In which I provide a link that compares HD video web page embedding options.

The design of this blog means I can’t show how large HD video embeds can be on web pages you control can be. This (non-designed*) page on my site compares size and quality between YouTube and Vimeo HD video.

The maximum embed size for YouTube is 853 by 480 and the service is free. If you pay $60 for the Vimeo ‘Plus’ service, you get 25,000 HD embedded plays at 1280 by 720.

A still from the HD video embedded on my site using both YouTube and Vimeo.

*I still avoid any HTML features more modern than tables

In which I provide six Final Cut plugins that provide more controls for video transitions.

If you want more control over how transitions start and finish, try these six transitions. Depending on the nature of the effect, you might want transitions to ease in and ease out. In other cases, you might want the effect to start quickly and finish slowly.

Here’s what they look like:

Cross Dissolve + curve

The graph shows the visibility of the outgoing clip. On the left, it starts at 100%, it initially reduces in visibility quite slowly. The curve is at its steepest halfway through the transition – the visibility is changing the most quickly at this point. The curve is shallower towards the right. That is when the visibility is changing more slowly as it approaches 0.

The curve controls look like this:

To display the graph, choose ‘Curve’ from the View pop-up. To change the shape of the curve, click the ‘+’ next to the point you want to change, then drag in the Canvas.

For example, these settings:

…produce this graph. The dissolve will happen quickly initially, then slow down:

If the ‘Green’ point (the control for the angle at which the curve approaches the end of the transition) is changed, the transition will start quickly, continue slowly and finish quickly:

Cross Zoom + curve

This version of the built-in transition ‘Cross Zoom’ adds controls so you can choose which parts of the incoming and outgoing clips are zoomed into and out of:

Which produces results like this:

Spinback3D + curve

There is also an extra control to choose a custom background colour for the background of the transition.

Spin3D + curve

Swing + curve

Zoom + curve

To use this plugin, download the ZIP document, copy the ‘Alex4D_transitions_+_curves’ folder to

Your Startup HD/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins

(Your Startup HD/Users/your name/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Express Support/Plugins for Final Cut Express users)

All the transitions except ‘Cross Dissolve + curve’ will appear in the ‘3D Simulation’ transition category. ‘Cross Dissolve + curve’ will appear in the ‘Dissolve’ transition category.

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips

In which I show evidence that Apple hasn’t given up on Pro Apps, and suggest why they aren’t in any hurry to update them.

Given recent upgrades for other editing software, Final Cut users have been increasingly frustrated with a lack of news of updates from Apple.

Today’s announcement of a very minor update for Final Cut Pro (to version 6.0.6) will be the main topic of conversation on the web and user group meetings in the weeks to come (such as the London SuperMeet on Thursday).

Some are saying that Apple have given up on editing software, and want to spend more time being a consumer products company.

I think that is unlikely. It is more likely that Apple isn’t releasing a new version until it is ready. As they don’t consider any other editing software as competition, they are letting technology trump marketing this time around.

In the 90s I used to beta test Director for Macromedia. It was long enough ago that we would get a care package every fortnight with 15-20 floppy discs. These would unstuff to be a new version of ‘Spike’ or whatever the codename was for the beta of Director 4, 5 or 6 we were testing. Every time we thought the programming team had only a couple of months left to squash the bugs we’d pointed out (as opposed to needing to sort so much that they’d never get it done), they’d send us a letter saying “Thanks for your help, we release in three weeks; please find a T-shirt enclosed.”

Macromedia needed to release at the next Macworld, or NAB or Comdex or whatever. The bugs were going to be fixed in version X.0.1 or 0.2.

But what is the evidence that Apple is still invested in Pro Apps such as Final Cut?

Apple is still looking for people to shape the future of Pro Apps

If you go to jobs.apple.com and search using ‘Pro Apps’ as the keyword, you get four listings:

Software Development Engineer Posted 9 Jun ‘09
Sr Human Interface Designer, Pro Apps Posted 13 Jan ‘09
Sr Visual Interface Designer, Pro Apps Posted 13 Jan ‘09
Video Editor Product Designer, Pro Apps Posted 18 Nov ‘08

These job descriptions tell a tale: The features and user interface of the next version of Final Cut were locked in November 2008. While the beta programme and bugfixing continue, it was time to hire an editor who knows about software development to join the team. He or should would be the person with real-world experience to communicate with the programmers the ways people in post production work up until now.

They didn’t find anyone who was quite right for that job, so they created two new job descriptions based on the previous one, but each looking for someone with more formal human interface design training ["Degree in interaction design, human factor and/or visual design (or equivalent)."]

