While it’ll be no surprise to many MacCentral readers just how good a PowerBook and Final Cut Pro can be as a portable video editing system, a few recent stories plucked from various stories help illustrate the point quite well.
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The makers of the movie “Charly” didn’t need a Hollywood budget for their film; in fact, they edited the flick on their Titanium PowerBook G4, according to a Deseret News story.
The film — made by Brigham Young University graduates and friends — is based on a book by Jack Weyland and released by Excel Entertainment Group. It’s now showing in local Utah theaters. The editing decisions on “Charly,” which took about nine months to make, were done on the TiPB and Final Cut Pro, then the film assembled at a lab, according to the article.
The editors used mini-DV technology, which was fast enough to let them process DV without additional video cards, then turned the signal into motion JPEG using DV and Firewire combined. All told, their equipment cost about US$7,000. Working in DV mode, the quality was good enough to make editing decisions and even to show a client, the Deseret News reports.
The “What’s Left of the Flag” video by indie rock group Flogging Molly made use of “a battery of digital cameras, and a flexible post production system tucked inside a PowerBook G4,” according to an Apple Hot News article.
Steve Marino, director of the video, used the equipment during a two-night shoot at the Bowery Ballroom in Brooklyn, New York. The entire video in mini-DV, using a Canon XL-1S as the primary camera (Sony VX 2000 and TRV 900 cameras were also used). After the first night’s shooting, Marino used a FireWire connection to load footage directly into a Titanium laptop for review.
“I’d pull up Final Cut Pro, load a few things, and just look to make sure everything was OK,” he told Apple. “If we were missing any sequences or set-ups, we could pick them up the next day. With film you’d have to develop and print dailies. We wouldn’t have been able to pull that off.”
It worked so well that they decided to finish the project on the PowerBook. They also used Final Cut Pro 3, Adobe After Effects, and Photoshop.
“Working on a Titanium laptop in Final Cut Pro 3 gave us more than we needed or even expected,” Marino told Apple. “From now on, this is how I do videos.”