Autosave Vault Image 1

MediaStorm Guide to Final Cut Pro 7 Autosave Vault

Final Cut Pro’s Autosave Vault is your insurance policy against crashes, lost work and just about any other mishap. In short, it will save your bacon. The vault works by saving an entire copy of your Final Cut Pro project file at a regular, user-determined interval. This post will explain how to set up your Autosave Vault, copy items from a backup to your working project as well as replace your FCP file with a backup file. Setting Up the Autosave Vault From the Final Cut Pro menu choose System Settings (Shift-Q). Click the Autosave Vault: Set... button. Select a directory to save your backup files. It’s important to set your backups to a different drive than your actual assets. That way, if your media drive dies you still have access to these files. Next, from the Final Cut Pro menu choose User Preferences (Option-Q). On the General tab, check the Autosave…

Continue ReadingMediaStorm Guide to Final Cut Pro 7 Autosave Vault

MediaStorm Now Using H.264 for Better Playback

When MediaStorm launched in 2005, video playback on the web was in its infancy. The best way to serve our projects was using Adobe’s Flash technology. Times change. Today, MediaStorm is excited to announce that we will encode all new projects using the H.264 codec. What this means is the quality of the files you’ll see in our new projects will be significantly better. They will also be larger. While our Flash files were encoded at 728 x 432 pixels, our new projects are 1280 x 720. Play the new workshop pieces Remember These Days or A Hundred Different Ways and you’ll see the difference, particularly in full-screen mode. Even better, the high-quality file you see on the internet will be the exact same file you’ll see on your iPad and iPhone. In conjunction with these changes, we’re also releasing two new white papers. The first, MediaStorm Compression Workflow: From Output to…

Continue ReadingMediaStorm Now Using H.264 for Better Playback

MediaStorm Guide to Archiving a Final Cut 7 Project

Note: This workflow follows the guidelines for setting up Final Cut Pro 7 found in Tips from the MediaStorm Final Cut Pro Workflow (see: Preliminary Setup, page 2 and Additional System Settings, page 11) After your project is complete and your output has been encoded, the next step is to archive your project. MediaStorm uses Mac Pro computers with four internal drives: one for the system software, one for project media, and one backup of each. When a project is complete, we remove the media drives and prepare them for archiving. Copying Your Files Copy your entire project folder to an external drive. (If you are already using an external drive that you intend to archive you can skip this step.) Make sure to include all of your media. The reason MediaStorm copies all files is, in part, because Final Cut Pro’s Media Manager is simply undependable. The other reason is safety. You…

Continue ReadingMediaStorm Guide to Archiving a Final Cut 7 Project
Read more about the article MediaStorm Online Training launches <i>The Making Of: A Thousand More</i>

MediaStorm Online Training launches The Making Of: A Thousand More

During the week of July 23, MediaStorm and three Advanced Multimedia Workshop participants shot and edited the short documentary A Thousand More. This new Online Training Module, The Making Of: A Thousand More, takes you behind the scenes of that process. This educational module invites you to learn about the decisions, both in the field, and within the editing suite that went into the making of A Thousand More. Join a conversation between Producer Eric Maierson, Director of Photography Rick Gershon, and MediaStorm Executive Producer Brian Storm, as they discuss the development of this story through a scene-by-scene break down of the piece. The Making Of provides over an hour and a half of discussion and exposition on the thousands of decisions that went into the editing and shooting of A Thousand More. Topics covered include: How the story was found What subject to focus on Working in teams Scene by scene…

Continue ReadingMediaStorm Online Training launches The Making Of: A Thousand More

MediaStorm Guide to Crossfades

In my last post, 10 More Ways to Improve Your Multimedia Right Now, I wrote: Delete all dissolves between images...The eye sees cuts. When we look from one object to another, we see a blink. We don’t see one object then dissolve to another. A reader responded with a comparison: "Our eyes don’t see shallow depth-of-field [either], but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use shallow DOF when appropriate." I agree. So before I discuss when it's appropriate to dissolve between pictures, let's quickly revisit why doing so usually doesn't work. The problem is that crossfades create an unexpected middle image. In most cases, this intermediate picture, a combination of two hopefully strong ones, is both messy and confusing. There's no particular meaning to be gleaned from this superimposition. Now, repeat this between every image over the course of a three- to five-minute project, and it's not hard to see how exhausting it…

Continue ReadingMediaStorm Guide to Crossfades