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Blog

Final Cut Pro XAlong with Larry Jordan, Norman Hollyn, Michael Cioni, and Michael Kammes, I will be speaking on a panel at Keycode Media about the future of Post-Production in a Final Cut Pro X world on August 18th, 2011.  Hopefully we will be able to de-bunk some of the misconceptions about what FCP X is and its place in the greater realm of post.  Besides that , we should be addressing post from a  larger perspective, asking where are we going and how are we going to get there?

Make sure to register to view the event online or in person.  At least make sure to upload your thoughts and view the video.


 

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A lot of people have set up their systems to utilize compressor’s Qmaster feature on their own system in order to use all available processor cores when encoding videos.

But what if you have multiple machines with access to file-level shared storage, like XSAN.   All client computers can have access and write access to the SAN simultaneously, so how can we utilize this fact to process distributed encoding tasks across multiple computers?

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Working with Composite Modes

Final Cut Pro composite modes determine how the brightness and color of one clip visually interact with those of another clip layered beneath it in a sequence. When you edit a clip into your sequence, it defaults to the Normal composite mode, meaning that it is a completely opaque layer that does not blend with the layers beneath.

How Composite Modes Affect Images

Composite modes mix colors from overlapping images together based on the brightness values within each color channel in an image. Every image consists of red, green, blue, and alpha channels (or one luma and two chroma channels in the case of Y′CBCR component video). Each individual channel contains a range of brightness values that defines the intensity of each pixel in the image that uses some of that color.

The effect that each composite mode has on objects that overlap in the Canvas depends on the range of color values within each object. The red, green, and blue channels (or Y′CBCR channels) within each overlapping pixel are mathematically combined to yield the final image.

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