Many people “worry” that Apple will abandon their professional applications (Final Cut Pro X, Aperture and Logic Pro X) because they don’t make much money for the company. Ironically, the same argument can be made about Media Composer: it is not core to the company’s primary business . In reality it’s more likely that Avid would abandon (or sell) Media Composer than Apple is to get out of the professional creative tools market.
Greg and I will head out for a long walk when we want to consider some big picture concept. Our most recent walk challenge: how do we fit the concept of Keyword Ranges in Final Cut Pro X, into the more traditional NLE model. As well as reminding me of the Biblical warning about new concepts into old models (at least metaphorically) there were interesting lessons along the way.
The Forbes article, Cable TV Model Not Just Unpopular But Unsustainable starts with a putative outline of a cable business: essentially “keep hiking the rates, have terrible service”! Finishing with this “goal”:
 If all goes as described, we should be able to consistently deliver customer satisfaction levels that rank among the lowest of any industry.Â
Now that’s not a business model I’d want to emulate!
Software that recognizes mood is apparently used in call centers – could be used to derive metadata for pre-post logging (and story derivation).  Imagine a keyword collection for “happy” or “stressed” or whatever mood happens to be demonstrate in the audio content. I’m not sure if the technologies are related but Affectiva have demonstrated emotion-detecting software in the past.
With speech-to-text, keyword extraction, mood extraction the basic logging of reality and documentary could be done in pre-post and handed to the editor.
There’s been a lot of discussion about what sort of professional videos work being done, that isn’t directly involved with Movies or network/cable Television. Well, SCRI has released an overview of their Digital Media Production Trends report. What’s important when reviewing these types of survey results, is to examine who was surveyed, and what they were asked.
Buried in John Siracusa’s excellent review of OS X Mavericks is this little gem:
Modern Macs with integrated GPUs get some nice improvements in Mavericks. Any Mac with Intel’s HD4000 graphics or better can now run OpenCL on the integrated GPU in addition to the CPU and any discrete GPU.
It’s that little bold bit that makes it special! With OpenCL increasingly taking up the load of general computer processes previously forced on the CPU, the more we can take advantage of the GPU power already installed.
I have conflicting thoughts about 4K for production and distribution. At one level I’m convinced it’s being pushed on us by equipment manufacturers when there is no real demand: at another I know from experience that there are some non-obvious advantages to 4K. But one thing is clear: the push to 4K is not about a push to improved quality.
According to Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan is the latest to speak to its brighter side. “[It] led to a lot of people watching the series who otherwise would not have,” Gilligan tells the BBC.
In this episode Terence and Philip discuss the way the App Store works and the issues that arise for developers; business models and compatibility between versions in Media Composer; in-app purchases; Adobe panels; Flash; Creative Cloud; app interchange formats; reporting; and app ecosystems.
A recent article in the Atlantic confirms my long standing suspicion that the best writing and most interesting characters with the most interesting stories are on TV, not in the movies.