SmartSound’s new Final Cut Pro Plug-In receives rave reviews from Final Cut Pro
expert Larry Jordan and attendees at this year’s NAB Show in Las Vegas. 

Mark It, Score It, Send It – Instant Music, No Hassle SmartSound provides Final Cut Pro users with thousands of music selections that can be automatically edited to fit any length of media and dropped into your Final Cut Pro timeline in THREE simple and easy steps. Step 1. Mark It - Using our new Final Cut Pro Plug-In, Sonicfire Pro 5 automatically reads your Final Cut Pro markers and in/out points and calculates the exact amount of music needed to compliment your visual media. Step 2. Score It - Quickly search through thousands of tracks using keywords, categories, Sensory Searching (“More Like This, Faster, Slower, More Intense, Less Intense”), or our Tap Tempo feature, which searches using the tempo created by clicking your mouse. Once you find the music track you like, Sonicfire Pro automatically scores it to fit within your Final Cut Pro markers, while preserving the orginal beginning and ending of each music track so your SmartSound selections sound like they were uniquely composed for your project. Step 3. Send It - Once you have customized your music track in Sonicfire Pro, simply click the “Send To” button and your music selection is added directly to your Final Cut Pro project.  Watch Our Demo Video

Roundtrip Editing that Works!

We know projects can evolve over time. That is why Sonicfire Pro 5 offers advanced editing and fine-tuning controls that allow you to reopen your SmartSound music directly from your Final Cut Pro timeline for quick and easy edits, from readjusting the lenght of the music track to adding a cymbal crash for an added effect.

Simply select “Open in Editor” when clicking on any SmartSound music track in your Final Cut Pro project and you’ll find yourself editing the music directly in Sonicfire Pro 5. 

Sonicfire Pro 5 even remembers your Final Cut Pro scoring markers, so you can get the music edits right on your first try. 

SmartSound gives you even more control by allowing you to access individual instruments and preset mixes with Mood Mapping®, move beats with Timing Control, and more.

After customizing the soundtrack in Sonicfire Pro, just use the “Send To Final Cut Pro”option and your changes will automatically appear in your Final Cut Pro timeline.

Mailing a link while browsing, this is a great tip for bloggers as long as you are using a Mac but then you would not be a professional unless you were !

For some of you who may be new to Final Cut Pro here is an introduction from Apple themselves. Final Cut Pro 6 works best with a MacPro Intel chipset but it will work on lesser specification machines but I would not recommend this, personally. If you want to view HD footage onto a monitor you will need a I/O box like the Matrox MXO or an AJA io HD, there are other options but the Matrox and AJA are the most popular.

Making the transition from an SD timeline to an HD timeline only requires you to adjust some preferences in FCP and as in my case the AJA box has to be set up via software. I use 7200 SATA drives in 3 DP500 Sonnet cases giving me 15 drives plus 4 in the Mac itself. 

The main problems with HD is the fact that everything takes slightly longer to render, Motion a 3D graphics application is similar to ‘After Effects’ but I think it’s better. Motion 3 as it is officially known can give you some wonderful graphics but in 720 50P things get a little slower and rendering takes longer but you put up with it.

Final Cut Pro 6 on the other hand is fine with 720 50P using Apple ProRez but this means anything you bring into FCP must pass through the AJA first in order to transcode it to ProRez. 

Apple ProRes 422 brings powerful new capabilities to Final Cut Pro editors thanks to its outstanding technical characteristics.

Stunning HD Quality

• Quality indistinguishable from the most pristine sources. Maintains superb quality even after multiple encoding/decoding generations.

• Full-width 1920-by-1080 and 1280-by-720 resolution. Offers the highest visual detail possible in any HD format.

• 4:2:2 chroma sampling. Provides precise compositing and blending at sharp saturated-color boundaries.

• 10-bit sample depth. Preserves subtle gradients of 10-bit sources (sunsets, graphics, and the like) with no visible banding artifacts.

• I frame–only encoding. Ensures consistent quality in every frame and no artifacts from complex motion.

Part THREE : HD Camcorders

It’s been two years since the introduction of Final Cut Studio 2 and apart from some minor make overs Apple have become stagnant to say the least. One major topic that rides round the forums is Blu-ray support. Apple see Blu-ray as a thorn in it’s side but Adobe seems to be quite happy with Blu-ray by adding full support in CS4, Encore.

