Spent most of the afternoon trying to chase down a Final Cut Studio bug.

Today’s task was to generate an audio-only OMF version of my movie for the sound editor. I wanted to check the OMF included the handles and keyframes that I had specified. As Soundtrack can import OMFs, I tried that.

My audio OMFs exported from Final Cut Pro 7 weren’t importing into Soundtrack Pro 3. There was no error reported, the command just did nothing.

After some trial and error, I discovered that OMFs won’t import if they have any clips created using the Bars and Tone generator.

Ironically you are more likely to use bars and tone generators in timelines you export as OMF, as sound editors like pops at the start and finish of sequences on all tracks to make sure everything stays in sync.

The workaround is to make a QuickTime pop by exporting your Bars and Tone frame as a single frame movie, import it and replace the generated tone on all your audio tracks.

PS: Don’t use OMF to transfer information from Final Cut to Soundtrack, use ‘Send to Soundtrack’. I wanted to use Soundtrack to check the OMFs to see if they’ll import into ProTools.

Watching ‘Hustle’ on the BBC this evening, I noticed a ‘good enough’ day for night shot.

It was made obvious by a transition directly from the day version of the setup:

To the same shot colour-corrected to look like night-time:

Click the shots to see bigger versions.

They used a flat monotonous sky to pull a key, but they ended up letting quite a lot of the tops of the trees floating in mid-air. Some of the house roof details vanished too.

They even added an owl hoot to the soundtrack to sell the idea. To imply that they had crossfaded between two shots, they moved the second shot down a little so that the whole image changed.

For the budding colourists, you can use these images as before/after references on how to change a day shot to look as if it were shot at night.

If you’re in the UK, you can see the the original episode for the next few weeks. Spool to (27:51).

In which I describe how Twitter Lists could supply us all with the power of context.

Twitter have just announced that you will be able to organise individual Twitterers into Twitter Lists.

This makes official the kind of organisation users have be doing with client applications such as TweetDeck – the kind of application anyone who follows more than 500 people has been using in recent months. Instead of seeing every update from all the people you follow, you can view just the tweets from specific groups of people.

At the moment Twitter is selling this new feature as a method of finding interesting people to follow. I might want to curate a List of people who write about post-production for example. By default, user-created Lists will be public. Once this List is known, and favoured by many people subscribing to it (as opposed to those ‘other post-production Lists’), I’ll have an incentive to keep it fresh, so the people that follow the List will have a continually refreshed list of ‘experts in a field’/'entertainers on a topic’/'philosophers of a specific school’/'fans of a given TV show’/'alumni of a school’ etc.

The first side effect of Lists will be that people who follow a couple of hundred others can now follow many more – knowing that these ‘check out their updates every once in a while’ follows can be relegated to a list that doesn’t clutter up the main feed. This will mean well-followed people/organisations will become even-more-followed people/organisations. But being followed by many people more who don’t read your updates very often might not improve your ‘Twitter Authority’ score.

Search

However, once people can limit searches to these Twitter Lists, the results they get back will probably be much more useful. Firstly, they’ll be able to search the text of the tweets of people in a given list. Then they could have the option for that search to include the content found at the site linked to on List members’ profile pages. After that the search could include the content linked to in the tweets, such as TwitPic pictures, Song.ly lyrics, text/images/videos from web links.

If Twitter then saw which link was clicked from the list of results, they’d be able to create a ‘PeopleRank’ algorithm that could stand a very good comparison to Google’s PageRank algorithm. In this case the person/organisation which supplies the best information on a subject will have their content moved further up the list of search results. A new measure of Twitter authority.

Sharing your contexts with the world

I’d also suggest that Twitter set up some default private Lists for each Twitter user that would define which sorts of updates they’d like to receive, for instance:
0. Family
1. Friends
2. Acquaintances/Facebook friends
3. Close colleagues
4. Co-workers/Superiors/Subordinates
5. Industry contacts
6. Work-related pundits
7. Entertainment/Pastime-based commenters and pundits
8. Governments
9. Everyone else

If there were default lists like these, Twitter would become very powerful in many ways.

