Waiting for the “Pro” in “X” means putting the “Final” in “…Cut Pro”.

 So, if you follow my friends like @JokeandBiagio on Twitter, you’ve figured out that we started out in Hollywood making docs and television shows - basically (and literally) in our apartments. 

We used Final Cut Pro and we used it like crazy. Had Final Cut Pro not existed I wouldn’t have been able to do so many things that I’ve gotten to do. I am grateful. 

Now over 10 years later… I’m basically back at it again… except this appears to be my last endeavor with Final Cut Pro now that Apple has abandoned the marketplace where my interests and work reside. 

My take on FCPX tweets like this…

#WTFCPX 

(thanks to @johnfoster for the .pdf printing and @NateCow for the image below. You can click the photo below to download the .pdf of the book)

Lately I’ve been revisiting Adobe Premiere and the new AVID Media Composer 6.  It’s basically become a test of what workflows in Final Cut Pro 7 can I simulate/duplicate in either of these programs with the least resistance…

And now… the latest (and last?) FCP project…

I got this opportunity to be PRODUCER AND EDITOR of this new show called PUNK PAYBACK which airs on Fuel TV. (Currently the number 1 show on the channel…BONKA!)

It basically began as sort of a guy in a room with a simple Final Cut Pro computer system doing whatever it takes to create a ten episode weekly series… just like we used to do it more or less.

Here’s the original unmixed show open I created which sums up the show…

[theme song by the band, fORMER thanks to Denny Smith]

(Now I’m going to pass over the interactions with the network for this entry and focus instead on the day before the show aired…)

On this first episode, there was footage with a phone number very visible in the back that needed to be removed. Great, ship it out to the graphics department. Done.

Except, there wasn’t one. The DP offered to roto the shots and he’d been working on them on and off for weeks. But on the day before air, several things had happened.  

1. The network wanted changes - yup, the day before air.

2. All rotos were almost finished but the shots’ ins and outs were now different. Ugh!

So, I quickly created a way to procedurally create a matte of Bas’s head inside Final Cut Pro and composite it - using the color of his skin!

Using the 3-way Color Corrector, I boosted Saturation and whites, blacks and mid tones.

Then a quick COLOR KEY filter (inverted) was added. Used the eyedropper to sample the flesh/orange color of the skin and a matte starts to appear.

Using more 3-way Color Correction - eliminate the color saturation make it High Contrast with the white and black levels.

Much like nodes, i had to go back and tweak little bits in the filter chain here and there but I had a quick usable matte that just needed rendering.

(ALPHA CHANNEL PHOTOSHOP COVERUP ELEMENT)

Now I could punch a clean Bas head element through the b/w matte composite over a Photoshoped version of the background graphic minus phone number.

A bit of color correction and composting in the final television element and it’s looked like this:

Was it perfect?

No.

Did it do its job?

Yup. 

The same trick can produce a sloppy/quick mask when a hand moves slightly in front of tv insert screen as well. 

BEFORE:

AFTER:

In smaller network television, it’s not always your best work, it’s what you can get done in THIS amount of time, with minimum resources and budget.

So, we all have to cheat… and Final Cut Pro helped a lot of us cheat for a long time.  

R.I.P.