Those jobs are still open, but on the 9th of this month, they posted the job description for someone to continue to develop the software behind the Pro Apps documentation system. A good time to hire someone new would be once a load of documentation for Final Cut Studio has changed.

Apple is working with external plugin makers on developer mailing lists

Although they can’t comment on unannounced products, if you follow the postings, they imply that version 6.0.6 will not be the last version of Final Cut.

For example, someone from the Apple team wrote this:

Sometime in the last year or two, I surveyed FxPlug developers and asked about which features they’d like to see, and one that came out near the top was “create windows in the UI.” If this was a feature you were looking for, can you remind me what it is that you need from it?

Although this might pique the interest of Final Cut users, I wouldn’t advise wading through the mailing list for nuggets for future features. You won’t find anything specific – certainly nothing committed to or worth basing your plans on.

Software development isn’t like pregnancy. It takes a different amount of people every time. This time it has taken a lot longer because Apple have had a ton of work to do. The current assumption is that Final Cut has had to be re-written from the ground up. Code written back in 97 and 98 has to be junked to get rid of the rats nest of additions and modifications over the years.

What about new features? I want them now!

I’ve already blogged about a great feature to add to Final Cut Studio which wouldn’t depend too much on existing or new code. You can bet that any feature that extends and re-enforces the Apple Pro hardware and software ecology will get priority.

The place to contribute to Final Cut Pro 7.5 and 8, therefore, is on user group sites with a lot of history. If you go the the LAFCPUG forum, they have a sticky topic that’s been around for years: ‘FCP Feature Requests’. If you think you have an original idea for a feature, read all the posts there first. If it hasn’t come up there, add a post on the end…

I don’t think Apple have given up on Pro Apps. The only problem they (and we) have is that they don’t consider Avid and Adobe proper competition any more. Premiere will forever be associated with enthusiastic amateurism, and Avid has only just passed Final Cut 6 feature-wise (in the eyes of FCP users) – which isn’t good enough for people to switch. If Apple felt more pressure from them, maybe we’d get new versions sooner. Competition is the only thing that will make Apple move more quickly.

Remember: Final Cut Studio is to high-end Macs what iTunes is to iPods/iPhones. Why would a few million dollars a year in software development not be worth all that hardware margin?

In which I consider whether platform defining software is more powerful than the inertia of a complex ecology of developers, software, hardware, support and marketplace.

The iPod system is an ecology that all competitors have found impossible to replicate and compete with. Better hardware features on mp3 players haven’t been enough, nor have different models for buying music, or involving social networks. These factors and more apply to iPhone. As well as the iPod factors, there is also the ease of application development, and a market for distributing applications.

The fact that the iPhone can be used to make and receive phone calls is just a way for Apple to make sure you always have their hand-held computer with you.

The inertia that competitors will have to fight against will be the comfort that people have with the user interface, the integration with their PCs and Macs, and the specific functionality of the apps that they’ve downloaded.

Over on geek.com Christain Zibreg says

“Imagine Apple losing the multi-touch patent infringement – the whole iPhone empire would be in serious jeopardized.”

It would mean problems PR-wise, and give competitors courage, but I don’t think the whole empire would be in jeopardy. I think that others will still find it difficult to create alternative ‘ecologies’ that match iPhone.

Apple only have to worry when middle-class conversations go something like this: “I hear that someone created an Android app in their spare time that made a million dollars in a few months!” “Wow, I like the idea of that! I need to come up with an app too. I could find someone to help me, upload it, and wait for the money to come rolling in!”

The only thing that Apple need to worry about is a new platform-saving app appearing on other phones as well as the iPhone. The Apple ][ had VisiCalc, MS-DOS had 1-2-3, Macintosh had PageMaker, Windows has Office and Exchange. This was the original definition of ‘Killer App’ – what will the next killer app be for hand-held computing.

What is inherent about BlackBerry, Android, WebOS or Windows Mobile that will make the killer app start on one of these platforms first? If their owners change these systems to attract that killer app first, Apple might get the competition we are all hoping for.

At least six free plugins coming in conjunction with the first Annual London SuperMeet for Final Cut Pro users.

They are mainly upgrades of existing transitions – featuring more control and extra features. I might produce a couple of useful generators too.

Come back soon!

In which I provide some differing iTunes AppStore charts from around the world, which might signal opportunities for iPhone/iPod Touch developers.

