Well, with Tax time upon us and a bunch of other deadlines tying me up I slowed down the posting here but I’ll resume soon. I’m preparing a quick tutorial about multi-camera synchronization that will be available in a few days and more video tutorials are on the way. I will not be at NAB this year, too many prior commitments in the same period. For those of you who will go, have fun and take many pictures of the new gear.
Author Archive
Tax time…
Thursday, April 10th, 2008After Effects and HDV
Friday, April 4th, 2008I’ve been hearing a lot recently, thanks to the fine folks at Creative Cow, about AE and HDV footage. Here is an explanation from Dave LaRonde, frequent contributor of the Creative Cow forums:
Dave’s Stock Answer #1 For Current Footage Woes:
If your footage is any kind of the following — Native HDV, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.
These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, which contain complete frame information, and they toss out the duplicated frame information on the following frames.
In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of woes.
Personally I had very few issues with HDV or XDCAM footage so I didn’t have the need to convert my footage prior of import but if you find yourself wondering what the hell is happening when applying some transformations, then Dave’ explanation sheds some light. My favorite codec for footage interchange is BitJazz’s SheerVideo. It has total fidelity to the original footage, it’s lossless, takes less than half the size of uncompressed and you can use it for roundtripping without loosing a single bit of your original footage.
Is there any geek out there? Beta testers wanted!
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008So, I talked about writing a program to convert Final Cut projects into Premiere projects. While the final program will be more or less accessible for anyone I have a sort of preview and this is only for the geeks among you. If you’re not technically expert, and I mean at the programming level, you are more then encouraged to keep reading this but I just wanted to warn you, it’s gonna start sounding like a gibberish very soon 
Adobe Lightroom 2.0 Beta out now!
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008Quick announcement to let you know that Lightroom 2.0 beta is out and it’s delicious. Version 2.0 adds the long-awaited dual monitor support and adds the ability to do non-destructive photo retouches right inside Lightroom. The retouches don’t rely on plugins, are completely undoable at any time, unlike Aperture. Lightroom remains very fast and responsive. On my MacBookPro it still run circles around Aperture, even with dual monitor support. Unfortunately the beta doesn’t allow the use of Lightroom 1.x catalogs yet but it’s pretty straightforward to import photos in the new application. In case you didn’t catch the link before, click here to download the new public beta. This are very exciting times for photographers!
The SF After Effects User’s Group is born!
Sunday, March 30th, 2008On March 20th a few of us in the Bay Area, about 300 people, gathered at the San Francisco offices of Adobe to witness the beginning of the local User’s Group. The initiative, started by Matt Silvermann and Marcello and Brandon Grande has been a lot of fun and a chance to meet fellow motion graphics and compositing artists and it was a good occasion to see vitality of the entertainment and media industry in the bay area.
Avoid creating a look in camera
Saturday, March 29th, 2008This post on ProLost made think about how far that approach on color correction can be stretch. The example given by Stu starts with a daylight balanced shot and turns it blue in post and then recovers the skin tones with additional tweaks. What if you have footage that is already blue and you want to recover the skin tones and leave the rest untouched?
Just say NO to Color and ProRes
Friday, March 21st, 2008Sorry to use such a trick to capture your attention but, well, I did, didn’t I 
No, I don’t have anything about Color and ProRes, they are good tools. I’m just getting a little concerned that lately anything in postproduction has to be revolving around these two technologies, as the other tools are not good enough. I love Apple products and I chuckled about the “reality distortion field” before but things are getting out of hand and it’s time to talk frankly about the shortcomings of these tools.
A day at The Office – part two
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008Second part of the interview with Randal Eyenhorn, cinematographer of the TV show “The Office.” Lot’s of cool ideas about lighting and dealing with props. If you didn’t catch the previous episode, click here to watch part 1.
[qt:/videos/2U-S02-EP02.mov /videos/posters/2U-S02-EP01.jpg 640 360]
When incompetent pundits strike
Monday, March 17th, 2008Now that the High Definition DVD war is over we could just enjoy buying our favorite version of “Blade Runner” without fear of it being obsolete next year. Instead somebody has to come up with some absurd reasons why BluRay is not relevant anymore, despite the fact that it is a novelty for most people. This ComputerWorld article is the sad demonstration of what happens when incompetent people are given the opportunity to yak about stuff that they don’t know. Let’s review it point by point.
Final Cut vs Premiere Pro – act two
Thursday, March 13th, 2008So, in the first few posts I’ve been nice to Premiere, the new software is generally getting a more positive attitude just because it’s “the new thing” and new things are exciting. It’s time now, after a few days to talk about a few things that could be enhanced, from the point of view of and old FCP user.
- Quicktime paramerters. In the render settings you can select which compressor (codec) you want to use but not all parameters are always accessible. For example, for the Photo JPEG codec you can’t set the quality slider in Premiere.
- Lack of the “E” command. In FCP you can set the position of the CTI (current time indicator), click at the end of a clip and press “E” to trim the length to the clip down to where the CTI is. Very useful, could not find it in Premiere. Maybe somebody can find out if there is such command and post here.
- Lack of blend modes. This kinda surprising given that blend modes are such a huge part of working with Adobe apps like Photoshop or After Effects. Could not find them in Premiere. None. Except for some effects. But they are not available for just video clips. Of course this could be easily done by using Dynamic Link but c’mon, this should be in the NLE as well.
On the other hand I had Premiere running on my MacBookPro for 3 days without quitting it and it’s rock solid. And this is the 3.0.0 Try out version, before the current updates and not updated for Leopard. Quite impressive. More later.