More info from Media Pro Camp

I had a chance to briefly chat with Philip Hodgetts of Intelligent Assistance last weekend when I attended the Media Pro Camp in Santa Ana. I sat in on a great talk he lead on pre-compression techniques. There was also info about his new utilities for Final Cut Pro and new book that will only released digitally as a pdf. Be sure to check out his blog.

Sound Garden

Ok, I'm going to start doing micro-posts so I can update more often instead of taking weeks at a time. This brief post is to add a little bit more info to the list of music libraries link that I posted a few weeks ago.
Music is often a pain for a lot of producers that don't have access to a production library or want to augment their existing library. I'm excited that the custom scoring Sonic Fire Pro 5 software now operates as a plug-in in Final Cut Pro. A lot of Reality TV is scored using this application. Their site is very informative and there are a series of extensive tutorials there explaining how to use it. Oliver Peters from the Digitalfilms blog has a great review on it.

Albatat Muse on the other hand, takes it to the next level by using "artificial intelligence to measure select elements of a moving picture and then composes music to match those elements". Um...thank God they also have tutorials.

But for producers and editors that want the traditional manual controls and need a quick a la carte solution Audio Jungle might work. It may turn into the MySpace of music loops if enough audio producers sign up. This is great for augmenting the existing loop libraries in Garageband, and Soundtrack Pro or for fleshing out sound design in Logic or Pro Tools.

Splice Vine - June Links

Ok, it's harder than I thought it was going to be coming up with thoughtful and engaging posts every week. So I'll take the easy way out. Links. Once a month I'll put out links to the latest info I've found on the web relating to film, video and new media. This will buy me a little more time to come up with long brilliant posts. Yeah, right.


It looks like YouTube is bringing YouTube to the TV.

This Twitter Job Search Engine has come out just in the nick of time.

Michael Critz has a great post on his site about a new app called Expansion Slot Utility that gives the user options on how to assign lane bandwidth to the PCI bus.

A post about Adobe's announcement of new Flash platform tools.

Panasonic is now offering cheaper P2 cards ($420 for 16GB and $625 for 32GB).

A great review of music libraries.

Web designers rejoice, a new Adobe service puts browsers side by side.

This isn't new - just new to me. The Huey by Pantone is an inexpensive video monitor calibration tool. You may also want to compare it to the popular Spyder 2 among others.

You may never have to key footage again if it's up to the guys over at All Bets Are Off. They sell pre-keyed alpha stock footage.

If you live in NY, try to make it out to Manhattan Edit Workshop's Edit Fest NY, June 12 -14. They'll be A-list panels, classes and partying. I'm jealous.

Not to be outdone on the west coast, LAFCPUG will be putting on the 1st Annual London SuperMeet - with special guest (the one and only) Walter Murch, on June 25.

And lastly, the anticipation for WWDC here in San Francisco is reaching a fever pitch. I just couldn't resist the WWDC 2009 predictions on the Mac Soda blog. Final Cut Studio 3 anyone?...

You Are Here: An Action List for New Editors

Last night I was lucky enough to be able to attend an open house at Rough House Editorial in San Francisco. They are a leading post production facility in the Bay Area and have been around for 20 years. Ironically, that is how long I've been in the industry but after talking to some of the best in the business last night I felt like I was just starting out.
Their online editor Marc Cebrian was giving a clinic on the finer points of color grading in FCP. Yeah, that's right - just using the FCP 3-way color corrector, garbage mattes and chokers he was achieving looks that most people would assume were done with Color, Colorista or Magic Bullet Looks.
I was also finally able to see a Flame demo up close an personal. Their Flame artist Gavin Mills (Curse of the Golden Flower, Andromeda) told me how as an Avid editor he was able to get access to a Flame and teach himself how to use it. Now 11 years later, besides being a highly sought after Flame artist he is a certified instructor and VFX plug-in developer. I guess it's time for me to start piling on more lynda.com tutorials.
But it made me think about new editors just getting started in the field or people wanting to make a career change into media production that often ask me for advice on breaking through. Below I have listed an actionable game plan for people trying to start a career in editorial. This is not necessarily a typical scenario at all, but just a general trajectory of the journey from novice to expert video editor. There are countless variations and mutations.

1) Create a demo reel if you haven't already. If you don't have any real world projects then use school projects.

2) Put this reel online. It's best to have the reel on your website. But if you don't have a website then put the video on You Tube or Vimeo. On your resume put the url link to your demo reel at the top under your name and address.

3) Get cards printed up that have your cell number and email address.

4) Network at as many industry events as you can. Join your local Final Cut Pro user group and any other user group that pertains to content creation. Talk to establish editors and find out the situation on the ground for the type of content you want to edit. What is the pay range for corporate / news / commercial / film editors in my market? What are the skill sets required and in demand? What is a typical post-production time frame that videos are expected to be delivered? Create a list of 10 questions that you memorize and ask working editors in your market an online.

