More Fun with RED

I just finished a four day shoot for solar energy company Sunpower where we used the RED for three days of location shooting and one day of green screen. More about the green screen later—here’s how I did all the live action shots.

moby gratis- film music

LA-based FCP & Avid editor and bungee jumper Shane Ross posted this tidbit on his Little Frog in High Def blog: moby has released nearly 80 tracks for free use in non-profit / noncommercial films and videos, and he’ll license them for use in for-profit works, too.

If you’re a moby fan (as I am), it’s worth signing up just to listen. The clips average about two minutes running time, and range from quiet and contemplative piano pieces to lounge to spaghetti-western themes with a mobyesque twist to driving electronica (and probably more; I’ve been sitting here the last fifteen minutes listening, and I’ve only auditioned ten tracks or so). Some tracks have variants, like differing length cuts, or versions without drums. It’s all genuine moby; and if moby’s good enough for the likes of Miami Vice, Memento, Minority Report, three of the Bourne films (so far), Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and The Sopranoes, he’s good enough for you (but then, I may be biased, grin)!

Thanks for the music, moby! Thanks for the heads-up, Shane!

No on Prop 8 (California)—shot on RED

I’ll revisit this next week when I have more time to write (I’m about to go into a four day RED project that will shoot over this coming weekend) but I’m very proud of this spot and—as it was just released onto YouTube—I wanted to show it off.

Intro to CS4 and New AVCHD Editing

Click Here for VideoWith the various price ranges of AVCHD cameras, tapeless workflows will surely reach the mainstream in the near future. I’ve been using CS4 internally for quite a while and have been totally converted to the new CS4 workflow.

Take a look at the quick workflow video and see what’s new in Production Premium CS4 and AVCHD. I also show a few more CS4 features like the new Media Browser which lets you browse media from any drive right from Premiere Pro. (The big advantage is here is not having to import unknown clips just to view them).

Surround Patching

Soundtrack Pro 2 does surround mixing.  Final Cut Pro will gladly handle your 5.1 mix, but you need to know a few things about making your sequence output 6 discreet channels. In this tutorial, Steve Martin will show you the importance of the Match Audio Outputs command.

DVD Studio Pro: Leaving 4x3 behind for good

With the prevelance of flat screens and digital transition, it’s time to stop worrying about 4x3. That statement might seem a bit lame, as many of us have already migrated to HD work where 4x3 SD really isn’t our concern any more. However, when it comes time to distribute our work, documentaries, shorts, bah’mistzva’s, whatever they may be, the good old DVD is still the most feasible means of distribution. The mandatory AACS fees for Blu-ray will keep legitiamte distribuion on BD out of reach for 95% of us (oh how I miss the, HD-DVD). So until the cost of blank BD media drops into the realm of sanity (likely still 18-24 months away) at which point you could distribute duplicated discs which dont require AACS, you are left bring your HD project back down to an SD world.

It’s happened a number of times now for me in the past year where I’ve had my head in HD and then sit down to design some nice DVD menus for a project and forget all about 4x3 title safe. So I’ve started forcing “16x9, 16x9 Letterbox” only for my DVDSP projects. For the feature this is not a big deal at all, but for menus and subtitles it has an impact.

When a 16x9 project is displayed as native 16x9, the DVD player typically just spits out the 720x480 (or 720x576 for you PAL kids) anamorphic pixels unadultered, and lets your TV stretch out the composited image for so it appears correctly. However, in letterbox mode, the player will vertically squeeze the video by 25% and center it in the 480 frame. The issue arises that this squeeze is done to the video layer, not the composited image, so it happens before any graphics were involved. So if you have button overlays or subtitles, the video underneath them just shifted and thus they no longer line up in the correct position any more.

I Decide: Anatomy of a No-Budget HD Spot

This was the first project shot for California’s No on Prop 8 campaign. In an attempt to reach out to young voters I recruited my cousin Catherine, and her best friend Austin, to record an appeal for youth to get up and vote down Prop 8. They’re both politically active and immediately said “yes” to the project.

AJA + Adobe = Great High-End Workflows

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have the privilege of getting to work with high-end workflows all of the time.  I go from everything to DV to Film 4K and everything in between, but clearly SD and compressed HD workflows predominate what we do. However, I have to say that I’ve been really intruiged with what AJA offers for Adobe products - all that you would expect and a whole bunch extra.  Read on to get all the details.

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