Video StudentGuy

I've moved to my own domain!

2010-11-20T17:20:00.005-05:00

I've finally moved my blog to a self hosted Wordpress site. I'm still in the process of transferring my earlier posts, but from now on it's home. Eventually I'll set up redirect so you won't even end up here when you're looking for me.

In the meantime, all these posts will remain, but I won't be updating this page any more.

The home page on the main site is static and there are menu links to view just podcasts and their show notes or a separate blog. As time goes on I'll be adding more menus organized by categories.

I'll see you there.

Video StudentGuy

Screencasting 101.2 Podcamp CT - Slides

2010-10-17T17:50:00.007-04:00

Podcamp Ct was a great success. Not a glitch as far as I could see. The facility was fantastic and several times I heard people say they had never had wireless access that was so good. I agree, it was rock solid and fast.

For myself I had mixed feelings about the presentation I gave on Screencasting. As before I have converted the slides to PDF and you download them here.

My goal has always been to get through the presentation slides all the way to the end. I so far I have not.

The presentation goes too deep. Even the demo I used to introduce the presentation was too involved. Well, real learning involves making mistakes, and embracing those mistakes is the path to success. As Mary Pickford said,

"If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down".

So not failure. I got some valuable feedback from the people who attended, thank you all and I'll give it some more thought through the next week as I prepare this presentation for Podcamp NH. I'll comment on those changes when I post the recording I made of the presentation in, hopefully in a couple days.

As always there were many fascinating presentations, more than any one person could see - 4 tracks running at the same time. I particularly enjoyed one late in the day on the international implications of being online.

I met a lot of fun and generous people. There was a two hour lunch, time for lots of talk and lots of great restaurants within a couple blocks of the facility we were in. Afterward there was more time to talk at nearby bar. A really good event. It was big, but on a human scale and it gave me weeks of things to think about.

#169 Screencasting 101.1 at PCB5

2010-10-11T19:39:00.014-04:00

In the last post I attached a PDF of the slides I used for a presentation on Screencasting I delivered a few weeks ago at Podcamp Boston. In this episode I've embedded a screencast that I made from the slides and the audio I recorded during that session. I've also included just the audio, which is part of the Video StudentGuy feed and will show up on iTunes if you're a subscriber.

Chapters & Timecode:

00:00 Preface
03:50 Introduction
13:53 What is Screencasting
15:45 How to do it
21:20 Workflow
29:00 Tools
31:35 Screencast Demo
41:30 Screenflow and Captivate
44:25 Online Screencasting Software
49:10 Other Editing Tools
55:08 Suggestions from the audience
57:20 Closing thoughts

The screencast was just too large to host on my Libsyn.com account. I don't know if I'll be doing enough of these to justify upgrading my account, so in the short term I'm going to look at TubeMogul and Blip.tv as a no cost solution. I'll let you know how that turns out.

You can view the source video and also download a copy of the file here at Vimeo.

I'm going to upload an updated version of this screecast in a week's time following a presentation I'll be making in New Haven at Podcamp Connecticut. And again, a week later following a third presentation at Podcamp New Hampshire.

If your interested in screencasting I promise to make it worth your while to watch the next two screencasts because I plan to include some, maybe lots of new material. I'll note in the Chapters & Timecode section if there's new material.

Not a Podcast Episode

2010-10-03T12:12:00.000-04:00

Last weekend I attended Podcamp Boston 5. It was a great experience meeting new people invovled in new media. You should really attend a podcamp, or any unconference that caters to your particular profession or interest. Why isn't there a videocamp?

Yes, there were some video presentations, but only on a basic, video blogger level. I myself presented a session on screencasting, the first time I've ever done that. It was presentation rough and somewhat chaotic, which is what I expected and overall I had a great time.

I recorded that session, but I'm still editing it. I want to combine it with the the slides I used and insert a brief screencasting demo. I hope to have that completed and posted here in the coming week.

My main reason for getting this post out without a show is so I could include a download to the slides for the benefit of those attending the session and anyone else who is interested in screencasting. If you do download it, I hope you'll check this site again for the screencast, I'm sure you'll get more out of the slides that way. At least you can use the links I've included in the slides.

I've converted the slide presentation into PDF format so everyone can view it. You can download it either by clicking on the title of this post, or click here. This file will appear in the iTunes feed.

Thanks for being patient, I'll talk to you later.

Paul

#168 Summer Vacation

2010-08-29T16:14:00.006-04:00

Here's a short explanation of the past three months

Projects

I finished a corporate promotional video for an integrated circuit manufacturer in Massachusetts. I partnered with Lou Goodman and we worked together shooting and editing the video. And I completed a 30 second commercial for the living history museum, Plimoth Plantation.
Even as I continue to look for a full time video gig I'm still volunteering my time to shoot and edit video for my former school, Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Arts

Plans
Everything always takes more time that you think

but I'm committed to learning how to maximize Worpress so I can transfer the Video StudentGuy site over to a self hosted Wordpress site with it's own domain. I want to develop a daily blog, add a number of interactive features and introduce video and still images.
Once I've got that nailed, I'll move on to producing a portfolio site
I continue to do audio production for another Podcast - The Post Movie Show
I'm working on a series of screencasts demonstrating how to edit in FCP using mostly keyboard commands.
I hope to turn my experiences into a presentation at some of the podcamps I've listed below.

Events

PAB10 Ottawa - great show and great people. What can you say about those Canadians except they're so nice!
DSLR video events through Avid, Rule and FCPUG. Lots of buzz about that I need to spend a show talking about that.

Podcamps Boston, NH, CT and Montreal in September and October

Montreal - Sept 11 & 12

Boston - Sept 25 & 26

Connecticut - October 16

New Hampshire - October 23 & 24

I'll be attending an introduction to Wordpress workshop at the Microsoft NERD Center in Boston Monday August 30.

It's closed, but there's a presentation later that evening also at the NERD, courtesy of the Boston Wordpress Meetup Group on how to insert video into Wordpress

#167 Marketing for the Creative

2010-08-21T22:19:00.001-04:00

Here are some thoughts I had following a business workshop for artists in the spring.

#166 Editing Pt1

2010-05-31T11:18:00.002-04:00

Organizing your media

Keep it simple, keep it lean

Consistent, uncluttered, organization of media that would allow you to return to the project 3 years later and find everything even though you've completely forgotten everything about the job. Although I didn't refer to organization of files on the desktop level, I strongly suggest that you organize all your media in the same hierarchical fashion both in your editing software and your computer's hard drive.

Something else I didn't mention it in the show which I will have to discuss it at length in a later show is that a very important part of organization occurs on the other end of of production, when you're done: consolidation.

Consolidation is the process of saving out the project and all the pieces of media that was used in the projects - in one folder. This is done once you are finished and you're preparing to archive everything and take it offline.

Someday you're going to want to re-edit this video, include it in your reel, or a compilation, or just find a piece of footage that you used and consolidation is a critical, time saving process you can use to do that.

#165 Dream a little dream for me

2010-05-21T11:40:00.005-04:00

At the time I recorded this show there were two great new media events taking place in the middle of June. That has changed. Podcamp New Hampshire 2010 was scheduled to take place the weekend of June 20, Father's day weekend, but it has now rescheduled to a yet to be determined date in October. What a pain that decision must have been to the promoters. It's still a great event to keep on your radar and you should seriously consider this once the new date is finalized.

That leaves Podcast's Across Borders 2010, formerly held in Kingston Ontario, now relocated to Ottawa Ontario, June 18, 19 and 20. Bob Goyetche and Mark Blevis are the promoters of this even and you can find out more about them at Canadian Podcast Buffet. You can check out shows I've done in the past for both Podcamp NH 2009 and PAB 2009.

By the way, Podcamps take place throughout America and around the world and they're great places to meet helpful, knowledgeable creative people interested in media, social networking and online branding. You can check out the Podcamp.org site for listings of shows in your neck of the woods. Remember, Podcamps are networking seminar events where everyone, including you, is the teacher. Most of these events don't even charge a fee to attend. Don't let the price fool you though, these are top notch gatherings that will help you connect with the top thinkers in the social media and networking world.

The remainder of the show is about self promotion - your own self promotion. After attending a day long workshop about business strategies for the artist, sponsored by the Connecticut Commission for the Arts I came away a number great ideas to consider. I'll talk about the sessions I attended in another show. There were three separate seminars presented in Connecticut this past spring and you can hear the recordings online on their site. Recordings of sessions from the May 1st event I attended have not been uploaded yet, so keep checking.

In the remainder of the show I talked about the power of talking about your plans with other people and how that helps shape and propel your vision. Making your dreams come true is also a creative act and it begins when you speaking them out loud.

