Back in 2003 when I converted my basement to full blown edit suite (a year long process), it was both a blessing and curse all at once. Gone was the commute and fighting with Chicagoland traffic. I could sleep in later and “get home” from work earlier. Sounds great! But the flip side of that, if you don’t have a serious commitment to putting up work/personal life barriers, you are always at your office and always working. And clients know that too. So what’s to stop you from working late into the evening or over the weekend? As I found out, not much.

First home edit suite, 2003

Basement edit suite, 2004

Luckily, the home edit suite was short lived. In less then a year my wife and I had outgrown it and had to get office space or we would lose some of the larger jobs. The separation of work from home life was back in balance. However, there have been times that I wished the suite was back at home. It’s one thing to stick around the office to edit, but it’s another to stick around watching a render bar or compression bar just so you can finish and upload a file. What if you could do this from home? And what if it was free to you assuming that you already have a high speed internet connection at your home and office? Well, I’m hear to tell you that the solution is not only out there, but it’s a lot easier to get setup then you might think.

I’m sure by now everybody knows about MobileMe and Back To My Mac on the Macintosh (just try to get Back To My Mac working reliably though) and services like GoToMyPC.com (now supporting the Mac platform). There is also a client/server based service called HamachiX for Mac, but I could never get that to work reliably and it would often get very frustrating. About a year ago I found a free service called LogMeIn.com, which supports both Mac and PC. They’re goal is to get you hooked on their free service, and then have you upgrade to one of their paid accounts. But for what i use it for the free version is perfect. I now have several computers registered with them and use it at least weekly, sometimes every day. It has become an important tool in my toolbox.

How It Works
The concept is very simple. You create an account at LogMeIn.com. Make sure you sign up for the free service to start, it’s not always obvious that it’s available. I actually had trouble finding it when I started writing this article. Once you have an account, you download the client software that you install on every computer that you want to control. The installation is very fast, and during the setup you enter some account information that they provide you when you setup your account.

Once you install the software, it takes you to the LogMeIn.com website and registers that computer as one of your computers. You’re able to keep everything in one master list of computers, or create groups of different computers as I’ve done here.

One of the great and flawless things that the LogMeIn.com service does is get around all of the routers hubs and firewalls of your network. Our network is by no means complicated, but it’s not just an open network either. We have a cable modem, Apple Airport Extreme router, and about 5 switches in multiple locations on the network. And not once have I had a problem navigating through all of that to the machine I wanted. Hell, I can’t even get iChat to work at the office half the time.

At home it’s a similar setup. Cable modem, Time Machine wireless router and a few switches. There have even been a few times that I was at Panera Bread and wanted to start downloading something on the server at the office, and did so with great success. That says a lot because if you’ve spent any time on the free wifi from Panera, you know how painfully slow and frustrating it can be.

If you want to get really crazy, there is an iPhone application from LogMeIn.com as well, allowing you to perform all of the same functions but using your iPhone. I have not tried this, but if you have please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Putting It To Use
Once you’ve setup one or more computers, it’s just a matter of logging into the LogMeIn.com home page and you’re taken to your list of registered computers. From the list you can tell which ones are on-line and available, and which ones are not. Just click on the computer, enter a name and password and you’re in. Your browser window transforms into the desktop of the connected computer, or you can make it full screen and get the full experience being in front of the remote computer. Nearly all keyboard shortcuts that you would use locally work as expected (I’ve found a few that do not and randomly quit the browser).

This is one of those situations where seeing it in action goes a lot further then me telling you. See my real-time demonstration of it at work by watching the video at the end of this post.

How This Can Help You In Your Business
I have found many uses for LogMeIn. The initial problem was getting used to the idea that I didn’t have to hang out at the office for everything that needed to get done. Here are a few examples.

Post Edit Output
By far the biggest use we’ve had for it is web approvals. For example, it’s the end of the day and you’re finally ready to show the client your masterpiece. The typical process for us is the export a self-contained QuickTime Movie to the project folder, take that into compressor and create a H.264 QT movie file optimized for the web, take the output from compressor and into our Dreamweaver Template, create a web approval page with all of the necessary details, sync that to the server and send the client the approval link. With the exception of the compressor step, it all goes very quick. But unfortunately, if we have a long video to post the compressor step can take anywhere from 30 minutes to 2-3 hours (we’ve tested the Elgato Turbo.264 USB key, but the output is not as good and the files tend to be larger. It is fast though).