If users got accustomed to switching between these standard Lists of Twitterers they wanted to see the updates of, Twitter would be able to infer the new context they are changing to. If someone wanted to be entertained, they’d view List 7. If someone wanted to do some background research on their field of work, they’d view Lists 5 and 6. If they were in a frivolous mood, they might view Lists 1 and 2.

Once Twitter knows your context, they can associate your context with the tweets you write, the information you give out and the searches you do. In this way context 2 would allow Twitter to act like Facebook-Lite. Other contexts could implement versions of other social network models: e.g. context 5=Linked-In, context 7=MySpace.

Also if you defined the mode you were in, then the searches you do could supply better tuned content.

It also means the day you spend searching for content associated with work would skew the searches you do when looking something up for a family member.

If users maintained these lists then different groups could get different versions of other information, such as location. When I’m in Family and Friends mode at the weekend, only they get my location information – other lists might get a ‘blurred’ location such as ‘London’. When I’m away at a conference, people in my Colleagues and Industry Contacts Lists would be able to find me on the exhibit floor (or at a specific local bar), while Family and Friends need only know that I’m away in ‘Barcelona’.

Who else would like to know what context we are in? How about advertisers? Imagine if we’d never see an irrelevant advert again. I don’t want to see or hear ads for movies when I’m concentrating on work. When I’m catching up with friends, I won’t be interested in being served adverts associated with my job. I think advertisers would get much better responses if their messages were being presented to people who were in the correct context to receive them.

Given that Google have tens of billions of dollars of cash, maybe now’s the time to buy Twitter – before someone else does…

An entry on Annie Mole’s Going Underground blog informed me that the London Transport Museum are now selling products where you can personalise them to show any part of the tube map you like:

Men’s T-Shirt

Women’s T-Shirt

Mug

Mouse Mat

Go to the ‘RailOrder’ section of the museum site to order yours.

Map geekery: the version of the map they use is different from others: no disability blobs and no East London Line section of the Overground:

This week Transport for London have released a big revision to the tube map. They are trying to make it clearer. It is a great deal simpler than the previous version, but they may have gone too far. The River Thames has gone:

I think that the Thames is one of the cues that gives some grounding to people who have a look at the map for the first time. In fact the river would fit perfectly well onto the current map as it is (apart from moving one station) if you incorporate a new rule: station labels are allowed to overlap the river.

Here’s a close up of what it would look like:

…and the whole map:

Instead of simplifying the map too far, here’s a reminder of my design that has all the same information as the previous map and more while being clearer:

My redesigned tube map.

For a long page on my thoughts on London transport design, visit this page.

For more radical tube map designs and commentary on the current official design, follow the work of author and designer Maxwell Roberts:

See also:
100 posters celebrating the 100th birthday of the tube logo
Better art on the New York subway

This Matte filter gives you much more control over feathering. You set up two shapes – one is the inside of the matte, the other being the outside of the matte.

Here is the filter in Wireframe mode, where you can see the two shapes:

If you switch to Preview mode, you can see how the blend between the inside and outside shapes effects the matte:

If you change to Final mode, increase the value for Steps in the Smoothness section, and overlay on top of a desaturated, darkened copy of the clip, you get this:

Here are the controls:

You can enable and disable points on the matte:


If you enable less than three points, all eight points become temporarily enabled.

You can also only use the outside shape to form the matte:

In this mode you can choose a feathering value to apply to the outside shape:

To use these plugins, download the ZIP document, copy the ‘Alex4D IO Matte.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)

The filter appears in the ‘Matte’ filter category.

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips

Over at the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro users group forum, ‘debe’ asked for a differing horizontal and vertical controls for the feathering of mattes. Here are three free Matte filter plugins to do this.

This is the kind of effect that Eight-Point Garbage Matte-hv has if the feathering is vertical only:

Included in ‘Alex4D Mattes-hv‘ are Four-Point Garbage Matte-hv, Eight-Point Garbage Matte-hv and Mask Feather-hv.

Plugins are implemented using FxScript code. These can be stored as text files in the Final Cut plugins folder. If you take a look at the code you’ll see that I changed very little of the code compared with the filters supplied by Apple.

