Zoom F8 and Zoom F4 Audio Recorder Review

November 11, 2016 Tags: Audio, Editing, fcpx, Noah Kadner, ProApps, workflow

FCPWORKS’ review of the Zoom F8 and Zoom F4 Multitrack Field Recorders and why they’re so awesome for Final Cut Pro X.

Zoom F8 and Zoom F4 Audio Recorder Review

A Final Cut Pro X Audio Powerhouse

Zoom’s F4 and F8 audio recorders offer some pretty amazing specifications and can create automatic audio subroles for Final Cut Pro X. When compared to higher-end timecode-enabled recorders like the Sound Devices 744T, which go for $4K and up they are actually a real bargain at $999 for the 8 (with 8 tracks)and $649 for the F4 (4 tracks).

Some key specs:

Up to 24-bit/192 kHz audio resolution.
Super-low-noise microphone preamps for professional audio.
Discrete, locking Neutrik XLR/TRS combo connectors for all kinds of wired and wireless mics.
Time code generation with 0.2 ppm accuracy (unheard of before in this price range or anywhere close).
Dual recording on two SD/SDHC/SDXC cards up to 512 GB each
Metal chassis that feels solid as a rock but weighs in at a very friendly 2.27 pounds.

For a closer look at the Zoom F4 and how it works, check out the official product video:

Starring Roles

What truly excites us about the F8 and F4 is their support for iXML metadata. With iXML you can name each track something useful on the Zoom and that name will automagically become a Final Cut Pro X subrole upon ingest into Final Cut Pro X 10.3 and up and can be visualized very clearly via the new Audio Lanes layouts in 10.3. Out of the box, each track is named intuitively enough Tr1, Tr2, Tr3 and so forth.

So even if you do nothing but hit record, you’ll automatically have each track neatly sorted in Final Cut Pro X from ingest through to final mixdown.

The one and only trick is making sure your Final Cut Pro X ingest preferences are set correctly for handling iXML metadata. To accomplish this, first launch the Media Import window with File>Import>Media. Then in the Audio Roles section click the checkbox for Assign iXML track names if available:

Automated Mixing

So just think of the possibilities. Sure you could leave the Tr1, Tr2 nomenclature intact and be able to see all of those channels discretely in the timeline by activating audio lanes and getting the benefits of track assignments without having to actually organize them yourself. Or you could take it to a whole different level by adding more specificity.

Some suggestions for metadata track configuration:

Name for characters: Bob, Linda, Narrator, Doc Subject 1, etc.
Name by Mic Type: Lav 1, Boom 1, Wireless 1, etc.
Name by mix type: Direct 1, -10dB pad, etc.

The Zooms also allow you to do all sorts of bouncing of individual tracks to others for confidence recording at different pad levels and the like. There are really limitless possibilities and the best part is you can do this directly on the Zoom by editing the metadata via the built-in display. Or if you’re in a bit of a hurry to get into production, you can stick with the default track names and rename them as subroles in batches later within FCPX after ingest.

Finishing with A Zoom

The bottom line is you get an incredible amount of metadata organization with the Zoom F4 and F8 because the iXML from the original tracks to subroles will continue to live on as you edit clips into sequences, nest into compound clips and the like. It’s like having an assistant sound editor working alongside you to quickly group and organize all your tracks— only everything happens automatically.

You can just focus on making good edits and when it’s time to do your exports- you can again use the subroles to quickly make sub-mixes and do exports with precisely the audio you want to hear in your final exports.

We think the Zoom F8 and Zoom F4 are essential pieces of kit for your Final Cut Pro X production package. They’re very easy to operate, record very high quality audio and are perfectly complementary to Final Cut Pro via the iXML to subrole ingest power.

