During the course of a day, business or otherwise, I use many Mac shortcut keys. When working with Finder and application windows I’ll often use Command ~ to switch from window to window. Often, in haste, I’ll accidentally hit Command Esc which opens Front Row and disrupts my productivity.

Turning off the Front Row hot-key is easy. Open System Preferences, Keyboard & Mouse and the top entry (for me anyway) is “Hide and show Front Row.” Uncheck the box and it’s done. Until you re-enable the hot-key you can open Front Row using its icon in your Applications folder.

Although some folks complain that Compressor is more trouble than it’s worth, I use it regularly to create self-contained QuickTime files and format conversions. No problems, really, until this evening.

Encoding a QT video from the Animation codec to a custom H.264 file resulted in Compressor generating “QuickTime error -120.” My was Mac was recently rebooted and neither Final Cut Pro or QuickTime Player was loaded at the time.

The problem was resolved using a suggestion from Apple’s discussion forum. In summary:

As a workaround for the -120 errors, I noticed the Compressor application menu has a choice for Reset Background Processing… which does get things working again, but isn’t really a good solution and suggests there’s a bug in the background application (qmasterd).

FWIW, the forum post is dated May 12, 2007 and I experienced this error on May 26, 2008 - one year and software version later.

I’m grateful there are so many keyboard shortcuts in Final Cut Pro because moving my hand between the mouse and keyboard is terribly inefficient and slow. Unfortunately, functions I’m using on a regular basis don’t have keys mapped to them making it a hassle to mouse over. Customizing the keyboard is easy and although it’s very crowded, there are a number of F-keys available if you don’t mind some modifiers like Option. For me, “Export as QuickTime Movie…” is mapped to Option-F1 and “Export OMF…” to Option-F2.

Although I’ve been memorizing keystrokes to no end, what I find lacking is the keyboard itself. Not the feel of the keys but the movement my hands makes across the keys. Picture this: your right hand is grasping the mouse and your left shoots across to press I or O. You could let go of the mouse and use your right hand but if you need to use the mouse immediately afterward it’s impractical.

The same goes for other command keys like F9, F10, J, K, L, and ; and ‘. In fact, it seems the most popular keys put your left hand across the keyboard quite often. These keys could be remapped in a mirror image but that will require remapping existing keys. Swap mouse hands? Ugh, no way.

Inefficiency aside, what about Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI)? It’s less stressful on your hands to keep them parallel with your body, not crossing your body. This is where I wonder about the benefits of a keypad to use alongside the keyboard. A keypad to the left could be programmed with common functions keeping your left hand in one place and your mouse hand on the right - both arms/hands parallel to the body.

P.I. Engineering makes a variety of USB keypads suitable for this task. Prices vary ($119 to $249) for something “editor” friendly. It’s unfortunate their X-keys Desktop (with 20 keys) is the price of a full 101+ key keyboard. The X-key Jog and Shuttle Pro seems the best device, but jog/shuttle devices can be found for much less.

For me, it will come down to this: how much do my wrists hurt after many hours in the clutches of Final Cut Pro?

Our project is shot in DV PAL which has a frame size of 720×576. However, we’re using the footage in anamorphic aspect ratio and discovering that exporting to other formats has interesting side effects.

FCP handles the anamorphic aspect ratio as easily as clicking a checkbox. When exporting a QuickTime movie it will always have a frame size of 720×576 (the native resolution). If you want to create a QT Movie for viewing in anamorphic (1024×576 display size) the footage must be run through Compressor (or QuickTime Conversion) and specify the larger size. It’s not automatically done for you.

The business of handling anamorphic footage is becoming a problem for our visual effects shots. Some artists request TIFF sequences rather than QuickTime Movies and unfortunately TIFF export will render the image in anamorphic’s 1024×576 frame size which produces unwanted artifacts when scaled back down to 720×576.

After some experimentation I discovered the way to force a TIFF export to the native size is unchecking the Anamorphic setting on the clip. Strangely, this produces an image of 768×576 rather than the desired 720×576. Is this OK? I’m waiting for my VFX Supervisor to tell me.

A related bug with TIFF export is the handling of file names. Although Apple warns against the use of special characters in clip file names (i.e.: /, ?, *, etc.) it does nothing to stop you from using them. I haven’t encountered any issues with forward slashes until I began exporting TIFFs. These special characters must be removed during the TIFF export process but QuickTime Movie files are exported without error.

This was observed using FCP 6.02.

Final Cut Pro 6 has the ability to batch capture DV footage and separate clips by breaks in the time code. It’s far better to burn consistent time code before using a tape (striping or rewinding a bit) but if you’ve inherited media with inconsistent time code you may not realize how FCP handles certain nuances.

Time Code Break

Time code break detection works as expected: a new clip is created at the break, assuming a new shot was intended.

Blank Tape Detection

Suppose you have a DV tape without any time code and you have portions of unrecorded tape (i.e.: black between shots). FCP will treat these blank portions as time code breaks even though there is no time code.

The same is true for media with time code breaks and black breaks.

How Does FCP Assign Missing Time Code?

If your source media is sans time code Final Cut Pro will add its own. I’ve noticed it assigns Hour 12 and higher to such footage although I’m not sure why it chooses that number. This makes it easy to spot in the Browser.