Evil Jedi

One of my favorite questions to editors is best practice questions.

I asked Anders Haavie of Monster what his three best tips for stable FCP projects is:
1) Don’t use more timelines than necsessary.
2) Magic Bullet seems to make the above even more important.
3) Large amounts of non-native material as mp3’s, tiff’s and jpeg’s also increase project size a bit.

AJA posted a press release today, and it’s not aprilfools

Storm as the rest of the macbased post-production environment uses AJA 3 cards, and Jon of AJA thought everyone should know! http://www.aja.com/html/press_storm_studios.html

So this is a long story…

A year ago at a conference in the Norwegian mountains called Broadcast Mountain (which is an entire different story) german mac-wiz and friend Björn Adamski presented a new product called MXF4MAC which later would be introduced at NAB2008. What the software does, is to trick Final Cut Pro, or I should say QuickTime into thinking it’s dealing with a native media wrapper while it isn’t.

Later at NAB2008, I attended Sony’s stand and Nick Smith, who used to be product manager for XPRI, and Tarek Eldin, who is one of the best demo guys in the business, they were showing off HDXchange. They were also working natively with FCP on the HDXchange with MXF material. They had a quicktime component which basicly did the same thing as Björns plugin, but the 30000$ HDXchange acted like a giant dongle on the functionality.

Time went, and finally also Calibrated Software lauched their QuickTime component. Also with feature rich functionality, but I haven’t gotten the chance to play with the software myself.

So now at NAB2009, what new things will emerge? Now everybody is doing MXF the dirty way for Final Cut Pro, why doesn’t Apple just support the format?