#164 Personal Branding

2010-03-25T10:47:00.003-04:00

In a recent episode of Spark, the CBC Radio and podcast show, Nora Young talked with Anand Giridharadas (14:59-24:25) about the nature and perils of personal branding. It's part of a larger show about about online identities and as always the people at Spark do a great job bringing insight into the way technology is effecting our busy lives daily.

As is often the case, the segment on personal branding made me think about my own difficulties realizing my online brand and the difficulties that content producers have being their own marketers. Because of the "always on", "global nature" of online branding the burden of time to position yourself for success is greater than in the physical world. Or maybe it's just a perceived burden. That's the question I have.

Now that a lot of the content we produce, whether it's books, illustrations, animations, video or music, podcasts and other audio, is online, how much additional time can we, as producers afford to devote to marketing ourselves?

I'm trying, but I still feel like I'm just getting out of the gate. How are you using your precious free time to promote yourself online?

Other links:
Dan Schawbell - Me 2.0
http://personalbrandingbook.com/
Krop - Online portfolio site
http://www.krop.com/creativedatabase/

#163 Video in a Day

2010-02-20T22:00:00.008-05:00

A Day in the Life of Plimoth Plantations

Hey, it's been a while. I should have gotten this out a few weeks ago but I"ve been running flat out. I think that's a sign of success of some kind. I'm not certain.

I'm working on a number of different video projects in various stages of production, doing the video production internship at CDIA and producing another podcast each week, The Post-Movie Podcast.

On Monday January 25, from 10:30am to 8:00pm I started and finished a short video of a day in the life of Plimoth Plantation. You can watch the results in the linked video player below.

I believe the real lessons for me gained from this experience are the things the director and I did right. Creating a finished video in one day is not an ideal job by any stretch of the imagination, although I had a lot of fun - you can't approach a project like this without a sense of adventure and a come-what-may attitude.

Producing this video does force you to focus on the bare essentials and requires that you be very prepared before you begin. Storyboard or shot list was essential. Script or story also had to be nailed down ahead of time as well. All of that lead to a focused shoot and really really spare coverage. We were constantly moving, dodging the rain, shooting about 8 or 9 locations, none of which I had previously seen. Being mentally prepared and trusting your equipment is also critical.

My point is, none of the things I've just mentioned are unusual requirements for any video you need to produce. A situation such as this only demonstrates how critical they are to keep on schedule.

The deadline was real because we needed to post it to a TV station's site before midnight in order for it to be considered for inclusion in a future broadcast of a Boston show, Chronicle.

On Thursday February 18 Chronicle did a best of submissions from January 25 and I was told, thought I didn't see it firsthand, that this video did show. Good exposure for Plimoth Plantations, I don't know how much bragging rights there is in it for me. But I'm happy.

I hope you enjoy it. If you'd like any further information about the production process, let me know.

Hey I need some Help!

I've got a number of ideas for shows coming up and one of them is figuring out rates for freelance videography. I can tell you information on the web is skimpy and I'm not getting a lot of feedback from the few people I know who are doing this, just generalizations.

Could I ask you to email me at videostudentguy.gmail.com with your ideas, or experience you've had pricing jobs? I'd appreciate also if you told me what kind of video is was, such as corporate, non profit, weddings or other social events. Also any anecdotes about difficulties you had justifying your rates. In the current economy I hear that a lot of the suppositions regarding what people are willing to pay has changed drastically from just a year ago.

Let me know.

#162 Say yes

2010-01-08T19:35:00.005-05:00

I thought I would give you an update on my busy schedule. In last weeks, last year's show I give you a list of things that I learned last year that were important to me, to my work and my career in digital video.

How busy I currently am is directly related to degree to which I'm engaged with other people. In other words networking. I don't have time to go into great detail, but I try to make the point that you won't get very far in meeting your goals if you don't say yes to people who ask for help, even if means getting little or no money in return.

Also, I want to plug a podcast I started producing - recording and editing, back in late November. The Post Movie Show is a conversation among Boston film critics about movies. I like it, not so much because I want to know about the movies, though they do cover a wide range of films, but because I appreciate their insights into what makes a movie a good movie to watch. This isn't a show about the latest coolest movie - opinions run high and are often hotly debated, but if you interested in listening to informed opinons in humorous doses, I think you'll like it a lot.

#161 Things I learned this year

2009-12-30T18:00:00.004-05:00

I've got some end of the year reflections in this show. I've had a busy year, full of a variety of different jobs. I've learneda number of things that are important to keep in mind for anyone who is looking to enter the video production playground.

Even if you're already looking, as I am, I hope you can use some of these personal insights to keep yourself moving ahead. Here's a list as a reminder, but listen to the show:

• Let time do the heaving lifting
• Work for free, but not for nothing
• Life is not a zero sum game
• Be bold
• Surround yourself with motivated people
• Network, a lot
• Say yes first
• Persevere
• Be positive about things you can't control
• Know your value
• Learning is cumulative
• Share your goals with others
• Ask for help
• Learn to trust yourself
• Don't compare yourself to other people
• Define success for yourself

#160 Working on a crew

2009-12-09T16:09:00.002-05:00

I've got a lot on my plate in December. But I enjoy the work.

#159 New Podcast

2009-11-29T21:32:00.005-05:00

I've been busy over the holidays producing a new podcast. It's called the Post-Movie Podcast and it's a conversation between two film reviewers on recent films. Radical right?

I've also have a lot of irons in the fire production-wise and I hope to tell you more about it in upcoming shows. I'm going to be busy for a while.

#158 Black Friday Shopping

2009-11-28T21:41:00.002-05:00

Black Friday is the mega shopping day in the United States, the day after Thanksgiving day. Stores open at 4am, even earlier and there are lines and crowds of people hours before the stores open.

The sound is a little poor, but hopefully this explains why I missed posting for a couple days.

#157 The price of free

2009-11-25T22:17:00.006-05:00

On my way home in the rain on Thanksgiving eve I stopped in at the local turnpike service center and spoke my mind.

You get what you pay for and tnstaafl (there's no such thing as a free lunch)

#157 White Noise

2009-11-24T23:31:00.002-05:00

Excerpts from a podcast recording session.

#156 Creative Exercise

2009-11-23T17:05:00.005-05:00

Journal entry about my current frame of mind about what to do next.

#155 It's a Wordpress World

2009-11-22T18:02:00.006-05:00

If you want to put your video on the web and you don't know a lick about website creation, look into Wordpress.

Producing media and distributing it online requires a platform that provides a base from you can attract interest and develop a community. I think its fair to say that self promotion on the internet is not a common skill set of most production oriented media producers. One of the best ways to step into this critical space and feel as though you have some control over the process is to produce a blog using Wordpress.

Wordpress is one of many different blogging software platforms, such as Typepad, Blogger and Drupal, however I think it is the best combination of flexibility, power and accessibility for non web developers. There's a tremendous amount of learning resources for the uninitiated, with tutorials for the beginner at Wordpress.org and online in general. Even easier, you can go to Wordpress.com, create an account and start blogging in 10 minutes. There is even a video channel, Wordpress.TV that offers up a hefty dose of information for newbies.

There are meetups that take place all over the country, all over the world! I just found a Wordpress meetup in Boston that I'll be attending next month. Last month there was presentation by Adam Wood on how to customize a theme called Atahualpa which you can follow here. I found an interesting review of Thesis, another popular theme, containing lots of information about how a good theme simplifies blogging.

The really valuable thing about Wordpress is that is is more than just a blogging tool. It's a content management system (CMS) the organizes your content, tracks your marketing efforts and does other things CMS software does.

Finally you can attend, for next to nothing, Wordpress Camps all over the country. I just found one will be in Boston, close to where I live, in January. Even if you can't attend one, or you want to know what kind of sessions occur you can check out past unconferences online. A recent Wordpress Camp in Phoenix has some video of some their sessions, including how to put video online. Last week, about 700 attended WP Camp New York City and going by the list of sessions it must have been amazing.

#154 Value Add Proposition

2009-11-21T22:49:00.004-05:00

I have a few thoughts I want to share, somewhat motivated by an article I read on TalentZoo, a hub for people who work in the Advertising field.

Knowledge of who you are and how to promote your value to clients are important factors in creating and sustaining a successful business.

Handmade in America

#153 Podcast Production Part 1

2009-11-20T20:25:00.004-05:00

Producing a podcast includes creating a destination. There are lots of things to consider if you want to create a community around your content and demonstrate to potential sponsors you can keep them around.

Hosting sites:

#152 4.0 on the Avid MC Scale

2009-11-19T23:15:00.001-05:00

A loose review of an event I attended this evening focusing on the launch of Avid Media Composer 4.0, Avid's mainstream digital video editing tool. At two thousand plus dollars it's not for everyone. But for anyone interested in a career in video and especially feature motion picture editing, it's the gorilla in the living-room.