YouTube Influencer FCPX Tutorials from ipsy

October 18, 2016 Tags: fcp exchange, fcpx, workflow

If you spend any time on YouTube (and really who doesn’t) you might have heard of ipsy Open Studios, the production platform created by Michelle Phan to enable cosmetic and beauty consultants to turn into YouTube Stars and Influencers. More on the runaway success of ipsy over at Fast Company. Well it turns out, they also love to use Final Cut Pro X to create content.

Topics and stars include:

Add Third Party Effects by Cydnee Black
Export a Thumbnail to YouTube by Madeline De La Rosa
Record Voiceover by Lynette Cenee
Retime Video by Cydnee Black
Create a Video for Instagram by Michelle Phan
Color Correct Video by Michelle Phan
Create a Title by Madeline De La Rosa

Enjoy these clips and learn how to use FCPX from some highly knowledgeable makeup professionals:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FCPWORKS Noah Kadner

This blog post contains the personal musings of FCPWORKS’ Marketing Director, Noah Kadner. Prior to joining the company, Noah spent several years at Apple where he worked with internal Workflow and Editorial teams in support of Final Cut Pro X customers. Noah also directed a feature film available on iTunes called Social Guidance and wrote “RED: The Ultimate Guide to the Revolutionary Camera.” Noah’s ongoing career goal is communicating digital post-production workflows to experts and enthusiasts alike.You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter at @FCPWORKS.

FCP Exchange @ NAB 2016

March 28, 2016 Tags: fcpx, workflow

FCP Exchange continues at NAB 2016 . This special session takes place in Las Vegas at the Renaissance hotel, right next to the main Convention Center from April 18-19th, 2016. Some highlights:

Guest filmmaker workflows and case studies including Apple, Softron and more.
Tips and tricks to maximizing Final Cut Pro X from pros and developers.
Networking and interaction with fellow FCPX editors and enthusiasts.

Join the Exchange!

View the FCP Exchange NAB 2016 schedule & directory.

For more information and to register, please visit:

http://www.fcpexchange.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FCPWORKS Noah Kadner

This blog post contains the personal musings of FCPWORKS’ Marketing Director, Noah Kadner. Prior to joining the company, Noah spent several years at Apple where he worked with internal Workflow and Editorial teams in support of Final Cut Pro X customers. Noah also directed a feature film available on iTunes called Social Guidance and wrote “RED: The Ultimate Guide to the Revolutionary Camera.” Noah’s ongoing career goal is communicating digital post-production workflows to experts and enthusiasts alike.You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter at @FCPWORKS.

FCP Exchange – Session Two

January 20, 2016 Tags: fcpx, workflow

We’re continuing our collaboration with Peter Wiggins over at FCP.co and the good folks at AbelCine to bring you FCP Exchange, our Final Cut Pro X Workshop series. The second session is March 5th in Los Angeles. Just like our events at NAB and FCP EXPO, you’ll learn straight from working professionals. Some highlights:

Guest filmmaker workflows and case studies.
Tips and tricks to maximizing Final Cut Pro X from pros and developers.
Networking and interaction with fellow FCPX editors and enthusiasts.

Session two features Collaborative Workflows and Shared Storage Solutions.

Join the Exchange!

For more information and to register, please visit:

http://www.fcpexchange.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FCPWORKS Noah Kadner

This blog post contains the personal musings of FCPWORKS’ Marketing Director, Noah Kadner. Prior to joining the company, Noah spent several years at Apple where he worked with internal Workflow and Editorial teams in support of Final Cut Pro X customers. Noah also directed a feature film available on iTunes called Social Guidance and wrote “RED: The Ultimate Guide to the Revolutionary Camera.” Noah’s ongoing career goal is communicating digital post-production workflows to experts and enthusiasts alike.You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter at @FCPWORKS.

FCP Exchange – Extras from Thomas Grove Carter

November 30, 2015 Tags: fcp exchange, fcpx, workflow

As you might have heard, the first session of our FCP Exchange workshop series that FCPWORKS is co-producing with FCP.co went quite well last October. As a follow up, we’re proud to present this group of new workflow videos from Thomas Grove Carter of Trim Editing. These videos were produced by Alex Snelling of Slack Alice Films. Some highlights:

Retiming tricks.
How to edit and make changes to a moving timeline.
Maximizing clip connections and the magnetic timeline.

