Podcasting Design

Alex Lindsay | 04/01- 02:04 AM

Podcasting has become an over-used term for “Video and Audio Production for Online Sources” (VAPOS) but…until the masses adopt VAPOS as a replacement (something I very much doubt), we’ll be calling this new fangled market Podcasting. Whatever it’s called, I will venture to say…this is the future of television, radio and much of what we think of as “entertainment.” Maybe not today, or in it’s current form, but video and audio online is where cars were in 1904, radio was in 1922, television was in 1952, print publishing was in 1988 and the world wide web was in 1994. If you are in the business of video production, you simply have to pay attention to this market or you will not survive long term and you will give up valuable opportunities.

In this article, I’m going to talk about designing and structuring a podcast along with some of the technical issues that should be considered when producing a podcast. The Pixel Corps produces about 80 episodes of web content a month in 6-8 different structural formats. Much of what I will share is a culmination of many painful lessons we’ve learned over the last 8 years of producing online video.

Greenscreen Primer Part 1

Alex Lindsay | 03/01- 02:05 AM

I pulled my first Greenscreen in 1996 working on “Star Wars: Episode 1” pre-viz. The footage was rough (pre-vis handycam footage) and the After Effects Color Difference Key was a complete mystery. Now, the Pixel Corps, we shoot an average of two hours of greenscreen footage a day, mostly 4:4:4 uncompressed. While the tools have progressed significantly, the process itself, and the rules, have changed surprisingly little.

In this article, I’ll cover the major issues you need to solve when shooting greenscreen footage. There will be future installments to discuss theory and keying technique. I will argue about 90% of the professionals out there do not use most of the information I will lay out here… and it makes their process much more difficult. I will say, everything we do in the Pixel Corps is designed to lower costs and accelerate delivery speed while constantly improving quality. We’re not particular to be particular. We do everything because it shaves time or improves quality.

Red releases Details on “Scarlet”, “Epic” and more

Alex Lindsay | 11/13- 02:51 PM

Red has, at least on paper, turned the entire imaging world upside down. While “When and Whether” this comes to fruition is still up in the air, the stats are pretty impressive.

I’m not going to regurgitate the stats. You can see the details on Red’s web site.

Here is the ADD upshot…

Modular - You buy a body and then accessorize. This is the ultimate erector set of cameras. Add lenses, handles, batteries and interface as you like. Set it up as the still camera that shoots Video or a video camera that shoots stills. You can upgrade and interchange as you go. You can often trade accessories from the Scarlet to the Epic. It’s the just the guts that set them apart.

Scarlet at $2500…from 3k to 6k. From fixed to Canon/Nikon to Pro lenses. Get this…there’s a controller on the Scarlet that you can pull off and operate the camera from up to 100ft…wirelessly. I wish I could do that with my F-950. I can see these cameras becoming the core of Industrial, small film, Pro-web video, TV and “hazardous” shooting.

Epic starts more expensive but goes up to…261 Megapixel…at 50 fps…yea, crazy. 65 Megapixel was really enough for me. I’m clear we’re looking at the end of the film…by 2010, digital will simply be passing the resolution and color depth of film. Especially looking at plates from films and videos…at 1080p here…I would never think about shooting film again.

Red Code 225 and 500…we’re talking CRAZY bandwidth (I don’t think Red even knows how to do it).

One of the most exciting things I saw at the Red Presentation was actually Apple’s unveiling of a Red Transfer plug-in (developed by Red) that wraps the Redcode into a Quicktime wrapper (with Metadata). What does that mean? No transcoding, no proxies, AND you can open Color and work with the 4K source footage. This is a big big deal. I changes the whole pipeline (which has been fine but a little cumbersome). Adobe will also be releasing a dot release that supports Redcode directly. The pipeline is starting to form.

Great stuff…more observations in the coming days and weeks.

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