A lot of technical stuff was presented but I've chosen to talk about a few features that I thought were particularly interesting and useful, including an open plug-in format that allows Avid to ingest media directly from AVC, P2, SxS and other solid state camera media cards without converting it to the Avid MXF file format - saving time and space on your drive.

Media Composer now allows you to store files it's using anywhere on your computer, but there are risks involved. The tracking feature allows you to stabilize the picture on the frame and it automatically resizes the image so it completely fills the width of the frame. The remarkable thing about this stabilization tracking feature is that instead of the standard practice of using one or several bright spots in the frame as reference points for holding the image in the same location, it uses the entire screen. This is better because, depending on the footage, reference point objects, usually very bright points of lights, like reflections off shiny objects, can be blocked from view during capture. Not a problem now.

The last new feature I mention is the ability to place clips on the same timeline with different frame rates. Something Apple has been able to do for a number of years. Avid says it does the conversion in realtime, faster and with better results than Final Cut Pro. There's certainly enough settings to adjust to make it so. Providing you have the time and money to figure it out.

#151 Slaying the beast

2009-11-18T23:23:00.002-05:00

I have overcome and more than happy to tell you about it. The DVD portion of this project I'm working on has come to a close and you can reap the fruit of my head-banging efforts in this post about DVD Studio Pro.

Not definitive by any means, but there are a few problems you could learn to sidestep if you're interested in learning.

#150 Juggling Dull Chainsaws

2009-11-17T21:50:00.005-05:00

I'm busy, I only noticed I hadn't taken care of feeding this podcast when I looked at the time and it reminded me I haven't done a thing for the show. That's how busy is.

Maybe when I'm done tomorrow I can put things in perspective. Right now I'll make another cup of tea and keep my frustration to myself.

#149 Free Books

2009-11-16T20:18:00.002-05:00

In case you didn't know, you should get a library card. It's free, you can get just about any book, magazine, movie and lots of other stuff. If you're a student you could probably get books from outside your school delivered right to your room.

Okay, right to your dorm room is stretching it a little, but still, almost.

#148 The Dark Art of Compression

2009-11-15T19:19:00.002-05:00

Controlling this wild magic

File compression. It's the last thing you do at the end of the project, but it should be among the top things to consider and settle with your client before you begin. Otherwise, things could be very dark indeed.

#147 Job Fair

2009-11-14T23:48:00.001-05:00

I visited a job fair in western Massachusetts recently.

#146 Remembering and Remembrance Day

2009-11-13T17:56:00.005-05:00

Reflections on the cost of war from newspapers, podcasts, twitter and magazines. Check out the link to the November 11th post No Mood Swing and listen to Valerie read the Toronto Star article about the Boys of Major Street.

No Mood Swing Remembrance Day Post
Newsweek - Could have won
Newsweek - Beware Revisionism - John Kerry
John Kerry Swift boat controversy

#145 Sony EDCAM EX-1 Review

2009-11-12T17:57:00.010-05:00

Ergonomics, slow motion and media

I recorded the review of this camera before I began the One a Day series and I'm not going to hold on to it until December. Since making this recording I've been able to use this camera several times and it's been a real pleasure.

It's well designed and I believe that's why it hasn't been difficult to learn how to use it. The media is easy to use, really not that much different from the P2, but it feels more comfortable to work with. I mentioned the Hoodman in this episode as a low cost replacement for the SxS from Sony. Kensington also has a low cost alternative you should look into.

CDIA
Over/Under crank (slow motion)
Keystone Cops
Creative Cow Pros and Cons between P2 and SxS
Wikipedia article on HDV and different screen resolutions
Thorough review of the EX-1

#144 Thinking out Loud

2009-11-11T14:27:00.006-05:00

One Thought leads to another.

Clear Blue Skies - CSN
George Carlin - Ecology: The Planet is Fine
Patty Duke in the Miracle Worker
Helen Keller - Social Activist turned lap dog

#143 Steve Audette

2009-11-10T20:17:00.002-05:00

I attended an Boston Avid User Group meeting which was held at WGBH in Boston. The speaker, Steve Audette is a veteran producer and editor on programs such as Nova and Frontline. He is an excellent entertaining and informative presenter with a lot of valuable insights into editing.

#142 Podcamp NH09 Day 2

2009-11-09T11:18:00.007-05:00

Podcamp New Hampshire 09
"Conversations That Matter"

Handmade in America

Session:

Session:
Social Media Levels the Media Distribution Field

Presenters:

Example of artist who has successfully promoted herself through social media:

Imogene Heap

Social Media resources for independent filmmakers:

Podcamp NH 2010 June or July

#141 Podcamp NH09 Day-1

2009-11-08T16:03:00.006-05:00

Podcamp NH 09

Location:
New Hampton School

Distributed video production podcast:
Spidcast

Session:
Brandcasting
Dan Freund

#140 Podcamp NH Road Trip

2009-11-07T22:05:00.000-05:00

Driving up to New Hampshire for Podcamp NH 09. Lovely cold fall day.

#139 One a day

2009-11-06T09:49:00.008-05:00

Spontaneity, serendipity and simplicity.

Today I'm beginning an experiment simply because I was challenged by a podcast. Listening to Description: Valerie in Toronto, a podcaster I met at Podcaster's Across Borders, held in Kingston this past June. I learned about a challenge to podcasters called National Podcaster's Post Month, where people are encouraged to post their podcast every day through November and keep it under 10 minutes.

I don't know what the other restrictions for posting are, but it doesn't matter because it's November 6 and I'm posting on my host not theirs, so I can do what I want.

But it's not simply because of Valerie's post that I'm choosing this challenge. I picked up a book recently by Chris Orwig, a photographer and teacher, which I mistakenly referred to as Visual Photography, a bit redundant that, right? It's called Visual Poetry and his premise is seeking ways to reinvigorate, inspire and step outside your creative routine. Take some risks.

So talking without the intention of editing, without even a clear idea of what I plan to say is a big risk for me and I'll post as consistently as I can, each day from this point forward until my I reach the limit on my server or I can't take it anymore. I don't even think I'll write these long show notes. I'll just try to keep everything to a minimum. Just the links maybe, like CBC Radio Spark Episode 90.

#138 Drawing on the right side…

2009-10-13T22:15:00.005-04:00

I'm using the last show as a starting point for this show, about an idea I want to put out there for helping students learn how to better produce content and how to produce better content. I believe school is the place where this learning can and should take place, but it's success depends on how well it's presented and maintained. You'll have to listen to learn more.

At the end I give a brief review of two books, Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky and The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida. They're not light reading but I think each one has something important to say about how the internet is changing the way we produce media.

#137 Teach your children well

2009-09-25T15:15:00.005-04:00

This show is about two experiences that were bouncing around in my head and collided. First, a podcast about technology and second,, conversations with educators lead me to consider the necessity of providing some kind of multimedia literacy as part of the higher education experience. Sort of like directed play in the schoolyard to avoid bullying.

My thought is not only how to produce content that hits the intended mark, but also present the impact and responsibilities, both personally and to others that being a broadcasting entails.

There was a time when it was rare and seemingly ridiculous to require students to attend schools with a computer. Not so ridiculous now. I think the time is coming to accept the responsibilities that private broadcaster carries. I don't have any solutions to offer, but I think we should be thinking about this.

Here are some links to people and places mentioned in the show.

#136 Something from Nothing

2009-09-10T17:24:00.011-04:00

Listening to this show and trying to reach from what I know to what the least informed person knows is very difficult. It's hard to record a session of me talking off the cuff, just using notes, because I end up using a lot of shorthand without explain things. I need a glossary.

I don't have one, but I have included some brief explanations of some of the video codewords I've mentioned in passing, in this show. If you follow the links you'll find more thorough descriptions. It can get pretty thick, but it really helps to know these things.

This episode begins with a recent revelation about my goals and future direction as a filmmaking professional. I've also included details I've gleaned from blogs, podcasts and presentations at a recent meeting of the Boston FCP User's Group.

This has been a busy summer of media events. I've attended Podcamp Boston 4, Podcaster's Across Borders in Kingston Ontario, the Boston Media Makers get together which meets in Jamaica Plains the first Sunday of every month and the annual Avid Summer BBQ.

I wanted to attend Podcamp Montreal, which takes place in a couple weeks, but I think I need to stay at home. There is also a Podcamp New Hampshire, taking place in Portsmouth in November.

