April Showers website a treasure of information

I was looking at some of the films coming to our local film festival, the Nashville Film Festival, (which I won’t be attending much since they scheduled most of it the same week as NAB!) and I came across a film screening this Saturday called April Showers. It’s not a light little comedy but rather a drama about a Columbine-like school shooting. The synopsis from the film’s website:

From writer/director, Andrew Robinson, a survivor of the Columbine High School tragedy, comes April Showers a dramatized retelling of what it was like to be a survivor in the midst of the nation’s largest school shootings. Based largely on actual events, April Showers follows the story of Sean Ryan (Kelly Blatz, Prom Night) as he and fellow survivors attempt to make sense of the horrors they’ve just witnessed and, for Sean, coping with the loss of his friend April (Ellen Woglom, Viva Laughlin).

Besides looking like an important film with very topical subject matter, one other thing that makes this movie worth a blog post are many of the resources available on the film’s official website.

Anvil trailer online!

I love music documentaries. From Gimme Shelter to Metallica - Some Kind of Monster they are always a lot of fun to watch especially when it’s about music you like. Then you’ve got your classic underdog docs like Murderball and The King of Kong. Combine them together and you’ve got Anvil! The Story of Anvil, a documentary about the biggest heavy metal band to never make it big. I’ve been reading about this film for a while and it looks like it’s going to hit theaters on April 10. Enjoy the trailer above and enjoy the film when it comes to your town.

Blu-ray comes to the Mac, kinda

So we all know by now that Steve Jobs called Blu-ray a “bag of hurt” and that Apple doesn’t officially support Blu-ray on the Macintosh. Yes we can author in Adobe Encore and burn with Toast. You can even back-up data galore onto Blu-ray data discs and mount those in the Finder but if you want to watch a Blu-ray movie then you got to look elsewhere because Macintosh doesn’t support that. One option for the Mac is a Blu-ray drive from MCE. If you’ve got a Mac Pro or a G5 tower then you’ve probably got a second optical bay just waiting for something to be shoved into it!

UPDATE A found video from RED’s headquarters?

Whooo Hoooo!!!!! Today I got my first ever “takedown” notice for a blog entry! I guess if you write about and cover any industry that deals in product launches and trade secrets for long enough then you will eventually post something that someone doesn’t like. Usually it’s just an opinion of some software or a certain hardware product but every now and then you might be posting something that really shouldn’t have been posted in the first place. Apparently that’s what happened yesterday when I posted a link to a video that a recent new Twitter follower had posted of an event at RED headquarters. Apparently he wasn’t supposed to be videoing this event as some powers-that-be at RED asked for the video and links to be removed. The video really didn’t show that much especially now that the RED ONE is out in full force in the world. But hey, the last thing I have time to worry about or mess with is some lawyer with too much time on his/her hands harassing me for linking to some other dude’s illegally obtained video. So off the link goes. Of course with the Internet these days, is any video really gone for good?

So I got a new Twitter follower recently and as I was poking around his website and I saw this link to 4 new movies.  One of those links was titled RED HQ. From Nathan’s RED HQ entry:

I got to go “somewhere near LA” and check out the inside of Red’s HQ, where the RED ONE camera was born. They showed us a couple of 4K movies, and offered hands on training with the camera and post software. It was insanely cool. In addition to that, I also went to Mexico, which has some interesting shots. Also check out the still images from the trip Right Here.

Nathan posted a video to some time he spent at RED’s headquarters (or some other very official RED looking event). The camera wanders around and shows RED ONE cameras, parts and pieces, a big projector on some scaffolding as well as what looks to be Red Leader Jim Jannard himself discussing the camera in an informal setting, cigar in hand. I don’t know anything more about the footage than what is on the poster’s website but it was kinda fun to wander around the place. Anyhoo ...

Kensington trackball as a poor man’s control surface

You may have never thought of using a trackball as a cheap substitute for a control surface when color correcting in Final Cut Pro but you can. At least you can use the functionality of a Kensington Expert Mouse Trackball to make using Colorista or the stock FCP 3-way color corrector to keep you hands off of the mouse.
Hardware •
Post Production • (7) Comments • Most recent comments by: Scott Simmons, Rob, Rob, Scott Simmons, larsonian, Scott Simmons, Ben Richardson, • Permalink

Keyboard Manifesto

When it comes to increased productivity and better efficiency while editing, saving time every place an editor can will help increase that productivity and efficiency. And we all know saving time is the client’s favorite thing as saving time means saving money. My favorite time saver in Final Cut Pro has been to remap the majority of the default keyboard setup. Since I began using FCP way back around 1999, one of my earliest thoughts was that the default keys weren’t very well thought out.

Why do I say this? I first learned non-linear editing on Avid so of course I was used to that keyboard layout. But while you have been able to map Avid keys for as far back as I’ve been working on it, that hasn’t always been the case with FCP. Early versions of FCP did not allow keyboard mapping at all. In fact, the earliest version of FCP didn’t even have the ability to JKL scrub! When keyboard mapping finally came along, life in FCP was good. What is so wrong with FCP’s default keyboard layout and so right about Avid’s? First, think about how you rest your hands on a keyboard. This is assuming that as an editor, you try to perform as many tasks as possible using the keyboard. Many people do not and while there are lot of fast editors out there using the mouse (I’ve watched a many of them edit) I honestly believe one can work a lot faster the more the hands stay on the keyboard. And this is also assuming you are doing a lot of edit assemble work; the nuts and bolts of good storytelling before the fancy effects work (read: keyframing) begins.

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