Splice Vine Links (2/28/10 - 3/7/10)

iPhone Apps

I talked with the people at Lynda about the need for this app over a year ago. I guess they got an earful from thousands of other members as well. So they've finally put out the Lynda.com iPhone app! Great, now I'll obsess even more about doing tutorials (as if that is possible). They must have been feeling the heat from their rivals at MacProVideo and their NEDi iPhone app.

Also, I've been checking out the very cool (quasi) Post Magazine iPhone app. I say quasi because the text is not reformatted for the iPhone, like say the NY Times iPhone app. But it's still great having the venerable magazine at my fingertips.

And, I haven't check this out yet but it could be cool. Air Video can stream videos in almost any format to your iPhone and iPod touch.






Websites

A whole heap of links from FCPDaily of sites where you can find FREE stoock photography for your video projects. (Do not click on freephotosbank.com - it has an annoying talking flash banner ad on the home screen).


Plug-ins

At the SFCutters user group meeting this week they were recommending the FieldsKit by RE:Vision Effects. It's supposed to give you very good results for deinterlacing, reinterlacing and doing pulldown on your source footage.


Software

I'm a sucker for any miracle product promising faster processing and encoding and Elemental's Accelerator 2.2 for Mac promises to do both - and more. It would be nice if there was a review with speed tests somewhere online to see if the $300 price tag is worth it.



Hardware

Scott Simmons has some First Impressions of the Euphonix MC Color on the Edit Blog over at the ProVideo Coalition. This is one of two control surfaces that are supposed to usher in a whole new era of precision color grading for the masses. The other one is Tanget Wave and it was reviewed by Simmons in November. They're both similarly priced at around $1,499.

Splice Vine Links - 2/20/10 -2/28/10

Plug-in:
Intelligent Assistance just released exceLogger for FCP. Use the power of Microsoft Excel to log already captured clips. I wonder does this work with Zoho docs and Google docs? Price: $66.

App

Wish you could see more info about a file when you click CMD+i? Well, with MediaInfo Mac you can. It's a mulimedia file analyzer and reporting tool for the Mac.



Reading

The Myth of DPI is an excellent and long overdue article from that should be required reading for both creatives and clients.

Also, I usually only do one link per category but the article Cottage Industry by Oliver Peters was so good I had to include it.



Gear

If you have been trying to find a way to justify the purchase of that Canon DSLR that you want so bad, you may now have an excuse to get it. Check out Borrowlenses.com where you can rent cameras and lenses by the week on the cheap.

App

Since I couldn't find an iPhone app for this week I'm going to list another great desktop app I discovered recently. If you don't want to spend $70 on the excellent Snapz ProX then you may want to check out the free open source app Capture Me.

Check back every Monday for new Splice Vine links.

Splice Vine Links - 2/14//10 -2/21/10

Plug-In

Oliver Peters has a great blog post about MyMusic Score , a newly released plug-in that imports music you pick from the MyMusic Score site directly into your FCP project. For $.99 you can buy a preview license that will allow you to download a full-length, full quality track and temporarily use it. If you and your producer and client like the song then you can buy an upgrade to the license that corresponds to what kind of project you are doing. One song I listened to cost $35 for non-broadcast, corporate use. This seems reasonable and I hope music websites like these continue to do well and expand their libraries. It will really help people that can not afford the yearly license fees of places like FirstCom and Killer Tracks that can cost over $3000.

iPhone App

Continuing with the music theme, PatternMusic is supposedly an app that is a full-featured music building program. I haven't used it yet but it already seems more intuitive than my current favorite music creation software BeatMaker. Other music apps that may be worth checking out include the powerful SunVox and the lo-fi Plinkton.

Website

While I was at Macworld I talked with the folks over at Crash Plan who offer unlimited backup for your computer for $3.50 a month. You supposedly can even backup external hard drives that are attached to your computer as well. If this is true then this is an incredible deal. Carbonite, a similar competitor, only lets you backup your internal hard drives. If anybody tries out Crash Plan let me know how well it works - i"m curious.

Gear

By now you've probably heard about Canon's new Rebel T2i/EOS 550D which will supposedly deliver the 5D and 7D experience at a fraction of the cost.

Tutorial

There is a great 3-part series on Adobe TV about how to make lower thirds in Photoshop. I can't wait to go through them and hope they include a workflow for animating PhotoShop lower thirds in After Effects

Splice Vine Links - 2/7//10 -2/14/10

iPhone App:

JogDial turns your iPhone or iPod Touch into a scroll wheel for your Mac. If you're one of those editors that likes those keyboards with the jog wheel on them then this is for you.




Website:

The3dstudio is supposedly the oldest and largest 2D & 3D resource site on the net. 3DLinks.com is probably an even better resource for everything related to 3D and of course don't forget about TurboSquid which is the most well known 3D marketplace.  My personal favorite though is CG Textures.



Plug-In:

Canon will be launching a FCP plug-in. I saw the demo at the Supermeet last week and it look pretty cool. It will integrate with Final Cut's Log and Transfer menu and will let you create custom metadata among other things. This will be a free download.



Gear:

Turn your iPhone into a teleprompter with ProPrompter Wing. You can find other iPhone obsessions over at Hand Held Hollywood.



Reading:

Scott Simmons has a great article on The Editblog over at the Pro Video Coalition site called, Ideas for the Apple iPad in Post-Production. Yeah, I know but just when I think I've gotten tired of all the tablet-talk then I see good articles like this one.