Strobe: The Anti-Cool effect

I'm the first one to admit it- the more you design/edit/whatever, you become attached to certain effects. Eventually they meld into your style. Occasionally you latch on to an effect that is beyond cheesy, but you're attracted to anyway. Whatev, if you can make it work sista, more power to you! And then there are the non-designers, editors, who latch onto an effect because, well, they actually have no good reasons.

There's one such person here up in Maine. He loves *drumroll please* the strobe effect in Final Cut Pro. The strobe effect has it's uses. When used subtley, it can give a slightly filmic look to video. When used non-subtley, it makes the audio appear out of sync with the video, and therefore stupid. Personally, I would only use this on video to specifically make it look like film for a specific reason (archival footage, a flashback that's supposed to be aged 8mm film or something like that) and never ever ever on a corporate video or documentary. If you want it to look like film, shoot film. If you can't shoot film, shoot 24p. But if you shoot 29.97, and light the video brilliantly, and then want to take away that brilliance by using a stupid filter because "everyone uses that filter" and by everyone, you mean hacks like you, well then, I call you what you are. A wanker.

Ok, I wanted to call him a wanker, but I couldn't really do that, but I told him in front of his entire class, a few times, that the strobe filter was STUPID and that people came up to me when the last piece his class did was shown (with ugly strobe all over it) and asked me what was wrong with the piece. Ignoring the fact no one did this outside of Post, shit, it still looked stupid, especially stupid projected onto a LARGE SCREEN. People who weren't in post came up to me and said "strobe filter, eh?"

If you can tell what the filter is (and it's a cheesy filter), but can finesse it so it's not so obviously *that* filter, rock on. If OTHER PEOPLE can figure it out, you're a hack.

I hate working for hacks.