To use these plugins, download the ZIP document, copy ‘4-pt Garbage Matte-hv.txt’, ‘8-pt Garbage Matte-hv.txt’ and ‘Mask Feather-hv.txt’ 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)

These filters appear in the ‘Matte’ filter category.

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips

Those of you starting to use Snow Leopard will notice the new QuickTime player.

Apple markets this as part of QuickTime X. However, it turns out that the new player is a small part of this new version of QuickTime.

As detailed as part of a 23 page technical review of Snow Leopard over at Ars Technica, as with the rest of the OS, most of the changes to QuickTime are hidden from end-users. The first release of QuickTime X is for developers to create new media manipulation applications.

The way Apple does this is through ‘abstraction’ – hiding which software is carrying out requests for applications. For the last few years developers have been asked to use a part of the OS known as QtKit instead of QuickTime 7. In earlier versions of OS X QtKit called QuickTime 7 to perform operations. In OS 10.6 Snow Leopard some operations are carried out by QuickTime X while most are still performed by QuickTime 7. As future versions of OS X are released, more of the application requests will be carried out by QuickTime X.

A wider advantage of Snow Leopard is that more of the OS is 64-bit compatible. The advantages won’t be immediately apparent for most users. This release (and the fact that it doesn’t cost very much to upgrade) is to encourage developers to create 64-bit applications and drivers. The eventual benefits will be access to virtually unlimited amounts of memory and much better processor performance.

For more on the 18 year history of QuickTime, the advantages provided by QuickTime X and how the 32-bit Final Cut Studio suite fits into the picture, read the QuickTime page of the Snow Leopard review over at Ars Technica.

For more on the QuickTime X player, QuickTime 7 player in Snow Leopard and the question of Pro feature unlocking, there’s another page of the Ars Technica review on these subjects.

This is an alternative to Final Cut’s crop section of the Motion tab.

This blog post used to host version 1 of my Crop plugin. I’ve updated it, so now you can download version 1.1.

When you blur the crop using the Edge Feather control, it only adds the feathering to the edges you crop. The built-in crop feathers all edges.

Here are the controls:

You can also invert the crop, so that the area removed is inside the area defined by the slider values. You can also choose the have different feather values for each edge:

…the result of these settings:

To use this plugin, download the ZIP document, copy the ‘Alex4D Crop.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)

‘Alex4D Crop’ will appear in the ‘Matte’ filter category.

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips

In which I list the location of the FxScript code that implements Final Cut Pro slates, countdowns and more.

Although many people have moved over to file-based content delivery, some still need to output to tape from Final Cut Pro 6 and 7. When you use Print to Video, you can choose to display a slate showing the name of the sequence to come and a built-in countdown.

If you have the developer tools installed on your mac (an optional install found on the OS X install DVD), you can modify the way the slate information and countdown look. They are implemented using FxScript, Final Cut’s plugin scripting language.

1. Control- (or Right-) click Final Cut Pro [6 or 7]
2. Choose ‘Show Package Contents’ from the pop-up menu
3. Navigate to Contents:Resources:English.lproj
4. Double-click ‘Localized.plist’
5. In The Property List Editor (from the developer tools install) open Root:STRL:8501 for the slate, Root:STRL:8502 for the countdown.

Here you can see the script specifies Italic text, chooses a size (relative to the sequence size), selects a colour to draw the type with, and draws ‘FinalCutPro’ to the top and bottom of the screen.

If you want to risk changing the script here, it will probably modify the countdown shown when printing to tape. It is probably a good idea not to add any items in either list, but as FxScript allows multiple commands on a line (separated by ;s), you have have space to insert your alternate code.

8505 – What to display when a clip is unrendered
8508 – What to display when a clip is offline

After writing about using Automator to perform repetitive tasks in Final Cut, I found a post in Andy Mees’ blog about a more flexible dedicated utility.

Spark can assign your own keyboard shortcuts to play Applescripts, menu commands, and series of keystrokes. Andy gives a few suggestions – including the Avid-like ‘Top’ and ‘Tail’ commands: roll the in or out point of the current clip to the playhead.

While you’re on Andy’s site, don’t forget to check out his free Final Cut plugins.

