Splice Vine Links #12

iPhone

NAB has released it's own iPhone app for the upcoming mega-trade show. This is starting to become the norm for trade shows with Mac World (fittingly) doing one of the first ones last year. And echoing Alex Lindsay's comments, hopefully in the future these apps will display your real time position based on your current coordinates inside of the venue. No more getting lost in the crowd.

Audio

As video editors we know how hard it is to find music for our projects. Non-broadcast clients (and there number grows daily) don't think about let alone budget for the royalty free music they must have for their video. This leaves us with a few options. 1) Use royalty free music we already happen to own. 2) Use music with permission from a local band or music producer, or 3) cobble together a song in a loop based music program like Garageband or Sonic Fire Pro. If I have the time I like the third option although instead of Garageband I like using Ableton Live. That's why it was very cool to find the sites freesound and ccMixter which both are filled with songs and samples that are filed under the Creative Commons license. Freesound has only samples and no songs whereas ccMixter has remixes that are created by artist from around the world. I can't wait to really integrate these sites into my workflow the same way I use sites like stock.exchange for images, turbosquid for 3D objects and cgtextures for - well, cg textures.

Typography

Everyone's been there. Your client wants to use a font from a pre-existing brochure / website / you name it but doesn't know what font it is. You can't figure out what the font is either and the graphic designer that used it is unable to be reached. What do you do? Use a font that is a close approximation and hope that no one will notice? Nah. Use Myfonts - the font analyzer. Upload an image that contains the font in question and using its vast font database it will analyze the image and produce several fonts that it thinks could be a match. It's been a lifesaver.

Gear
Creative Cow has a great post on the nitty gritty of using an HDSLR in post. "Marco Solorio takes you inside the real world of production with paying clients using these cameras, including workarounds for their current limitations, and some of the things that video shooters will need to know as they get started using these cameras." Be sure to read the extensive comments at the bottom of the post they are in many ways as fascinating as the article itself.

New Media

Everyone's buzzing about video coming to Wikipedia. What does this mean for video editors? Will it be the same kind of user generated content that's on YouTube or will it create a new form like music videos did decades ago? The nascent book trailer movement also has the potential to create a new aesthetic. Vidlit has been doing something similar to this for a while but Bookscreening have trailers with very high end production values thanks to the increasingly popular Canon HDSLRs. I'm sure the proliferation of tablet devices like the iPad and the HP tablets will only increase the drumbeat for these new categories.