First Cut
Still not released to the public yet

The digital age allows to change the workflow of 'traditional' film editing more and more towards the desktop.
This means a lot of work formerly done at the telecine can be moved to a cheaper inhouse workstation - as long you have the right tools.

The picture below shows how a workflow could look like.
First Cut is the tool to speed up the editing process within an environment where video/film has to be linked with audio from another recording system.

You can use the tool to pre-edit lab rolls and sync them with the bounced audio, even out of sync lab rolls with sound can be easily resynced without loosing the TC information.
The clips created by First Cut will be referenced to the original lab roll, and so they do not use noticable space on disk - typical around 20 k per shot.
Those clips are clean, which means there is no audio or video overlap, which can cause timecode errors within the EDL output.

Thanks to the people from VideoScript, First Cut can read the keycodes and add them to the FLEX/ALE file it will create. FLEX files are an essential complement to Apple's cinema tools and a good backup, since the FLEX files can be used to restore the edits and/or clips.
A double click on the XML will open or activate FCP and import all edits into a current or new project.
This kind of project will be much 'cleaner' than a conventional one, since there is no need to keep audio roll, audio clips, video rolls, video clips and the synced (sub)clips in the project.
An optional XML creates a FCP sequence which can be used to record the audio only to the original lab roll.

Editing is very easy since you use some kind of three point editing metaphor. Select shot in, select shot out, select a sync point or the clap (if it is not the same as the in point) and the name of the scene, the audio file for the scene will be found automatically if the audio was prepared with BounceUsII. Then select the sync point in the audio file, hit enter on your keyboard, then check the sync, maybe fine tune it, hit enter again and the movie will be trimmed automatically, now hit enter to save the clip.
Even just selecting the sync point in both of the files would be enough, but this will create some 'overlapping' video, which might cause some confusion lateron.

Some screen shots of First Cut can be found here soon.

Movie showing the workflow within First Cut (very old version)

System Requirements:
  • Apple PowerMac G4 (the faster the better)
  • 256 MB RAM (more=better)
  • MacOS X 10.3 or higher
  • QuickTime 6.4 or higher
For further information contact:

Andreas Kiel
Spherico
Gablonzer Str. 29, D-76185 Karlsruhe
eMail: kiel@spherico.com,