Apple is celebrating the impending billionth iPhone/iTouch application download from the Apple Store with a competition. It is a lottery based on all downloads from today until the billionth download. Each time you download an app (free or paid-for), you get an entry in the competition.

Once the billionth download happens, a person will be chosen at random to win an iPod Touch, a Time Capsule, a MacBook Pro and a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card.

On the competition page they list the all-time top 20 free and paid-for apps. If your country is open to the competition, your local iTunes Store lists the top apps for each store.

Developers might find some ideas in apps that are popular in other countries, by finding some apps in the top 20s downloaded elsewhere. I’ve shown apps that aren’t in the US/Canada top 20s in bold.

While researching this I found that Australia, New Zealand, Spain and France have exactly the same top 20s. Either those countries have exactly the same tastes, or they share statistics, or not all countries have their own charts and this is the chart for ‘elsewhere in the world’.

To see what’s sold in other countries, go to the iTunes Store home, and choose another country from the pop-up menu at the foot of the window. Somewhere on the home page, you’ll see a button showing the current application download count, click it for the top 20s.

US & Canada Top 20 All-Time Paid Apps
1. Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D
2. Koi Pond
3. Enigmo
4. Bejeweled 2
5. iBeer
6. Moto Chaser
7. Pocket Guitar
8. Flick Fishing
9. Tetris
10. Texas Hold’em
11. Super Monkey Ball
12. Pocket God
13. Cro-Mag Rally
14. Ocarina
15. Fieldrunners
16. iFart Mobile
17. Touchgrind
18. iHunt
19. iShoot
20. Monopoly

US & Canada Top 20 All-Time Free Apps
1. Facebook
2. Google Earth
3. Pandora Radio
4. Tap Tap Revenge
5. Shazam
6. PAC-MAN Lite
7. Backgrounds
8. Touch Hockey
9. Labyrinth Lite Edition
10. Flashlight
11. Urbanspoon
12. Movies
13. iBowl
14. Lightsaber Unleashed
15. SOl Free Solitaire
16. MySpace Mobile
17. Virtual Zippo Lighter
18. The Weather Channel
19. BubbleWrap
20. Remote

UK Top 20 Paid Apps
UK (US & Canada)
1. Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D (1)
2. Moto Chaser (6)
3. Virtual Pool (-)
4. Cro-Mag Rally (13)
5. Flick Fishing (8)
6. Koi Pond (2)
7. Monopoly (20)
8. Super Monkey Ball (11)
9. PocketGuitar (7)
10. iCopter (-)
11. Pocket God (12)
12. London Tube (-)
13. Bejeweled 2 (4)
14. Texas Hold’em (10)
15. Real Football 2009 (-)
16. Blocked (-)
17. Fieldrunners (15)
18. Tetris (9)
19. iShoot (19)
20. iFart Mobile (16)

UK Top 20 All-Time Free Apps
UK (US & Canada)
1. Facebook (1)
2. iPint (-)
3. Google Earth (2)
4. PAC-MAN Lite (5)
5. Touch Hockey: FS5 (8)
6. Labyrinth Lite Edition (9)
7. Lightsaber Unleashed (14)
8. Tap Tap Revenge (4)
9. Flashlight (10)
10. Shazam (5)
11. Backgrounds (7)
12. iBowl (13)
13. Crazy Penguin Catapult (-)
14. Remote (20)
15. BubbleWrap (19)
16. Audi A4 Driving Challenge (-)
17. Darts (-)
18. eBay Mobile (-)
19. Last.fm (-)
20. Movies (12)

Australia/New Zealand/Spain/France Top 20 Paid Apps
Australia (US & Canada)
1. Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D (1)
2. allRadio (-)
3. Texas Hold’em (10)
4. Ocarina (14)
5. iBeer (5)
6. Enigmo (3)
7. Koi Pond (2)
8. Pocket Guitar (7)
9. Super Monkey Ball (11)
10. Flick Fishing (8)
11. WifiTrak (-)
12. Brain Challenge (-)
13. Asphalt 4: Elite Racing (-)
14. Monopoly (20)
15. Cro-Mag Rally (13)
16. Real Football 2009 (-)
17. Moto Chaser (6)
18. Fieldrunners (15)
19. Face Melter (-)
20. Tiki Towers (-)

Australia/New Zealand/Spain/France Top 20 Free Apps
Australia (US & Canada)
1. Facebook (1)
2. Labyrinth Lite Edition (9)
3. Touch Hockey: FS5 (8)
4. Google Earth (2)
5. Shazam (5)
6. Flashlight (10)
7. PAC-MAN Lite (5)
8. Remote (20)
9. iBowl (13)
10. Tap Tap Revenge (4)
11. Free Translator (-)
12. Crazy Penguin Catapult (-)
13. Lightsaber Unleashed (14)
4. Backgrounds (7)
15. Audi A4 Driving Challenge (-)
16. Fastlane Street Racing (-)
17. iHandy Level Free (-)
18. AroundMe (-)
19. fring (-)
20. Sudoku (-)

In which I provide a free Final Cut plugin that provides more typeface, position and design options for adding text to productions.

