Local television commercials don’t all have to be bad

There was a post on Autoblog recently about a Cincinnati Ohio area Kia dealer’s commercial spot. It uses a special edition of Kia’s little sport utility, the Kia Soul, that adds a bit more pizzazz to an already funky vehicle. The dealership, Jeff Wyler Kia, has produced an equally funky spot advertising Kia in general and their dealership chain in particular. It got me thinking that local commercials don’t have to all be loud, ugly and annoying.

More Avid Media Composer for the Final Cut Pro Editor

Continuing on an article in the last Pro Video Coalition newsletter, The Basics of Avid Media Composer for a Final Cut Pro Editor, this article will look at a number of other functions and how they differ from Final Cut Pro to Media Composer. One of the main reasons why I’m writing these articles is that Avid offers a free, full-featured demo of Avid Media Composer 4 available for download. When I wrote the first piece that demo was only for 14 days. They have since upped the time for this trial to 30 days. That’s great as it brings this demo in line with most free demos and even affords enough time to try to learn the in’s and out’s of the application a little bit better any maybe even use it on a real job.

How the BBC made one of those amazing plant growing shots

For those that aren’t on Twitter I wanted to post this amazing video that shows how the BBC series Life was able to achieve an amazing plant growing shots for the episode “Plants.” It involves multiple time-lapse tracking shots in the wild as well as the same shots recreated on blue-screen in the studio. All shot with a DSLR and brought together in the all-powerful After Effects. You can see the power of the re-tweet at work via Twitter with this link. I finally saw it this morning on its 3rd re-tweet.

Edit suite etiquette and sharing your space

If you’re a working editor out in the world, chances are you freelance or you are on staff at a post-production facility. No matter which of those two categories you might fall into you probably don’t work in a vacuum; that vacuum being one single edit suite that you and you yourself occupy without any interaction with others. Okay maybe if you are one of these hyphenates that do it all, then you might not ever work in another edit suite but if you are freelance you probably (hopefully) are called to bring your talents to into other post-houses to work your magic. If you are a full-time staff editor you might occasionally have to leave your edit suite behind to take a vacation or an extended leave of absence while you travel the world on the film festival circuit (hey, a guy can dream can’t he?). This article is meant to stir a little discussion on what both sides of this equation can do to make life a bit easier when dealing with someone else’s edit suite or someone else coming into your room.

Using the Show Duplicate Frames function in Final Cut Pro

Show Duplicate Frames is a very useful feature that has existed in Final Cut Pro for some time now. When activated, Final Cut Pro will show you clips that have been used in a timeline more than once placing a colored stripe indicator across the bottom of a clip for each frame that has been duplicated. But if you’re working with Canon 5D or 7D footage, dupe detection won’t work until you modify the clip just a bit.

Please click more and read the rest of the article before watching the screen capture video

The Apple Magic Mouse just got a bit more useful

A few weeks ago I wrote a review of the new Apple Magic Mouse and using it with Final Cut Studio. There’s now a little 3rd party application called MagicPrefs that adds even more functionality to the mouse.

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