Uses This

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Liam Lynch. I'm a writer, director, musician and video artist. To learn more about stuff I do, you can see a playlist of my work on YouTube.

What hardware do you use?

I use Macs. I have several Mac desktop computers. I record audio on a newer iMac and some large ThunderBolt drives. I have a lot of hard drives EVERYWHERE. I also use a late 2013 Mac Pro. I have a lot of equipment because I jump around a lot between things I'm doing. I shoot a lot of video and record music, and do photography and sound design, editing, animating and compositing.

I also use my iPad and iPhone a lot while I'm working (no, not just texting friends). I use my phone as my source for audio playback when I'm shooting videos and my iPad as a teleprompter, and also image references for my storyboards and backgrounds when working on a green screen. I use my phone's recorder quite often to record and save ideas, and to record EVPs when ghost hunting.

I normally work on two computers at once, to make things more efficient. If I'm animating a scene I'll set up an animation and start it rendering on one, then switch over to the other and start the next shot or element. I put that on to render and go back to the first computer to add its render into a composite, and set up the next element - I'm ping-ponging between computers so I can get twice as much done at once.

I have my computers on a network at home, so that if I'm in my studio on my iMac I can record a song or backing music or voiceover and put it into on to the hard drive of my editing computer, so the track is waiting there for me. I'll bounce files around a lot between computers and my iPad and iPhone; I'm constantly shuffling data back and forth for different points in the process.

And what software?

I use Final Draft, Final Cut Pro, Poser Pro 2010, Poser Pro 2014, After Effects CS6 (with a long list of plug-ins), Photoshop, Motion, Logic Pro, particleIllusion, Soundtrack Pro, and a bunch of others that I'll use to do small specific things - lots of different video compressors and converters and audio file converters, things like that.

Most of the stuff I do tends to use several programs at once - I do a lot of compositing, and it usually involves three or four programs coming together to achieve an idea. In After Effects, I really like the plugins Element by Video Copilot, which is really flexible, and Magic Bullet Looks by Red Giant, which can really help any home-made shoots add a layer of color treatment or film looks and effects. It even has some basic beauty filters in there called Cosmo that I've used a lot.

Another useful set of plugins for After Effects is the Trapcode collection. I really love working with Particular, Shine, Form, Lux, Sound Keys and Horizon.

What would be your dream setup?

I would like to build my own green screen stage. A large green stage with a setup for motion capture and a programmable robotic motion control camera rig. A space where really any kind of visuals and effects could be created. With that, I'd also have a nice editing suite that was soundproofed and had the proper architecture for good sound design and mixing. I do have my own home studio, but it would be nice to have a green stage and my editing and sound mixing all in one space.