It was at the Boston Final Cut Pro User's group that took place in August that I saw Philip Hodgetts present an overview of new features for FCP7. I've also included information I've gleaned from Apple's FCS site and the Digital Production Buzz. You can also find video tutorials online that demonstrate what the new features are in all applications within the suite.

One of the warm up presentations that I thought was particularly noteworthy was for Mocha for FCP from Imagineer Systems. Check out the link above for videos that explain image tracking and rotoscoping in a way that will quickly make sense. Here's my abbreviated version:

Imagine you're seeing a movie and there's a scene at a football stadium. There's a huge video screen that shows instant replays and and short commercials. The people who made that movie didn't record the information on that screen when they shot the footage of the stadium, they inserted their own footage on the screen in the editing suite. Maybe an advertisement for a product that they're getting paid to place in the movie.

In a still image you can select the space inside the frame of the jumbotron and remove it and insert what ever image you choose. In a moving image, the shape of the screen and position of the screen in the frame is changing in every frame if the camera is moving.

You accomplish this difficult task by marking places in the frame that are always visible (bright white points usually) and then making sure they remain in place as the camera pans across or zooms out. Now that you've got the location of the anchor points, you create a mask that fits inside the screen area of the jumbotron and then make sure that mask is linked to those anchor points that are being tracked. That is called rotoscoping. Then you drop in your video and make it look like it was always there.

For sure, that's a gross simplification, but I hope it gets the idea across.

The new version of the Final Cut Suite (no number, should be #3 tho) include new feature updates for all the produces (except for DVD Studio Pro), but Philip was there to cover just Final Cut Pro 7.

Because I clumsily referred to ProRez 422 in passing, give me a moment to explain what an intermediate codec is and what 422 color space and 4444 refers to.

A color space is the limited range of color that can be viewed from the entire spectrum of color. Humans can see a wide swath of color between ultra violet and infra red (violet to red). Some insects and animals can see beyond that range. Mechanical devices, like monitors and cameras and capture and display color in a variety color spaces depending on type of color space. HSB (Hue Saturation and Brightness) is one space, RGB (Red, Green and Blue) is another.

Video cameras generally use a color space called YCC, which is roughly RGB. The Y is the luma quality and the two Cs are the chroma, or color qualities. Those are the three values in a camera that shoots 4.2.2.

Our eyes are more sensitive to luma than chroma, so in a 4.2.2 color space there's twice as much luma, or light, as there is color. Web and DVD video use a 4.2.0 space and the DV standard uses 4.1.1.

Think of the 3 areas of information captured by a 4.2.2 camera as distinct channels of light or color. Like channels in photoshop. There is 4th channel of visual information which cameras won't capture because it is created in post production, the alpha channel.

Alpha channels are used in Photoshop, After Effects and Final Cut Pro are an additional layer of information that can be used to remove areas of the frame so that something else can be seen through it. Or it can act as a selection area of a moving object in the frame so an effect or filter can be applied to it.

Hold that thought for a moment and let me move on to a codec. Among other things, it's a software program that compresses a moving digital image. There are a variety of codecs that compress video as a camera records it, and decompresses it as a DVD player plays it. It's a lossy process, which means digital information is lost when it's compressed. The greater compression, the more minutes of video can be shushed into a gigabyte of storage space.

Still with me?

There are a lot of codecs out there and the variety is necessary because of how you're using them. Camera codecs need to compress data a certain way to retain the most information to fit on the storage medium, tape, drive or solid state card. Cameras are capturing video for one purpose only, to store it. You aren't using it, cutting it into pieces, so it can squeeze it really tight.

Cutting video in a codec designed for camera capture, particularly HDV, is not a pleasure to cut. It's doable, but has problems that I'm not going to get into. If you're producing a feature length movie or TV video you want to work in a codec that will give you more freedom to edit. That's what an intermediate codec is.

One codec for capture, another for playback (sometimes the same one) and one in-between for the edit. Prorez is an intermediate codec.

You capture the video from the camera as you do normally, then select the footage in FCP and then convert it to a Prorez codec.

Hang in there, I'm coming to the end.

When you convert footage captured by a camera using a codec using the 4.1.1 or 4.2.0 color space to, say, Prorez 4.2.2, does that mean you're getting a better quality out of the footage you shot?

No!

Footage captured in every DV or HDV camera is being compressed on the fly using whatever color space the camera uses. That compress, being lossy discards anything that doesn't fit. So when you convert it to a high resolution color space, it's got a bunch space it isn't using. When you shake it, you can hear it rattle.

So why would you convert it to the 4.2.2 space, or for that matter, 4.4.4?

One reason is these other codecs have other characters that make it more efficient for your editing software to edit, render and export the video. More importantly though, and this IS the reason you would use Prorez 4x4 (4.4.4.4) is that anything else you add, a still image, motions graphics from After Effects or Motion, or 3D animation from Maya or 3D Studio Max will be added at their full, mostly likely higher color and image resolution.

These additional elements, even something as simple as title text have to be massaged by various filters and often moved in and out of other programs to make them feel like they're as real as the realness of the video footage. Have a space that allows you to work with the maximum amount of resolution of color and pixel depth offers the kind of control the people with the big bucks are looking for.

You and I are just lucky that we don't have to have big bucks to get into this party.

As hard as that was to read, and I congratulate you if you got this far, it was no picnic figuring how to say it. And be careful, don't use this in your research paper.

I'm not going to put links to all this stuff. I've put out the bare bones. If you need to know more you can look it up for yourself.

I hope it's been useful.

You can find pricing for educational software at Journey Ed and Academic Superstore. I've used them both and they're fast.

Mike Jones at Digital Basin has a good review of the suite upgrade, including what's missing. And check out the Film School Drinking game which I found in the same article. It's an education in itself.

Finally, if you're on the fence about getting the Snow Leopard update, Leo Laporte and his gang of usual suspects provide a definitve thrashing of the pros and cons in #156 of Macbreak Weekly.

#135 What Good is It?

2009-08-07T20:56:00.009-04:00

This week's show is the second part of my thoughts about craft and art, this show focusing more art.

Right off the bat let me confess that not once did I get the title of the book by John Carrey that I keep refering to, which is What Good are the Arts. Terrible oversight on my part and while there is no defense let me repeat that the book and it's correct name is less important to my remarks than the thoughts and ideas that were spurred by it. With that in mind, here's a link to The Craftsman by Richard Sennett. I think it has a lot to say about methods of producing quality work for anyone, including filmmakers.

The great thing about having all these diverse sources of information and opinion is not so much the opportunity to learn as it is the ideas and where they take me, and the things I think and believe.

I generally find that I come to understand what I think and believe by saying it out loud, either to myself, to others or to you in this time shifted fashion. There's a monitor in my head as the words come out that evaluate the rightness of what I'm saying against what I think. Sometimes when they are at odds I find that what I have said is more true to what I believe than what I was actually thinking. The sense of smell and taste comes to mind as a comparable experience. Often they are very different experiences and one or the other will become the defining sensation.

So despite how dense, or confusing this all may sound, I found it necessary to work it out, out loud and as I say in the end, I have a better understanding of how I think and feel on this subject, for the present time.

But I feel a need to say these things not only to clarify my own thoughts, but because this is an important issue we all have to face and settle for our own selves. Everyone in the world is a creator and the more culture and technology enables anyone to share to larger groups of people, the more the question of craft versus art comes back at us.

Speaking of which, I'm currently reading a fascinating book, Here comes Everyone by Clay Shirky. It addresses the impact of social media on creativity and the changes it has had and will continue to have in the future. You should read it.

Finally, as I was putting together the links for this post I came across a comment (goodreads.com) from a reader of John Carrey's book who was disappointed that they didn't finish the book with clearer understanding of what art is. Diana commented that his definition of a work of art is 'anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art'. She goes on to say, "In other words anything, and correspondingly, nothing" A few more thoughtful reviews are found on the Times Online, Denis Dutton Online and The Reason Online.

This perspective, which is the cultural norm, that calling something art acts as a qualifier, sieve, gate and value judgment. Defining art is like separating the sheep from the goats. Not only does this approach lead to fruitless and unending debate, I think it's destructive and wrong.

I couldn't find a way to artfully add a couple links into the show notes, so I'll just list them here:

The Emoti-Chair
CBC Spark episode # 71 about the Emoti-Chair

Here's the transcript of the show, it may or may not help.

Let me know what you think.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Hi, and welcome to the Video StudentGuy show, the weekly journal of a video student. I'm the guy, Paul Lyzun.

This is the second part to a show I posted a few weeks ago, Show #128, which was about Craft. In this show I'm gong to be talking a little bit more about art and some more about craft,

I began that show by talking about the path you might follow to make a film. I just wanted to sum it up in a tight little package, from my own narrow little perspective.