5) Get some kind of edit system at home (preferably Final Cut Pro).

6) Start doing spec projects. Look for jobs at: mandy, media-match, indeed and craigslist. And don't just look for projects that originate in your geographic area, a lot of editing jobs can be done remotely nowadays thanks to You Send It and Skype.

7) Do a great job on these projects and you can start charging. Clients talk and after word gets out that you have decent chops, potential clients will start calling you.

8) After 6 mos or so of doing this, re-cut your reel using a lot of the real world projects that you have been doing. It really helps when people recognize the content / brands / celebrities in your reel. Once you do this it increases the likelihood that you will be taken more seriously by post houses / tv stations / corporations who will be willing to give you a shot.

9) Your first few jobs will probably be pretty non-creative (asst. editing, dubbing, duplicating, coffee making) and insanely hectic but it will give you access to a place that has cool tools. If you are allowed to use these tools during off hours (read: weekends and overnight) then you can take your skills to the next level, especially if you are allowed to shadow a senior editor. Eventually you will be given a shot on a major account because the lead editor is to busy / sick / left for another job, etc...

10) Kick butt when you get this big break.

I hope this has been helpful to those out there that want to run with scissors. And for working editors that have been around the block, what is other sage career advice you can give those starting out?

A Very Interesting Development

It seems Avid has unveiled yet another makeover. It continues to aggresively go after Apple's Final Cut Pro and Oliver Peters has an excellent blog post about compositing with Avid Media Composer. Looking only at the compositing tools within the two NLE's, Oliver makes the claim that Avid comes out on top. I use both programs and I have to admit that he makes some very valid points. The Collapse tool in AMC is better than nesting in FCP. Nesting in Final Cut creates a seperate timeline for the tracks that it references. Oliver describes a collapsed clip in AMC as a “container” with additional tracks inside it". Also in Avid, effects do not have to be constatntly re-rendered on the time line like in Final Cut. This is probably hands down one of the most un-efficient things about FCP. He also has great screen shots that show how he does rotosplinng in AMC and how he creates graphics from scratch in Photoshop. I have to start doing more of this. But even with all these great tools I wish Avid would enable layer blend modes and paste attributes like Final Cut. I assume this has not happened because a lot of Avid's code would have to be re-written. Would it be worth it for Avid to do this? Maybe. And even though this post looks only at the compositing capabilities of the two competing NLE's it makes me wonder if there has been an in depth comparison of Final Cut Studio and Avid Studio Toolkit. We purchased AST at a facility I used to work for but we weren't able to use it because our facility stopped upgrading our Avid suites. We were stuck at older versions of AMC and QT that wouldn't support AST. So who has used it and how does it compare to Final Cut Studio? It's my dream to run both Avid and Final Cut on the same box. There's a great thread on Creative Cow where Shane Ross talks a user through this process. And along these lines, it was just announced that Avid has now qualified Final Cut media to run on it's Unity and Isis shared storage systems. Up untill now it has been possible to run Final Cut media on Unity but it was never officialy supported and was often buggy. This lead facilities that used both NLE's to try shared storage solutions like Edit Share. I wonder how this announcement will effect Edit Share's market share (pun intended). I assume Apple's pro apps division is quietly monitoring this situation and making adjustments to a hopefully soon to be launched Final Cut Studio 3. The anticipation for a refresh of the FCS line is reaching a frenzy. This announcement was curiously absent at NAB and one could only hope it will be made next month at WWDC. Until then, I'll just keep trying to get the most of the tools I have now.

Keyboard Manifesto

ProVideo Coalition.com: the EDITBLOG by Scott Simmons

The Keyboard Manifesto from the EDITBLOG by Scott Simmons is great advice for creating customized keyboard shortcuts in FCP. It's funny how I instinctively do this in Avid but not FCP. Weird.


Posted using ShareThis

Cloud Control

I was reading the latest copy of Post when I saw an ad for a service that I have been predicting for a while: incremental online media back-up. It was for a site called Syncsy that allows you to fully automate the process of sending large files and folders. Big deal you say. Apple has been doing this with Time Machine and Amazon Web Services such as EC2 and S3 have been around for some time now. These services have been great but they haven’t have had wide adoption so far. The biggest reason for this (besides unreliability due to scalability and security issues) has been price. It is cost-prohibitive for producers to back-up hundreds of gigs, let alone several terabytes of video online. And with the increasing trend towards bigger and bigger frame sizes and resolutions of HD the cloud revolution has been an unattainable dream. Until now? Syncsy promises incremental back-ups of media over a P2P network for only 50 bucks a month. And they also say ‘Any Size, Any Content, to Anybody’. When they say size does that mean the size of your file, your account or both? What would stop people from trying to back-up the moon? I didn’t see the word ‘unlimited’ anywhere on the ad or website but I’m hopeful.