Splice Vine Links - 3/7/10 -3/14/10

Plug-In

The folks over at Digieffects are working on a new plug-in for After Effects called Shapeshifter and they are looking for beta testers. The plug-in promises to go "way beyond basic text extrusion". Judging by the quality of the rest of their product line it should be something worth keeping an eye on. One of their plug-ins I want to try in particular is Damage. It's similar to Twitch by Videocopilot in that it makes your footage look like it has been to hell and back. So it's great for genres like horror and action or any shots that you want to look digitally degraded.


Tutorials

Curious Turtle has just put out a 6-hour training DVD for the incredible planar tracker Mocha by Imagineer Systems. It's for the Final Cut Studio version.



ReadingI'm right there with Michael Coleman and his high hopes regarding Google's ambitious pilot program to provide 1 Gb per second connection to a few select cities. Our computers keep getting faster and faster but it does us no good if our next works are slow. For editors to be able to work remotely we need higher bandwidth so we can move large video files around without it taking forever. Hopefully, this move by Google will put pressure on local telcos to free up more lanes on the information superhighway.


Website

FinalCutters now has the first ever comprehensive directory of Final Cut Pro related products.
This site, created by the innovative company Digital Heaven, has only been around for about a year but they have grown by leaps and bounds. Besides being a huge resource for FCP editors they allow us to peak out of our own caves and view other FCP edit suites from around the world. So many configurations, so little time.



Legal Watch

Will the future of the H.264 codec be pay to play? That's the question that has recently been raised after someone actually read the the Final Cut Pro user license agreement and found a grey area. It implies that users of the popular editing software (as well as users of Adobe Premiere) should be paying a licensing fee if they create videos using the H.264 codec. Apple and Adobe have both declined comment on what could potentially be a thorn in the side of content creators. We'll keep you posted on the developments.

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.

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.