Ripple have just brought out a fantastic plugin called “Callouts” for $49 and was a God send for my updated C300 DVD. That is why I have not been blogging as much recently this is a major update and is taking a lot of my time.

I was not happy with the 1st draft of my new C300 DVD so I gave it to my good friend and broadcast cameraman John who I knew would not miss the wall if it was not up to scratch. John had a good look at it and came back with some of his own thoughts which have now been implemented into version 2 of the DVD.

One of his ideas was to describe the various parts of the camera and what they do which on reflection has been a good exercise, this is where the very timely appearance of Ripples Callouts became a God send.

Motion 5 is good at producing graphics and is used extensively throughout the DVD but can be time consuming if you want to achieve simple animations like Callouts. My workflow was as follows…Edit the sequence with my VO on the FCP-7 timeline, export a QT to one of the SATA drives, import the sequence into FCPX and place the Callouts over the appropriate buttons then exporting back out of FCPX into FCP7.

One reason I can’t switch to FCPX is that I use a Matrox MX02 MAX and it won’t run both FCPs as it uses different firmware for 7 and 10. I still am not convinced that FCPX is the way forward and have Premiere Pro CS6 on order…time will tell.

Please note for those of you who have already purchased the 1st draft of my C300 DVD the new version will be sent to you as soon as it is ready…possibly tomorrow at no extra cost.