Live Cut

Other LiveCuts on the web

The Internet's best way to get legal recordings of the live concert performances that you see.
The SMILCut (new name) media mixing program.
Also the rhythm track sequencer plugin for VST.

Documentation - Version 0.9, 2004/12/01
(c) 2004 Michael Egger [ a n y m a ], me(AT)anyma.ch

Please note

As of version 5.0 Final Cut Pro has it's own, very good multicamera suppport

Live Cut works with FCP 4.5 on Tiger, but will not be developed any further. For a sustainable solution, Leopard support, and more, ...
we recommend you to switch to Apple Final Cut 6.0

Introduction

Live Cut is a very simple and intuitive tool for editing multi camera shots (up to 4 cameras).
Editing can be done in realtime, very much as in a live editing suite, by simply switching between four synchronized sources.

Live Cut is donation ware - if you find this program useful, please consider making a donation to support further development

Live Cut is used as a preprocessor for Apple's Final Cut Pro. A standard procedure would be as follows:

Shoot your event with up to 4 cameras
Capture your footage in Final Cut Pro
Synchronize your tracks in Live Cut
Let it roll! Watch all your sources in realtime and cut between them on the fly
Fine tune your edits in Live Cut's timeline, if necessary
Export your timeline to Final Cut Pro
Add transitions, effects, inserts and titles...
Burn

Live Cut is programmed in cycling74's Max/MSP and David Rokeby's softVNS

Main Features

Four track synchronized multi camera viewing and editing
Large preview window
Editing in the timeline
Final Cut Pro XML export (as a file or directly into a FCP project)
Support for self contained and referenced Quicktime movies
Support for virtually all Final Cut Pro formats, from RT Offline to HD
Custom formats and export options can be added to /Library/Application Support/Live Cut/Export Templates/

License

Live Cut is free software (as in "free speech" not "free beer"). 
It is published under GNU GPL; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of 
the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this document; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307, USA.
http://www.gnu.org

System Requirements

Live Cut runs on my 876Mhz G4 Powerbook - two tracks when the footage remains on the internal harddisk
Up to 4 tracks if footage is split over different (external) harddisks

Required

Final Cut Pro HD
Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther)

Live Cut Documentation

Known Issues

Versions 0.9.92 and up

On certain configurations alert boxes don't show up, which can cause the interface to freeze. One known source of this problem is SubEthaEdit (see below). If Live Cut doesn't ask you to save changes before making a new project - consider using Live Cut version 0.9.91!
Live Cut will not function properly if you have a copy of SubEthaEdit installed on your computer. If you want to use Live Cut, remove SubEthaEdit

All Versions

Live Cut will not export to Final Cut if the name of your main hard disk contains accents
Double-clicking on an Live Cut file opens Live Cut application, but doesn't load the file. Please use "File"->"Open" in Live Cut to load saved files ...
Footage files can't have the characters < > / " ; , & in ther names and file paths
Don't move around your footage files, Live Cut won't be able to find them anymore...
If you try to export a track that has no sound, but have the sound toggle on, you'll get a non-critical error in FCP, as well as an empty, white audio track...