Along the way I got lost talking about craftsmanship. I don't apologize for wandering off the path, craftsmanship is the subject of my recent film. Craftsmanship is integral to filmmaking, and for myself, the duality of Craft and Art has been a lifelong tug of war.

I think I did a passing fair explanation of what I felt craft was, and by implication, what it's value is. I'll work hard not to go over the same ground in this episode. Let me just mention one more time how much I enjoyed the book, The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett, and if you are at all interested, as I am, in the meaning of art and craft, particularly what it means in your creative process, I strongly recommend you find a copy and read it a couple times.

The last two things I mentioned in episode #128 that leads into today's portion of the conversation are that art, or better and broader yet, creative expression, is a form of communication, and the other is the question and the book that bears the name, What is Art Good For, by John Carey.

Let me start with the idea that I got form the book, which is what good is art for? Let me start with the idea that was spawned by the book, which is, what is art good for?

The first thing I'm going to do is dispense with the word Art – it's a loaded word meaning everything and nothing. Just trying to narrow it's definition would take more time than it's worth.

I'm going to use "it" in exchange for Art and you can assume when I say "it", I'm saying Art.

I want to start off that way because it eliminates preconceived ideas of creativity. It eliminates pictures of what is not art and removes the risk of applying taste and prejudice (same thing? you decide) to the topic.

That frees me up for a few minutes to look at the question itself, which is really very telling.

To rephrase the question, "what is it good for" is a universal and a common, commonly asked question. It places the focus on the practical and pragmatic. Things exist because they perform a function. In a Darwinian sense, you could say things exist because they're food for something else, or are means of avoiding being food. Every detail in the construction and appearance of everything has a purpose. I believe that's true whether you believe in a higher power or the evolutionary process, or both. This isn't about who's responsible, this is about dealing with the way things are.

So, asking what is it good for implies there must be a purpose, that things exist for a reason. As I just describe, I concede they do exist for a reason.

Imagine that I made something. At a very minimalist level it is good for being the result of an effort of realizing an idea in the real world, the world outside our minds. We're thinking things all the time. Making stuff up that never was, and is not. But when someone takes an idea and makes it, physically, it becomes separate from the maker, beyond their control.

Now, why would anyone want to do that? Well, perhaps to get a more concrete grasp of this idea, Looking at it externally allows me to refine it's nature until it matches my expectations OR it changes the way I think.

Once I put an idea in the physical world, my mind isn't solely in control of it's idenity. The world that we both occupy now has some claim to it's meaning and in the process I can change as well as it can.

The thing I made changes me.

THAT, is the real power of creativity!

Being able to change yourself.

That makes it worth the effort alone, just to experience change in how I perceive the world I live in.

But it doesn't end with communicating with the world separate from myself. When I put it out there in a world of other individuals I open it and myself up to further change through the reactions of other people and how they view themselves and the world, the same world I live in objectively, but not subjectively.

It's a means of expressing a human experience and a means of sharing a human experience

Sounds complicated eh?

Well, getting back to the main question, what is it good for?

It's good for changing myself, changing other people – changing the world.

What is it again?

It is art, it is creativity, it is human expression, it is communication.

Everything changes all the time. Scale isn't the issue. We are bombarded, shot through every iota of a moment with information that changes our world view and I'm guessing here, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me we don't register most of it.

So the volume and the scale, it doesn't matter very much. Everything changes, all the time. You can't take it all in.

That's why we're all different right, we are the sum of what we choose to perceive.

Now, lets get a little more concrete. I want to talk about the book "What is Art Good For? by John Carey.

Because once we get past the abstract, fundamental view I've just presented, things get immediately sticky and oh so thick. Watch out that you don't loose a shoe in the mud.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I have not read this book, I'll tell you right up front and as long as I'm being honest I'll say that in all likelihood I won't.

I think I would enjoy his writing and find I would agree with a lot of what he has to say. I just don't have the time or inclination. I'm not saying this a means of passing judgement on his book, it's just a matter of personal bandwidth.

By all accounts John Carey is a good writer and very convincing in his arguments. He is witty, intelligent and dead on in his ability to deconstruct and lay bare the self serving mystification of the art establishment. His books are a pleasure to read. One author thought he was just a little too forgiving in his appraisal of the one medium he feels is superior, but overall, he thinks that it's a good book.

I've read a number of reviews and I've put a couple links on the blog page if you'd like to read them as well. After several different articles read, I feel I can made some generalizations (obviously without having read the book) and offer this simple, perhaps unfair generalization.

He says that the art culture is pompous and hypocritical
and that greatest art is literature.

See the time I saved you!?

The primary reason I'm discussing it here is to present an alternative view to his perception that all other creative works are subordinate to literature. And since I haven't read his book I'm not going to indict him personally, he may very well feel misunderstood on that count, I just want to use his premise as a jumping off point for this idea of a hierarchy in value to art – that there's always a pecking order.

The more we embrace technology in our lives, the further we become removed from our origins, the places and things that have shaped us as human beings over our time here on earth. Despite the pervasiveness of the technology surrounding us today, it still doesn't have the same impact on the way we think act and feel as "natural" environmental shapers.

So, we've surrounded ourselves with an environment of our own making – which is alien to us in a historically cultural sense. Plastic, steel concrete – they register in our higher functioning brain, but not in our unconscious mind, which got us by for hundreds of thousands of years before we began collecting together to build farms, towns and cities.

The invention of writing and the ability to read has had a profound impact on our culture, both as a means of advancing it, and archiving it. Certainly our success in living in an artificial environment is due mainly in part to reading and writing. But whatever we've read, whatever has been written, is a memory that connects us to a real experience of something we've felt, touched, smelled, seen and heard at an earlier time. I believe these senses are more immediate and transfer information to our brains in a more visceral and direct way. And yet, the further we move into the future, the less exposure we have to these sense touchstones. It's sort of like living without knowing what the midnight sky looks like without light pollution.

How much are we really missing? How much are we really separated from the past, from the real world in terms of the artificial world that we've created for ourselves?

Well, if you're honest, you know you can't beat a tornado. The best you can do is hunker down with Auntie Em. And how different is that from hiding from a tiger in a cave.

Of course it can be rightly said that writing presents information in an organized manner. After all, how valuable can art be that slips by your conscious understanding and sits like undigested meat in your colon until it finally integrates into your body you're not even aware of the cause of any change that's taken place? Or that change has taken place.

Actually, I think change that occurs without knowing is an an awesome power.

So think about music, the texture of a basket or the smell of a leather coat. It's a message organized in a different way. Nonlinear, holistic.

And you could say that writing has achieved a greater cumulative scale in meaning than any other media, but I reject the importance of volume and scale, in favor of the specific impact a creative work can have on an individual.

Let me use a specific instance to clarify what I mean about this unique effect that non verbal art can have on different individuals.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

About communication through the other senses
Spark #71
http://www.cbc.ca/spark/2009/03/episode-71-march-25-28-2009/

I listened to a show called Spark . It's from CBC Radio in Canada. It's a great show. Each show has several stories of different length about current and bleeding edge technology and how it's transforming people's lives. I like it mainly because, although it's all about technology, it dares to find ways in which technology is changing the way we live – as we're living it. Right now! That, is cool.

One of the stories in a recent episode, episode number 71, was a conversation about the creation of an emoti-chair, a device which produces electrical impulses, tiny shocks, that are triggered by the sounds in music.

When you sit in this chair it actually – it can actually feel like something is touching you. The creators of this technology have developed a new form of expression based on the sense of touch.It has begun to morph quickly. One example is that deaf people can sense music in a greater dimension.

Someone who was deaf described how at a party everyone who couldn't hear would hear the music through feeling the vibrations, barefoot, through the wooden floors. The difference with the emoti-chair is that each instrument creates a different sensation. Instead of all of the music coming through as one vibration, you had different vibrations at different locations on the chair, which of course affected different parts of your body. For each instrument. This mechanism allowed a deaf person the ability to experience music through assimilating multiple layers of sensation, in this case tactile, which mirrored closely the manner in which a hearing person experienced music through their ears.

Another person, one without hearing limitations found that the emotional impact of the music was intensified with the combination of the sensations that were generated by the emoti-chair. It literally brought her to tears in a way the music did not.

Finally, a musician who was composing music for the chair found that he was able to elevate the effect that the chair on the senses, not by writing a great song, but writing the music based on the sensations produced by sitting in the chair.

So the chair itself was his feedback loop, not his ears.

Is this any less the impact that literature has? Is the argument that literature is more powerful as a single force and to the greatest number of people because of it's ability to cross reference itself and establish a more cohesive, inter-referential whole? Is it because it's easier to document and catalog it's impact that sets it apart in value from all other forms? Is it the consistency of the media over generations that makes it easier to judge?

