Brian Meaney, Will Stein, Bill Hudson, Tom McDonald, Michael Wohl, and a host of other FCP dignitaries graced the stage and seats of the theatre and gave us all a show and tell of what's new in 2. And we liked it. Yeah, thats right, we liked it. Worth the 20 year wait. -(Or so it seemed) Much more on this later in the summary. But you can click here for more pictures of this event.

Stump the Gurus with Ken Stone (taking over for our dear departed Ralph Fairweather) and Andrew Balis was first up and as usual no one Stumped the Gurus and no one took home 3 raffle tickets. Next month it's four raffle tickets to the unlucky person who can't get her or his problem solved. So start working on your unsolvable problem today as it will take all month to -Stump the Gurus.
A few of the questions asked:
Q- What's the best repair Utility to run if you suspect disk corruption?
A- Well, Tech Tool Pro, Nortons, and Disk Warrior are all good products. Just don't install Nortons. Run it from the CD.
Q- I'm applying a transition over a title over video and it looks like crap.
A -Best to keyframe the opacity for this sort of thing as the transition tends to introduce blacks. Upgrade to 2.0 also.
Q- How can I modify the speed of a clip yet keep the clip the same length.
A- Park your playhead over the clip, do a match frame edit which brings up a copy of the clip in the viewer. Apply the speed change to this copy and then do a replace edit over the original clip.
Q - How come I'm getting a red render bar when I'm bringing a clip into the timeline?
A - Check your settings to make sure that they match. Your sequence settings MUST match your capture settings. Also if you get a red bar and you an play through the video then it is your audio that needs rendering.
Q -What's the easiest way to do a L cut.
A - Many ways, but use the option key and drag on the audio or video handles in the Viewer.

It was now time for what most of the crowd came to see and they were certainly not disappointed. Tom McDonald, Product manager for FCP was first up and gave us a quick PowerPoint overview of Final Cut Pro 2.0 new features. He thanked the audience for their patience and explained that Apple took this long because it simply wanted to get it right. There are over 80 UI and workflow improvements in 2.0 according to Tom.
Brian Meaney, (Brian has a nebulous title at Apple, but generally he is the guy with the ideas. The guy who is responsible for the things you love about FCP.) took over and immediately when into "what's new in 2."
First on what's new and high on everyones top 10 request list was Real Time. Running a DP Mac with a Matrox RTMac card, Brian ran through a few transitions and showed us what the card can do and told us what the card can't do.

What's cool is that by opening the effects items in the browser, the ones in BOLD are RT ready. No guessing. And there is a bunch of them. He reiterated that this is the first card out and others will have different functionality and do more and different effects, and transitions. Impressive, and cross dissolves looked quite nice and motion tracking looked and worked flawless.
Media Management went over real big and the audience applauded often as Brian walked us through it's many new features, all of which are entirely useful and beautifully implemented.

OMF export got a lot of response from the audience as well it should, since the majority of the house were professionals frothing at the mouth for the ability to export audio easily to a system like ProTools. Well you got it now.
In fact audio enhancements to FCP elicited a great deal of "oh wows, and thank yous, thank yous."

There were many wonderful enhancements shown, too many to go into here, and if you have read Phil Hodgetts review of FCP 2 here at lafcpug.org you know about all of them. Cool thing was, we got to see them in action, and I for one was not disappointed.

There were so many questions and we could of spent the entire night on this segment but what follows is highlights of the Q and A

Q -What is the maximum ram you should allocate to FCP
A- If the project is large, give it more ram. If it's really large , give it more ram. No known memory leaks and Brian is working on a project giving it 400mgbs
Q- Does FCP 2.0 perform better on a DP 533 or a single 733 Mac
A- The 533DP is significantly faster is the short answer.
Q- Is OSX necessary to get all of the advances of FCP 2.0
A -No. it doesn't work under OSX .
Brian then segued into an issue he has with Firewire drives, saying he does not recommend their use, at least for some of them. He said if it works for you then great, but right now he is not recommending you use them. He also said that you will definitely have issues if you set your disk cache in the memory control panel to CUSTOM rather than DEFAULT, which he recommends highly.
Q- Are their any major issues with cutting film on FCP
A- No . Film Logic takes up the slack where FCP leaves off and works very well indeed.
Q - I'm in the middle of a project, should I upgrade?
A- If your looking for the new tools in 2.0 and you want to use them, then get your project done, make a copy of it and drop it into 2.0 and play with the enhancements that you need. Remember to reset your memory allocation to what ever you had it in 1.2.5 as the upgrade defaults to 100mgbs.
Q- I am having a gamma issue with FCP 1.2.5 and QT 5 and the MPEG 2 exporter.
A- We are aware of it and are looking into it.
Q- I have a JVC camcorder. Has the problems been resolved with JVC camcorders and FCP
A -We are aware of the problems and are working on it. Go to the FCP web site for a complete list of approved cameras.
Q -Is there any low rez capture in FCP 2.0
A- No
Q - Any new transitions or cool filters added?
A - No.
Q- When I do a SAVE AS I loose the render files when I Open the copy.
A -Best to save at the finder level. Save AS will result in lost render files at this point
Q - Any tips on bring an old project into 2.0 from 1.2.5
A - you will loose your prefs, re set your memory settings and all should be cool
Q- scroll mice don't work in 1.2.5 do they work in 2.0?
A -Never tried it, don't know, but I don't think so.
Q - Can I put more than one render card in my Mac and can they co exist?
A - Yes.
Q - In capture scratch are the settings still global?
A -Yes
Q - Do EDLs work better between Avid and FCP?
A -Yes, but if you read the manual you will have very little problem. A big part of the manual is on EDLs and its nuances
Q - How about Custom columns in the browser?
A - We are aware of it.
Q - Is there more After Effects filter support
A Yes. We will be posting that list soon and if you use them get more Ram. AE effects LOVE ram
Q- Is Auto Save fixed?
A - I feel very good about Auto Save so I have no issues with it. Michael Wohl says he sets it at 30 minutes and often 60 minutes and has no issues

