Skunk Fu!

I've just finished my first TV series!

In one way I'm sad that Skunk is wrapped, but in another I'm delighted that I had the oportunity to work on a TV series that has been sold all over the world with such a talented crew.

I started on Skunk Fu! in March 2006 as assistant editor to Joe Fitzpatrick. I really had no idea what was involved in editing animation. I thought I knew - but I hadn't a clue! In the last year and a half I have learned so much about editing, working with Flash animation, broadcast standards and a whole lot more, but my most important lesson was don't work with Avid Xpress Pro unless you really have to.... he he he

Skunk Fu! is due to be broadcast in the US in the coming months on Kids WB and is currently being aired on the BBC and ABC Australia (I'm sure it's on in other countries now as well).

Check out the website - www.skunkfu.tv

I have the Skunk Fu! promo clip on my website - www.alanslattery.com

It's here... Yay!

Gabor, the Hungarian IT guy here in the Cartoon Saloon Skyped my in his Hungarian IT guy way to tell me that An Post had delivered a box! My Canon HV20.

The first thing that hit me was the size. It's teenie... so cute!

The HV20 records 1080i HDV. It has a 3.1 MP still camera and a 1920x1080 CMOS sensor. The manual controls are a little hard to get used to, especially after been using full size cameras, HVX200s, DVX100s, and my XH-A1. The menu button, the all-in-one joystick/button for exposure, audio levels and shutter is right next to Menu button which is right next to the Record button... all a little too close for my awkward thumbs.

I shot a little footage around the house, got Daw making coffee and some exterior stuff, captured it into FCP and it looked deadly! Some of the settings I tried resulted in quite grainy footage, but it was dark enough on our landing of no-lightbulbs (!) so that's to be expected.

One thing I noticed was that Final Cut took longer to capture from the HV20 than it does from the XH-A1. Why? I-oun-o!

I have a shoot next week and I'm using both the XH-A1 and the HV20 so I'll post my comments on how the two compare then.

My New HV20

I haven't gotten it yet... but it's in the post.

AnPost.ie tell me it's in Portlaoise Mail Centre... I should definitely have it by tomorrow so.

I've been wondering what to buy as a second camera to shoot with my XH-A1 and I'v eben looking at the full range of AVCHD and HDV cameras - well by full range I mean anything made by Panasonic or Canon!

AVCHD really seems to be the way to go - even a "full HD" HDV format wouldn't sway me. The reason I went with HDV this time round is because I haven't the facilities to work with AVCHD just yet. The new (completely new!) iMove can work with it, but that came out the day after I bought the HV20!


I'm not sure if iMovie works natively in AVCHD or if it transcodes the footage to AIC on import - just as it does with HDV. It would be handy if it did transcode the footage, because you could very easily work with AVCHD and HDV in the same project - unless you are using FCP6 where you can have differently encoded clips on the one timeline.... But I only have FCP5.

Over the next few days I'm going to be playing around with the camera and I'll post my thoughts on mixing HV20 footage with footage captured by the XH-A1.

Editing HDV - In Hinesight

Dont! Just don't.

I'm in the middle of a nightmare - I'm cutting a 190 minute piece and thought "huh! I'll capture to HDV and edit with HDV.... that's smart!" NO IT'S NOT SMART. YOU'RE A FOOL!!!! I should have read my own post about editing HDV using Apple Intermediate Codec in Final Cut Pro.

Rendering HDV is a pain in the arse. You go to render everything - you have to render everything, even a dissolve - and you get a lovely progress bar telling you that Final Cut will be "Conforming" until Christmas!

I now just render for preview (ctrl + r) and that bypasses the need to conform the video. I'll get into this in a bit more detail later.

If you are shooting HDV (now don't get me wrong, HDV footage looks great), for the love of God transcode your footage to DVCProHD, AIC, DV...... anything other than bloody HDV before you start to edit.

I'm currently transcoding the footage to DVCPro50 to make for an easier edit workflow. It looks great when burned to DVD and that's as far as this project is going.

QuickTime Fills The Screen

Hurray for Apple! QuickTime Player has now caught up with every other bloody media player out there!

Early this morning I read an article on TUAW that said that Apple had released updates for QuickTime and iTunes, so off I went to install.

The iTunes update was grand.... run of the mill stuff, but the QT update unlocked a function that was previously only available through QuickTime Pro - Full Screen Playback.

It is kind of silly that Apple are still charging people for QuickTime Pro when almost everything that it does (fullscreen playback, audio transcoding, video transcoding......) can be done through the iLife suite.

I'd say the main reason they unlocked the full screen option now is because of the QuickLook feature in Leopard which will allow you to preview documents, images and video in full screen mode without having to launch any programmes other than the Finder!

Sorry Redmond, the wow starts in October :)

Editing HDV in Final Cut Pro 5

This is what i have discovered while getting my head around editing HDV footage from my lovely, shiney, sexy (is that wrong?!?) new Canon XH-A1...

HDV can be captured straight into Final Cut via firewire, but you have to set the system up for HDV capture before hand in the Audio/Video Settings menu. The Capture interface is similar to the regular capture in final cut, but is geared ONLY towards HDV. It can be logged and batch captured..... or so it says in the help menu, but I have had no success. For some reason Final Cut could never find the timecode, so I just used capture now.


HDV can be edited just the same as DV but because HDV is a long GOP codec, there are only 2 full frames of video in every second and about 23 "in between" frames. This means that if you make an edit, or use a filter or a transition in the footage, Final Cut has to reproduce the affected frames. This is very taxing on the processor and means that simple fades cannot always be played back in realtime.


