My Adobe (Non-)Switch Story

I can clearly remember my first experience with Adobe Premiere.  It was in the early 1990’s, and I was working full-time in the News Department at Wisconsin Public Television.  I had managed to talk the news director into buying me a really new-fangled device – a desktop computer.  I believe it was a first-generation Pentium, maybe 90Mhz.  I had been into computers since about 1984, and had composed music and scored a lot of TV programs using Atari computers. Geekery was in my blood.  So once I got the Pentium, I was poised on the launching pad for what was to come.

And then I got a copy of Adobe Premiere, version 3 I think it was.  And I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it.  Strange, buggy, crash-prone, you name it, it was just not good.

REVIEW:  ProDAD Mercalli

If you have been paying attention to PVC lately, you may have read my recent article “An Aerial Adventure.”  If you haven’t, go ahead and have a look.  I’ll wait.

There, now wasn’t that fun?  You may remember that my experience with Loran Nordgren and his AirCam aircraft wasn’t entirely successful.  While the pictures were certainly usable, even the combination of the Canon XL-H1’s optical lens stabilizer and the Kenyon Labs KS-8 gyro wasn’t enough to smooth out all the buffeting caused by being out in the wind at 70 MPH.

Software to the rescue!

How To Pick The Perfect Font

My buddy Mark Suszko sent along this link to a great flowchart which takes the mystery out of choosing the right typeface for you project.  Me, I want a copy in poster-size!  Thanks to Gizmodo, too.

Roku Gets An Update

It seems inconceivable that I first recommended the Roku box over two years ago, but it is true.  This is one of the times when being an early adopter has been a great experience - with every passing month, the Roku has gotten more functional and has added many more channels, including Pandora, Leo LaPorte’s TWiT Network, Vimeo, Revision 3, MLB.com, Flickr, and dozens of others.  Of course, not all of the channels are to everyone’s taste, but you can usually find something to watch in there.

Engadget has just posted a fairly in-depth review of the new Roku XDS box, with support for video up to 1080p (there is some of that on Vimeo, but not much anywhere else - yet.)  When the baseline Roku HD only costs $59, that falls into impulse-buy territory for many folks. Seems like this is a harbinger of even more splintering in the distribution business, and it is exciting to watch. 

ivi Goes For The Throat

Got an interesting email last week from a company called ivi.  (yes, that’s a lower-case “i”.)  Maybe you got it too.  It contained a link to an application for Windows computers which allows them to receive the over-the-air broadcast signals of stations around the US.  The initial list is pretty comprehensive, including network affiliates in New York City and Seattle.  I downloaded the app, and it is really pretty slick, with decent (but certainly not HD) picture quality.  The business plan seems to be to charge users $5 a month or so for access to scads of TV channels over the Internet.

Of course, most of the broadcasters in the US look poorly on anyone re-transmitting their stuff.  But the interesting twist to ivi is that, instead of waiting for the network lawyers to come disembowel them, they are taking the fight to the networks - through the court system.  As soon as the service launched, ivi was snowed in with a blizzard of cease-and-desist letters from NBC, ABC/Disney, CBS, WGBH and others.  However, ivi seems to think that re-distribution of broadcast signals over the Internet is allowable due to a gray area in copyright law.  From an ivi press release:

The Complaint states that ivi is legally operating under U.S. Copyright Law. According to section 16 of page 3 of the Complaint, “The Copyright Act expressly authorizes secondary transmissions of copyrighted works embodied in primary transmissions. For example, the Copyright Act expressly approves of the secondary transmission of an original television broadcast where the secondary transmission is subject to a statutory license. Under Section 111 of the Copyright Act, statutory licensing fees are paid periodically to the Register of Copyrights in accordance with an established scale and schedule. Section 111 further provides that the secondary transmission of an over-the-air primary transmission is not an infringement of copyrights in the works contained in the primary transmission.”