Using LogMeIn.com, this has changed. When the edit is over and the master is exported, we take into compressor and start the conversion. We prep the web page with everything except for the final video file, and leave. Then the editor, from home that evening checks in when the file is done being compressed (we’re sent email notifications from compressor as each file finishes – or fails), finishes the web page and sends the link via email on the edit computer. Total time spent about 5 minutes. The big differences is that all of the time you would have waited around, is now spent at home.

Check The Status
From checking the progress of an AE render, FCP export or making sure a large copy in the finder completed, getting peace of mind is fast and easy. How many times have you left something going in compressor just to find out that it crashed 5 minutes after you left and you had no idea. Now, even if you can’t fix it remotely, you know what you’re in for before you get there.

We’ve also used it to check on large DVD runs. Our duplicator usually runs flawlessly, but on runs of 500 or more it occasionally gets hung up and has to be reset. Again, in this case there’s not much we can do to fix the problem remotely, but just knowing that somebody has to go in early to fix so that we make the deadline it is a huge help.

Creating DVD’s
While this is not an ideal way to create a DVD by any means, in a pinch it can be very helpful. There have been a handful of occasions that I received a last minute panicked call that a client now wanted a DVD instead of a web approval. At the very least I could login and start the compression so that the DVD was a quick output in the morning. In most cases though I can get the entire process done right up to saving a disk image that the assistant can burn as soon as he gets in and then messenger it out.

Grab Files Remotely
While the edit computers themselves can not share files outside of the office, it’s no big deal to login to grab some files and upload them to a FTP server so that they can be downloaded elsewhere. When I was out of town on a remote job there was a situation where I needed a graphic element from a current job that I had forgot to bring with me. It was an animated background in QT format. No problem. I logged into the edit system, dragged the QT movie to a program called FileChute, and emailed myself the link from the edit system. Ten minutes later I had the file downloaded on my remote edit system and the client was blown away (these sorts of things can really make you look like a hero).

These are just some of the ways we’ve found it can help. I’m sure based on your own projects and work flow you’ll come up with new ones of your own. If you do, feel free to leave a comment on the blog and share it with others.

See For Yourself
Click on the link below to see a real-time demonstration of just how easy it is. To sign up for your own free account, just go to LogMeIn.com and you’ll be up and running in just minutes.

Several times a year I find myself on the road editing on-location with clients. These travel jobs are usually a convention, corporate conference or incentive trip. The locations can be as close as Chicago (20 miles away) or as far as Thailand and Hong Kong. I have a travel system that’s in cases and ready to go at a moments notice, and each year this part of our business at Edit Creations has grown.

One concern I always have when doing these jobs is having a system go down while being far away from the office. Part of my safety net is having a second laptop with me on every trip. I learned my lesson the hard way when a few years ago one of our editors was doing a job in California and the a AJA IO box stopped working. It was a Saturday so I couldn’t get in touch with tech support at AJA and no amount of google searching helped find a solution. By Monday the job was going to be all over, videos laid off or not. So in that case, after troubleshooting all night on the phone and realizing it was not going to be fixed, with only a 4 hour window I had to shower, head to the office and make a second system from one of our edit bays, stop and Home Depot and buy a hand truck and head to the airport. I made it in time to save the day, but it burned though all of the profits for the job.

While having 2 systems is great security, I always want to have the ability to troubleshoot, test or rebuild a machine with all of the needed software on site, should the need arise. In my worst case scenario that I play back in my head (rehearsing it like a fire drill) I imagine running to a local Apple Store, buying a new machine on the spot and reinstalling everything I need to get the job done.

Up until recently I’ve always brought with me a small selection of DVD’s. Everything from all of the original FCP and Adobe install disks, to Disk Warrior and a system restore disk. While this would obviously work, there is a better way. Why not buy a new, small portable FW drive (or even better, use one of those old drives that you have laying around) and created a multi-partition boot drive that contains everything? Then, not only do you have everything you need in one place, booting and running off of the FW drive will be much faster then working off your DVD drive.

The rest of this post will show you how to create your own emergency boot drive that is the perfect companion to your travel system.

