Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Studio

My name is Jan Mejlgaard Bliddal I am from 1971 born in Herning Jutland, Denmark in the middel of spring. My first experience with Final Cut Pro was then Apple released Final Cut 1.2.5 with PAL support, and I aquired through my job at a large Apple dealer In Denmark. I upgraded to version 2.0 and 3 when they came but had to skip version 4 and 4.5 due to the lack of proper hardware. My basic problem was that I only had videoediting as a hobby, the equipment I had at my disposal was thus at the lower end of the recommended specifications a Powerbook G3 400mhz with extra memory. With the release of version 4 I didn´t live up to the minimum specification, and I thus had to skip that version. When Apple annonced Version 5 i 2005 I decided to buy a machine capable of running that version. The choice was a Mac mini 1,42Ghz with 1GB of memory an a Lacie 250GB USB2/ Firewire400/Firewire800 harddrive as mediadrive. It was no speed champion, but my excuse was well. I am only editing my children and our holiday as an hobbie. I can´t afford spending a lot of money on my equipment.

The Mac mini did run Final Cut 5 and later Final Cut studio with the exception of montion which required a graphic card faster than the ATI 9200 sitting in my Mac mini, but it didn´t do it well and I had to cut back on learning the more processor demanding techniques due to lack of time and processor resources. It didn´t stop me from filming my cousine Charlottes church wedding and editing it afterwards.

That wedding really pushed my equipment to the limited. My BeyerDynamic DT290 headset and Beyer Dynamic MCE86 shotgun mike handeled the soundside in flying colors, but my 7 year old JVC 9600 miniDV camcorder had a hardtime with the lack of light at the place where the afterparty was held. That gave me a lot of problem in editing as the bridecouple asked for all the speaches at the wedding. It had quite af few. The first couble of speaches didn´t provide any problem du to sufficient amout of natural light. The trouble started when the sun had set and I had to filme in the eletrical lightning provided by the in.

I tried fixing that during the editing face but got blowout superwiths when I tried to raise the brightness level of the clip. Thus Clips thus ended up very dark, but I decided to ad them to the DVD any how, because of the quality of the sound.

That was last year. Since then i have learned through articles in Edit Well by Alexis Van Hulkman that concentrating on the mids in the 3 way color correction would have been a better Idea. I thus used that technique on a project with my own children and was surprised how it was able to save clip I thought to dark to use. I didn´t however take a second look at the video even though I still had the clips on my media harddrive and the project in my projects folde.

That chanced this week. Do to changes in my equipment in May, and the things I am learning from Advanced editing techniq and color correction by Alexis Van Hulkman. In may I finally dicided to buy the computer I really wanted. A Mac Pro 2.66Ghz with one 250 harddrive and one 500GB media drive I Installed 3GB of memory at first, but later Installed annother 4GB of memory do to a drop in memory prices and recommendations for the Creative Cow Final Cut Forum.

Going through Van Hulkman color correction techniqes made me think about the less than satified results I had with the brightness level on the DVD I made for my cusine. I thus decided to give the video another try. Armed with the techniques I learn fom Alex I reconnected the harddrive with the videofiles on upgraded it to Final Cut 6. That turned out just fine. Looked at the video filmed when it was dark outside, and used my new knowlegde about how to decrease highlight and increase the mids. This created a new version of the movie where it was possible to reconize peoples faces without blowing out the highlights. It still looked crappy, but not as crappy as before