So, if I read this right, if ivi pays the federal Register of Copyrights previously-set fees, the airwaves are fair game.  Of course,

I Am Not A Lawyer !!!!! ,

so my interpretation of THEIR interpretation might be (and probably is) flawed. And even if they do win this case, you can assume it won’t take long for the pertinent sections of copyright law to be tightened up and exclude such signal-....  what’s the proper term?  Jacking?  Theft?  Rebroadcast? Entrepreneurialism?

Keep an eye on ivi.  Even if they get crushed, this is a subject that is going to come up over and over in the next few years.

And by the way…

I Am Not A Lawyer !!!!!

AdobeCS5 and nVidia:  First Impressions Part 3

Well, I’ve been editing with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and the nVidia Quadro CUDA video card for about six months now, and it has been an interesting ride.  You can check out my starting impressions in blog posts here, here and here.  But what’s the latest?

I recently had one of those Tevye “Fiddler On The Roof” moments - you know, when he sings “Sunrise, Sunset” and weeps about how quickly his children grow up?  Well, the summer of 2010 has been like that for me.  It seems like yesterday that I was sliding the nVidia card into my fairly-new HP z800 eight-core Xeon edit workstation.  Blink twice and it is the end of August.  To say this has been a busy summer of editing is a gross understatement.  I’ve shot and edited around 25 videos of varying length for the craft industry, did multi-cam shoots and edits for several concerts, did a commercial for a Vermont bed & breakfast and managed to pack in a a wedding shoot and edit to boot.  I would love to say that the experience was flawless…but I can’t.  I’ve had almost as many crashes with Premiere CS5 as I did when I was running CS4 with what was usually a fairly buggy Matrox RT.X2 card. 

Two of my larger projects consisted of lots of HDV footage that was shared between several different timelines.  One of the projects had over 300 different HDV clips.  If you have edited with Premiere for long, I’m sure you had a project that, when loading, just grinds to a halt.  In this case, what seemed to be the offending clip was always a Quicktime .MOV file, and when you load up 300+ clips and the machine freezes at “12 clips remaining” to load, it’ll make you pull your hair out.  Interestingly, even shiny-new CS5 still offers the workaround that it’s predecessors did:

Color Correction Conundrum SOLVED!

Many thanks to all the PVC readers that responded to my anguished plea for color correction help!  You can see the before and after results above.  Not perfect, but good enough for my purposes.  Five readers (if you include Chris Meyer) offered ideas, but Eric Addison was both timely and pretty damn good.  He even set up a small Premiere Pro sequence to be downloaded, unzipped and opened.  Once the sequence was loaded, it was no big deal to save the color correction preset and re-use it in my four-camera HDV concert coverage.  As you can see, the yellow was exiled and the shot was saved!  Thanks, Eric!

And a tip ‘o the bike helmet to PVC readers Portishead, Jim Hines and PerroneFord for sharing their ideas too!

A Color Correction Conundrum

Hey folks, remember I mentioned that one of my first big projects with the CS5/nVidia Mercury/CUDA combo is a choral concert?  Well, it is time to cut that puppy.  I recorded the concert with 3 Canon HDV cameras, which look great, and my brand-spankin’-new GoPro Hero HD camera.  Problem is, I didn’t have time to white balance the GoPro (in fact, I’m not even sure how you would go about it.  Gotta re-read the manual.)  In any event, I clamped the GoPro to a light stand and pointed it at the piano keyboard.  Blind, of course, since the GoPro has no monitor, but I had a good feeling about the framing.  What I didn’t count on was how far out the white balance would get.  You can look at the thumbnails on this page, or go find full-sized .TIFs of the GoPro shot and a reference from the back of the church at these Flick addresses:

The wide shot from the back of the church

and

the piano shot.

Honestly, I’d be happy just to get the piano shot *close* to the wide shot, but at this point I will take what I can get.  BTW, I would suggest you give tips using the basic PremPro color-correction tools, like 3-Way Color Corrector and such.  I’ve gone through a dozen interations, sometimes stacking different CC filters, but so far no luck.

I’m just a simple country videographer - all this color-correction stuff isn’t in my native skill set.  See what you can do and educate us all!  Fame awaits (in ot her words, I’ll post the names of the folks that come closest.)

Thanks in advance!

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