Check List
Before you get started, here’s what you’re going to need.

• A hard drive. FireWire is my personal preference, but a bootable USB 2.0 drive will work as well. I don’t care what anybody says, FireWire is still faster then USB so I prefer to never buy a drive that is only USB.
• Hard drive space on your computer – lots of it if you’re going to be putting a lot of software on your new boot drive.
• Original CD’s/DVD’s that you want to make copies of.
• Apple Disk Utility (in the Utilities folder of your hard drive).

Pick Your Drive

The first step is to get yourself a drive. For me, I used a 500 gig G-Raid Mini that has not been getting a lot of use.

I had several other options as well, but all were too small for what I wanted to do here. Funny how 60 gigs is now considered “small”. However any one of these would make a great DiskWarrior/OSX Install disk.

If you are buying a new drive, I would recommend one of the Western Digital Passport drives. You can get a 500 Gig USB drive for less then $120, or a 400 gig version with both USB and FW800 for $115. If you’re not as concerned about the size of the drive or having an external HD, you can get an even better deal on a 1TB Quad Interface drive for about $150, also from Western Digital.

Select Your Software
Before you do anything with the drive itself, decide what you want to use it for. In my case, I decided to make partitions for the following.

• Disk Warrior Emergency Boot Disk
• OSX 10.5 Leopard Install Disk
• OSX 10.5 Server Install Disk
• OSX 10.4 Tiger Install Disk
• “Additional Software” partition for Adobe and FCP disk images

Make Disk Images

It’s time to make disk images of each disk. If you have not done this before, it’s a way to create an exact byte by byte copy of a disk (even a hard drive) to a single file on a your hard drive. Later you’ll use these files to create the hard drive versions.

Insert the disk into the disk drive and open Apple’s Disk Utility program. Towards the bottom of the list on the left you should see your DVD drive listed, and the CD that you have inserted. In my case the Leopard install disk is inserted in the machine. Click once to highlight the mounted disk as shown here.

Now click on the button along the top that says “New Image”. You will be asked for a place to save the new disk image. If you’re doing this for several DVD’s, you’re going to want to make sure you have plenty of space since each disk can be multiple gigs in size. Name the disk something meaningful and hit save. The default options of “compressed” and “none” will work fine.

Disk Utility will now create a single file that is an exact copy of your CD or DVD.

Repeat these steps for each disk you want to put on your boot drive. Even if it’s not going to be a bootable disk (for example, the Final Cut Pro suite of disks). Later you’ll see the benefit of doing so.

Get Organized
Once you’ve created a disk image for every optical disk you need, it’s a good idea to organize them into two main categories. Boot drives, and non-boot drives.

As seen here, I’ve not only put my bootable disks into their own folder, but in the additional software folder I’ve created sub-folders to keep programs grouped. Doing this is going to help you figure out how many partitions you need, and how large to make each partition.

Looking at the list I have, I can tell I need 5 partitions. There are 4 boot volumes, and the rest will go onto a 5th partition called “Additional Software”.

Before we move on we need to know how big each of the bootable volumes need to be. The best way to do that is to double click on each Disk Image so that it mounts on the desktop, and do a “get info” on the mounted volume. You may be tempted to just look at the size of the disk image, but since it’s compressed it will not give you an accurate final size.

I went through each of my drives and just made note of the final sizes. I don’t really care about the extra non-bootable images since they’re all going on whatever is left and there should be plenty of extra space. If you think you’re cutting it close you may want to get their sizes as well just to be sure everything will fit.

Splitting Up Your Disk
We now have everything we need to create the boot disk. Again, open Disk Utility and select the drive that you’re going to use. Make sure to select the drive itself, and not the current volume that’s right below it.

With the drive selected, click on the Partition tab. Currently there is just one partition for the entire drive. Let’s change that. Under “volume scheme” change it from “current” to “5-Partitions” (or however many you need for what you’re creating). We know we need 5 from the previous work we’ve already done.

Initially you’ll see 5 equal sized partition boxes. To optimize the use of space we’re going to create each partition to match the disk image so that we don’t waste space. To do this, starting from the top box click on each partition box and type in a name and size based on the sizes you recorded earlier. I usually make the partition size a little bit bigger then the size I recorded, just to be sure it all fits and there’s some working space. it’s really not necessary, but that’s what I do for my own neurotic reasons. I usually add half a gig to each recorded size.