Okay, this is where you're saying, well Paul, you should just read the book and find out. Find out why he thinks that way!

Well, my point at it's very heart is that any creative expression has to be judged on it's own and by an individual.

So, the first point is that there's all this bogus mysticism about art, and it's being propped up by museums, and art collectors, and art speculators and so forth. That has, for generations and hundreds of years even, affected the way we perceive art. Remember, there was a time when art and craft were one thing. They were just simply creative expressions. At least in western culture, it wasn't until the Renaissance that they sort of split apart. And so there was a humbler form of creativity, and a higher form of creativity.

But, that was just simply a societal choice. Up to that point people didn't make that distinction and there was no need to make that distinction. And I believe very much that that was generated by money.

If people valued it and therefore they had to identify that it had a special, unique value, that set it apart. Supply and demand so to speak.

So however powerful any work of art can be, I just don't believe that there is a greatest hits of art. There is great art, there is universal art, but I think it's important to value work based on a personal level.

Just as one's knowledge and understanding of math and science is easier to measure compared to the arts in general, like in SAT scores, so society believes that's the better organized the information is, the better it represents a higher intelligence.

After all, isn't that how we were able to create a sophisticated culture? And I'm not saying that we can throw that away, but I think that it would be good to embraced that disorganized, holistic, intuitive aspect of ourselves just as much. This is what we're starving [for], currently, in our culture

So the idea of having the ability to quantify and categorize and hierarchize and organize art - that makes it much easier sort-of-like to build a mountain of blocks and then see which comes upon top.
Is that the reason literature achieves greater significance over the other arts?

I'm not going to enter into that argument. I can only say that measuring the value of something through the volume of it's impact is dehumanizing. Creativity is expressed on a personal level and impressed on individuals in the same way. Hundreds of people can view a painting at a museum in a single day. Thousands of people can hear a musical performance at one time in a concert. Millions of people can watch a movie on TV simultaneously. But every person internalizes that experience on a personal level.

Painting, music, literature, origami, everything touches everyone of us in a different way at different times and while you generalize about the critical defining characteristics of one medium, you also lose a lot in the streamlining process. And in that process you disenfranchise a lot of people from a lot of creativity.

It's not just about what you see and identify as art, it's what you allow yourself to believe what you can do, as far as art. And if you think that knitting is secondary to some other art form, then you're always going to feel like a second class citizen of art. Of creativity, forget the art word.

[Streamlining, simplifying art is a form of marketing. For money, for ideology, take your pick. The honest reaction of an individual to a single creative expression cannot be calculated, summed and expressed in anything more than a gross generalization that distorts its value.]

But I'm not interested in changing the world on this point. For myself, I feel that holding this thought, this consideration, as I create, will help me keep my balance against any outside pressure of generalized, common knowledge, wisdom and understanding.

Well, now that that's over I don't think I enjoyed it very much at all. How about you? It was hard work and I don't think it makes any difference.

Well, maybe a little difference. Now that I've written this down and thought about it, I have a better idea of what I think I think, and I can consider whether it makes sense or not. I don't know about you.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

After I wrote all this that I just told you, I had some other thoughts and I decided that, instead of integrating them, I'd just simply leave them as a footnote at the end .

I think the reason I'm going on and on about the idea of craft and art is this (and remember when I say art, I mean an expression of creativity and a desire to communicate):

Art with a capital A, as I've tried to identify earlier, creates a sense of heightened expectations. Somedays you don't feel inspired, you're glad you can drag your sad butt out of bed and put your shoes on the right feet.

Days like that can make you wonder if you should even put in the time. Everyone has days like that and you can't control when they happen. Frankly, I don't want to live with the weight of expectations about what I'm going to do or how well I'm going to do it, while I'm in the middle of my work. I don't want to be distracted, I want the creativity to flow out of me without any speedbumps.

That's the feeling I want, regardless of how useful, attractive or successful is the thing I end up creating. When I'm in that frame of mind, what I make is almost always good and whether it's what I want or not, it leaves me feeling good about the work and myself. And that just perpetuates more creativity.

[So I think all the talk about art is an after the fact thing. It's hindsight. Who knows how many trials, experiments or dead ends any creative person has to pass through before the finished work of art is delivered. No one wants to know, no one cares. So why do people who are making the thing itself have to think about it.]

I know, there's all kind of situations where you have to keep your eye on the deadline, measure the work you're doing against the anticipated product, keeping customers happy, keeping the business flowing.

I'm not saying you can dispense with all those voices, I only want to provide a little breathing room so we can create and build, At the same time I'm also listening to myself think, I can watch myself work, think about what I'm doing and have enough presence of mind to evaluate it, or re-evaluate it and then proceed forward to the next step.

When the focus is on craft you can have that kind of internal conversation, just you and the thing you're creating. And you can feel good about what you're doing, because you can see how you're doing.

Immediate feedback loop.

//

There's something about big people and little people when it comes to creative endeavors and I don't like the mentality that we qualify the creative value of something based on it's ROI. Yeah, we got a great economic steamroller of a system, but when I make things, I'm answering a need that places money below first place.

I'm not saying that we can live in a world where doesn't money matter, only that we should choose to live in a world where it matters a lot less than it does.

//

If you're still listening, I applaud your fortitude. Thanks for letting me talk this thing out. I think next week I'll do a short show about something superficial.

I've got links on the blog to the various podcasts, or books that I've talked about. Take a look at videostudentguy@libsyn.com. You can also leave a comment or a criticism at the website. Or you can send me an email at videostudentguy@gmail.com.

Despite how I may come off, I am interested in what you think, even if we disagree. In fact, I reserve the right to disagree with myself sometime in the future.

I'm Paul, the videostudentguy, thanks for listening,

I'll talk to you later,

in the meantime, be creative.

Bye

#134 PAB09 Afterthoughts

2009-07-22T20:13:00.008-04:00

What's in this show:

I'm going to talk mostly about some of the events at PAB 09 in Kingston. It's been a month and I'm just now getting my thoughts down. My apologies to Bob and Mark, the show's promoters, and thanks guys, for once again producing a first class happening.

First I have some updates about my computer. Then, after I give you a quick reminder of what PAB is all about, I talk about Jowie Taylor and the Six String Nation Guitar. Check out the site, it's full of really interesting stories that I can talk about only in passing. Better yet, if you can attend an event where Jowi Taylor speaks(his schedule is right on the homepage) about this remarkable artifact, you should attend and get your picture taken holding it.

As a counterpoint to Jowi's story I discuss some sobering and pragmatic information presented by Chris Penn of the Financial Aid Podcast and Marketing over Coffee. This guy's good!

All this leads me to talking about identity, personal and national, and the power of the stories that people tell…

I'm serious about my offer to interview any Canadian expatriate, or emigrant to Canada. Send me an email at videostudentguy@gmail.com and we can talk via skype. It's easy!

Oh, if you can help me understand what to do with Twitter (@bermamot), I'd be very grateful.

This is a long show, about 45 minutes so I've listed the time-code for the sections so that if you want to get on to another subject you can scrub your way forward.

00:16 Introduction
06:47 What is PAB?
08:55 Jowi Taylor and 6 String Nation Guitar
25:04 Chris Penn
32:14 Networking 101
33:41 Social Media History
35:51 Personal History
37:29 Call to Action
40:42 Good Intentions
45:46 Close

#133 Laptop Down

2009-07-05T17:57:00.010-04:00

Talking about hardware problems with my car, my own mental wiring and my laptop, leading up to attending Podcaster's across Borders in Kingston Ontario. I made it there an back, but I'll have to give you the high points in the next show.

Check out these shows,

On the Log - Episode 68: The Sound Between the Notes
DicksnJanes #202: postPABblab
Being Buff # 36, Jowi Taylor PAB2009 Keynote: How a guitar brought a nation together
Canadian Podcast Buffet will be uploading recordings of the sessions throughout the summer

Also, google PAB09. Every attendee who writes a blog or posts a podcast/vidcast will put this tag in their RSS fee.

In the process of troubleshooting problems with my laptop, using tools such as Techtool Pro, Carbon Copy Cloner and and Apple Disk Utility, the drive and the motherboard failed and an emergency trip to the Apple Store Genius Bar resulted in it being pronounced DOA.

All that I can do at this point is offer some cautionary advice on how to prepare, and deal with the inevitable computer meltdown.

Finally I go over some of the critical features I'm looking for in my next laptop.