This plugin gives you an extra style to use in lower thirds plus a few more extra features.

This how it looks with default settings:

Here is what the controls look like. As you can see from the text entry boxes, you can have more than one line of text in each section. You can also add a graduated fill behind the text.

If you change some settings, the generator can look like this:

To use this plugin, download the ZIP document, copy the ‘Lower 3rd – Alex4D.fcfcc’ file to

Your Startup HD/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins

(Your Startup HD/Users/your name/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Express Support/Plugins for Final Cut Express users)

‘Lower 3rd – Alex4D’ will appear in the ‘Text’ generator category.

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips

In which I show how to use a combination of three of Final Cut’s filters to produce a green-tinged night-vision effect.

Neil writes in:

Do you know a quick and easy way to apply a night vision look to something shot during the day? I am trying to imitate some green night vision material that was shot with an infra red light off the camera.

Take your original clip:

Use the Channel Swap filter to make it display only the red channel:

Add the Bloom filter (from the Glow section):

And shift the colour to green and reduce the contrast using the Color Corrector 3-way filter:

The settings for the filters depends on your source footage. Spend most of your time changing the Brightness and Threshold of the Bloom filter. Then reduce the contrast using the Level control for Blacks, Midrange and Highlight.

Here are the settings I used for the example above:

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips

In which I suggest that timestamps of live comments during TV shows could be used to replay them when you catch up with a live event

A few days ago I started to be wary reading blog posts and tweets. I’ve been following the modern version of Battlestar Galactica. I may have not seen every episode, but I’ve enjoyed the most recent series. My social media reticence has been down to the fact that the concluding episode was shown in the US a few days ago. That episode will be on TV tonight. I’m looking forward to seeing it, but I’m off to the London Bloggers Meetup, so I’ll be playing it back later.

In the past I’ve noticed that big fans of some TV shows like to message others while the show is on air. They post messages to forums, tweet, add comments to blog posts in real time – as the episode unfolds.

I’m not that much of a fan to have my eye on a computer screen while watching a great story, but I sometimes like to check out what people wrote once the show is over.

That prompted me to come up with an idea – it might be interesting to be able to follow people’s comments (audio as well as text) if they were optionally integrated into the stream – synced so that they were available at the time they were originally posted.

It would be like having informational subtitles or commentary tracks to a film or TV show – but they could be created by anyone anywhere. If I was selling content, I would provide an option to subscribe to alternate streams (of any content).

This follows on from my post on using a simple tag to extend HTML to allow overlays on everything.

Create a live chatroom with a single click at TinyChat.

In which I remind you of Apple’s concept videos from the 80s and suggest it is time for a new one.

In 1987 and 1988 Apple were still facing an uphill battle with businesses when it came to convincing them that graphical user interfaces were better than MS-DOS command-line interfaces. Part of their campaign to show that the Mac way of doing things was the start of the future of computing was to create speculative videos of how computers might evolve in ensuing years.

The Knowledge Navigator video was set in the far off year of 2010. In 1987 John Sculley suggested that if Apple defined an idea future for the Mac, it would be more likely for that future to happen. Commentators have theorised that Moore’s Law, the prediction for the rate of improvement of the amount of computer power at a given price, has galvanized technologists to do all they can to do better than predicted.

The year isn’t stated in the video, but the figures presented only run up to 2009, so I’m guessing this is set in 2010.

It is interesting to see how close we are to this kind of interaction with our technology. In 2003 Jon Udell revisited this video and commented

Presence, attention management, and multimodal communication are woven into the piece in ways that we can clearly imagine if not yet achieve. “Contact Jill,” says Prof. Bradford at one point. Moments later the computer announces that Jill is available, and brings her onscreen. While they collaboratively create some data visualizations, other calls are held in the background and then announced when the call ends. I feel as if we ought to be further down this road than we are. A universal canvas on which we can blend data from different sources is going to require clever data preparation and serious transformation magic.

