Monday, March 31, 2008

Upgrade Progress

Finally got around to the Final Cut Studio 2 upgrade on Friday. Before that, I’d been contacting the other musicians whose music we used in the temp track to see about licensing their work. I’ll tell you more about that later, but the artists have been so incredibly helpful--some even offering to rework their songs a bit so we can use them--that I just wanted to quickly thank them all now for their time and support. You’re all amazing!

The upgrade went smoothly. I started with a fresh install of the OS, did all the system and firmware updates, then installed Final Cut Studio and a few other essential programs. Technically, I’m not quite done, because I’ve still got to install the Matrox MXO utilities, and then calibrate the display I use with it. Some people have reported problems with the Matrox drivers, so I wanted to make sure that the system was stable otherwise, before I added that to the mix.

The movie is divided up into seven ten-minute segments, each of them in its own project file, because all of the Final Cut Studio apps seem happiest when working with projects about this length. So, I opened my first ten-minute project file in Final Cut 6, which converted it from a 5.1.4 to a 6.0.2 project.

A few little glitches: the opening shot of the movie is a sunrise shot, but we actually filmed a sunset and reversed it in Final Cut—after the conversion, the reverse filter wasn’t applied for some reason, although the speed changes I’d made to the clip were; I’ve altered the framing on a lot of shots, and some of those changes didn’t stay; other little oddities. There may be other problems I just haven’t noticed yet, but so far these are easily fixed.

So, upgrade complete! Pretty much, anyway! After fixing any problems and converting to the ProRes codec, it’s on to effects work and then into Apple Color for the first time!

Exciting! Kind of!

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