No one asked what the deal was with OSX support. This topic seemed to dominate the forums at 2-pop.com for a short while and I was surprised no one brought it up.. So during the break I grabbed one of the Apple folks and asked them myself. The quick and dirty answer was, "Simple, we don't have enough people on the FCP team. It's a matter of resources and nothing else.It was either ship it as is or wait for OSX . We decided to ship."
I also asked about the Yak. Does it still exist and where is it?
"It's in there. Just gotta find it."

OK, cool. 10 raffle tickets to the first lafcpug member who finds the Yak. Just write me when you find it. If you live in LA, come to a meeting and be the first on your block to show the world where it is.
Man, I love contests.

At this point it was time to take a fifteen minute break to allow everyone to go into the lobby and be sold something

Boris Red 2.0 was up next with Director of Marketing Tim Wilson entertaining and wowing the crowd. Boris Red has to be seen to be appreciated and Tim Wilson is the guy to show it to you.

At this point most of us were suffering from information overload and we needed to be dazzled just to stay awake and trust me, Red will dazzle you.
Working INSIDE FCP and shipping at the end of April 2001 it is a must have effects package for the serious compositor. It features over 700 settings (pre-sets) to make your life easier. Each setting is customizable and if you can keyframe, you can use Boris Red.-In a heart beat.

It features Auto animation, support for Type 1 fonts, motion tracking, 3D compositing, 3D titling, vector paint, and enhanced support for altivec. There's more but I'm brain dead at this point.

Tim spent a good 30 minutes ( no where near enough time) showing us wonderful clips of animations he has done in Boris, many of which were eye popping "how do you do that" stuff. Well he showed us, and even I think I could do it. Course you need imagination.
Go here to check out Boris Red 2.0 Really cool stuff.

Filmmaker and co-creator of FCP, Michael Wohl was up next with the one and only show and tell of the evening. Michael gave us a look at his new Movie "WANT" which he describes as a story of Dot -Com mania and sex addiction. Michael showed a five minute clip of his movie which he shot on DVCam/Pal over a 2 month period. Compiling over 60 hours of footage and so far whittled down to 3 hours, he hopes to have it completed in June of this year. Using a 450GB Medea Video Array for storage (which he describes as awesome) Michael's only troubles in Post has been that TimeCode issues arise because his assistant editors are logging PAL tapes in NTSC. But they were easily solved. Media management enhancements are Michaels favorite new thing in 2.0

You can get more info on "Want" the Movie at www.wantthemovie.com and if you are an effects wizard and you want to hang with the co creator of FCP and help get this movie to completion, Michael can use your help Contact him through the web site. This film, from what little we have seen could be wonderful. Heck, the story is.
Thanks Michael for coming down and showing your baby and we wish you good luck.

Next up was World Famous Raffle and we had a gazillion dollars worth of prizes to raffle off. Unfortunately there was a bit of chaos at this point and we forgot to write down the names of the winners. My apologies, but you know who you are and we congratulate you.

Prizes:
Visual QuickPro Guide by Lisa Brenneis from Lisa Brenneis
RTMac Card from Promax
2 copies of DV Companion from Intelligent Assistance
2 Scholarships for a FCP training class at the Stanford Academy for New Media in Palo Alto.
DVD Studio Pro from Promax
Boris Red Training Tapes from BorisFX
Final Cut Pro 2.0 from Apple
2-ATA Raid Cards from SmartDisk
Boris Graffiti from Boris
Dr Rawstock Hat - from Dr Rawstock
Dr Rawstock bag - from Dr Rawstock
3GB FW Hard Drive from Smart Disk.

Wow

Gonna have nothing for the April meeting except T-shirts and mouse pads unless you are a vendor who is reading this and feels sorry for the lafcpug. <g>

Great time, great meeting and special thanks have to go to Paul, and Patrick at the LA Film School. Also- too, Lisa, Bill, Doug, Ned, and Donna for taking tickets and hawking raffle prizes and keeping me under control. Ralph Fairweather for helping me coordiante this show. Chris Coe for stills. Dan Brockett and Terry McCarthy for taping. Promax for footing the bill for the theatre and Dr Rawstock for donating the computer equipment.

See you all April 25 for the next installment of the lafcpug.

Michael Horton
"HeadCutter"