Splice Vine Links - 1/31/10 - 2/7/10

Website:

The always insightful Philip Hodgets has a great post on his blog that asks Why are most post production workflows inefficient?

iPhone App:
iPodcaStudio allows you to record, edit, and transfer audio. The audio editing supposedly goes way beyond simple trimming. You can transfer the audio files via WiFi, email, or FTP. FTP transfer works on WiFi and cellular networks. Hopefully the product managers for Soundtrack Pro, Garageband, Pro Tools, Sound Booth and Logic are furiously toiling away on mobile versions of there desktop apps. In the meantime, if you want to do some serious music production on your iPhone I highly recommend Beat Maker by Intuit. At $20 it's probably the most expensive music app in the iTunes store but it's also peerless.

Plug-in

The guys over at Video CoPilot have a new plug-in called Reflection. It lets you quickly make a reflection for objects similar to what you see all the time in iTunes or when you use the coverflow folder mode on Macs. I also want to add that I have a love-hate relationship with plug-ins because they always have the potential to make us editors lazy. So I recommend that as much as possible you try to understand how plug-ins that you use actually work. To that point Video CoPilot also offer a tutorial on how to do reflections in After Effects.

Gear

I got a chance to listen to a great demo by AJA at the latest SF Cutters meeting. It was about their new AJA Ki Pro box. It's a pretty cool tapeless recorder that captures Pro Res 4:2:2 and has almost every I/O imaginable including built-in WiFi and Ethernet for complete control via a web-browser, or iPhone. Cost? $6000.

Book

Just got my copy of the newly updated Video Systems in an IT Environment: The Essential of Networked Media and File-Based Workflows. This book contends that "IT, for the most part, is becoming invisible and woven into the fabric of A/V solutions". A real world example of this is explored in Creative Cow Magazine's latest issue Heavy Lifting. They take the reader on a tour of the LA post facility Digital Film Tree who explain how they have "embraced new, disruptive low-cost technologies" that are a mix of A/V and IT technologies. It was instrumental in their work on the Jet Li, Jackie Chan film The Forbidden Kingdom.


Hope you find these links useful. Check back every Monday for 5 new ones.

Splice Vine Links - 1/24/10 -1/ 30/10

Ok, let's see if this works. Instead of trying to do a big batch of monthly links, I'll try to do just 5 great post-production related links a week. These 5 links will be my most recent discoveries relating to my current projects. That's not nearly as daunting as having to come up with 20 links in one fell swoop. Enjoy.


Fxphd just started their January term a couple of weeks ago. They mainly offer remote project based training on how to use high end VFX software like Nuke, Maya and Flame. But they also have classes on ubiquitous software like After Effects, Mocha and Cinema 4D. The most interesting new classes are DSLR Cinematography and Introduction to Stereoscopic. The best part of Fxphd though, is that when you enroll ($99 per class) you get a full VPN license of the software you need for your course. I'm running a full licensed version of Cinema 4D on my laptop and it will open as long as I have an internet connection. The new term runs 10-weeks. Check it out.

I've been waiting for a site like encoding.com to come along for a very long time. If they could make it affordable and fast to send files up to the cloud to get compressed they could really give Apple Compressor and others a run for their money.

In case you missed my tweet earlier about this you may want to check out Backupify. They back up your online accounts for free - for now.

I recently used voices.com to hire a voice-over artist for a spot I did for a web-start-up. Once you figure out their less-than intuitive Sure Pay system, it's really a cool and much needed service.

Lastly, I finally got a Mifi from Sprint. It's a mobile broadband device and Verizon offers their version as well. It is basically a personal hotspot. This has been real helpful when I'm editing on-site in a suite that does not have an internet connection. I'm also looking forward to the Sprint Overdrive when it comes to our part of the country (SF Bay Area). It will be the first WiMax mobile broadband device.

Insuring Your Home Studio

I don't know if it's an attempt to be more responsible or an expression of my growing paranoia but I finally got renters insurance. I bought a macbook pro back in September with hopes of taking it on a long overseas trip. That was the impetus to get renters insurance to cover my laptop in case it was stolen or irreparably damaged. This of course also covers my home studio all for the price of $23 a month. What a...um...steal. What I was not looking forward to however was the tedious process of cataloging all of my possessions including my long list of miscellaneous software. That's when I was pleasantly surprised to find that Allstate had a desktop app called Home Inventory that does exactly what it implies.