Repeat this step for each of the new partitions, working your way down the list. When you’re done, name the final partition “Additional Software” and leave the size as is. It will automatically be whatever space is left.

The Partition Table Scheme
I will come right out and tell you the first time I went through all of this trouble I ended up with a disk that would not boot. I was baffled. I knew I did everything right. It took some digging to realize what I had done wrong.

This part is very important. Before you create the partitions, click on the option button at the bottom of the screen and you’ll see this dialog.

The type of partition scheme you use effects what machines can boot from the drive. By default, it’s setup so that it can boot from non-intel machines only (G4, G5). My problem was I was using a MacBookPro which is Intel based.

Nearly all of my machines are now Intel based, so I don’t need to have a dual booting drive that does both. But if that’s what you need, there is a way to do it. I’m not gong to bother showing you since I didn’t do it myself, but I found a good step-by-step description on how to do it on Mac OSX Hints. Feel free to follow their instructions. If it were super easy I may have done it just to say I did it, but it’s more of a pain then it’s worth to me personally.

So in my case, I chose GUID partition table and clicked OK. This will create partitions that all boot on any Intel based Macintosh.

With everything ready, click on the “apply” button and you’ll receive the standard warning letting you know you’re about to destroy the disk as you know it.

Click Partition and let it do it’s thing. It shouldn’t take more then a few seconds to a minute. When it’s done you’ll have 5 new volumes created under the main hard drive on the left side of the screen. You will also have 5 new hard drives mounted on your desktop representing each of the new partitions.

Makin’ Copies
We’re almost done. You now need to take each disk image that you created, and restore it to the matching volume that you created for it. This is pretty straight forward.

Inside of disk utility, click on the first partition that you want to work on, and click the “restore” tab. From that window, you can select your disk image file, and then drag and drop the HD from the desktop that you want to copy that image to.

Click the “restore” button, click OK on the warning dialog and enter your user password and away it goes. This part can take awhile, especially if like me you’re restoring form a network server drive that’s also busy doing other things.

Repeat this for each of the boot volumes.

If by chance you get an error like this one…

…don’t freak out. At least not yet anyway. Chances are pretty good you have that disk image mounted on your desktop. Just unmount the disk image by and try again.

The Rest of the Software
The disk images that were not intended to be boot disks (all of the Adobe/FCP images) can just be copied using the finder to the volume called “Additional Software”.

Once all of the drives are restored from their perspective disk images and all of the extra software is copied over to the extra drive, it’s time to take it for a test drive.

Restart, Reboot, Relax
Plug in your drive and choose restart. As soon as your Mac chimes on, hold down the option key on your keyboard. (I should mention that this needs to be a wired keyboard for this to work). In a few seconds you’ll see a list of all of the bootable disks. Use the arrows on the keyboard to make a choice and hit return.

A Few Usage Notes
A few things I wanted to mention.

Installing OSX
When you use the OSX install DVD, normally you put the DVD in and click on the “Install” icon, and away it goes – rebooting the machine and starting up from the DVD. If you try to do this from the boot drive you just created, it will not work. It can tell that it’s not the original DVD and gives you an error. So the way to get around it is how I described above, restarting and holding down the option key to choose your drive. After that it all goes as normally.

Installing FCP
One of the great benefits of having a program like FCP Studio as disk images, is that the installation goes a LOT faster, and you can install everything unattended. No more switching of the DVD’s as it needs them. The trick is to just open up all of the images and have them mounted on the desktop. Once you start the install, it will appear that you have multiple DVD’s all mounted. So as it finishes with one, it just moves onto the next one.

Quick System Restores
Creating disk images can be a great way to keep a backup of your current edit system. Once a month we create a disk image of the boot drive of each edit system in the office. Why? This way if a system crashes or goes down due to a hard drive problem, we can use the image to create a new identical drive and be up and running with all of our software, plugins and system settings as we had them. This was put to the test once already when a system just didn’t boot one morning and we were on deadline. By noon we had a new drive installed and imaged from the backup and were up and running again. Try rebuilding an entire system from all of the original software disks in just 3 hours. Our usual rebuild from scratch time is about 8-10 hours, and usually several days of finding little things that we forgot and fixing system settings and preferences.

