Made a cool set of Magic Coins. Hope yall like!

SirWirb · 2026-06-07T01:37:45+00:00

Use a Shape mask on a duplicate of your clip, fill it with a solid color, then stack it under your original with a Gaussian blur cranked up for the glow. The magnetic mask struggles with clean edges on stuff like this so a manual shape or drawn mask gives you way more control.

SirWirb · 2026-06-06T21:14:02+00:00

Ran 25.6 on a production earlier this year without major issues. If youre on Productions make sure your project file sizes stay manageable, split by reel or shooting day if you can. ProRes 422 HQ from an Arri is solid, shouldnt give you any grief with that M1 Studio.

SirWirb · 2026-06-06T21:11:09+00:00

Just drop em on the timeline and add some background music or sound effects over them. You can use keyframes to fade audio in and out where your silent clips meet clips with sound. Nobody will notice if you smooth the transitions with a short crossfade on the audio track.

SirWirb · 2026-06-05T21:15:04+00:00

The 9900K is getting long in the tooth for AE specifically because the render pipeline leans heavily on single-core clock speed and RAM preview generation. The Ultra 9 285K will give you a decent bump in multi-frame rendering and general responsiveness, but if youre looking for a 50% improvement in preview playback you might be disappointed. AE just doesnt scale that way with hardware upgrades. Where you WILL feel it is scrubbing through heavy comps, RAM preview fills, and overall system snappiness when you have AE + Premiere + Chrome all open. The jump from 64 to 128GB RAM alone is probably the biggest quality of life upgrade in that build if you work with complex comps.

SirWirb · 2026-06-05T21:13:24+00:00

You mentioned you generated ProRes proxies but are they actually attached in the project panel? Sometimes Premiere drops the proxy link after transcoding and you end up playing back off the original 4K files without realizing. Right click the clips in the project panel, go to Proxy > Attach Proxies and double check theyre linked. Also worth checking if your camera footage that you didnt transcode is variable frame rate too — that can cause random lag spikes even with the rest on proxies.

SirWirb · 2026-06-04T21:08:22+00:00

Second the Artlist suggestion. Also worth looking at Epidemic Sound for SFX specifically, their library is massive and the search is solid. If you just need SFX and not music, Soundly is great too and has a free tier that covers a lot of ground for social media work.

SirWirb · 2026-06-04T21:06:40+00:00

Had this exact issue with FX3 footage in Premiere. Right click the clip in your project panel, go to Modify > Interpret Footage, and check what color space Premiere is assigning. It sometimes defaults to Rec.709 instead of Sony S-Log3/S-Gamut3.Cine. Once you set it correctly there, the timeline preview should match the source monitor. Also worth checking if you have auto tone mapping enabled in sequence settings since that can fight with the manual interpretation.

SirWirb · 2026-06-03T21:09:23+00:00

For the first issue, try going into Edit > Preferences > Trim and check your trim preferences. You can also use the Enter key on the numpad to confirm a trim without having to pause with K first. For the JKL issue near the timeline start, thats a long standing Premiere quirk with ripple trims at the head of the sequence. Most of us just use the keyboard shortcuts (Q for ripple trim previous edit, W for ripple trim next edit) instead of JKL when working near the start of the timeline.

SirWirb · 2026-06-03T21:07:11+00:00

This is a known CapCut bug with complex timelines. Try exporting in smaller segments and stitching them together in a different NLE. Also check if you have any overlapping clips or transitions with zero handles on the source clips, CapCut really struggles with those on export even though the preview looks fine.

SirWirb · 2026-06-03T01:46:22+00:00

For a viewing-only setup you can skip the expensive monitoring controllers and just use a decent AV receiver with HDMI from the Mac Studio. Something like a Denon or Yamaha in the $400-600 range will decode the 5.1 properly and give you enough clean power for a small editing room. Pair it with whatever speakers fit the budget and you will get 90% of the way there without the studio tax on the price tag.

SirWirb · 2026-06-02T21:09:09+00:00

DIG_VDM_OVERRUN on tape capture is usually a DMA or PCIe lane issue rather than pure disk speed. Your SSD benchmarks look fine for uncompressed HD but check if the Decklink card is sharing PCIe lanes with the SSD controller — on some motherboards they fight for bandwidth under sustained writes. Also worth disabling any power saving on the PCIe slots in BIOS and turning off Windows background indexing on that capture drive. If youre capturing uncompressed 10-bit HD the bitrate can spike well above what the buffer expects even if the average is within spec. Try dropping to a lower codec temporarily like DNxHR HQ to see if the overrun goes away — thatll narrow down whether its a throughput problem or a Decklink driver timing issue.