Corrections:

I made an error in describing the pixel dimension of the MacBook Pro 15" laptop. It is 1440x900, which is identical to the highest resolution on my PowerBook 1.67 Ghz 17" laptop.
Also I was wrong about the price difference. There is only a $200 price difference, not $400.
Finally, the factory warranty is one year and you can purchase AppleCare, an extended warranty for a maximum of 3 years (not 4 years). A real bargain at $350. It covers any defective parts and service to replace them.
There are two graphics cards in both the 15" and 17' which have 2.8Ghz processors, and they function the same. There are other, slower processor 15" MacBook Pros and their hardware configurations are very different.

Here's the primary differences between the two laptops as far as I can determine right now.

15" 17"

• Cost Difference $200 less
• Two video cards Yes Yes
• Drive 500 Gig 500 Gig
• Card Slots SD ExpressCard/34
• Display Good Larger, HiRez
• Battery 7 hours 8 hours

The 17" is a good deal for the extra $200, no question about that.

#132 Handmade Film Screening

2009-06-17T10:28:00.006-04:00

In this show you can hear a recent screening of the film, Handmade in America at the Community School of the Arts in Mansfield CT.

Heather Bunnell, the Arts Coordinator of the school and Susan Gerr, one of the potters featured in my film, start off the show with introductions, as do I, to a crowd of of over 100 people.

I don't include the recording of people watching the film, but you can view the complete 20 minute film at Vimeo using the password: lorezfile.

The remainder of the show is a Q&A with the audience.

#131 An Interview with an Intern

2009-05-29T11:49:00.006-04:00

This show is a summing up of my recent experience interning at a documentary film production house as a production assistant. It was a good sized business, about 20 to 30 people, depending on the business climate. I didn't really comment about this in the show, but now, during this economic pit we're in, now has been a very good time to observe how a business like this functions.

Filmmaking may or may not be recession proof, but there's no question this time around a lot of money has dried up. I saw a lot of resourcefulness at work.

If you listen to this show I hope you'll get an idea of what an internship can offer you beyond your formal education. I also talk about some valuable lessons I learned and generalized how to go about getting what you want from this learning experience.

I have no doubts that internships aren't about the money, the time you spend or the sacrifices you make. In a nutshell about temporarily living the life you think you want. You can't see more than a small part of it, but it's a lot more than you see any other way. In the end the value you get out of it rests entirely on your effort to learn what you want.

Oh, an one correction, there is no such thing as JUST an assistant.

In the beginning of the show I mentioned I was interviewed by John Meadows for his show On the Log and we discussed the future of filmmaking. The show, Lights Camera and Interaction was broken into Part 1 and Part 2.

And I'm serious about the offer of interviewing you over Skype. If you would like to be on this show and you think you have something interesting, even half interesting, to say about filmmaking, video production, editing, motion graphics, even internship, let me know by leaving a comment here on the blog or emailing me.

#130 Catching the Big Fish - Review

2009-05-10T17:41:00.004-04:00

I've just finished a book by David Lynch, writer and directory of many movies, including Eraserhead, Dune and Twin Peaks. Catching the Big Fish is a the author's reflections on how he has and others can find ideas, big ideas through TM, Transcendental Meditation.

But the book isn't about the workings of TM, it's about his experiences as a filmmaker trying to solve puzzles as he worked on his films.

It's a quick read and has a lot of interesting reflections in it. You won't find a lot of practical information, but you will get a glimpse of the man and the way he thinks, and what he thinks about storytelling.

I hadn't finished reading the book before I recorded this episode so I didn't get to mention that he spends a few pages talking about digital video and it's impact on him and the Hollywood film industry. I'm always interested to learn how established filmmakers view this new technology and his response is blunt and pragmatic.

Here are a few links to comments I made about another filmmaker who writes and is written about, Walter Murch. He wrote a great book about editing, In the Blink of an Eye. He was the subject of another book I highly recommend called, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. Finally, though I haven't read it yet, I would suggest you look at, Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain Using Apple's Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema, it's a little dated, written in 2004, but between the history and biography I'm certain it's an interesting read.

Leave a me a comment or send me an an email

#129 I'm on the Radio!

2009-04-26T16:25:00.005-04:00

Towards the end of last year I had so many things to do I switched from a weekly to a bi-weekly show. I thought I could switch back, but I still don't have enough time, so for the foreseeable future I'll work hard to get one out every two weeks.

This week is kind of short, but a lot has been happening. Following a screening of my film a couple weeks ago I got an invite to a local radio to talk about the film and pottery. I was joined by Linda Gerr of Birch Mountain Pottery, who is one of the subjects in my documentary.

By the way, send me an email and ask me for a link to the full film and I'll be glad to send it to you.There's a link in the show a one or two episodes back if you thinking looking for it is easier.'

The radio call letters are WILI, you can find the link to the audio online here (posted April 23) or you can link directly to the audio file. Watch out, it's a Windows Media file.

Bill Meems left a comment on show #86, which was about the National Association of Broadcaster's show in Las Vega that I attended and commented on this time last year. Thanks Bill. I mentioned the Digital Production Buzz show as a source of news about industry announcements during the event. I've gone for the past two years and enjoyed it a great deal, but I'm glad for the chance to take a year off.

#127 Intern Again

2009-04-02T08:28:00.005-04:00

I have certainly been very busy, and certainly not with preparing podcasts, but that's about to change soon.

I have finally put up a gallery page on the website with production stills. The interface still needs a little neatening up, but it's working. I also found IE on PCs don't work well with the copy of the trailer that I had linked it to (it wasn't playing, it would load, but it wouldn't play.!) Rather than figure it out I loaded a new one and it seems to work. Let me know if I'm still wrong.

This show is a 15 minute ramble about things I'm doing as an intern. As you know I'm working as a production assistant at a documentary production company for a few months and I'm trying to make sense of the experience.

I think part of the problem is that I've worked in the same company for 10 years and I'm being throttled by change, down to the elementary level. That changes how you look at and think about everything. But I'm getting better. That or I'm numb.

I also have a screening at a local community center Friday April 10th. Here's a copy of the announcement (warning, it's a PDF) and if you're in the area and would like to come by - do so. And come up and talk to me to let me know you did.

For everyone else, I am ready to release the film, at least in a limited way. You can find the film here and the password is lorezfile. It's twenty minutes long and may take a while to load depending on your connection. If I already have your email address I'll be sending you an email with the same information.

If you have any feedback, good or bad, leave a comment here or on the Vimeo site.

Finally, there's going to be a local screening of the film at the Community School for the Arts on April 10. This is on the old UConn campus in Storrs Connecticut at 7:30. There is no charge, but if you can bring a baked food item that would be great. Download the flyer, which is a pdf file.

#126 I Am Intern

2009-03-17T09:39:00.003-04:00

I am starting a 3 month internship this week. I'll be a production assistant at a production company in Boston, so there'll be a lot to say about that in the next few months.

The big news is that I finally have enough of a website of the film to put online. Still rough and incomplete, it felt good to put it out there, sort of draw a line in the sand.

You can find it at handmadeinamerida.us, there were no more.com's available. Send me any suggestions, really, I'm not looking for congrats here, I think it's very rough and really only in phase one. Still I would like to know if there are things I can do to make it easier to use, or I've overlooked some content I should be displaying.

It's tricky because it's not just a website, it's a website for a movie, so if it doesn't pique your interest, or satisfy it, it's not working.

There's a trailer you can watch on the Trailer page. If you're really fast it will load slowly. I'm going to be recompressing the file and uploading it to Vimeo, the hosting site I"m using, then updating the link in the next few days.

By the way, if you're curious about that process, let me know, I can spend a show talking about that too.

#125 Stanford Documentary Film Program

2009-02-23T16:33:00.002-05:00

In this week's show I talk with Jamie Meltzer, filmmaking instructor at Stanford University. Stanford has a separate film program for documentary filmmaking and Jamie was generous with his time to tell all about it.

Stanford University Documentary Film Program

#124 Film Trailers

2009-02-04T20:00:00.004-05:00

I'm still in a bunker state of mind.

This show a little catch up on the state of the film.

How I approached creating the trailer
Vimeo vs YouTube
Compression artifacts, Macroblocks, compression noise
Building a website for the film and I'm using Blue Host

I leave you with a little ramble about being done vs being finished.

#123 What is New Media?

2009-01-14T18:00:00.004-05:00

Hi there, Happy New Year.

I've been hunkering down in the editing bunker through the holidays and came up long enough to leave you this note and the latest show.

My film is done. It's called Handmade in America. I'll be posting it online later this month and when I do I'll let you know now you can watch it.

I was thinking about the nature of social media and spoke about that a little bit in the show. I also wanted to let you know about a website and a podcast you should check out if you're interested learning how to make money through online distribution of your media, specifically audio and video podcasts.

Here's the links for things I mentioned in the show.

