Holy Beluga, Birdman!

Back during the production of Season 3 of Jonathan Bird's Blue World, we went to the mystic aquarium to spend a day with the Aquarists who train and care for the Sea Lions. At the end of the day we were shooting some b-roll at the Beluga tank and ended up spending about 45 minutes there, interacting with the big white mammals that were on the inside of the tank. It was so much fun that we never wanted to leave, but the day drew to a close and we had to head home.

Now that we're in production for Season 4, I was thrilled to hear that we were going back down to Mystic to shoot an entire segment on the Beluga. I was even more happy to find out that they have four Belugas in one tank!

Our day started out a little earlier than I like to wake up. We had to be on the road by 4:30 AM to meet up with our camera guy and get down to mystic with plenty of time to set up and be ready to shoot by 7:00am. It was a crazy time to wake up, but it could have been worse. Although, it would have been nice if the delay brew function worked properly on the coffee machine.

We started off right on schedule, and while Jonathan was inside with the other Tim shooting some Beluga food prep, I scored a good half hour alone outside shooting b-roll of the whales. The Mystic Aquarium is totally great and their tank has plenty of areas to look in on the whales from different perspectives. The whales are so curious and playful that they just seem to follow you around from window to window. I'm not sure if they were curious as to what that goofy looking guy with a camera was doing, or if they were such hams that to couldn't wait to pose for pictures. Either way, it made for some great footage.

A Beluga whale waiting for a snack.

The rest of the day was filled mostly with Jonathan actually interacting with the whales, helping to take blood samples and getting them to perform some tricks in exchange for some fish and squid snacks. Those aren't the kind of snacks I prefer, especially since they were raw, not breaded and deep fried.

Things went so well, we ended up running ahead of schedule. Anybody in the production world knows that being ahead of schedule is a very rare delight. So we had plenty of time to shoot more b-roll and some really awesome stand-ups. I can't wait to get back into the edit suite and start editing this segment together. It's going to be a great one.

Until next time!

- Tim

Starting to edit with a tablet

For years, I've been editing video with a mouse and keyboard. Keyboard shortcuts have become my best friend, because they increase the speed at which you can edit. I've heard that some editors use graphics tablets, but I never gave it much of thought until now.

I just purchased a Bamboo Create, by Wacom. It's far from the best tablet you can buy, but I feel like it's a pretty decent tool at a far lower price than the Intuos line of tablets. The Intuos line offers many more features, including a shuttle wheel and a few more buttons, so if money is no object, go for one of those.

After I installed the drivers, I immediately noticed how easy it became to navigate the computer screen. It's so much easier than a mouse, I am now kicking myself for not giving it a try before now.

Since I mostly edit with Final Cut Pro 7, I will be explaining how I've set up my tablet for use with Final Cut. Eventually I may write a follow up post about my experience using this tablet with Avid Media Composer or After Effects.

Setting up your tablet for editing

There are four programmable buttons on the tablet itself, and two programmable buttons on the pen. I tried thinking of the commands that would most benefit me to have quickly on hand. Your preference may be different than mine, but I felt like a good place to start would be:

• Option
• Shift
  
  
  
  
• Render
• Snapping
• Pop Up Menu
• Right Click

The first four are keys I mapped to the buttons on the tablet. The last two are mapped to the pen. The coolest option for configuring these buttons, is the ability to have a pop up menu. I've put the pop-up menu on the bottom position of the pen, closest to my index finger for easy access.

I've set up the pop-up menu with what I consider the most essential tools. These would be:

• Selection Tool
• Blade
• Pen Tool
• Roller
• Undo

I use these more than any other tool. Another one I might consider adding is Audio Crossfade.

Using your tablet with more than one program

One advantage other tablets have over the Bamboo series is the ability to automatically switch your key mapping when you enter another program. I don't know about the Intuos series, but I know that Cintiq monitors are really good at this. The Bamboo does't offer any such feature, but if you switch between different programs fairly often, there is a work-around might help you out.

• With your tablet plugged into your computer, go to the Bamboo Utility located in the Bamboo folder in your Applications directory.

• Click Back Up

• Save the back up to a folder. I saved mine to a folder called, "Wacom Tablet Presets".

Now, you can map your buttons to commands and keystrokes for a different program. When you're satisfied, repeat the above steps. If you're working in Photoshop and you want to load in the presets for Final Cut, just find the backup file you created and open it. This isn't as nifty as the tablet automatically switching, but it gets the job done. Also, if you're like me and you are often bringing your tablet to use on another computer, you can throw these back up files onto a flash drive or a dropbox and just load them in to your other workstations. Always make sure to install the drivers first, in fact it might be a good idea to copy the install disc over to a flash drive too.

Conclusion

Another really cool feature of this tablet is that it can be used as a multi-touch work surface too. I'm not using it at the moment, but it was worth a mention because some people might want to experiment with using gestures for editing, and if you do, please let me know how you like it.

If having these tools literally right at my fingertips doesn't speed up my workflow, I don't know if anything will. This should be a pretty good configuration to get me started with tablet based editing. I'll post an update in a few weeks and discuss any changes I felt necessary to my key mapping. I'm sure I'll find something about my current set up that bugs me.