About

This a little about me, Mike McCarthy, the creator of this site.  I have worked for a number of media production companies in Hollywood over the last fifteen years, and my experience in those environments is the basis for what I have posted on here.  I have primarily done my work in Adobe Creative applications on Windows systems (I know, I am in the only industry that puts me in the pioneering minority as a Windows user) but I have also designed and supervised workflows based on Avid, Resolve, and a variety of other tools.  I have extensive experience pushing the envelope in regards to high quality film post production workflows, first in HD, then 4K, and now 8K.

A majority of my work has been as the Director of Technology for the production company Bandito Brothers, where I was the post-production engineer (among many other roles) on the feature films Act of Valor and Need for Speed.  More recently I supervised the post-production process on 6Below, the first film shot for the new 6K Barco Escape theatrical format.

I originally got into this business because I was fascinated by fast computers and high end display technology.  And I have had the opportunity to work directly with Adobe, HP and NVidia to build some of the fastest Windows based workstations ever created.  At the end of 2010 I moved out of Hollywood, and back to the Sierra foothills where I grew up.  I still return to LA on a regular basis to work on new projects, but continue to find new endeavors elsewhere as well.

I try to keep up with the most recent developments in the technology industry, especially as they relate to post-production.  I am always interested in an opportunity to help work with or troubleshoot the newest implementations of developing technology.  Feel free to contact me at “mike” at this domain with questions, requests, opportunities, or suggestions.

Mike McCarthy

8 thoughts on “About

  1. Ray Tragesser

    Hi Mike,
    I really enjoyed your workflow post on 6below. I was wondering if you could give me any details on how you handled the location audio while you were editing the native 6k footage.

    I have the plural eyes panel plugin and that works pretty well but creates a lot of extra sequences and duplicate media in my project :(. I am most curious how you handled multi channel location audio during the cutting process. My experience is the timeline can get very clogged up in a hurry. My own experience also tells me if I cut with camera audio mix only, syncing after the cut is locked and rebuilding the whole timeline is very tedious.

    Any thoughts at all would be most appreciated.

    Thanks

    Reply
  2. Mike McCarthy Post author

    Our assistant editor Jon Carr was the one who did the sync on the dailies. I believe he synced manually based on time-code, because we had the Red Dragons and the audio recorder synced on set. I believe he used the sub-clip feature in Premiere to edit the synced audio. (As opposed to the Merge Clip feature). He may have just used the group clips feature, since our main editor Vashi, likes to use what he calls the “pancake” approach to editing, where he has all his source clips in one sequence, directly below the sequence he is editing, instead of pulling from a list in a bin. Put regardless, the timeline did get clogged in a hurry. When I showed back up to do the finishing work, they had at least 24 tracks in every sequence, and were constantly scrolling up and down. (But they were editing 5.1 temp mixes with mono tracks. In the future we will use 5.1 tracks to remove some of the clutter.)

    Reply
  3. Justin Bone

    My brother is a lego fanatic and would like to startup a lego-based podcast. This podcast would cover lego news and events. Nothing political or controversial.

    After reading your article about you made the lego puppets, my mind is blown. I understand there was a tremendous amount of work and effort that went into your project. That being said, it’s worth a shot to ask this. Is there any chance you would sell us access to your puppets? Or any chance we could pay for 2 custom adobe puppets? We most likely wont be going too much into detail. A quick auto lip-sync is likely good enough for us. Characters would follow a “doctor” or “professor” theme.

    Reply
  4. Andre

    Hi Mike, in these days of GPU shortage, I find myself looking at older technology and wondering if it can be used for a new purposed. This search lead me to researching the Red Rocket-x. I came across your article “Review: eGPUs and the Sonnet Breakaway Box – January 22, 2019”

    I just wanted to get your opinion concerning the Red Rocket-x GPU. I know what it was created to do but do you think Rocket-x could be used in combination with another GPU for improved gaming performance? There are some Rocket-x on Ebay that I might be able to get one cheap to try in my system but I don’t want to waste money if the card will not interact with game rendering.

    I hope you will respond because you are probably the only person I’ll be able to contact who has past experience with the Rocket-x

    Thank you and Semper Fi

    Reply
    1. Mike McCarthy Post author

      I do have a Red Rocket-X, and never got around to writing an article about it. It did make a difference, but never worked as well as I hoped it would in Premiere, and then wouldn’t accelerate footage over 6K I believe. I am not a hardware computer engineer, but I do not think you will find a way to do general graphics acceleration with that dedicated raw image processing hardware. And that card is very old, so I believe that a 1080Ti has about the same total processing power. (The 2080Ti can process 8K Red in real time, the RocketX can only do 6K in real time.) So you may want to look for a different source for extra GPU processing power.

      Reply
  5. tony mark

    Hey Mike,

    I can really use your help. I purchased your KB covers for Final Cut Pro and Photoshop and the plugins from your site. The Final Cut Pro one is working great but the Photoshop one isn’t. The buttons all work but none of the dials work. I am running the latest Photoshop 20024 on my Mac M3max laptop and can’t seem to make those dials do anything. Is that something to do with the latest software? Is there some legacy thing I need to enable to get it to work? Please help me as I am so frustrated.
    Tony

    Reply
    1. Mike McCarthy Post author

      They stopped supporting the adjustment layer dials in PS a couple versions back. My understanding is that this was caused by an issue on Adobe’s side, when they revamped the plugin API, but it is frustrating that Loupedeck hasn’t been able to find a solution in all of this time. One solution is to use the older drivers on an older version of Photoshop, but that might not be possible or feasible on newer ARM Macs.

      Reply

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