Adding or Changing Partition Size
Let’s say that you create 5 partitions as I did in this example, and later on want to add a 6th because a) you have enough space on the drive and b) you now decided you wanted to add Snow Leopard as an additional boot disk. Can you do this? Yes, and no. Mostly yes.

Apple’s Disk Utility does allow you to resize the partitions, but in doing so you will destroy everything on that partition. After going through all of this work, it’s clearly not the best option. However, there is a great and reasonably priced program called iPartition from Coriolis.

This nifty program makes it possible to non-destructively and intuitively adjust the size of each partition. You can create new partitions and a whole lot more. In my limited testing, iPartition performed as promised and made short work of what would have otherwise been impossible using Disk Utility. At the low price of $45, this was a no brainer purchase for me.

Duplicate Your Work
And finally, after doing all of this work, wouldn’t it be nice if you could make a disk image of your new boot drive? Well, you can! Just follow the same procedure and you can have a backup disk image on your system to either create another drive from, or to just have as a backup in case your new boot drive goes down or gets lost.

The SuiteTake?
With a little bit of work you can not only put some old unused drives to work, but be better prepared for a unplanned emergency. At the very least, you will have a more efficient way to install your standard production software and have a great troubleshooting disk. If you ask me, being prepared like this is underrated. It’s little things like this that allow me sleep just a little bit better at night.

Ahhh the age old struggle between Final Cut Pro and After Effects. For what seems like centuries now us Final Cut Pro editors have been struggling with finding an efficient and, moreover, convenient workflow between FCP and After Effects. Sure, products like Livetype and Motion have come along and made life easier for some tasks but when it comes down to real motion graphics work and serious compositing nothing beats After Effects. Have you ever put Motion’s Primatte RT side by side with a key pulled from After Effects Keylight? To me there’s no comparison.

Coming from an editor’s chair, not a designer’s, it took me a while to really get up to speed with After Effects. In the past I was using AE infrequently for several reasons: 1. I didn’t know the interface and key commands well, 2. I didn’t know the software’s capabilities well, 3. I was intimidated by the rigid workflow between FCP and AE. All these factors equaled inefficent workflow and so I just usually opted not to use AE in favor of a faster and more flexible option like Livetype or Motion.

However, in the past year the work we have been doing has called more and more for serious graphics design and compositing, Livetype and Motion were simply not going to cut it. So I buckled down and really learned the After Effects interface, key commands and it’s capabilities. Through that hard work I quickly became much more efficent with AE and started creating some really cool stuff. But all this new-found efficency with AE itself still did nothing to help with a round-trip workflow to and from FCP. And if we can assume anything about Apple and Adobe there will probably never be an intergrated roundtrip solution between the two.

Now of course there are 3rd party solutions out there that help with this problem (at least half of the problem anyway). Automatic Duck is a great 3rd party solution that exports Final Cut Pro projects and timelines in a format that After Effects understands and converts to compositions. Bam, you’ve got half of the roundtrip issue solved right there, prepare a timline in FCP and export with Automatic Duck into AE and take care of your graphics and compositing. The problems? Output is still the same, you must render your comps out of AE and import them into FCP just like always. Then later if changes are needed you must go back to AE, make your changes, and re-render the revised comp and import back into FCP. The other problem, Automatic Duck is expensive. If you’re a home business or just struggling like everyone else in this economy buying the plug-in may not be an option.

I call this solution The Manual Duck. It doesn’t involve any special plug-ins or any other software, it’s just a few simple steps to add to the workflow that can make the trip to and from AE much easier, and more importantly, leave less room for errors requiring revisions in After Effects later.

I had a job recently where I knew that I was probably going to need to do almost entirely in After Effects. It was an image piece that involved nothing but text builds and a few stock images. The producers instructions were simply to take the “boring” corporate message and make it just “look cool.” Ahhh, is there anything better then the old “Just make it look cool…” line? And what’s more, from listening to the music that was selected, it was going to be a music driven edit.

In my opinion After Effects is not a good audio editor from a workflow perspective and have to cut to music in After Effects can be a big hassle being that there’s no “real” real-time playback or scrubbing of audio. All this added up to a perfect candidate for The Manual Duck workflow.

