Saturday, August 23, 2008

NAB Conference Raises White Flag

Homepage animation has some talking.

Visitors to the NAB 2009 website are greeted with an animation of a raised white flag… typically seen as a sign of surrender. This is sending the wrong message.  The conference is going strong and continues to evolve.  I’ve attended and spoken at the conference for the last five years.  Despite some high profile drop-outs (like Avid and Apple) in 2008 the show still boasted more than 72,000 attendees.  I found it as relevant as ever and enjoyed informative presentations, looked at great products, networked like crazy, and managed to have some fun in there too.  I believe in NAB, last year I brought 5 employees with me.

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Sunday, August 17, 2008

Photoshop for Video – Creating Custom Backgrounds from Scratch

Motion Graphics •
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Friday, August 15, 2008

Photoshop for Video – Making Selections with Calculations

Advanced Technique made easy… learn how to chromakey in Photoshop

Motion Graphics •
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Sunday, August 03, 2008

I Can’t Even Open My FCP Project File” (Or Other Flaky Activities)

1. Look in the Autosave Vault. Before panicking, simply try going back a few versions. Do a search for Autosave in the Finder. Look in the folders for a backup of your project file. Work your way backward through the recently saved copies.

2. Create a new user account. Create a new user account for testing purposes. This is a great way to see if the problem is a corrupt preferences file. Most Final Cut Pro preferences files are stored in the user’s settings. Open the System Preferences panel under the blue Apple. Click Accounts. Click on New User. Create one call test, and give it admin privileges. You can assign it a password or not. Only use this account for troubleshooting (you may want to keep it for the future).

Now, log out, and log in as the new user. Try opening Final Cut Pro. It should open with no active project files. If it opens, you’ve narrowed the problem down to bad user preferences (see next tip) or a bad project file.

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Saturday, August 02, 2008

Video Compression Workshop – Helpful Advice

Need to get your video delivered to your audience?  Then there’s probably going to be some compression involved.  Don’t let hardware or software get in your way. Let’s take a common sense approach to getting your video out there. 

Pick Your Power
There are tons of compression tools out there, but the pro apps offer important features like batch processing, multiple architecture support, and customizable presets.  The five most popular options are:

Apple Compressor (www.apple.com) Bundled free with Final Cut Pro or DVD Studio Pro.  However it can’t output some Window’s oriented formats and it is occasionally cranky (requiring restarts, trashing preferences, and even re-installs to get back on track).

Canopus ProCoder (www.canopus.com) a versatile PC-only solution for encoding video in a variety of formats.  It offers both a guided and an expert mode to setting up your jobs.

Autodesk Cleaner and Cleaner XL (www.discreet.com) The granddaddy of encoding utilities.  It’s suffered from changing ownership several times and hasn’t seen much development lately. 

Telestream Episode and Episode Pro (www.flip4mac.com) This product offers hooks into Apple Compressor and offers a variaety of additional formats that Mac users need.

Sorenson Squeeze (www.sorenson.com) An easy to use compression utility that also unlocks some specialty formats like Flash Video.  Version 4.1 (a free upgrade) build in support for Windows Media files on the Mac Platform by using Flip4Mac (not a free upgrade - $99/$179).

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Thursday, July 31, 2008

Video Compression Workshop – 10 Steps to Better Compression

1.) De-interlace your video: Most video files are interlaced, which means that half of one image is blended with half of the next.  On a Television this produces smoother motion, on a computer it produces junk.

2.) Lower your audio standards: Most users are listening to computer audio on tiny speakers.  Cutting your sample rate to 22 or 11 kHz and the sample size to 8-bit will often produce unnoticeable audio changes but huge space saving.

3.) Shrink the window: While you don’t need to make video postage stamps sized.  But reducing the window to half size creates a file that is 25% the file size of the original.  That’s a BIG savings in space.

4.) Reshape the video: Most likely you are working with a video file that is sized 720 X 480 (or 486) pixels.  You need to resize this to 640 X 480 for it to properly display on the computer monitor.

5.) Restore the washed-out picture: Video signals operate between an RGB value of 16 thru 235.  Computers use an RGB value of 0 thru 255.  You will need to restore the back and white point of your image.  Many applications have this option.

6.) Improve the saturation: A video file displayed on a computer will also need the saturation turned up a bit.  This is to compensate for what I call the Wal-Mart effect.  Consumer TVs have their reds over-cranked to make skin tones appear richer on their cheap tubes.

7.) Frame Rate:  Your video file is likely recorded at approximately 30 fps.  This is needed for a television display, but not important for most web video.  Reducing your frame rate to 15 or even 10 fps will result in a 50 - 66% savings in file size.

8.) Codecs: The file architecture you pick will often have its own codec chosen.  However some file formats support a variety of codecs.  Be sure to keep compatibility and audience requirements in mind.  Newer codecs offer a significant advantage over older formats.

9.) Don’t use a Conduit: For faster compression, don’t run web compression through a conduit like Final Cut Pro to your compression utility.  Instead, save a flattened, self-contained movie and then compress.

10.) Test it: Before you compress a lot of video, create a small test file.  Try compressing 10 seconds of video with different settings.  Find the ones that work best for you.

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Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Video Compression Workshop – An Introduction

Successfully getting a video file delivered to your audience usually means it will be compressed (heck it’s often compressed just so we can work with it in the first place).  Making the video file available to your target audience is your goal, but the challenges of hardware, connection speed, and even operating system can affect the decisions you make.  Let’s take a common sense approach to getting your video out there.

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Wednesday, July 30, 2008

The Most Important Piece of Paperwork for Your Projects

I often preach extensively about project management at design and creative conferences around the globe.  The one piece of paperwork that I always emphasize is completing a scoping document for a project then getting the client to sign off and accept it.  This one piece of paperwork can solve all sorts of problems and is really worth the 2-5 hours it takes to write.  The outline is as follows.

Project Scoping Document
( 2 - 1 0 p a g e s )

• Project Name
• Executive Summary
• Background
• Project Scope (High Level)


• Project Objectives
• Deliverables
• Organizations
• Interfaces Required
• Assumptions
• Constraints
• Evaluation Criteria
• Risks
• Rewards
• Budgets
• Schedules (Due Dates)
• Project Team Readiness
• Key Roles


• Executive Sponsor
• Project Manager
• Business Experts
• Technical Experts
• Signature Lines - Sign Off “Charter”

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