The upside... and there is an upside... is that HDV is small. 1080i HDV is about the same size as regular old DV.

I haven't been using HDV for either capture or editing. I have been using the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC). Again, AIC capture must be set up in the Audio/Video Settings menu. There is an option in the "Capture Preset" called HDV - Apple Intermediate Codec. This allows you to capture HDV through firewire and re-encode it on capture to AIC.

The HDV-AIC capture window is just two fields for filename and description, and a Capture button. You cannot log the footage, meaning that AIC cannot be batch captured through firewire. The AIC QuickTimes in the Capture Scratch folder now become your master tapes! If you have a HDV player with RS-422 Deck Controll and a component video input card you can capture and batch capture to your hearts content. Or if you want to send an EDL or a Final Cut project somewhere else you might have to go down the route of having the tapes logged and captured to an external drive that you can take away with you at at post facility. You are probably better just to make the QuickTimes you new masters though, and keep them backed up somewhere.

If you wanted, you could re-encode the AIC files as compressed DV files as an "offline' option. Edit with the DV files and then at the end just re-link the project back to the AIC files for colour correction and stuff.

Unless you have a super new Mac AIC will not capture in realtime. The tape will play at speed, but Final Cut will have a delay on the footage meaning that it will still be capturing and re-encoding for a few minutes after the tape has stopped - depending on the duration of the footage. The file sizes for AIC are about three times as big as HDV, but they are much easier to work with as you can edit them the same as you would DV or "real" HD.

The sequence should be just set to "Apple Intermediate Codec 1080i50" in the Load Sequence Preset menu.

After that, it's all the same as editing DV......

EMI + iTunes - DRM = The Way It Should Be!

So those rumours a few months back were right - EMI and Apple had a big thing in London today where they announced that EMI would be releasing their entire catalogue through iTunes DRM free! DRM stands for Digital Rights Management - It's what keeps (or it's what is supposed to keep) us from sharing music we purchase from the iTunes media store.

This is a big step for the music industry. They say that they are losing money because people are no longer willing to fork out money for songs and albums that are available freely on line either through bit-torrent sites or through P2P applications. DRM was supposed to slow the "sharing"down but hackers soon found ways around the digital protection.

Universal Music are so strict about their music being protected that they are getting $1 from Microsoft for every Zune that is sold to compensate for losses due to music piracy on the device. [tangent] Maybe JVC should give $1 to the film industry for every VHS player sold, and Dell should give $1 to each the film industry, the music industry, and the software industry for the piracy that takes place on their machines.... Fuckit, maybe Nissan should give money to the insurance companies around the world to compensate for insurance claims from people who crashed their Micra..... [/tangent]

I'm not sure if other music publishers will follow suit, but I don't see why they shouldn't. They are already selling DRM free music everyday on CDs and copyright laws haven't changed, so why not give us back the freedom we used to have when we were able to buy an album or a single on CD for example and copy it to a cassette tape to listen to in our Walkman or the car.

Now, at least, we can buy songs from the EMI catalogue, copy them to our iPod, CDs, our friends iPods, and their CDs......! Hopefully this is just the start of things to come.

Things That Annoy Me: About Email

So what is the point in having 27 different email addreses. As I see it, you need 2 or three email address at most - one for work, one for personal email, and one more for...... something else....!?! What's with these people who have a gmail account, an MSN account to talk to that one person who still uses Messenger, a Yahoo! account, an O2 account, a campus.ie account.............. How can your friends keep up with all that?!? Maybe you want to have an email address that you use for singing up to sites when you don't want them to have your real email address, that's understandable.

As well as annoying me, when you have all these different email addresses you are taking up login names that someone else might want but they can't have them cause you have it all locked up - and you're not even using it!

Dear Mr. Steve Jobs,

If by chance you read this, I want you to know that I have money sitting in the bank with your name on it. In fact, I have been considering getting my pay cheques made out to Apple from now on - It would save me the bother.
Do you think you can find it in your heart to release Leopard and the Mac Pros with the H.264 chip, BlueRay and HDDVD RW drives, along with the much rumored Final Cut Extreme in the near future? My iMac can't handle HDV footage and I'm waiting to buy a Canon XH-A1 so I can shoot this TV pilot a few of us are working on. RTÉ need submissions in by August and unless we get shooting soon we won't make the deadline.


All the best,
Alan Slattery

Still Waiting

I've been waiting for the latest OS X release, OS X.5 Leopard, from
Apple for so long now that I'm starting to believe that I'll never see it at this stage.

I thought that I'd be able to buy my Mac Pro in January, but instead I got a promise of the iPhone. I'm was holding out until NAB in April, but apparently all we're getting then in the latest installment of Final Cut Studio. Now I really want the new Final Cut, but it's not much good to me until I get me new mac. Next we pushed back to the WWDC in June. But now I hear we'll have to wait until October! What the fuck!

About Me

I don't think I've ever read a blog before, now that's not to say that I've never been to a blog before, I just never read one. I'm not sure why I even decided to start a blog... But here it is, and it's all about me!

I'm from Kilkenny in Ireland, and I work for an animation studio here called The Cartoon Saloon. We're currently working on an animated TV series called Skunk Fu! (The "!" is part of the name, just in case you think I'm over using my exclamation points!). I'm the editor.

I started editing video when I was 14, cut a TV feature for Channel 4 and RTÉ when I was sixteen. Went to university in the UK when I was 20 to study media production, taught in the Young Irish Film Makers from 2003 when I graduated, and started working full-time for the Saloon last March..... big breath.....

Check out my website - www.alanslattery.com