Chris gets geeky on FCPX Grill

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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 have missed about your favourite sci-fi film, writer, robot, artist, creator or filmmaker. Maggie is awesome, and it’s great learning the history of such amazing projects and films.
The Nerdist: Chris Hardwick, Jonah Ray and Matt Mira have a very informal and normally completely random and hillarious conversation with someone famous. Listening to this podcast is like gate-crashing a discussion at a house party.
digitalCINEMAcafe: Chris Fenwick & Alex MacLean have an open discussion with industry professionals. Chris and Alex are awesome – and they bring on some truly fantastic guests.
The Edit Bay: Shane Ross tells stories from the edit bay. The bad clients, the disasters, the triumphs… the fun stuff. This is a really short, really tight, really awesome scripted podcast – highly recommended!
The Terence and Philip Show: Terry Curren and Philip Hodgetts bring their not-politically-correct opinions on Avid, Adobe, Apple, post production, production, distribution and pretty much anything they want to talk about. The show has no fixed duration or schedule, taking the form of a free-form discussion between the hosts, who bring their years of industry knowledge to the discussion. Terence and Philip aren’t afraid to talk about extremely complex and technical subjects – which is great.
This Week in Enterprise Tech: Father Robert Ballecer, aka Friar Tech explores the complex, cutting edge world of enterprise technology with IT professionals explaining the ins and outs of enterprise solutions. This podcast gets very nerdy, very quickly – and it’s definitely not film or television related what-so-ever, but if you’re into routers, switches, firewall’s, VPNs and cabling, then this is the podcast for you!
This Week in Tech: Leo Laporte and other tech luminaries such as Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, John C. Dvorak have a roundtable discussion about the latest trends in digital technology. Released every Sunday by midnight Pacific. Leo is king of the tech podcasting world and has created an empire from this little podcast. Highly entertaining and enjoyable.
The Coloristos ColorCast: Josh Petok (a colourist working on reality and episodic television in Los Angeles), Juan Salvo (a colourist and online editor for films and commercials in New York) and Jason Myres (a colourist and post-production engineer in Los Angeles) talk about Film and Television Color Grading, Color Science, and Post-Production. Josh, Juan and Jason are incredibly talented, and very, very smart – and because they work in different markets all have a very different perspective on highly complex creative and technical discussions.
That Post Show: Kanen Flowers has a roundtable discussion with industry experts about the art and science of video, film and post production. Kanen is one of the best interviewers in the podcasting space. He’s super intelligent, and just a joy to listen to – he also gets some of the best experts in the industry to chat on the show. Rather than focusing on the super high end – Kanen really tries to focus on the independent scene, which is fantastic.
Ruining It For Everyone: A weekly podcast for geeks, by geeks. Your hosts Maggie McFee and Christopher Harrington discuss everything in excruciating detail, from video production to how to make your own giant robot. Each week they take a topic, deconstruct it, and if you’re lucky, put it back together without any leftover parts. Nerdy. Fun. I spent a lot of time yelling at the radio.
fxphDOD: John Montgomery and Mike Seymour talk about the inner working of their online training site, fxphd, but also spend a lot of time discussing VFX and film industry issues in general. Very casual, and very enjoyable.
the rc: Mike Seymour and Jason Wingrove talk about digital cinema, filmmaking and cutting edge imaging. I absolutely love Mike and Jason – they’re incredibly smart and enjoyable to listen to. Although the show is quite structured, they’re not afraid to go down some serious rat holes!
fxpodcast: Mike Seymour (and occasionally Jeff Heusser & John Montgomery) talk with industry professionals about high-end visual effects, production and post. This is a serious hardcore interview show. Mike chats with some of the most senior and high-end artists and technicians in the industry and gets extremely detailed and geeky.
the vfx show: Each show Mike Seymour and friends discuss the VFX and filmmaking of a single movie in a huge amount of detail. What’s great about this show is that most of the time you have three people on the panel with completely different views and opinions on the films. Sometimes it gets heated – but it’s always a incredibly intelligent discussion.

I spend a lot of time listening to these podcasts and yelling at my car radio when I disagree with what people are saying! After the release of my FCPX Rant on this blog, Chris Fenwick of digitalCINEMAcafe (and formerly of The Digital Convergence Podcast) invited me to take part in an episode of his relatively new podcast, FCPX Grill. Suddenly, I was given the opportunity to be on the other side!

Chris started this podcast because he wanted to capture the kind of conversations he regularly has with editors about how happy and comfortable they are with Final Cut Pro X. This is not a general post production show like That Post Show – instead it’s a casual discussion about how people are using FCPX in the real world – providing a bit of a balance to all the other places that discussion Autodesk, Avid and Adobe products in great detail.

As someone who’s normally yelling at the radio, but never getting a response, I have to say, it was pretty weird casually chatting with Chris – especially as we started the conversation as soon as Skype connected – it was straight in. Chris is an absolutely awesome host though – and he makes the whole process extremely painless and fun.

It was a bit of a rough start, as due to crazy schedules on both sides, we basically just caught each other at a good time, and just had to go straight into it. I was home at the time, without any of my audio gear, so I had to hack something together with what I could find around the house:

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Yes… it was a bit of a hack job – but it didn’t actually sound too bad all things considered.

You can download the podcast here, or subscribe on iTunes.

If you have any questions or comments (or if you’re one of the people yelling at your radio at how wrong I am!) feel free to comment below. Enjoy!