sure is covered in Shane’s tutorials) to the laptop hard drive or the external hard drive. Copy the files from the laptop hard drive to the external hard drive (if you haven’t got them their already). Take the external HD to your tower and log and transfer or copy to your editing HD and then edit.

The rub lies in the formatting of the external hard drives used. And here is where I am happy with using MyBooks as external (transport and secondary backup copy) drives. and only here, as I don’t trust them beyond this. MyBooks come formatted as Fat32, so they are easily read on the PC automatically and they are cheap. My G-Tech isn’t recognized by my PC laptop, ’cause it’s formatted as Mac OS extended. I find that my Mac G4 tower reads them as well, formatted just as they are. So they work as the perfect transport HD from that PC laptop to my Mac tower.

I’m big on having redundant data, so I like to have multiple copies of everything around and the MyBook, while having a bad reputation, works good as an additional backup, and I stress ADDITIONAL backup. The 1TB MyBooks that I get at my Costco have USB, FW400 and eSATA for $139. Makes for handy data transfer with whatever connections you’ve got. Heck, in a pinch, you might even be able to get away with copying the data via USB!

Additional notes: I haven’t run into the file size limitation that you might run into with Fat32 formatting, so you should keep that in mind.

I’ve since moved on to a MBP and Duel adapter, but the above got me through my P2 HD class and helped a lot of other students get their data off their P2 cards as well. Plus it’s a lot cheaper than some of the other solutions. Hope this might help some others too.