Last week Stephen Wolfram announced that his next project is an online system that can take your natural language questions and compute answers for you. That reminded me of Apple’s Knowledge Navigator. I imagine it will be able to answer questions like:

“Is there a link between the size of the Sahara and deforestation on the Amazon rainforest?” “What if we bring down the logging rate to 100,000 acres a year?”

It’ll be a while until we have foldable screens, but it seems that if WolframAlpha can be made to work, we might be closer to the Knowledge Navigator, or what computers should be doing for us anyway.

In 1988 Apple made another video, one that is less famous, but much more accurate in its predictions. Which is another way of saying, if we were to make a video today about 2020, this is what we’d be predicting right now.

A OK quality video can be found at http://www.mprove.de/uni/asi/futureshock.html

…or you can stay here and watch it encoded for YouTube:

You’ll see that some of the ideas are still be speculated today. Microsoft especially likes the idea of real objects interacting with technology (as used in their Surface product). Microsoft has a video set 10 years in the future. It starts off with some impossible to implement stuff in a classroom, but continues with some good ideas:

(about that classroom, it’s all very well having augmented reality ideas (overlaying graphics onto the real world), but they only can work when there’s an audience of one – the display needs to take account of the position of the viewers eyes to line up the graphics in the right place. The kind of classroom telepresence shown at the start of the video would only work for one kid in each classroom at a time. For everyone else, the display would look odd and distorted. For more on this, see an older blog post.)

A much more realistic and specific Microsoft video was made four years ago, and set in 2010. You’ll see that their estimate of what we’ll be able to to in 20 months time:

On the subject of speculative videos, maybe we should start thinking of one for the creative industries. If collaboration is what makes TV and movies so satisfying, how will technology support media production in 2020? Or is the ultimate aim for 3D movies to spring out of people’s heads fully formed?

In which I suggest that making it easy for everyone to show movies and TV shows to various-sized audiences would revolutionise media.

In these days of democratic production and distribution through digital technology, it’s about time we had a look at the exhibition side of things.

In the UK there has been some support for indie film distribution through the Film Council’s Digital Screen Network. They’ve fitted out over 230 screens around the country with digital projectors. This means microbudget films could even be released on DVD to many cinemas around the UK.

How about adding a few thousand more screens to the programme?

I suggest it would be a good idea for the UK government to combine two aspects of movie exhibition to make it simpler for anyone to create a cinema:

1. Some sort of open-source digital rights management scheme, so that content owners wouldn’t be worried about making their work available for exhibition. This would include automatic payment for rights holders by exhibitors.

2. A one-stop licensing scheme so that amateurs can arrange to pay rights-holders, public liability insurance, get permission from local authorities (and whoever else needs to get involved) for a single price.

Maybe by 2011, movies will premiere all over the country on all sorts of screens.

Any person with a room and projector could simply create a permanent or one-off cinema for whatever content they wanted. Prices could be banded so that the economics was straightforward based on audience size. Films could be made available at different screen resolutions. SD for up to 40 people, 2K for larger audiences. Most TV shows would be cheaper to show, unless you want to show the HD version with surround sound. People would then be able to promote screenings, knowing how many people they need to get to watch. You could set up a season of obscure films or have a weekend party based around watching 23 episodes of your favourite TV show (leading up to a final 24th episode).

Indie and short film makers might get their films shown as part of creative double bills. Once this form of distribution becomes common, producers will be able to calculate how many licences at which price points they’ll need to sell to justify producing an idea in the first place.

The easier it is for movies to find audiences, the better it is for the film industry.

In which I suggest a feature for Apple’s Final Cut – a way to create and edit multiclips (clips that can be switched as live between different camera angles).

Here’s another idea for a future version of Final Cut. To make multiclips a lot more flexible, imagine being able to use any (single codec) sequence as the source of the multiclip in any other sequence.

Shooting productions in order to prepare for multiclip editing is a little unforgiving. If sequences can be switched like multiclips, shows with timecode problems could be set up in sequences like this:

You can see here that cameras 1, 2 and 3 were started and stopped during the performance. Camera 4 had a sync problem, which was fixed by delaying the audio 9 frames.

Imagine if you could view this sequence as a multiclip. Instead of video layers, you would have video angles. Audio channels would move to be associated with their specific video angle:

All the angles would remain editable as tracks – you could change filter settings, clip positions and keyframes. The extra rows at the top of the display would give you the option to blade to cut between angles, choose which angle to switch to, roll to reposition cuts, add transitions to video and audio edits (but probably not ripple, slip and slide. You could make those kind of changes in the rows in the lower part of the window). You could treat the area as a preview of how the multiclip will appear if it was added to a ‘parent sequence.’