In which I provide an improved text crawl effect for Final Cut range of applications.

I created this plugin in response to a question in Larry Jordan’s monthly Final Cut Pro newsletter. Someone pointed out that the Text Crawl generator built into Final Cut Pro had a limit on how much text in can move across the screen.

[Note that generators aren't limited to a 2 minute duration. If you change the duration in the Viewer before you add them to the timeline, they can be any length.]

As well as removing the text limitation, I added more features: shadow, background and animation controls.

Controls: section by section

If the font you want to use doesn’t appear in the font menu, you can type its name in the ‘Other’ field. See a previous post for methods of finding the exact name of the font you want to use.

Note that the plugin will ignore any font you then choose using the menu until you delete the name of the font named in the ‘Other’ field.

If you set the Shadow Offset to 0 and set a value for Shadow Spread, your text is outlined.

The Text baseline ranges from 0 (the top of the screen) to 100 (the bottom). The Solid Height and offset give control over the size of the background of the text. If the Solid Horizontal % is 100, there is no gradient fill. The Gradient Centre ranges from 0 (the left of the screen) to 100 (the right of the screen).

As well as animating the text so that it is all animated across the screen over the duration of the generator (Method ‘From In to Out’), you can also keyframe the ‘% Complete’ value (see this post for how to do this), or set the speed of the text to a specific number of pixels per second.

The Shadow settings can produce results like this:

…using these settings for Shadow Angle, Softness and Spread:

Here’s a demo video:

Note that this plugin does not stop you from choosing terrible colour combinations for text, shadow and background colour.

Download: Alex4D Crawl.

Copy the ‘Alex4D Crawl.fcfcc’ file into one of two places on your computer:

Your Startup HD/Library/Application Support/Final Cut Pro System Support/Plugins
or
Your Startup HD/Users/your name/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Pro User Data/Plugins/

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

Restart Final Cut, and you’ll see the generator in the ‘Text’ section of ‘Video Generators’

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips

In which I provide a free Final Cut generator that adds opacity controls to the built-in Custom Gradient generator.

While working on my next plugin, I needed a reliable way of creating gradients with opacity controls on the start and finish colours. Here’s Custom Gradient – Alex4D:

I also added a radius control for the radial gradients:

To use this plugin, download the ZIP document, copy the ‘Custom Gradient – Alex4D.txt’ 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)

This plugin is a Video Generator. It will appear in the ‘Render’ category.

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips

Over at the CreativeCow.net Final Cut forum David Fu asked this question:

Is there a way to make the final cut thumbnail preview in the Browser preview a different frame other than the very first frame? The editing assistant was capturing the last frame of each previous take to the new take thus every thumbnail is not indicating what is in the take. Or is there a way to batch remove the first frame out of every video clip? (There woud be close to 1000).

The thumbnail preview can be set to any frame in your clip. It is known as the Poster frame. You can set it in the Viewer using the command in the Mark menu, or press Control-P. You can also set it in large icon view. Scrub through the content within the thumbnail using the hand tool (Control-H or hh or Shift-Control). If you have added the Thumbnail column to your text browser view (Control-click a heading), you can scrub through the clip without choosing the hand tool first. Hold down the Control key while dragging left and right – release the Control key when the thumbnail is showing the frame you’d like.

There’s no Final Cut way of doing this to 1000 clips very quickly.

There are two directions you could go:

1. Export an XML of the clips you want to modify and use another application to modify all the in points of the clips and re-import the XML as a new project (Final Cut’s XML format doesn’t include Poster frame information, so you’ll have to use the fact that the default poster frame is the in point).

