1st Video ships bringing more video editing to the iPhone

There’s another entry into the iPhone video editing app category that has just hit the iTunes app store in the last day or so. VeriCorder Technology’s 1st Video (which I previewed here thanks to HandHeld Hollywood just after NAB) aims to one up the previous king of iPhone video editors, ReelDirector, by providing a bit more functionality and moving it beyond a novelty or a toy.

UPDATE: 1st Video has received an update to output better video:

This is good news if you’re planning on buying the app as the video quality was one of its weakest points.

Digital Rebellion’s Footage Calculator adds more codecs

A while I back I posted a round-up of various footage calculators around the Internet. The one from Digital Rebellion had the most supported codecs but was lacking some new ones like ProRes Proxy and ProRes 4444. Well Digital Rebellion has updated the Footage Calculator with ... well, pretty much all of them.

From Wired magazine: The Good Enough Revolution

Continuing with the links to other good articles that are great reads for our particular industry comes a link to a Wired article called The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine. That kinds of sums up a lot of what is going on in film and video production today wouldn’t you say? That Flip camera footage that comprises a large part of your program would have been flat out rejected on broadcast television at one point in the past but today ... it is good enough.

Enlightening interview about distribution with Maverick Entertainment founder and president

I was catching up on podcasts recently and I got to the July 16 episode of Filmmaking Central.  On this episode host Dave Basulto spends an hour interviewing Doug Schwab, President and Founder of Maverick Entertainment. This is one of the most honest and informative discussions on feature film distribution that I’ve heard in a long time and is a great listen for anyone making movies. Blogs and podcasts often discuss the technology and craft of filmmaking ad nauseam so the good distribution discussion is often few and far between. Maverick Entertainment is a direct to video distribution company and though you as a filmmaker may be shooting for theatrical distribution the reality is that very few films see the big screen. Schwab engages in a very thorough and very honest discussion about the reality of feature film distribution. There’s a lot of great tips within the show about what distribution companies are looking for as well as tips to get your film in front of a distributor or buyer. You can listen to the episode right off of the BlogTalkRadio webpage or subscribe to the Filmmaking Central podcast (iTunes link) and look back into July for the episode.

Petition:  Apple, give us Blu-ray support in DVD Studio Pro!

Apple’s opinions on Blu-ray have been well documented and even their general thoughts on regular DVDs isn’t all that strong these days. But no matter what Steve Jobs believes, out in the real world DVDs are still very popular and a lot of people do want Blu-ray options on their Macintosh and Blu-ray authoring in DVD Studio Pro. Adobe has added affordable Blu-ray support in Encore but that’s not as affordable as it being added into something you already own - DVD Studio Pro.

A Tweet began circulating this morning to sign an online petition called Apple, give us Blu-ray support in DVD Studio Pro! Who knows if Apple will listen but it doesn’t cost anything to sign. When you do sign the petition it asks for you to set up an account or sign in with Twitter. I didn’t do either, just supplied my name and my junk email, and it took my signature, creating a new account for me. The goal is 10,000 and it’s only at 24 at the time of this writing so please sign up and send the message to Apple that we want Blu-ray in DVD Studio Pro ... and by that we would get Blu-ray support on the Mac OS as well an upgrade to DVD Studio Pro!

HBO’s Alzheimer’s documentary

Starting this Sunday, May 10, HBO Documentary Films is going to begin air a 4 part documentary series on Alzheimer’s disease called The Alzheimer’s Project. Normally I probably wouldn’t promote or post about an HBO film but this series looks to be a bit more important than most. Alzheimer’s disease is a cruel brain disease that affects over half of all Americans and has an indirect cost estimated at more than $148 billion annually. Any disease with that kind of broad reaching impact deserves a special event like this that HBO is producing. I’ve personally been affected by the disease as my mother suffers from Alzheimer’s and I’ve seen the toll it can take on both the victims and their friends and family so I’ve been encouraging all that I can to watch this series.

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.

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!

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