manusapo_us

Since the Thunderbolt release on my Macbook Pro, I was just considering it as another hole in the Laptop. Until now. As I had to go to China to shoot and edit onsite, The Thunderbolt external Hard drive had to be the solution for handling HD files without any frame skipping. I bought one of those new Seagate GoFLex Pro  500Gb ( 149$ )and a Thunderbolt adaptor for almost the same price as the drive . I must say I was quite surprised by the overall built quality. The baby can do the job as fast as promised. And the good news is you do not have to buy a Thunderbolt interface anymore after, as this swappable disk lands on a dock. You can also commute to USB and  Firewire, but if you have the TB interface on your Mac I suggest you go for it ! With finalCut Pro X, disc access is the key element to a fluid playback. One can regret the fact that the seagate disc only feature one port. Which can be a problem when you connect a second display for example ( The only solution would be to buy an expensive LaCie hub or a New MacBook Retina ). The other bad engineering is the USB interface which has tendency to disconnect itself. But once you go around those limitations, you have a great portable and somehow affordable product for Nomad Directors / Editors.

I will never stop blessing the new FCPXML protocol. It is a powerful tool that allows exchange between FinalCut Pro X and any modern software. Last hot product : Send To.(V1.1.1) The name might not be a seller, but it does what many of us expected : Export edited shots to After Effects. Until now, editors had to process the whole edit or send it to Compressor for rendering... ( WTF ?). "Send to" allows users to choose inside your XML shotlist and create an After Effects Project in a single drag. This Protocol has two main upsides. You can re-use the same FCPXML file for many other softwares like  X2Pro or DaVinci Resolve. And most of all, Send to uses your original media as source file. For 7.99 € this can be considered as a no brainer Mac App Store

If you are as I am both a Finalcut Pro and After Effects user and you are switching between them all the time, you tend to forget keyboard shortcuts ( Are we getting old ? ). KB covers solve the issue by selling silicone covers for your keyboard. It's a very efficient way to customize your device without having an expensive and useless keyboard switch. The only issue is you cannot find French AZERTY keyboard. Let's hope this will be fixed in the near future.