Cool new plugin from MotionVFX

I've been lately testing MotionVFX's new lens flare plugin called mFlare. It should be soon available to Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5 and I can warmly recommend it. It's great! In this promo I used mFlare for beginning sequence (first 8 secs) and also very subtly to some other shots.



Learn more about the mFlare plugin: http://www.motionvfx.com/mplugs.html

Use clean title as adjustment layer in Final Cut Pro X

I love the collaboration between Final Cut Pro X and Motion 5. You can make generators, titles, transitions and effects to Final Cut Pro X with Motion 5. Each of these behave little bit differently in Final Cut Pro X.

One thing I love in After Effects are adjustment layers and I just realized you can actually use titles as effects in Final Cut Pro X and they behave just like adjustment layers (actually you can go much further in Final Cut Pro X). For example if you color correct in Final Cut Pro X it's very easy to create illegal colors and to get colors back to legal you're supposed to create compound clip and then apply broadcast safe effect to it. I also love compound clips but those can make your projects really complex and another thing is that you have to render everything once again after you apply filter to compound clip.

So titles process everything below in Final Cut Pro X even with effects applied to those. So why not just build clean title in Motion 5, put that to top "track" before starting color correction and add broadcast safe effect to it. This way everything is rendered straight to broadcast specs and you don't have to hassle that much with compound clips.

This technique works with all effects (also color board works on titles) so for example if you want to have certain look for some period of time simply add clean title to top track for that time and add effect to it. I think this technique has tons of potential for people who want to keep their timelines in order and don't want to create complex compound clip messes.

If you don't have Motion 5 you can download Adjustment Layer here. Just extract contents to your Movies/Motion Templates/Titles folder and you'll find it in Final Cut Pro X Titles under Adjustment Layer.

UPDATE 10.7.

Mark Spencer informed me in CreativeCow with this very essential information:

If you don't have Motion 5 installed, you won't have the necessary folder structure for placing that title into. You'll need to create a "Motion Templates" folder in your "Movies" folder, and inside it, create folders for "Titles", "Transitions", "Effects", and "Generators".

And still, this won't work until you do a get info (command-I) on each folder and add the ".localized" extension.

THEN it should work.

Here I come MediaBizLab!

I just got information that I'm accepted to MediaBizLab minor subject studies (http://mediabizlab.fi/2011/06/new-students-in-the-mediabizlab-minor-studies-program-2/). So my next academic year will be about innovation and business development process of digital media services. I don't know if I told you already but my first year was really media art focused so it's very interesting now to focus on business side (dark side?) of things.

Views From My Windows

I almost had forgotten I recorded some views from my windows with iPhone 4 and TimeLapse app in March. At last I had some time to put clips together. If you want to do some time lapse with your iPhone I really recommend TimeLapse app because it can save original stills to your camera roll. So you'll have much more possibilities in post.

My summer job

I'm working once again! Next three months I'll be working as an promotion producer at Sub television channel. So back to old good promos. It actually feels very nice now when I haven't been doing those for last nine months. Yeah... Sometimes it's really good to have breaks if you've been doing same thing for years. Anyway here's the first project I did after coming back. It's simple showreel of TV shows coming from Sub next autumn.

My experience about how to make international DVD with multiple subtitle tracks

Recently i onlined a documentary called My Brother, Buddhist Monk. Now I was asked if I could make a international DVD from it with multiple subtitle tracks. My first idea was that I simply burn subtitles to picture and put all different versions to DVD but then I realized that all the versions wouldn't fit to one DVD and it'd be anyway very amateurish way to do things.

I decided to do authoring in DVD Studio Pro. First problem was that i got my subtitle files in EBU STL -format and realized there's no way to open those files with free softwares. Second thing was that even if I could have opened the files, subtitles would have looked poor when done in DVD Studio Pro.

So I did some googling and found perfect solution to all my subtitling problems. The program is called Belle Nuit Subtitler and it allows you spot, edit and render subtitles for video editing, DVD authoring and digital cinema. It opens all professional subtitling formats and makes great looking subtitles for Avid, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro etc.. It costs 130€ but it's nothing compared how much easier it makes your life. I warmly recommend trying the software if you need to work with translators and subtitles.

And BTW in addition to authoring the actual DVD I also created covers for it.

(Click on picture to see it larger.)

I made RjDj scene with RJC1000 & Pure Data

I just participated to Sound design and interactive music -course where we had to build experimental interactive sound piece for course exercise. We worked mainly with Pure Data and because I was already little bit familiar with how to build scenes for RjDj I wanted to try taking things further.

I found out RjDj guys have made easy to use software called RJC1000 where you can actually build RjDj scenes without using Pure Data (you can still make advanced things inside Pure Data). I wanted to try it so I made four page scene with RJC1000 & Pure Data called Tapio's Cool Beats where you can control soundscape and some instruments with microphone and accelerometer. It's far from perfect but at least you can get some meaningful sounds out of it :)

If you have iOS device and RjDj installed you can download scene here with mobile Safari.