2. Use a keyboard and mouse recording app to record the operations to change the In points or Poster frame of one clip, and modify the macro to virtually press the keys 20 or 100 times. QuicKeys would be best, but I managed to use Apple’s free Automator application to do the job:
a. With the browser window open, and your first clip selected, start Automator
b. In the main Automator window choose a Custom workflow
c. Make sure the browser window is visible on screen
d. Press the Record button in the Automator window to start a ‘Watch Me Do’ action. The following needs to be done quickly as Automator records in real time.
e. Press Return (opens the clip in the Viewer)
f. Press Shift-I (jump to in point)
g. Press the right cursor key (to move to the next frame, or Shift right cursor key to move 1 second on from the in point)
h. Press Control-P (To set the poster frame)
i. Press command-4 (To bring the browser to the front)
j. Press the down cursor key (to select the next clip down in the browser)
k. Find the floating Automator window and press the stop button

You now have an Automator action that brings FCP to the front, sets the poster frame of the currently selected clip and moves to the next selected clip. We can now duplicate that action in Automator, remove the command to bring FCP to the front. This new action will set the poster frame of the currently selected clip. You can then duplicate this action as many times as you like.

Click to see the Automator window showing the full workflow

l. In Automator, save your workflow as ‘Increment clip poster frames’
m. Select the Watch Me Do action and set the Playback Speed to 10x which speeds up the key presses
n. Select all the events and set the Timeout to 0.0 seconds
o. Duplicate the first Action using Duplicate from the Edit menu
p. In the duplicate Action, select the ‘Bring the window “Browser” to the front.” event and delete it with the delete key
q. You now have an action you can duplicate as many times as you’d like the ‘Change the poster frame of the currently selected clip in the browser’ to repeat.
r. Save your workflow again.
s. In the browser, select the first of the clips you’d like to modify
t. Back in Automator, press the Run button to see your actions performed.

[- If you aren't sure about pressing the keys fast enough, you could use a special keyboard layout in FCP to assign those actions to a series of keys on the keyboard!]

It is possible to use this free utility on your computer to do this, but you’d get a lot more control if you use QuicKeys from Startly – which costs $60.

I hardly ever use text crawls to create on-screen ‘news ticker’ effects, so I’ve never came up against the limitation mentioned in the July edition of Larry Jordan’s Final Cut Studio newsletter:

crawls will only show 2 minutes worth of text, no matter how long you make them in the Viewer.

This is due to a limitation in FxScript, the Final Cut language that implements most filters, transitions and generators. You cannot draw any text that is wider than 32767 pixels wide. Even if your video is only 1920 pixels wide, in order to move the text past the screen, the generator draws all the text for each frame, moving it a little each frame.

I’ve fixed that limitation in a new version of Text Crawl. I’ve also added the ability to animate based on a keyframe value and at specific speeds (as well as the usual from in to out), also if a font you want to use doesn’t appear in the menu, you can type its name into the ‘Other Font’ field:

Before I release this, I’m wondering what other features you would like. Add a comment below, and I’ll see what I can do.

As Final Cut Studio comes with an optional install of templates for DVD Studio Pro, the application itself has fonts built-in to match the templates.

You can open up DVD Studio Pro and install these fonts in your system so you can use them in any other application:

— Control- (or Right-) click its icon and choose ‘Show Package Contents’ from the shortcut menu.

— Navigate so that the Fonts folder is visible.

— Open the Font Book application.

— Drag the Fonts folder icon from inside DVD Studio Pro to the Fonts panel in the main Font Book window

The html-based documentation in Final Cut Studio applications is convenient to access and simple for Apple to keep updated. However Apple’s Help Viewer can be slow to show pages.

If you have the new Final Cut Studio installed, copy and bookmark these links to access the help systems using your favourite browser. Make sure you select the whole link, this blog can’t display multi-line links. Drag from the start of the link to the following blank line to make sure the whole link is selected – they all end with ‘index.html’

Final Cut Pro
file:///Applications/Final Cut Pro.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/finalcutpro_help/index.html

Motion
file:///Applications/Motion.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/motion_help/index.html

Soundtrack Pro
file:///Applications/Soundtrack Pro.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/soundtrackpro_help/en/soundtrackpro/usermanual/index.html

Soundtrack Pro Effects Reference
file:///Applications/Soundtrack Pro.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/soundtrackpro_help/en/soundtrackpro/effectsreference/index.html

Compressor
file:///Applications/Compressor.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/compressor_help/index.html

DVD Studio Pro
file:///Applications/DVD Studio Pro.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/dvdstudiopro_help/en/dvdstudiopro/usermanual/index.html

Color
file:///Applications/Color.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/color_help/en/color/usermanual/index.html

Cinema Tools
file:///Applications/Cinema Tools.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/cinematools_help/en/cinematools/usermanual/index.html

The product manager for Windows 7 recently demoed its multitouch features. The video is over at The Inquirer.