We think you’ll find these clips highly informative and easy to follow. Please feel free to share them with folks using competitive NLEs as well.

Here’s Thomas’ completed Audi commercial cut in Final Cut Pro X from these demos:

And some additional amazing work from Trim Editing:

For more information and to register for FCP Exchange, please visit:
http://www.fcpexchange.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FCPWORKS Noah Kadner

This blog post contains the personal musings of FCPWORKS’ Marketing Director, Noah Kadner. Prior to joining the company, Noah spent several years at Apple where he worked with internal Workflow and Editorial teams in support of Final Cut Pro X customers. Noah also directed a feature film available on iTunes called Social Guidance and wrote “RED: The Ultimate Guide to the Revolutionary Camera.” Noah’s ongoing career goal is communicating digital post-production workflows to experts and enthusiasts alike.You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter at @FCPWORKS.

News Graphics Plugin from Idustrial Revolution

October 19, 2015 Tags: apps, Editing, fcpx, motion, Noah Kadner, plugins, tutorial, workflow

Here’s a news story about the XEffects News Graphics plug-in from our good friends over at Idustrial Revolution and FxFactory. You know exactly what these look like because you see them all day long on TV monitors in airports, restaurants, hotel lobbies and in the comfort of your own home. Check out this sample of what News Graphics ($49) can do:

This plugin makes short work of all kinds of ubiquitous news graphics standards including tickers, bugs, DVE, picture in picture and more.

Some specific features:

Six preset color palettes in every template or choose your own
Use any font, any color, any size
Build In & Out animations on templates to choose between cuts & adjustable animations
Many display options and positioning on every template
Shrinkback effect controls all video DVE moves without key-framing
Not locked in to a single template, layer many elements on top of each other
Color shaded background, transition & title wipe included
4K Ready

We came up with this shot in just the first couple of minutes of playing around with the plugin:

You’ll find the Shrinkback effect in the FCPX Effects Browser:

and everything else in the Titles Browser:

Settings are very simple and easy to use:

If you’re doing any sort of project that requires news graphics you want this plugin. I can see it being useful for corporate videos, news shows, online streaming and more. Sure you could make these kinds of things on your own in Motion if you really wanted to…

…. but why waste days of your time when all the hard work has already been done for you. Go grab XEffects News Graphics instead for just $49. There’s also a free trial and tutorials available here: http://www.idustrialrevolution.com/x7-news-graphics

Look out for a few free copies at the October 24th, 2015 edition of FCP eXchange too.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FCPWORKS Noah Kadner

This blog post contains the personal musings of FCPWORKS’ Marketing Director, Noah Kadner. Prior to joining the company, Noah spent several years at Apple where he worked with internal Workflow and Editorial teams in support of Final Cut Pro X customers. Noah also directed a feature film available on iTunes called Social Guidance and wrote “RED: The Ultimate Guide to the Revolutionary Camera.” Noah’s ongoing career goal is communicating digital post-production workflows to experts and enthusiasts alike.You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter at @FCPWORKS.

FCP Exchange – A Final Cut Pro X Workshop Series

October 8, 2015 Tags: fcpx, workflow

We’re teaming up with Peter Wiggins over at FCP.co and the good folks at AbelCine to bring you FCP Exchange, a new Final Cut Pro X Workshop series. The first session is October 24th in Los Angeles. Just like our events at NAB and FCP EXPO, you’ll learn straight from working professionals. Some highlights:

Guest filmmaker workflows and case studies.
Tips and tricks to maximizing Final Cut Pro X from pros and developers.
Networking and interaction with fellow FCPX editors and enthusiasts.

