Around two years ago I was preparing for a trip to Florida to start a journey producing a reality TV series on a solar powered boat trip. There were some challenges: specifically the lack of time to log footage and then edit (and still get some sleep). I need my sleep so I had the idea of logging real-time as we shot. Finally, the outcome of that challenge is available to everyone: Lumberjack System is live.
As part of their October 2013 Creative Cloud updates Adobe have released Prelude LiveLogger, an extension to the Prelude family of metadata entry tools, for real-time on location logging. Like us, Adobe realized that there are situations where there is simply no time to log between the shoot, and the need to edit. Adobe offers the example of a football match where plays are tagged in real time during the game, and a highlight real pulled from Prelude moments after the shoot.
Our need was to log, shoot and edit as we undertook the Solar Odyssey, realizing that the only way to allow time for sleep was to log as we shoot.
What is metadata. Well, largely it depends on where you are in the production-to-distribution pipeline. We use metadata to solve problems in production, asset management and distribution. Let’s consider each of these problem and how it was solved before the digital era, and where metadata fits into the modern workflow.
Press release from my day job. For you Premiere Pro users.
Intelligent Assistance, announces major update to popular report generation tool, allowing producers to interface with Adobe’s Premier Pro CC and instantly produce deliverables in the form of reports such as music cue sheets, stock footage reports, text generator reports, narration reports, sequence markers, etc.
I have written on the six different types of metadata for post production, and by extension the area of pre-post. One of those types of metadata is Inferred: based on the metadata we have already obtained from the source, or what someone’s added, what can we infer. Well, apparently a whole lot more than you’d think. Two articles I’ve read recently show just how much can be inferred – pretty accurately – from a relatively small amount of metadata.
After Terry Curren’s round up of last year’s Hollywood Post Alliance Retreat I decided I should attend this year. While I was working on marketing for Lumberjack – our real time location logging tool – I got an email from the HPA offering spaces in the demo room during the retreat. It was immediately obvious that this was the time and place to reveal what we’ve been working for the last 8-9 months.
Anyone who knows me, knows that I’ve been preaching the value of metadata for longer than I’ve been writing this blog. Usually to a very quiet house! Â Certainly when I started there was very little recognition of the value to postproduction of production metadata. In fact I’ve coined the term “pre-post” to describe how metadata from the set can be used to save time in post.Â
One of the more interesting press releases coming  this week out of CES, was from RAMP, a company I’d not heard of before, but with some interesting technology if the press release is to be believed for automatically generated metadata. (I say let’s give them the benefit of the doubt!)
While logging the Road to Ra material I’m working on, I’ve developed a pattern for the Content Logging part of the process, so I can do it all with the keyboard. The process was: