What is This Stuff?

The Final Cut learning process continues.

Our most recent Alien piece is almost done (and is not yet available online as this one has a different, secret purpose). It's taking much longer than the others for a whole host of reasons: the reconceptualization of the piece which required reshoots, then a day of reediting the piece itself, then I went and experimented with using LiveType to do the end titles before discovering that Final Cut has some Boris titling filters already included in the package that would have handled our simple titles very easily. Once Marc saw the end titles there was some rejiggering of the whole piece, which we then burned onto four DVDs so we could distribute them to our people.

And only after burning the DVDs, as we looked at the piece on my TV set, did I realize that yeah, when editors say that the image on your computer monitor looks a lot different from what will be on a TV screen, they're absolutely right. It's a huge difference. And one of the things I didn't notice at all on the computer screen is that on a TV, the MiniDV footage we shot really obviously looks like video.

I first started to learn the Final Cut software itself, then got just far enough in to feel mildly comfortable with the interface, then I started playing around with LiveType. Now we're into what are called "film look" filters, designed to make video look, as you'd guess, more like film. But in order to understand why video looks like video, and why film looks like film, you have to start learning about interlacing and why it works the way it does, and why the 30 frames per second of video are so different from the 24 frames per second of film, and how you have to change things so that the one will look like the other. (There's a pretty decent explanation of a lot of this here.)

But filters don't come cheap, at least not by my standards of cheap. Boris's Continuum package looked great, but cost $795. Marc and I found the Digital Film Labs package for $295 and spent the night playing around with their filters in demo mode. Next I went on Apple's message boards for Final Cut Pro, where I found plenty of people asking some of the same questions I am. Eventually I came across numerous references to the Nattress plug-ins as being particularly great, and extra-great because they only cost $100. I ran the de-interlacing filter and sure enough, there it was: a film look began to emerge. A little more playing around with grain and diffusion, and now we had something we could work with. When was the last time the cheapest product turned out to be one of the best?

So one thing leads to another, and I learn a little bit more about the process only to learn how many more things I need to learn. Because even though I think I've found a good set of film-look filters, I also realize that I need to have what's called an NTSC monitor on my desk next to the computer display, so that I can always have a real tube image to look at for a true idea of what our footage will look like. But these monitors aren't cheap--$500 on Craigs List is the cheapest I've found so far--and then you get into questions about which kind of monitor is best, and it just all turns into one big muddle very fast.

But having a monitor sure would save me from having to burn a DVD every time I want to see how a project looks.