It’s simple really, start in Final Cut Pro. I laid down the music track in an empty timeline and made the audio edit (the track did need to be cut down and mixed a bit). Once I was happy with the audio I started to block out what I wanted the shots to be using the built-in text tool. I had the script and knew what order the text build had to go in. With the text tool I was able to very quickly block out where the individual sentences would go. I went along through the song and timed out all the text builds adding no style or animation of any sort. The key to this step is the speed at which you can work, just copy-paste the text clips from one edit to the next and copy-paste the next sentence from the script into the text tool. Format just a bit so the lines can be read and that’s all you need to do. Of course, if your project is more complex you can get as complex as you’d like during this step, adding images, transitions, etc. The point is that you lay everything down and time everything out in Final Cut Pro where you have quick real-time editing available with no significant render or RAM preview time.

The project blocked out in a FCP timeline

From there export the timeline to a codec that After Effects will play well with. Import that QT into AE and drop it into your Comp. From here you can proceed in the manner you prefer best. You can scrub through the Comp and add markers at the edit points or do split-track edits. Either way you can quickly scrub the Comp and see where you made edits in FCP with no need for audio playback or scrubbing. Also you now have a base layer that acts as a virtual storyboard. As you build your effects and composite you can easily solo the base QT layer to see what you blocked out next.

The FCP QT imported into an AE Comp

As a side note I after I have made my markers or split tracks I turn off the visibility and lock this layer to ease RAM preview time and avoid offsetting the layer with a stray drag.

The final composite

Now there’s nothing automated about the process and it doesn’t add any sort of round-tripping between the two but I’ve found that it helps a great deal with being efficient once in After Effects and leaves far less room for errors and mis-timimg. If you can build your graphics and composite and get it right the first time that is far more valuable than the extra time it took to block the project in Final Cut Pro.

If you’ve ever had to edit with the Sony XDCam format, you already know that the work flow can be a challenge, especially if you’re using Final Cut Pro. While the Panasonic P2/DVCPro HD format integrates very well with the Log and Transfer tool, XDCam has had many shortcomings. That is, until now. 

Sony recently released version 1.0 of their log and transfer plugin that works with both XDCam and the newer SxS solid state media cameras like the EX-1 and EX-3. 

Installation is very simple, and no restart is required except for relaunching Final Cut Pro. When you open the Log and Transfer tool, you won’t find anything visibly different, but when you select XDCam media, either from a hard drive or directly from a SxS card, the footage now loads, and you can log and transfer the same way that you can P2 footage. 

In limited testing, we have found it to work as expected. The only downside is that you can’t transcode the footage into another format during import. This would be a helpful feature since editing in the XDCam format less then ideal. But for now, we’re pretty excited to see Sony improving the workflow and look forward to future upgrades. 

You can find more information by visiting Sony. 

DOWNLOAD THE SOFTWARE

If you’ve been in the business long enough, you probably remember doing split track master layoffs to tape machines. For me it started with 1 masters that had VO on channel 1 and everything else on channel 2, and progressed to using D2 and digital beta that allowed you to layoff vo on one channel, natural sound on channel 2, and stereo music on channels 3&4. If you were fortunate enough to have higher end decks, you were able to layoff up to 8 discreet audio channels. 

If you’ve never done this you may wonder why you would want to do such a thing. It’s all about the revisions. Before everything was on the computer, doing changes to a tape masters could be a real pain and very time consuming. Often you would need to make a change to the VO, or maybe the client wanted to change the music. If all you had was a mixed master you were pretty much out of luck for the quick fix. It was back to all original elements. 

Now that everything is digital and all file based, changes are easier then ever. That is, as long as all of your original elements are still on the computer. But what happens if a project comes back for changes or an update a year after it was originally done? Maybe a translation into a different language (this happened to me recently). Most editors I know usually have a mixed master layoff (many of us don’t have access to the high-end decks that cost more then a house) and/or a QT export of the final master sequence that gets archived to a DVD or HD Backup system. But that doesn’t help much if the changes you need to make involve audio. However, since the release of QT 7 there has been the ability to export multi-track QT movies from FCP that retain all of the individual audio tracks so you can make whatever changes you need! The problem is, most editors don’t seem to know about it. This article will walk you through the process step by step.