DVD Studio 4 is very dated in my opinion and really needs a make over. I use Photoshop like everyone else so having to learn Encore was no big deal, I am in no way a wizard with Encore but it’s tie in with Photoshop makes it very refreshing and a joy to use. 

What Apple are not appreciating is that as more production companies start to use both applications the bigger the chance that there will be a larger migration to Adobe and that will inevitably  cost sales for FC Studio 3. Another major factor will be the inclusion of Blu-ray in DVD Studio 5, unless Apple bite the bullet I think they will loose their market share to Adobe.

Snow Leapord (SL) the new operating system will not be compatible with FC S2 that’s why we have not had an update because Apple are rewriting the code for FC S3 bringing together core elements and moving towards graphic card integration whereby rendering will be solely up to the level of graphics card and not the CPU as is present.

So in other words what you have at present will be redundant … now this might have been ‘cool’ for Apple in the past but a hard hitting recession, a buggy operating system, not to mention the financial implications will not in my opinion warm many hard core Apple fans to join the new revolution.

So lets see what’s on offer…

One new MacPro with Snow Leopard (4Gig Ram) = £2800

Graphics card = £1200

One FC Studio 3 = £800

Total £4800 not to mention the price to add CS4 for SL and all the other apps that you will need to buy again !

Apple must be off their heads if they think we are all going to jump over the edge into the unknown with new software that no matter how good it is will be buggy, new hardware costing £4K upwards…why not reformat the older MacPro I hear you shout…don’t be daft you will need a working system to get the work done so you don’t have that option.

Sorry Apple, I can’t see a solution to your impending implementation of a new OS that is so radical that we are forced to start all over again and spend a fortune, it just won’t happen. As usual Apple will have some form of solution…I hope, as for implementing Blu-ray into DVD Studio-5 that’s anyone’s guess, if not as they say in Glasgow “The games a bogey”.

Please note. All Lumix G1 users…Once again Apple have not updated the codec to allow Lumix G1 users the facility to use RAW files in Aperture 2.1.3  

I just tested this 1min ago. 

Apple once again up the specs of the MacPro with the introduction of this new model.

Apple “Many quad-core processors are composed of two separate dies, which means some cached data has to travel outside the processor to get from core to core. That’s an inefficient way to access information. Enter the Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor. Its single-die, 64-bit architecture makes 8MB of fully shared L3 cache readily available to each of the four processor cores. The result is fast access to cache data and greater application performance. Combine that with the other technological advances and you get a Mac Pro that’s up to 1.9x faster than the previous generation.”

“The new Mac Pro introduces Turbo Boost: a dynamic performance technology that automatically boosts the processor clock speed based on workload. If you’re using an application that doesn’t need every core, Turbo Boost shuts off the idle cores while simultaneously increasing the speed of the active ones, up to 3.33GHz on a 2.93GHz Mac Pro.”

“If you’re a pro who wants a desktop computer that keeps pace with your imagination, the Mac Pro delivers with faster graphics application performance across the board. Whether you’re decoding H.264 content in Final Cut Pro, creating 3D graphics in Motion, processing massive RAW images in Aperture or playing the latest games, the graphics hardware in the new Mac Pro makes graphics applications faster.”

“The foundation of this new graphics architecture is the latest generation of GPUs connected to the system via a fast and wide PCI Express 2.0 16-lane bus. Couple that with Core Animation, Core Image and Core Video technologies in Mac OS X Leopard. The result is a graphics platform for applications to seamlessly tap into a teraflop of graphics power.”

This is a great App for your iPhone it runs in real time, very useful if you are filming several locations in one day, type the persons name in the “dir” column and you have a record of the interviewee , date and time it was shot. This I might add is more useful for the editor who in many occasions is not with you on the shoot. 

Along the top you will find ROLL in my case this would correspond to what SxS or MxM card I was using, then you have SCENE which can be changed and lastly you have TAKE which changes every time you activate the clapper. You can change the FPS from 25 to 50 if you are filming 720 50P and you can also change the camera number.  

I love the concept and it works to a degree but it can be fiddly to activate the editing screen but for £1.79 it’s a snip for such and advanced pocket clapperboard.