Over the last year I’ve managed to have some valuable insight on the direction Apple has been, and is, going with what became Final Cut Pro X, but of late the timing – June 21 – has got me thinking. One of the things that has bugged me is that Final Cut Pro X seems like it’s only most of a story. That there are still “other shoes to drop”. Since I don’t know how to quit when I’m “ahead” on the forward looking insight, here’s some more.
Lighting bill plumets using EPIC. http://tinyurl.com/3rqz73q. Post on Reduser parallels my thinking from March http://tinyurl.com/6kfogsy
From the forum post:
We are working on a few quotations out of the US, Europe and Asia at the moment and we often go back to older jobs for reference.
One thing that dawned on us the other day was how our lighting (gaffa) quotations have plummeted over the last 12 months. We still hire Gaffas but really.. hardly any gear comes out any more. Well only a small percentage of what we did use.Â
The latitude and range of the chips these days are so bloody good in hi contrast situations and low light situations that large lamp fill is almost non existent anymore. In Shots were I’d throw up an 18k without even thinking twice to fill a shot under a tree through a 20×20 trace… gone. Generator gone, best boy gone… time delays waiting to set it all up also gone… Trucks have turned to Vans, Hmi’s turned to small LED panels or bounce boards…
Is cloud editing the future of editing? http://tinyurl.com/3mpfqq5
Is the cloud the future of editing: with a facility cloud or a remote cloud? How will the tape shortage change delivery into the cloud? How does cloud editing work? Will the cloud be suitable for archive? Will the cloud be suitable for archive? Will the cloud lead to outsourcing?
(Recorded before Apple’s NAB Final Cut Pro X preview was announced to be at the Supermeet.)
The project is not mine, but that of a client where I was called in to see if the “crew” (mostly just one guy) was going to be able to shoot content that will integrate with the existing project.
The thing is that  the rest of the project is HDV, XDCAM, DVCPRO HD, AVC-I, AVCCAM, some SD – so today we add DSLR!
This is not an art project so there’s no big advantage of a “shallow depth of field”. Most of the b-roll is coming from achieve SD video of varying quality, but because it was shot over a long period, without anyone keeping track of formats we end up with this sort of mess. A young and reasonably competent “editor” was on the job but totally unaware of the complications of having every known frame rate and format in the project (except DSLR until today).
Every different format complicates the project and adds additional processing time to bring everything to a common format before starting the edit, including mixing 23.98 and 29.97 frame rates.
And while Premiere Pro and Media Composer (and probably Final Cut Pro X) can deal with all these formats natively, I hope no-one would recommend that as a workflow for a large documentary project. Certainly AMA for Media Composer is a great way to choose selects from the native format and then transcode to DNxHD for the edit.
This is simply madness. Every one of us needs to educate producers and directors that mixing frame rates and formats is going to cost them a lot of money in post production. And then make sure the message communicates by charging what it costs.
On Thursday night I did one of my regular sessions for the Digital Production BuZZ, where Larry wanted to me to predict what was going to be “hot” at NAB 2011. But before we got to that, he played back my predictions for NAB 2010 – the equivalent show of a year ago.
You can listen to my segment on the BuZZ with this year’s predictions and last year’s roundup here.
I thought I did OK and the live chat audience during the show gave me 100% accurate. Check it out and tell me whether you think I’ll be as good with 2011!
Last week I was a the official Storm launch at RED Studios. While Storm – the RED Digital Cinema Camera Production Hub – is undoubtedly going to be the “go to” app for  anyone working with RED footage, it wasn’t what set my mind thinking about lighting.
Before I get to that though, I was very impressed with Storm in every way (without having actually used it myself). Well thought out and priced appropriately, if you have to work with RED, you will end up buying Storm.
What set me thinking was the demonstration of RED Epic where the incredible low light performance and high dynamic range combined to kind of answer a question I’ve have had in my mind for a while.
Ditch the Satellite Truck: Livestream
http://tinyurl.com/6c26ey3 More disruption of traditional approaches.
Whereas a live remote feed in even recent times was a chore involving a large vehicle and loads of gear – and more than a little smarts to set it up – now Livestream have a dedicated box for less than $2000 that takes video and audio input and live streams it from anywhere via Verizon’s 4G LTE network, with upload speeds of up to 8 Mbits/sec.
That’s a little low for really high quality HD at about 1/3 the rate of AVCCAM at 24 Mbits/sec but it is possible to push a good quality 720P signal through that bandwidth.
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Master Metadata for Post-Production – 2 Mar 2011, 11:00 AM EST #webinar http://t.co/NXv0XvZ
It’s repeated during the day.
What’s going to happen in 2011? http://tinyurl.com/48f979s
Our longest show ever!
In this episode Terence and Philip, with Greg Huson from Secret HQ, look forward to what we can expect in 2011.  You might want to pace yourself on this one as we’ve set a new record for show length.
What will the Microsoft Kinect be used for? Who’ll be releasing new software this year – will we see new versions of Media Composer, Final Cut Pro or Adobe Creative Suite? Will Avid open up to 3rd party hardware? What will be in those releases? Is this the year Metadata (finally) takes off?
How many movies have to not make money from 3D before the fad is over? Or will 3D TV spark 3D production? Will we see RED Epic this year and will it be a success? What will develop with large sensor cameras?
How will the collapse of State Governments affect production subsidies? Will runaway production come back to LA?
When will the tipping point come when distribution breaks out of broadcast and cable channel models? Is ivi going to be ruled legal? What’s the future of Netflix? Is a social network a replacement for channel guides?
What do we wish we could predit for this year? More use of metadata for production automation and where it comes from? What if we didn’t do a first string-out manually? This leads to a discussion of the philosophy of editing.
What will be this year’s surprise? Another DSLR? Another daVinci/Smoke on Mac?
What will happen in distribution? What’s the future of DVD Extras?
What isn’t going to happen that needs to happen?
Had an Epic in my hands today at BandPro’s One World event.
It’s amazingly small and lighter than you’d expect.