Avid Hidden Gems #2

This is a weekly series of tips culled from years of experience and hours of actually reading the manual - so you don’t have to.

This week’s tips include a console command, Title Tool help, fast info and color correction tips.

Color Primary video tutorial

This is the first of 24 weekly color correction video tutorials from the revised edition (due in December) of “Color Correction for Video” which was the first color correction book ever published at the time. This tutorial is pretty basic and others are quite advanced. I’ll try to release them in an order that builds on concepts from previous tutorials. Many of the tutorials will be based on Color, but others utilize Final Cut Pro, Avid and Color Finesse (as a plug-in for Adobe After Effects or Premiere). There may be some gaps in the information, since the video tutorials were designed to be viewed in conjunction with the book. Enjoy and make sure to sign up for the RSS feed so you don’t miss any of the tutorials!

Avid Hidden Gems - Part 1

One of the most useful things I ever did as I began to master the Avid user interface was – I know this will be hard to believe – read the manual. Actually I read EVERY word of EVERY manual. The folks at the Avid Technical Publications department can confirm this, because I sent them many pages of corrections for which they sent me an actual one-of-a-kind “Deputy Tech Pubs” badge. Geeky? Yes. Should YOU actually read the manuals? Of course not! That’s what this series is intended to prevent!

Ready to trash your expensive wireless mics?1

Chances are good that if you own a production company, or freelance as a sound recordist, you’ve invested in a few pricey wireless mics. Most of these mics operate on the unused local bands in the VHF or UHF spectrum, However, with the move to digital television the FCC has reallocated some of that frequency range to emergency radio use and has begun testing the possibility of using some of the so called “TV white space” for use with proposed “unlicensed devices” such as wireless broadband services, wireless multimedia systems, and PDAs. Currently, these products operate in other radio frequency bands, such as 2.4 GHz. The FCC is looking at allowing the use of these unlicensed devices starting on February 17, 2009 when the switch to DTV occurs.

Software Scope Shootout

So I’m finally continuing my earlier article on software versus hardware scopes, with a shootout of the top software scope sets. The scopes I’m using for the shoot out include the Hamlet VidScope and Adobe OnLocation on the PC, Divergent Media’s ScopeBox on the Mac and the dedicated Tektronix WFM7120.  I also added Synthetic Aperture’s Test Gear, which is a scope set exclusively for After Effects.

Review of Abaltat Muse

Ireland is a land of fantastic music and musicians. I’ve been to Doolin, in County Clare and heard brilliant traditional musicians there. And for those with more of a rocker sensibility, you’ve got Irish exports U2, Van Morrison and the Cranberries.

The latest musical export from Ireland is a software application called Muse from a company called Abaltat, which means “ability” in Gaelic. This software supposedly analyzes a Quicktime movie and creates a custom musical composition based on the video content. I think most people would be highly skeptical that this software can actually compose a meaningful tune based on actually analyzing the true content of a video program. Its similar to the disbelief that any video editor has about the programs that I’ve heard of that will take your video footage and make a great edit from the raw bits and pieces.

Angelina and Lindsay battle over their favorite RED scopes!

Let’s face it: if I didn’t start with a title like that, there’s no way you’d read a story about waveform monitors. They’re boring! They’re not creative! They’re all the same! They’re not sexy. They’re not RED.

Scopes are important if you’re doing real work that gets duplicated, broadcast or color corrected. They can be used “creatively.” They can help you do better work. Without them, all that other cool gear is worthless.

So WHY are scopes the “Rodney Dangerfield” of the production and post production world? Some of it is probably fear of not understanding them. Some is probably that they don’t really seem to DO anything other than cost a lot of money. Some is probably because they have a lot of unrealized potential.

Using web tools to collaborate between creatives.

Wisdom from the masses – In depth on using web tools to collaborate between creatives.

A few weeks ago there was a short but interesting thread on CML-pro (The Cinematographer’s Mailing List) about how to collaborate with other creatives on a production team using web-based tools. The original poster wanted a solution – a “group scrapbook” - that would allow a small pre-production team to share images, photos and notes. Expanding on the idea a little further, it would be good to be able to communicate across the group, share schedules, comments and video.

There were basically six good solutions presented by members of the list:

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