Not a front for a secret organization.
Written by Rob Schultz (human).
Last weekend I had a good set in front of a great crowd right here in Los Angeles, at Meltdown Comics, which has been like my comedic home for the past few years.
My thanks to the crew of Diani & Devine Meet the Apocalypse, for giving me the stage time and for using their fancy filmmaking equipment to shoot this video while I did it.
(Here's a tech post from August that never got published. It's running today to celebrate the wrap on production for Diani and Devine Meet the Apocalypse, pictured below.)
As the assistant editor of the sci-fi road comedy Diani & Devine Meet the Apocalypse, I’ve been speeding up my workflow with PluralEyes[1] . We’ve been shooting two cameras at once, and PluralEyes compares the scratch audio recorded by the cameras with the audio recorded by our sound man in order to put all three tracks in sync.
Here’s a rundown on how I start prepping a scene. After importing and labeling the footage, and grouping the audio, I lay out a rough sync map in a sequence as follows: camera A on my first video track, camera B on my second video track, and audio from the sound guy on the bottom-most audio tracks[2] . Then I sync each scene separately. If I had the entire movie delivered to me on drives, maybe I’d do this in a different order, but I’m breaking down the footage on set, while we’re shooting.
And now we start stacking our shortcut software. My favorite tool for adding keyboard shortcuts that don’t exist is Keyboard Maestro. What I like about it here is that I can run through all my scenes in PluralEyes without taking my hands off the keyboard. I created a shortcut for opening a sequence from Final Cut Pro 7[3], Cmd-Shift-f, (for Final Cut!) that lets me open a sequence from the FCP project that I have open currently.
Then comes my favorite macro. It’s so simple, but it makes everything feel so much faster. Every new PluralEyes ‘project’ resorts to the default settings, and there’s no built-in shortcut for the very handy ‘Level Audio’ menu item, so Cmd-Shift-s (for sync!) clicks the level audio button for me, and then it starts the synchronize process.
When the sync is done and you’re ready to send it back to FCP, I use Cmd-Shift-e. This one is actually built into PluralEyes! It uses your last export settings to export without opening the dialogue window. So you do need to do a regular export (Cmd-e) once, to set it up. Here’s what I use.
And that’s it. Open a sequence (⌘-⇧-f), choose your timeline, sync it with the leveling tool on (⌘-⇧-s), and ship it back to Final Cut (⌘-⇧-e)! Here’s a little screencast of me zipping through a scene so you can see how fast this is.
Here’s one little extra thing I have set up. PluralEyes leaves a lot of little debris files near the media it works on, so I have a set of Hazel rules that watches my work drive and cleans up after them.
As you can see, it's actually two rules watching one folder. Here's the first one. If it finds a folder named Pluraleyes_Synctemp that I haven’t touched in an hour (which is beyond generous!), it moves that folder to the trash.
And here's the second one. What's it's doing is checking to see if there are any subfolders and if so, running all of my rules (1. Check for PluralEyes files, 2. Check for subfolders) in them. If you had to apply the first rule to every folder that needed it individually, it would be useless. It's the recursion recipe that makes it sing!
And that's really it. The stats show that these more tech-oriented posts are helpful to people googling their problems away, but I bet if you're here for the pithy movie reviews, they're kind of a bore. If this helps you out, leave a comment, let me know!
This is to do with PluralEyes version 3. Version 2 was, in my experience, slower than syncing by hand. V3 is fast and fun to watch, when it works. ↩
For best results on the first try, I separate my audio based on how many tracks the sound guy was recording. All of the takes with just one audio track might go on A4 for instance, the takes with two audio tracks might get A5 and A6, three tracks gets A7–9, And so on. It’s better for PluralEyes to think these are separate audio recorders then one recorder that’s making a lot of mistakes. ↩
Yep, Final Cut Pro 7. Editor’s choice. These techniques are applicable to other editing software, but this is about how I sped up my own workflow while providing what my client requested. Namely, an FCP 7 project file. ↩
Here's hoping you had the traditionally SpoooOOOooky Thanksgiving!
And a friendly reminder that just because you're supposed to buy everything today, you could buy Nothing instead!
Delighted to say that I'll be performing over at iO West tonight on this fine Buzzy Nights program.
I'm an optimist. That's why I throw money down the Kickstarter hole and hope for the best. But there are a lot of duds that come back too, and today I think we're going to be talking about a bunch of them.
Both of our first two categories today are great subjects for Kickstarter, since what we're backing is mainly the creation of physical goods. It's only Second Quest, the project kickstarted from merely an idea, that's horribly behind. It's the exception to the categorical rule to match with FTL from last week, a game that was just about done before going public for cash.
A lot of the gadgets were early projects in my backing history, and pretty discouraging at that. Successful projects rapidly outpace the expectations of creators who thought they were going to be making these devices in their garages. They usually don't have any experience with manufacturing, and they certainly don't have any experience with contracting Chinese corporations to do the work for them. A reliable and trustworthy broker for factories and manufacturing would probably really clean up in mentoring suddenly successful kickstarters the way sites like backer kit seem to be doing for fulfillment.
Alright, and here is, in my estimation, the worst deal available on the site, or at least the most one-sided. Movies take a long time to make, and they're so hard to get right. Plus, like the video games, if the movie gets made at all you can almost certainly get it for less later on. I suspect it's a good deal for the filmmakers if they happen to have the fan base ready and waiting to make it happen. For one thing, kickstarters are a great way to mark up your DVD. By a lot. Assuming of course that DVD even still exists by the time your movie is shot, edited, toured around to festivals, and then released to your backers.
Some projects defy polite categorization. Or I didn't file them correctly. They include:
And that's my backing history to date. I thought it would be fun to cover projects that I missed out on, and projects that failed to fund despite my support, but I think we'll save that for another time.
Time to tally up the scores! This week I mentioned 21 different projects. Of those, an astounding 14 of them have completed. And of those, I know approximately 4 of them to awesome.
Grand totals: 47 backed, 31 complete, and 11 certified rad. It doesn't sound encouraging. But are more than 1/3 of all products you buy via normal means amazing? I've probably bought plenty of underwhelming movies and books in stores too.
We've learned that the more realized a project is before it asks you for money, the more rad (re: thoughtful, prepared, cautious(?), fun, prompt, smooth) the project is likely to be. Maybe there are other useful guidelines to good backing that we can take from this aggregated look at projects. In the meantime, I'm holding out hope for a lot of 👍 signs from the 16 projects I'm waiting to receive.
Now I'm also interested in tabulating the average amount of time between backing and fulfillment, and how late the late projects tend to be. Maybe that stuff will make it into the 'missed-out' post.