The most positive thing about having a quickly animated globe was that the demo showed that you select a small part of a large database of information very quickly. I’m not sure what the value of rotating that view was.

Corel added some large icons and a single twist feature in a photo album. The software didn’t seem to respond to any kind of gestures – the touch was simulating a mouse only. The page turn looked unnatural and inhuman. The photo twist could have been achieved using a mouse in conjunction with a modifier key.

There were no cues to show what features responded to multitouch, and the content didn’t seem very directly manipulatable.

It would have been much more interesting if the demo had shown that you can use both hands to grab lots of pictures at a time and drag them to your album. Why drag one by one if you have a multi-touch screen? It is likely that Corel doesn’t have the engineering skills or resources to make this happen yet.

The most telling aspect was that this product manager sounded like he was walking on a tightrope – staying very close to the demo line and worried that at any moment he would fall off. To switch metaphors, it sounded as if he was worried that a kid would pipe up that the Emperor has no clothes.

This sort of demo makes it seem that Microsoft would rather some other software company shows them the way, so they can implement a version that is good enough for the majority. The history of computing so far shows that it is better to wait for others to innovate for the 20% thought leaders, so you can implement for the other 80%.

After seeing that video, you might get the idea that Microsoft have no chance, and they need to wait for Apple to come along and show them how it’s done so they can rip it off and sell it in Windows 7.X. It turns out that Microsoft have been doing interesting research on the subject and have been coming up with some useful principles.

Here is a better video featuring Microsoft Surface’s manager talking at a Microsoft developer event back in March about how to design software for multitouch and Natural User Interfaces:

He says why Office doesn’t run multi-touch, why tapping the screen isn’t the same as touching the screen, how form factor is a big problem, the danger of ‘ghost contacts’ and how Wacom came up with a key ergonomic improvement. Fun fact: Microsoft’s Surface product can detect 52 different touches at the same time. Amongst the highlights, he outlines five design principles and contrasts them with older systems:

You use Command Line Interfaces to manipulate text.
They are based on recall, you must direct them, there are many paths through the system to get to the many very specific commands you might want to use, your keyboard commands are words that perform operations on disconnected data, they are static.

You use Graphical User Interfaces to manipulate graphics
They are based on recognition, you can explore them, there are fewer routes you need to take and you have different ways to getting the system to do what you want, you control a mouse that acts as your agent to manipulate graphics, they are responsive.

You use Natural User Interfaces to manipulate objects.
They should be based on intuition, the correct tools are made available for each context, fewer methods to quickly achieve what you want to get done, you directly manipulate, they are evocative.

Check out the video, it’ll give you a much better idea of what multitouch away from iPhones might be like.

Not sure how useful this is, but this might help when friends from elsewhere would like to use your copy of Final Cut Studio on your machine. At the very least, this offers up an opportunity for pranks.

If you go to System Preferences and select the International panel and move another country up to the top of the list, the next time you open any Final Cut Studio application, the user interface will be displayed in the new country’s language:

As Chinese is at the top of the list, the UI of many Apple applications will be in Chinese. Final Cut Studio also has German, French and Japanese built in:

I wonder if the Chinese version of Bruce is even more inscrutable than the English-speaking one…

Here is a 15 minute tutorial showing the whole process – from extracting the help system from Final Cut to compiling the document in TextEdit:

I deleted 4-5 minutes of waiting for content to be inserted and pasted (on my MacBook Pro), so it shouldn’t take more than 20 minutes to finish. It’ll be faster if you have Pages from Apple’s iWork suite, or can still use the free trial period.

See my previous post for instructions:
1. Create a copy of the documentation system and make all hidden text visible. Creating a version that can be viewed in your favourite web browser.
2. Combine the 3,500 html and graphics files together in a single document.

You can do the same for the other applications in Final Cut Studio. Here are the locations for the help systems for each of them.

Visit my Final Cut home for more plugins and tips