I am still slightly horrified whenever I hear or read of someone who “doesn’t use keywords, I just use Favorites and rename them” I am infuriated. What you want is not a Favorite. What you want is a Keyword.
A Keyword that automatically organizes itself into collections. (Unlike Favorites).
Just under a year ago I wrote Why I love Keyword Ranges. If you’re using Favorites that way, read it.
I first wrote about derived metadata back at the end of January 2009. Derived metadata uses computer analysis to derive metadata from the video source. There are now technologies for speech-to-text, meaning extraction, facial detection, facial recognition, emotion detection, image recognition, and more. One company has been accumulating these somewhat diverse technologies: Apple.
One of my favorite writing tools – Celtx – has revealed itself as a full production management resource.
Celtx has added a ton of new features to help not only screenwriters write scripts, but also help directors and creative teams work together on their projects using new story development and video planning tools.
Basic writing and storyboarding tools are included in the free version: $10 a month gets you it all.
If I wrote and produced narrative, I’d be all over Celtx.
CES finally brings High Dynamic Range TV to the consumer. Brighter (really brighter) white levels, cleaner blacks and wider color gamut are more obvious to most people, than high pixel count. 10 bit sampling will allow for smoother gradients and contribute to the wider color gamut.
Fortunately, the competing technology companies came to an agreement with UltraHD Premium.
Already at CES TCL and LG have announced new models with Dolby Vision incorporated. Dolby Vision is probably the widest adopted of the HDR standards. But it doesn’t really seem to matter as UltraHD Premium is about standards met, rather than how to meet the standard. This is a good approach as it allows the technology to evolve, as long as the same basic standards are met.
My year seems to have three major themes: sucking while learning, family history video and small production kit. Along the way there have been 13 episodes of Lunch with Philip and Greg.Â
In total, Intelligent Assistance Software released 76 updates to our apps:
and even one update for prEdit!
Not to mention a completely rewritten and enhanced backLogger, and the transcript features for Lumberyard, for Lumberjack System.
I’d started writing about the inevitability of vertical video, and how we should adapt to it, when what should came up in the Frame.io blog but Say yes to vertical video.
I had come to the realization that fighting against vertical video is not a winnable battle, simply because most people really don’t care. They shoot on a mobile device, and that’s where they view it. Most mobile phones and tablets default to vertical video. Every non-industry person I interact with shoots vertical video: from my singing teach to my niece!
UPDATE: On Twitter Kenneth X or @Knesaren pointed me to an article on How Norwegian Broadcasting made the first vertical video documentary. As always, start with a good story!
UPDATE 2: Clark Dunbar of Mammoth HD tells me that they’ve had large format (HD to 6K) vertical footage for well over a decade for signage, POS and museum installations! Their vertical stock footage gallery is at http://www.mammothhd.com/MHD_QG_VertPort.html.
UPDATE 3: Carl Olson @TheCarlOlson on Twitter, had some thoughts on vertical video today:
Vertical video haters keep this in mind: For centuries artist have used the vertical format to represent human presence intimately.
Perhaps that explains why many people (not cinematographers) are naturally drawn to the vertical. It’s not laziness as some scoff.
Rather, think about a mother who films her child. Subconsciously she goes for the vertical to intimately capture her child filling the frame.
To the mother, that’s the most natural thing in the world. Try to overcome your prejudices as a creative and see things as others do.
2014 was a pretty good year for Greg and I. Getting our first screen credit on Gone Girl and the release of Focus where we were able to make significant contributions were definitely the highlights. At the beginning of 2015 I had only the most basic idea of “family history video” and neither Lunch with Philip and Greg nor The semiSerious Foodies were more than an idea in my head.
My singing “career” entailed three concert performances, and – perhaps a first ever – a custom song with words appropriate for ‘custom metadata’ opened my Content Metadata session at The FCP X Creative Expo in June. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that we are only days away from closing on our first house together. Something completely unplanned at the beginning of the year. It was also the year I filed US Citizenship, having been a permanent resident since 2008.
If there was a theme to 2015 in production technology, it would be that this was the year of more. More pixels – 4K and beyond; more dynamic range with HDR video; more field of view as VR establishes; and more programming sources as Netflix et. al. become fully fledged ‘networks’.
A new article in Scientific American - Why Creativity is a Numbers Game – hits on themes that resonate with me. The point of the article is that even famous creators like Edison and Steve Jobs have many failures as well as their prominent successes. In fact, even Shakespeare was remarkably inconsistent in his creative output.
Problematically, most of us are scared of failure, or at least want to avoid it, so we never get past the point where we suck – always at the beginning – and start to improve.
Back in 2009 I wrote an article – What is the role of “failure” in innovation – where I explored the role of ‘failure’ in my own career. It seems relevant again.