Once you are happy with the sequence, you could then add it as a multiclip to a parent sequence by holding down a modifier key as you drag to the canvas:

Once the multiclip is on the parent timeline, it would be editable in the same way as it is today.

In which I suggest that Apple could use their expertise in creating an App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch to create a store for post-production professionals.

Now is the time to start guessing about the new features Apple might introduce in the ProApps that will make up Final Cut Studio 3. Most people are guessing that new versions of Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Motion and DVD Studio Pro will be launched around the same time as the next version of Mac OS X. Snow Leopard is expected to be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer conference in May, with availability in June.

Some people say that Apple have had more and more problems dealing with Final Cut’s aging codebase. Fixing faults that have been around for years has proved too costly, however much they get in the way of long-time users. For example it is possible that Apple wanted to add draggable markers in the timeline, but implementing them caused too many bugs and unpredictable effects elsewhere in the application. It was probably easier to add features such as multicam.

This means that it might be that the best Apple could do with Final Cut would be to rewrite the whole application to fit better with the technology of 2009. It would probably take a few programmer-years to rewrite it all with no new big features. Experienced users would upgrade if all those little niggles were fixed, but Apple Marketing would have a problem with the ‘All new Final Cut Pro 7: Now works like it should have done for the last few years. Part of the new Final Cut Studio 3. Upgrade for only $499.’

Faithful Studio users are starting to request new features for their favourite apps, but it is likely that the feature list was frozen a little before Studio 2 was announced.

So, what would I add to Final Cut Studio 3? A built-in store for Final Cut Pro, LiveType, Motion, DVD Studio Pro, Compressor, Color, Soundtrack Pro, Aperture, Shake, Logic Pro, and MainStage.

Imagine having access to extra software and help from directly inside Apple ProApps. The Apple ProApps Store could also provide instant download access to plugins for Final Cut, Soundtrack, Motion, Compressor, Color, Aperture, Shake, Logic Pro and MainStage.

The economics of the App Store for the iPhone has changed the way people expect to be charged for their tools. Instead of buying large collections of royalty-free content, people could download just the parts they need. This would apply to clip video, livefonts, sound effects, music loops, and templates.

This would give people direct access to extra tools and help. This would also give tool makers access to a large community of users. As a Final Cut plugin creator, I would gladly give up 30% of my fees for Apple to handle distribution and billing for my software. They could even associate my plugins with specific serial numbers of Final Cut Pro and Motion. I could also provide free plugins, tutorials, footage and fonts to those who want them.

The Apple ProApps Store could also give access to freelancers who could provide personal tutorials, instant help and workflow consultancy. Sound designers, motion graphics professionals, typographers and programmers could make themselves available for commissioned work. Not many editors have created a professional environment for colour correction. Via the ProApps Store, freelance Apple Color graders could even colour correct a few representative frames from a series of shots in a difficult scene.

The Store could also provide a special search facilities that index external forums that might provide help when things go wrong or ideas when inspiration fails us.

Access to the store could be arranged through the Help system of each application. Version 1 could use a special version of the iTunes application. That would make the software engineering relatively simple given the huge effect this would have on the ProApps community.

If there was an Apple ProApps Store, what would you provide on it?

In which I suggest a very small user interface change to add a feature to Final Cut that editors have been requesting for many years.

I know… an idea that has been around for at least 10 years. However there are two parts to any feature request: the idea and how integrate it into the application. Many Apple and Avid competitors can add better features to their software. The trick is to come up with the user interface.

Final Cut has had markers on the timeline since the beginning (markers are the equivalent of Avid Locators). Clips can also have markers. I assume the request to make single and multiple markers movable using the mouse or keyboard has been around since before Final Cut Pro 1.0 came out.

The secret aspect of software development is that Apple and Avid know perfectly well the features than the majority of users would like. They need to weigh up which it is worth spending the money on implementing. We can only assume that when Final Cut was being designed in 1996 and 1997, a software implementation decision for the Timeline window was made that meant that it would be expensive to add a ‘move markers’ feature.

This means that adding an “option-click a marker and shift-clicking another marker before dragging” user interface is probably too hard to implement without causing too many other problems.

Most people guess that Final Cut 7 will probably be a completely re-written version (to get rid of all the bugfix and implementation workarounds of the last decade and for OS X Snow Leopard compatibility). However, how could you add moveable markers to Final Cut without having to change too much in the user interface?

If we go back to why we’d want to move markers, we usually need to move them to reflect edits. If a scene is shorter or longer, we want the markers further along the timeline to change too.