We think you’ll find this series highly informative and useful. We hope to bring a wider audience to Final Cut Pro X and show way creatives are using it to maximize their workflows. These events are educational but also represent an excellent opportunity to meet other filmmakers and participate in the community. We welcome FCPX editors and enthusiasts at all levels.

Join the Exchange!

For more information and to register, please visit:

http://www.fcpexchange.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FCPWORKS Noah Kadner

This blog post contains the personal musings of FCPWORKS’ Marketing Director, Noah Kadner. Prior to joining the company, Noah spent several years at Apple where he worked with internal Workflow and Editorial teams in support of Final Cut Pro X customers. Noah also directed a feature film available on iTunes called Social Guidance and wrote “RED: The Ultimate Guide to the Revolutionary Camera.” Noah’s ongoing career goal is communicating digital post-production workflows to experts and enthusiasts alike.You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter at @FCPWORKS.

FCP EXPO 2015 Roundup

September 18, 2015 Tags: fcpx, workflow

Our FCP EXPO event at IBC 2015 was a huge success.

We loved working with Alex Snelling and Soho Editors and watching to the great presentations and case studies. Some of the highlights included:

Dashwood 3D’s 360VR Toolbox suite of virtual reality plugins. If you’re interested in VR and the Oculus Rift you need these. Not only can you view live edits on the Oculus Rift you can also do cool things like adding titles in 3D space and transitions.

If VR ever really takes off, these kinds of tools will be essential. Tim also mentioned some secret additional cool features on the way soon. Keep watching this space.

The good gents at Intelligent Assistance again showed great ways to collect metadata on set and follow it all the way through post with Lumberjack System.

Frame.io showed off their cloud-collaboration integration with FCPX. Really a lovely workflow and aesthetically pleasing tool. Blackmagic showed how straightforward and cost-effective 4K production has become thanks to their democratizing gear. Their OB van was pretty awesome too.

Folks from the Apple Marketing team were also on-hand both to give a presentation about the current version of FCPX and profile some interesting case studies. It’s great to see interaction from the team with fellow filmmakers and editors.

Thomas Grove Carter showed off his truly groundbreaking editorial work with some quite impressive commercial spots edited in FCPX.

Other highlights included great networking with folks like Alex4D, whose IBC wrap-up is here and FCP.CO’s Peter Wiggins.

FCP EXPO was a fantastic event and the place to be for FCPX during IBC 2015. For even more information about it, please visit: http://www.fcpworks.com/ibc-2015-fcp-expo/

With any luck we’ll have some videos up from this event to share before too long. We’ll see you all next year.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FCPWORKS Noah Kadner

This blog post contains the personal musings of FCPWORKS’ Marketing Director, Noah Kadner. Prior to joining the company, Noah spent several years at Apple where he worked with internal Workflow and Editorial teams in support of Final Cut Pro X customers. Noah also directed a feature film available on iTunes called Social Guidance and wrote “RED: The Ultimate Guide to the Revolutionary Camera.” Noah’s ongoing career goal is communicating digital post-production workflows to experts and enthusiasts alike.You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter at @FCPWORKS.

Role-O-Matic Rocks Audio Roles in FCPX

August 6, 2015 Tags: fcpx, plugins, workflow

FCPWORKS guest blogger Charlie Austin has addressed a cool workflow need with a new app. And the best part is it’s totally free.

For more details, here’s Charlie in his own words:

A couple weeks ago I released Role-O-Matic, a little app that, using FCPXML, allows you to batch assign audio Roles and Subroles and rename the components to match with lots of multichannel files. I cut trailers, and pretty much all my source files consist of 5-6 reels of picture with split DME audio, so 3-4 channels or more. Some of you may have multichannel audio files from production sound recording, it’s a pretty common thing.

And, as you know, the only way to set Roles on individual components (Dialogue/Efffects/Filled Effects/Music etc,) is to open each clip in a timeline one after the other and set the Roles on each component. Not bad with a couple files, drudgery with 5, 6, a dozen or more. I figured there had to be an easier way.