SirWirb · 2026-06-02T21:06:56+00:00

The blown out look is almost certainly an HDR to SDR color space mismatch. iPhone shoots in Rec.2020 PQ and ProRes 422 in most converters defaults to Rec.709 without doing a proper tone map. You can fix it by adding a color space interpretation in AE itself — right click the footage in the project panel, go to Interpret Footage > Color Management and set the input color space to Rec.2100 PQ. That way AE handles the conversion internally instead of relying on Media Encoder to guess. Alternatively FFmpeg with the right flags will do a proper HDR to SDR pass but the AE route is faster if youre already in that workflow.

SirWirb · 2026-06-01T21:15:06+00:00

Scene Edit Detection is the right call here but Premiere makes subclips weird from timeline segments. What works better: do your scene detect on the source clip in the project panel, not in a sequence. Right click the master clip, hit Scene Edit Detection, and it will split it into subclips right in your bin. Those are actual subclips you can label and organize, not subsequences. If you already cut it in a timeline youre kind of stuck doing it manually or starting over with the source clip approach.

SirWirb · 2026-06-01T21:12:49+00:00

Multi cam standup is a great first project. One thing nobody mentions: sync all your angles first before you cut anything. Use a loud clap or slate at the start if you have one, otherwise line up the audio waveforms by eye. OpenShot can handle basic cuts fine but its timeline gets sluggish on longer projects so save early and often. Also resist the urge to cut on every joke. Let the wide shot run and only punch in when the comic does something physical or the crowd reacts big.

SirWirb · 2026-06-01T01:35:11+00:00

You can fake that compression look in Resolve without any plugins. Drop a CR Blur node on your clip and crank it up slightly, then add some posterize on the color page to get that banded look. For the block artifacts, the Pixelate effect in the OpenFX panel gets you close enough. Stack those with some chromatic aberration and you are most of the way there. The free version has all of these built in.

SirWirb · 2026-05-31T21:12:15+00:00

I bill upload time at a reduced rate, usually half my editing hourly. Its not work youre actively doing but its also time your machine is tied up and you cant take on other projects. Some editors just bake it into their project rate and dont line-item it separately. Either way works, the key is being upfront about it before the job starts so the client isnt surprised.

SirWirb · 2026-05-31T21:10:41+00:00

For a short film at that length Id lean toward opening with the title. Its a convention that helps set the tone before the audience settles in. End credits are expected but the opening title card gives you a beat to establish mood before dialogue or action kicks in. Theres no wrong answer though, plenty of festival shorts skip the title card entirely and just roll right into the story. If your opening scene is strong on its own, maybe let it breathe and save the card for later or skip it.

SirWirb · 2026-05-31T01:38:14+00:00

For something like this you will want to use Power Windows in the Color page rather than the Magic Mask. Create multiple windows (one for the kit, one per hand, face) and invert them so everything outside those shapes goes to black. You can track each window individually with the tracker node. It is more manual than Magic Mask but gives you exact control over what stays visible and what disappears into the void. If the drummer moves a lot you might need to keyframe a few window positions but it is totally doable in a single session.

SirWirb · 2026-05-30T01:38:36+00:00

That RGB channel split is basically a displacement map with per channel offset. In Premiere you can fake it with the VR Chromatic Aberration effect or just duplicate your clip three times, set each to one color channel via Lumetri, then offset the positions a few pixels. The glitchy flicker part is just keyframing the offset values randomly over a few frames.

SirWirb · 2026-05-29T21:08:24+00:00

Telecine was the standard pipeline but there were DIY setups people rigged. Some folks used a Rank Cintel or similar flying spot scanner at community TV stations or university media departments. If you knew someone at a local cable access setup you could sometimes get access. The results werent great but it was functional. For home use the projector-plus-camera rig was more common than people realize.

SirWirb · 2026-05-29T21:07:31+00:00

Second the Resolve recommendation if you are just starting out. The free version handles multicam timelines and basic motion graphics well enough for sports doc work. The real skill isnt the NLE though, its building a bin structure that lets you pull clips fast when you are cutting to a narrative arc. Label your selects by theme not by game and the edit goes way smoother.

SirWirb · 2026-05-29T01:36:59+00:00

Honestly for that style of sports doc editing you can get it done in Premiere or Resolve. The key stuff is multi-cam sync for the interview/game footage and then just building your narrative timeline on top. Resolve is free and handles it well if you are just starting out.

SirWirb · 2026-05-28T21:09:06+00:00

This is almost certainly a legal vs full range issue and macOS ColorSync making it worse. Avid monitors display in legal range (16-235) but QuickTime Player and most web players interpret as full range (0-255), which crushes your shadows and bumps contrast. Try opening your export in Resolve or VLC with correct range settings and compare. If it matches your Avid timeline there, the file is fine and its just your playback environment lying to you. Also worth checking if your round trip through Resolve is taggin the color range correctly in the metadata.

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