Preparation

Although there are no hard rules on exactly how you should edit your audio, it’s a very good idea to give each type of audio it’s own discreet channel, and stick with it! As your project grows and gets more complicated this becomes crucial. Being organized makes batch changes easier (say raising the audio on just the vo for the entire program or swapping out English for Spanish), mixing easier, editing faster in general (because you’re not spending time trying to find any given piece of audio) mistakes less likely (how many times have you edited audio into your sequence and blew over something else that you didn’t’ realize was on the same track?) and will keep your audio guy happy should you need to send your audio to an audio house for higher end mixing.

My usual break down on audio is to have voice over on channel 1, bites on channel 2, natural sound on 3-4, and 5-6 (allows for over lapping sound), and usually stereo music on channels 7-8 and 9-10. If I have SFX, they usually go on 11-12. 

But enough talking, let’s get to it!

Once you have a final approved video that you’re ready to archive, duplicate the final sequence. I normally append “Split Audio” to the end of the sequence name to differentiate it from the original. 

Next, right click on the new sequence and select “Settings…”. Click over to the audio tab in the new window. The default “Outputs” setting takes as many audio channels that your sequence has and outputs them to a stereo pair. In most cases that’s what you want since most edit systems are only setup to monitor 2 discreet audio channels. For our purpose we need to have as many channels as we have tracks of audio. In my example here I have 12 audio tracks, so I’m changing the output to 12. 

Once you make this change, you’ll see the extra outputs listed in the window. 

Click OK to close the window. 

You’ll now notice that your audio tool has been updated to reflect the extra outputs you have added.

The next step is to map the proper timeline audio tracks to the proper outputs. To do this, right click (control-click) on each audio track in your sequence and change the output to match the associated track number.  Note, you must click to the right of the audio patch panel number to see this option). The first 2 channels are correct already since they need to go to outputs 1&2, however the rest of them will need to be changed. 

So when you’re done, you should have both tracks 1&2 going to the output called “1&2”, tracks 3&4 in the sequence should be going to the output called “3&4” and so on. 

If you play back your sequence now, you’ll notice that the audio tool meter shows the different channels going to there proper locations. You’ll probably also notice that you don’t hear all of your audio now. You can probably only hear what is being played back on channels 1&2. That’s normal, again because most edit systems are not setup to monitor more then 2 channels of audio. However, if you want to hear your full mix in this configuration, just click on the “downmix” button located above the audio meters. 

You are now ready to export your QT movie. Use the “Export Quicktime Movie…” selection and be sure to make the movie self contained since this is for long term archive long after the rest of the media has been deleted. I also always include “DVD Studio Pro” markers, even if the file is not being used for a DVD at this time. You never know if it will be in the future, and adding those makers now will allow for a higher quality compression later should I need to compress it. FCP inserts compression markers at all edits and transitions to help the quality of the compression. 

As a general rule, I never change the name of the exported file. It should always match the sequence that it was exported from so that there’s no doubt which files match which sequences. It’s a good way to stay in sync with changes as well. Once I do an export, if any additional changes need to be done to the sequence, I duplicate the sequence and version it up to do the changes in the new sequence. That way I know if my exported file does not match the most recent sequence number, that the QT file is not the most recent version. 

Look at the newly exported file in the finder and you’ll see that it’s larger then the one I exported earlier with just stereo audio. This is because of the extra individual tracks inside of the QT file. 

Now open up the split track QT move in a QT player and you’ll notice nothing different. Only 2 audio channels are displayed on the meters, and if you play it, it sounds like a stereo mix. Don’t worry, FCP will see the extra channels. This is actually pretty awesome because you can still use this file for most of the post processing you would normally do to create a DVD, web files, or anything else.

Go back into FCP and create a new sequence. Add as many audio tracks as you had on the original sequence. In my case, it’s 12 tracks of audio.

Import the QT movie file that you exported and load it into the viewer. Notice that on the patch panel you have a lot more audio channels to work with. Use the patch panel to match up the tracks numerically, and edit the movie into the sequence. 

Play back the sequence and you’ll notice that all of the audio is now split into the proper channels. You’re now free to change the VO, swap out music, remix the whole program, or anything else! 

If you find this tip useful or have any suggestions or comments on how to improve it, please email me. I am always interested in feedback.