Updated (20TH APRIL 2017): IMPORTANT UPDATE: FCPX Hacks has now been superseded with a standalone application called CommandPost, which offers all the same functionality of FCPX Hacks, plus a whole lot more – including Text to Speech & Watch Folders. It remains free and open source. We strongly recommend removing FCPX Hacks, and installing CommandPost instead. You can…
Shooting The Wizards of Aus
In this blog post we have two very special guests – first up is longtime collaborator and close friend, our amazing Director of Photography on The Wizards of Aus, the awesome Benjamin Hidalgo De la Barrera, followed by his trusty 1st Camera Assistant, the incredibly hardworking Jonathan Haynes. Enjoy! Shooting The Wizards of Aus has been one of the most challenging…
Here Be Dragons
On 19 July 2014, Inspiration Rentals screened three short films commissioned to show off the brand new Dragon camera from Red Digital Cinema. We were very fortunate to be given the opportunity to create one of those short films! The short film we made, Palindromes is currently commencing a film festival circuit, so we can’t…
Calculating Timecode in Google Sheets
One of the most popular blog posts we’ve ever done has been on Calculating Timecode in Excel. Even though it’s now around 3 years old, it still gets a constant amount of views each week. Although the Excel article is still relevant and useful – personally, I don’t actually use Microsoft Excel very often any more, much preferring…
Chris gets geeky on FCPX Grill
As someone who spends a lot of time driving from shoot to shoot, I’m a massive fan of audio podcasts. My good old trusty Fifth Generation iPod is constantly stocked up with a huge amount of nerdy film and tech related podcasts such as: – SciFi Idols: Maggie McFee chats about Sci-Fi history, trivia and things you may…
FCPX’s Hidden Debug Preferences
UPDATE (JUNE 2017): The PEAppDebugPreferencesModule.nib file no longer exists in the Final Cut Pro 10.3.4 package, but has been replaced with PEAppAudioPreferencesModule.nib and PEAppUserPreferencesModule.nib. Back in November last year, I was listening to a FCPX Grill episode with Alex Gollner, where he talked about talked about a secret “debug mode” he discovered whilst looking through all…
FCPX Rant
Ever since Apple announced Final Cut Pro X (pronounced “Final Cut Pro Ten”) back in April 2011 I have been keeping a very close eye on it. Like many people, as soon as it was released in June 2011, I instantly bought and downloaded it, and started playing. You could see it had potential – but it…
The Hard Drive Challenge
I’ll be honest – I’m a bit of a hoarder and collector. I absolutely love film books, DVDs and all kinds of film gear. Our office, and my home (especially the garage!) is jam packed with all kinds of wonderful film related books, DVDs, BluRay’s, Lights, Grip Gear, Tripod’s, Magic Arm’s, etc. But the one…
Waiting On Sound…
After a solid 1,274 blog posts, one of my heros, Stu Maschwitz has finally taken the time to write a detailed article about the pain of getting good audio, titled Production Audio is Ripe for Revolution. Apart from a really tiny blog post that links to an external article this is the first time that Stu has really even…
Blackmagic Cinema Camera
This is probably going to be a fairly long blog post, so let’s just start with my personal conclusion in regards to the Blackmagic Cinema Camera: The camera is built like a brick – very solid. It’s super easy to use – anyone who can operate an iPhone can operate this camera. This is NOT…
Calculating Timecode in Excel
UPDATE (26th January 2017): As Brad mentions in the comments below, you can now download the TC.XLAM 2.0 beta, which is no longer password protected and works on modern versions of Excel. For those that no longer use Excel, there’s also a Google Sheets version explained here. Today I was contacted by a filmmaker friend that wanted…
Lightworks – Day One
At 3:30 in the morning today, I received an e-mail from EditShare announcing that the first public beta release of Lightworks 10.0 was released into the wild. Unfortunately I’ve had quite a bit on today – however I have managed to do a couple of tests, and do a bit of mucking around. Over the next few…
New MacPro Monitor Issues
The company I work for (when I’m not busy doing latenite films related work) recently purchased a brand new MacPro. Nothing too fancy, just something that can easily handle offline editing in Avid Media Composer and Final Cut Pro. Here are the specs: One 2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 4GB RAM (4 x 1GB) 640GB 7200-rpm…
Avid Experiments
If you have read any of my previous blog entries here you would know that I am a long time Final Cut Pro user, but since the beginning of this year I have been working at an offline edit house (in addition to the time I spend doing latenite things!) that primarily uses Avid on…
Mac Hardware Predictions – Death to the Mouse
As most of you will know, I recently wrote an article on this blog listing my Final Cut Studio 3 Predictions. It has gotten a really great response so far, and has helped generate a lot of incredibly interesting discussions. Regardless of whether my predictions come true or not, I think the article has really…
Avid vs FCP – My thoughts…
There has been a lot of discussion on the Internet over the last few months in regards to Avid vs FCP. People have been blogging about it. Scott Simmons from The Editblog has written many entries over the years discussing this topic, as has Shane Ross on his blog Little Frog in High Def. There…
Final Cut Studio 3 Predictions
There has been a lot of discussion on the Internet the last few months in regards to what Apple is going to do with the seemingly out-dated Final Cut Studio package. Lots of people have written blog articles about what features they would like to see in the new versions of Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack…
GPS raises significant issues of mobile privacy
In Tony Scott’s 1998 blockbuster, “Enemy of the State”, a successful Washington DC lawyer is hunted down by a government intelligence group, after he is inadvertently given a video tape revealing the murder of a congressman. As he attempts to gather the facts with the intention to release them to the public’s eye, the full…
Philosophy of Open Source
Introduction The purpose of this document is to explain the philosophy behind Open Source. It will first examine the definition of the term, then reveal its history, and finally, explore how the philosophy is affecting all areas of society – not just the information technology world. At the end of this document is a bibliography,…