After a little more thought and fcpxml treasure hunting, I could see exactly what needed to be done. There was just one, little problem. I had no idea how to do it. Fortunately I found someone who *did* know how to do it, (Thanks Hiroto!) and with a little tweaking and fumbling on my part, Role-O-Matic was unleashed. Here’s how it works…

You create an Event in FCP X containing all the clips to which you’d like to assign common Roles. You can mix audio and video files, as well as files with differing numbers of channels, so It’s pretty versatile. the only thing to remember is the “common” part. If you’d like to assign Roles A,B,C,D etc, CH1 in every file will get Role A, CH2 in every file will get Role B, 3 gets C.. you get the picture. You need to do a little simple prep beforehand, (details in the instructions of course) but it’s super easy.

After your Event is set, export xml, and launch Role-O-Matic. Open the file you just exported and tell the app where to save the new one it will create. Role-O-Matic will then prompt you to enter Roles and Subroles for video clips first, then audio clips. You’ll have an opportunity to confirm what you’ve entered and redo it if needed.

It will then set all the Roles, rename the components to match the Roles, and create your new fcpxml. Import that into FCP X and you have a new event, with all your clips Roles set and nicely renamed. If your clips have existing custom names, you’ll get an additional prompt asking if you’d like to change them, or leave them as is. Easy, and an enormous time-saver.

If you need to work with a lot of multichannel audio, I think you’ll like it. The only limitation is that it can’t set Roles or rename the components of interleaved files. Stereo pairs, 5.1 surround files etc. Anything where FCP X sees the file as a single component in a timeline. You can set the Role on the component, but not it’s contents. Once again, I can see what probably needs to be done to be able to do this but, uh… don’t hold your breath. Much more exciting detail is in the Manual,which you really should read. Give it a try!, It is free after all. If you’re bored, here is a little 7 minute tutorial/demo, in my trademark rambling semi coherent style:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Charlie Austin.

This blog post contains the personal musings of Guest Blogger Charlie Austin. Charlie Austin is a fancy, award-winning editor. He began editing with Media Composer, has worked in FCP Classic, FCP X, Premiere, and has dabbled in Resolve, Lightworks, and Hit Film. He likes FCP X best of all. Over the course of his career he has worked as a professional musician, a post production mixer, and worn a variety of hats in film, TV, and live production.

He currently cuts trailers and other advertising for the talking pictures in Hollywood. You can read his blog over at fcpxpert.net

You can also follow him on Twitter at @fcpxpert1.

FCPWORKS @ the FCPX Creative Summit

June 8, 2015 Tags: fcpx, workflow

Learn about FCPX from some of the greatest minds in the business, including FCPWORKS’ own Sam Mestman at the FCPX Creative Summit. Highlights include:

The art of storytelling: learn how to create emotion and enhance
your story using special effects.
Workflow efficiencies: discover pro tips for organizing your media
to save time.
Creative possibilities: explore built-in features plus essential plug-ins.

For more information, please visit:

http://www.fcpxcreativesummit.com

FCPWORKS fans can get a special 15% discount with coupon code, FCPWORKS15.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FCPWORKS Noah Kadner

This blog post contains the personal musings of FCPWORKS’ Marketing Director, Noah Kadner. Prior to joining the company, Noah spent several years at Apple where he worked with internal Workflow and Editorial teams in support of Final Cut Pro X customers. Noah also directed a feature film available on iTunes called Social Guidance and wrote “RED: The Ultimate Guide to the Revolutionary Camera.” Noah’s ongoing career goal is communicating digital post-production workflows to experts and enthusiasts alike.You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter at @FCPWORKS.

Tag workflow

Zoom F8 and Zoom F4 Audio Recorder Review

A Final Cut Pro X Audio Powerhouse

Starring Roles

Automated Mixing

Finishing with A Zoom

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