We can do this my having the option to make clip markers also act as sequence markers.

You do this by adding a check box in a dialog box…

and a different graphic to show in the ruler:

The advantage of this method is that the sequence markers will then be updated to reflect any changes to the clips in the timeline.

An old idea from 2000. I don’t think Transport for London would give their approval, but maybe Absolut don’t need it.

In which I provide some feedback to the UK government on their Digital Britain report: a place to build and democratise access to the internet.

From ‘two birds with one stone’ part of my brain, I’ve come up with an idea for the government that will head off complaints that Post Offices are being closed all over the country and get rural areas connected to the rest of the world.

Lord Carter, the UK Government minister for Communications, Technology and Broadcasting recently presented the interim version of his “Digital Britain” report. He talked about it this morning. Here’s the blurb on what he has to say:

In his first major speech since the publication of the interim “Digital Britain” report, Lord Carter outlines how he believes industry and government can work together to put the UK at the forefront of the global digital economy. Lord Carter discusses the implications and recommendations of the report, and focus in particular on how to deliver the infrastructure for next generation networks and universal access to broadband.

You should have a listen, it’s great to hear how informal, yet informed a member of government minster can be.

The headline summaries of the report usually mentioned his suggestion that it would be a good idea of everyone in the UK to access to at least 2Mbps broadband connections in the next few years. Most people think that this is woefully unambitious.

My idea is to create an intermediate sort of nation-wide access until the infrastructure can reach every home: a Digital Village Hall for every community in the country. Imagine a small building with a large room and a few meeting rooms where local people will be able to share a 2Gbps connection to the rest of the world. This would be where the community would meet, be educated, where retired people could care for toddlers, where people would get access to government (post office-type) services.

It is a great deal easier keeping a single link to well set-up computers in a single location than dealing with sorting out access for hundreds of households.

The large room could be used to link communities together via conferencing technology during the day, or as a place for youth groups to meet in the evening. Smaller rooms could be used by people needing private access to the net, or for digitally connected meetings. Corporations who value employees with a good work-life balance would benefit from an intermittently connected workforce.

Imagine what a single very fast connection, three or four well-trained members of staff and the correct good value equipment in a few rooms would be able to do to keep children, freelancers, home workers, retired people connected and involved with the rest of the country and the world! I think that older people would be much more confident on dealing with the government through the web if they were led through it by a considerate human being.

Remember that Village Hall is a kind of branding, there’s no reason why these Halls couldn’t be set up throughout urban Britain too. It will also make sure that people still leave their homes and get out to meet other members of their ‘village’, wherever it is in the UK.

The Digital Village Hall is the place to introduce us all to the future of the internet and Digital Government.

After Larry Jordan’s London show a few punters stayed at the bar. We wondered whether some of the attendees there might want to stay in touch. We could support each other using similar Q&A sessions as we had today. Digitally, as well as meeting up in pubs and bars. If you’re interested follow me on Twitter and send a message using #ukeditors as the hashtag.

If you aren’t on Twitter and find all the noise about it a little irritating, read my posts on Twitter – ‘anti’, ‘check it out without signing up’ and ‘why Twitter’ for my take on it.

If you are new to Twitter and looking for editors and post people to follow, check out the people posting using the #editingandpost tag. If their posts interest you, follow them.

Following on from Larry Jordan’s intense, cool and informative Final Cut PowerUp tutorial event in London, the question came up: which version of Final Cut works best with which versions of QuickTime and OS X?

Larry gave the most important advice: If your system is working fine do not upgrade until you need a specific new feature.

Here’s a link to a blog post with a table showing which version works best with which version… It might be a year old, but it should help the majority of people out there.

I’ve had no problems with FCP 6.0.4, QuickTime 7.5.5 on OS X 10.5.4

Comment with your combinations that work well!

In which I transcribe some notes I took at a trade fair about the BBC works with surround sound in their TV productions.

At the Broadcast Video Expo today I heard some useful tidbits from Chris Graver, a dubbing mixer with the BBC. He presented a seminar on 5.1 sound.

- Although you might see multiple speakers along the side walls of some cinemas, the sound usually is still 5.1. The same signal is being sent to most of the speakers.

- The six channels of sound are known as ‘5.1′ because the sixth channel (for low frequency effects) has a tenth of the bandwidth of the first five. L, C, R, Ls and Rs have a frequency range of 20-20,000Hz, LFE has a range of 0-200Hz. This channel isn’t usually included in the stereo downmix

- 5.1 ambience shouldn’t be noticeable enough so that people keep looking over their shoulders – you want them looking at the screen.