Besides including your serial number you can also attach pictures of your possessions and pictures of the receipts. The app was made by an interactive design studio on Wall Street (of all places) called M-One Studio. The cross-platform app is very intuitive and being a version 3 release it feels very stable. Hopefully there will be a web version of this app soon so that if anything ever happens to the my computer that's running this app all of my data will be safe. So my work-around has been to email myself copies of my newly updated Home Inventory files.

This brings me to Allstate's iPhone app Digital Locker. It has the same features and functionality as the Home Inventory desktop app. But by using a mobile app to catologue inventory data my information is not tied to the very hardware that can be stolen or destroyed (and ironically the iPhone itself is not covered). This of course means that the I need to make sure I always have the iPhone passcode feature enabled. My only beef is that I wish there was a way to sync the data from the desktop app with the iPhone app. It's gonna be a pain to have to manually re-enter all of my inventory data that's in Home Inventory into Digital Locker. I sent a message to Allstate asking if this workflow is possible (maybe I just missed it). Hopefully, I will hear from them soon.













Meanwhile, I'm moving on to the last phase of being 100% covered in case of disaster: incremental cloud-based media archiving. I'm currently in the process of establishing regularly recurring back-ups of Super Duper volumes on Dropbox. If this sounds like gibberish check back in a few weeks when (if I'm successful) I will explain my archiving modus operandi. In the meantime, let me know if you're using renters or home owners insurance to protect your studio. Also let me know if other insurance companies are using apps to make the process easier. I know Farmers Insurance has their iClaim iPhone app which lets the user do inventory but are there others? Let me know. Until then stay creative, vigilant and safe this holiday season.

December Links

My New Year's resolution is going to be to post more. I don't want this blog to turn into a link farm. My excuse is that I've been extremely busy working on a lot of interesting projects the last couple of months. I'll post links to those videos in a week or so. Until then, here are the December links:

- Like so many others out there, I've been extremely excited about Smoke on OS X. It finally puts top tier editorial within closer reach of mere mortals. The blog (aptly named) Smoke on OS X is a repository of information on the topic.

- The post-production crowd-sourcing trend continues with the virtual animation studio Mass Animation. Imagine what we'll be able to do once the bandwidth limitations start to fall away.

- You knew it was coming pt. 2 - Hand Held Hollywood - Where iPhone Obsessions meet Hollywood Professions.

- Post Haste (freeware) looks like a great app for organizing folders for all of the apps you use in post.

- Adobe launches free PhotoShop iPhone app. Another similar app that I covered months ago is Mill Color by the world famous VFX house The Mill.

- Speaking of VFX, the web app tracksperanto promises to convert trackers between VFX apps.

- And yet another great free web app, Baseline, will show you a visual image of the amount of space on your drive and what apps are using it.

- I wish my new MacBook Pro had the upcoming optical port Light Peak that may start shipping on new Macs next year.

- The next version of iDVD is rumored to support the creation of iTunes LP Apple's new album format. And this week on MacBreak Weekly Alex Lindsay brought up a provocative idea (about 54:20 in) that on the next big update of DVD Studio Pro Apple should make it so that you can build interactive QuickTime movies. I'd take it a step further and say that a lot of content creators would love to create Rich Internet Apps apps but are intimidated by all the scripting. Air and Silverlight apps are everywhere but they're are still part of the domain of web dev types. As the content / mobile / web convergence increases I think we will hopefully start to see more
video editor oriented web app tools appear.

Splice Vine September Links

A lot has happened in the month since my last post. Black Magic Design buys Davinci, Avid Media Composer 4.0 is released, Apple releases Snow Leopard, and Canon announces a late-september early October release of EOS 7D. This is good timing considering all the excitement the RED cameras and the Canon 5D Mark II continue to elicit. Anyway, on to the links...

- For those that want to get ahead of the curve on the next media revolution 'Element Technica introduces groundbreaking steroscopic 3D production tools'. FxFactory also just released some stereoscopic plug-ins. Avid Media Composer started supporting 3D editing this year, but when Apple products start doing this naively people will really begin to take notice.

- Pro Video Coalition has a great blog post about round-tripping with Final Cut Pro and After Effects.

- Philip Hodgets has an interesting post that wonders if large post houses are heading for the editing graveyard. He expands on this in his latest appearance on Larry Jordan's podcast - Creative Planet Digital Production Buzz. I think the high-end niche focused Davinci Systems getting bought buy the broader market Black Magic Design is a good example of this. There continues to be a trend of moving away from expensive proprietary hardware-based ecosystems and towards open software-based ecosystems. You've got to wonder how much Magic Bullet and to a lesser extent Apple Color has been cutting into Davinici's margins. Broadcast Now talks in more depth about this in their latest post What is next for DI?

- Since I'm editing remotely more and more I want to find a good online backup / archiving solution. There's a good post on Drop Box vs Carbonite that explains how they seem similar but are for very different types of users. Carbonite is what I want to go with but it appears that they only back up internal drives. So people with a Drobo or external G-Tech drives (like myself) will be out of luck.

- Just discovered BuZZdex which is a resource database on Larry Jordan's site that displays articles, forums, tutorials and other resources for over 100 video, audio, VFX and animation applications.

- The iPhone storyboarding app Hitchcock has everybody talking. I'm rarely involved in pre-production anymore but this game-changing app makes me want to be.

- Yoostar is taking what Serious Magic (now part of Adobe) was doing to the next level. They sell chroma key kits that give you the tools to videotape yourself over a green screen and edit yourself into famous Hollywood films. They hired Snoop Dog and then shot and keyed him into movies where he is interacting with Marilyn Monroe, Dan Akroyd, Lou Costella and Cheech Marin. Genius.

- Great article on Augmented Reality in contact lenses. This is supposedly closer to being er...real than we think.

- A hack for getting Flash video on an iPhone. I haven't tried it yet but I hope it works.

- Oliver Peters has a really good post on audio post geared towards video editors.

- Digital Rebellion just released FCS Maintenance Pack. Now you no longer have to cobble together a bunch of disparate mult-vendor FCP utility apps. You can get most of what you need from one place in one box.

- And lastly, this is very exciting. I may actually be able to afford to finally create a Splice Vine iPhone app: And Now a Service to Roll Your Own iPhone App.

Splice Vine - August Links

> From the Final Cut User blog, a future iPhone app by Cinemek: the Hitchcock Mobile Storyboard Composer. It looks very robust and I doubt it will be a .99-cent app either.

> While we're still talking about pre-production, check out Celtx which is open source media pre-production software. You can't beat free.

> "All ready ?!" Yep, the world's first iPhone 3GS Film Competition is already here.

> Animata brings us open source real-time animation software.

> Tired of the cookie-cutter sound effects in Soundtrack Pro? Well, make your own with SFX Machine RT. Definitely check out the interactive SFX Machine simulator - it's hilarious. This plug-in works in Soundtrack Pro, Garage Band, Pro Tools and hopefully Final Cut Pro soon. And if you buy the plug-in before the end of August it's half off ($50).

> A slick looking text-animation plug-in called Motype for FCP, Motion and After Effects.

> The Art of the Title Sequence is a great site that shows the most cutting-edge title sequences in films from around the world. Their archive also has a lot of great ones from the past like the classic one from "Se7en".

> On2 has been in the news a lot lately because of the Google acquisition but they have also quietly released an update to their game changing On2VP6 codec. The new codec, On2VP8, promises to have even better compression than H.264. Well, if anyone can do it, they can.

> And check out InqScribe for simple transcription and subtitling. I wish this were available as a plug-in for FCP.

> Last but not least: the funniest demo reel I've ever seen. btw, this is for mature (or not so mature) audiences only.

Final Cut Studio 3: Road Rules

Ok, so Apple is just calling it Final Cut Studio. But so as not to confuse it with earlier versions we'll call it version 3. Either way, the upgrade has been a long time in coming. At this point there have been countless reviews with a very detailed one in particular by Scott Simmons. diLynda.com already has a 3-hour class on what's new in Final Cut Studio 3 - and the best part is that it's FREE! i Also, Diana Weynand the Final Cut Guru and author of all of Apple's books on the subject is offering a free webinar of FCP 7 on August 13. And finally, Final Cut Studio Documentation and Workflows are now online. Adobe and others have had online manuals for a while and now Apple is getting with the program. Make sure you don't overlook the workflows link - it's more comprehensive and clear than you might expect.

My take on the new Final Cut Studio? The growing sentiment is that it does not seem too revolutionary. Larry Jordan may have summed up this sentiment best at his recent seminar in Sacramento when a friend of mine stated that Larry said FCP 7 feels more like FCP 6.5. Phill Hodgets though seems generally impressed by the release. I definitely want to upgrade but will have to wait until I get an Intel Mac since the new version of FC Studio won't run on my G5 quad. The biggest selling points for me are iChat Theatre so I can collaborate remotely with others and being able to round trip to Color. But like others I am surprised that FC Studio is not 64-bit or OpenCL compliant to take advantage of the processing improvements that come with Snow Leopard. That said I am sure the new release will slowly take off once clients and producers find out about the new features. Once I get a chance to test it out I will report back.