Dolby E

- A transportation encoding. Not for consumer use. As some delivery media only have four channels of audio, the first two are for the stereo downmix, 3 and 4 hold an encoded Dolby E soundtrack. This soundtrack delivers the 5.1 channels to the distribution systems of the broadcaster/publisher.

- Dolby E has a 1 frame encoding delay. This means you must advance your Dolby E soundtrack by 1 frame to match picture and the stereo downmix

- Dolby E has a 1 frame decoding delay too, but most decks can be set to account for this delay. A minority of broadcasters requiring Dolby E encoded 5.1 expect it be advanced an extra frame (for a total of two) to sync with picture and stereo

- The BBC and others will fail your programme in tech review if you do not add the metadata tag stating the correct Average Dialogue Level. In worst case scenarios, consumer kit might filter some of the dialogue bandwidth out if it doesn’t know the extents of its range.

- Make sure you use the correct track order before encoding as Dolby E: L, R, C, LFE, Ls, Rs – otherwise you might get your Back Right channel filtered as if it was the LFE channel!

In which I transcribe some notes on how the BBC uses Apple’s Final Cut Studio suite to make TV programmes.

I thought it would only take a day, but tomorrow I’m going back for more!

Trade shows bring out the worst in me. In recent years I’ve learned to do without them. However this time I have a couple of new reasons to go to an exhibition featuring Avid, Sony, Canon, Panasonic et al. demoing software and kit for post-production.

I spent the day at the Broadcast Video Expo here in London. I haven’t been in three years, so was expecting economic considerations to reduce the number of stands and attendees. I was wrong on both counts. The show isn’t huge, but it was big enough to be worth attending, and small enough to look very busy for the number of people there.

Here’s a picture I posted using my iPhone/Twitter/Twitpic/TwitterFon (!):

Today was a day of seminars, starting with the BBC on how they use Final Cut Studio for HD workflow. They concentrated on Final Cut Pro’s links with Color. Here are my live tweets from today, with extra notes.

100:1 shooting ratio: Offline at dv res. 100 hrs=1.2Tb
– For documentaries, the shooting ratio ranges from 100:1 to 200:1. That is too much for anything other than DV resolution. 100hrs of DV rushes is only 1.2TB

HDcam not great. Avid worth it if time pressure is high.
– Problems with HDCam tapes. Using Adrenaline/Nitris etc. workflow is fine, but not worth the extra cost unless you have a very tight transmission deadline.

Mouse based colour tools not great. Like control surfaces.
– The Avid colour correction tools they used had to use mouse/keyboard and bright screens. Darker displays and control surfaces are much better

Apple Color is good option. Stable version of Final Touch
– BBC used Final Touch before Apple bought it. Worth the high price, but not reliable. They thought Apple were right not to change anything but improve the reliability. Now any problems are due to operator error, so allow for a couple of extra rendering hours in case something goes wrong overnight.

Use Apple ProRes as equivalent of Avid dnxhd. 6:1 ratio.

Docs need too much storage for uncompressed – can’t delete footage – producers always coming back with changes
– As HD takes so much storage, rushes need to be removed to backup. That is bad news for docs. Producers and directors are always coming back with a couple of little changes every few days. That doesn’t work well with high-end systems.

Apple Color doesn’t roundtrip well. Export full res qt from fcp, grade in color and bring back into fcp.
– Export ProRes QuickTime from Final Cut timeline. Import that QuickTime onto a new video layer in your project. Use the blade tool to slice your movie at each edit point in your timeline. Delete your original clips. Send to Color. Correct in Color. One problem is that you can’t correct Picture-in-picture sequences this way. You need to 3-Way Color Correct these in Final Cut relative to the background picture before you export to QuickTime. Once the grade is ‘over’ export at ProRes QT and return to Final Cut for captioning.

Grade in Color in 20 minute sections
– This is the most stable way to use Color, a figure determined by trial and error and talking to Apple.

Apple Color one flaw for pros: can’t get sound cues. Color is mute

BBC uses Natress Bleach Bypass filter in Apple Color
– There is a built-in Bleach Bypass filter, but Natress’s one is better. They also use Natress’s film effects plugins.

Apple Color can match any high-end system at a fraction of the price – if you have the time.
- The problem is that clients/production people need to understand that Color will seem to be dropping frames. However tricked out the Mac is, it seems to play 90% of the frames per second. You need time because rendering usually takes 6 times real time.

Apple Compressor for standards conversion very slow, but good enough

More soon…