#122 Thoughts while I edit

2008-12-18T23:20:00.003-05:00

Here are a few thoughts that have been distracting me as I hunker down and edit my film.

In case I didn't go into enough detail in the show, or worse, if all that detail confused you, let me explain a couple things.

In one segment I'm talking about the "Fishbowl" of podcasting. It's a term that has the same currency among podcasters as kleenex has within the general public. With podcasters, the fishbowl syndrome means we have created a world that is not only unique, but separated from most people. Information gets in, but nothing is getting out. And because it's comfortable there's a risk no one inside the fishbowl will make an effort do something about it. This is the same experience every avid hobbiest has, the difference is that podcasters, participating in a "social" media, where communication means community and community building, there is an evangelical weight on their shoulders.

Another term used a lot, ad nauseam really, is "monetization" which I'm not sure is a real word. Apple's dictionary doesn't recognize it. Monetization's intended meaning within the podcasting/social networking community is the process of converting you podcast/social media into a money making machine. Essentially turning your hobby into a job. That sounds like a terrible idea when you put it like that.

What makes some people roll their eyes when they hear it is that the constant request for "how to" monetize is becoming a cliche. There are a lot of facets to podcasting, and monetization is a valid piece. But it's importance is often/sometimes inflated beyond it's real stature in this emerging medium. And, I have come to believe that the fact that the con people feel this way, and the pro people continually request "how to" points to the fact that no one knows how to.

It's like the get-rich-quick telethons on weekend and early morning TV. Never the same guys, always a different method.

Links mentioned in this show:

#121 Ruff Cutz Film Conference

2008-12-01T08:10:00.000-05:00

I recently attended a filmmaker's conference that included screenings of independent films. My film was included and while that was gratifying, I found the real value was attending the filmmaker's panels and viewing other people's reactions to my and other films. I picked up a lot of valuable information about ways to navigate the independent filmmaking process and I've included highlights in this show.

I am preparing a number of changes on this site and an upcoming video podcast, as well as completing my film, so, from now on for an indefinite period of time, I'm going to post shows twice a month instead of every week. Once I get a few new projects running I'll return to a weekly show.

Here are the links to people and sites I"ve mentioned in the show.

Ruff Cutz Film Conference

Jim Jermanok - Producer, Writer, Director

Steven Jermanok - Writer

Dale Carnegie - How to make friends and influence people

Michael Corrente - Federal Hill

Ed Sanchez - Blair Witch Project

Michael Phillips - Academy Award winning Producer

Patrick Smith - Animator

#120 Twitter is Alive

2008-11-20T13:32:00.000-05:00

The most recent episode of This Week in Media, #115 has some interesting comments about Twitter's impact on Brand marketing. TWIM is a great show if you want to understand the developing space of new media. Comments starting at about 47 minutes made me realize how important it is for marketers to stay on top of every kind of marketing, especially social networking apps like Twitter.

Daisy Whitney - New Media Minute

Motrin Commercial Flak - Forbes

#119 Rhinebeck Sheep & Wool Festival

2008-11-10T18:42:00.000-05:00

It took a lot of time to complete this show. I changed the format, just this once, to the AAC Enhanced format, so that I can include pictures and links. I have also made the pictures available online. I'm using Photobucket, instead of Flickr, because I was having serious problems loading the files. I've never seemed to have much success using Flickr. You can search for them under the heading, Sheep and Wool NY08.

You can view the pictures and listen to the audio through iTunes or on an iPod. I don't intend to distribute this show as an MP3 file unless I get some requests.

This is just an experiment at trying to tell a story, in this case about my trip to the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival a few weeks ago in October. It was a combination holiday and location scouting trip. I'm planning on extending ideas I presented in my student film about crafts and craftspeople into a regular video cast and I wanted to learn more about the fiber arts.

It was a pleasant event, don't know if I would need to return next year, thought there is an additional day decidcated to interantional fiber vendors, that would be interesting.

It's worth commenting on the amount of effort required to create this show. I'm not complaining, it's just amazing how much work it takes to proof files and use the right ones in the chapter markings. I think it would have been better to just put the images on Flickr and left this as a simple MP3 file.

But then, it wouldn't have been the same product.

All told, it was fun and interesting to make, but I'd have to do a lot more preparation to make this fit into my regular workflow so I wouldn't miss a weekly deadline.

Now that I'm not reporting on weekily events such as classes or assignments at my school, CDIA, I have to create content on my own. It's liberating, but it also places more demands on my resources and time. I can see there has to be more planning into the future so I can have three or more shows in the can to compensate for times when I don't finish a project on time.

Learning.

#118 Lame Excuse

2008-10-31T09:40:00.000-04:00

It's been a while and I've been working, I really have, and it's going to be great, you're really going to love it.

Give me a few more days.

Thanks. You're beautiful.

#117 Looking back, moving on

2008-10-13T16:06:00.000-04:00

I've been spending most of my free time completing the transcription process. This is critical for me to figure out what remains to be shot in order to complete my film, as well as speed up the editing process.

Transcribing is boring, tedious work and there's not a lot of stuff I can say about it, though I try my best. I've tried to speed things up by using transcription software. I started out with iListen from MacSpeech and then, when they came out with Dictate I switched to that, Dictate uses a vastly improved software translation engine that was licensed from Dragon Naturally Speaking on the Windows platform. I think I will have to look into using Dragon on my next project and see if that tops them all.

I've also been using my time to talk with instructors and get critiques on how well my film works. I know it needs improvment. I've spoken to a number of film faculty at CDIA. It's interesting to see how each person views the essentials of filmmaking.

One instructor, who is not a documentarian, emphasized the story elements and how the story is presented. Franco Sacchi, our resident documentary filmmaker was all over the structure of the film and how to use visuals to connect the ideas. I have another critique coming up soon with an instructor who is a strong editing and sound person, so it will be interesting to see how he views the needs of my film.

#116 Do I like Avid?

2008-10-04T19:32:00.000-04:00

It's been a couple weeks since graduation, so I've decided to catch you up with my plans for the coming year. I've got some additional podcasts in the works as well as ideas for this show. you can look forward to more interviews in the near future.

This is an unusually long show and I'm loading a lot of news on the front end, so if you want to skip that, jump to 10:40 where I start my eval of Avid.

My film, Handmade in America is still in process. I'm screening it with a number of people at school over the next few weeks, to find out how I can make a good film look and play better. I'm conscious that meeting the graduation deadline required me to skimp on some quality features, and while I don't want to dedicate the rest of my life to this story, I do want to look back on it knowing I did the best I could given my current abilities. I already see the need to do some pick-up shooting.

Even though I'm out of school, CDIA has a very open approach towards it's alumni, encouraging continuing connections and mentoring between former students and faculty.

I can spend a lot of time validating the time I spent in school, learning this craft, but I'll put that off for another time. I do want to bring to your attention a series of articles by Mike Jones of Digital Basin about whether it's worth your money to go film school at all. His first post was dated Monday Sept. 08, 2008 and continued for 4 more posts up to Wednesday Sep 17, 2008.

In the show, I mention a video host called Vimeo that I'm considering using to post screencasts. Blip TV is similar one that comes to mind. Anyone had experience with either of those, or recommendations of others?

And as far as a host for future sites and blogs, I've committed to BlueHost, a name I've heard other podcasters refer to positively. I've looked at a lot of different hosts, read comparative reviews and I feel that, at least on the basic level, they're more or less the same in terms of features offered. So, in the absence of any clear direction, I'm going with what's appeared on my radar.

Check out the Ruff Cutz Film Festival. I submitted and have recently been added to the films screened at this event, taking place at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University in Waltham Massachusetts, in the middle of November. I don't know much except that CDIA is a sponsor, they're encouraging films that are rough, which mine is, and it's inexpensive to enter. I'll be there and let you know about it.

The remainder of the show is spent sharing my thoughts about the pros and cons about using Avid.

Bear in mind, I'm approaching this from a beginner's perspective. As far as I'm concerned, I'm standing on the edge of the learning prairie, the mountains are nowhere in sight and I have no idea if I'll reach the sea on the other side.

So a lot of my concerns and ideas are limited by my exposure and use of this program. I don't think this negates the usefulness of what I've got to say though. I think this program is really, really weak for the beginning user. There was a time when the only way you could learn this software was from the cocoon of the production company that had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for each Avid workstation. Anyone who was chosen to learn this tool had the benefit of a seasoned professional editor, as well as their own years as assistant editors, watching in the shadows.

Experiences like that can still be had, but they aren't the norm anymore. At the midpoint on the user curve are people such as myself, people who want to produce their own independent films with a small team of people. Bootstrap filmmaking. This is where Final Cut Pro and Premiere have taken the lead and Avid is lagging behind. I think Avid has a lot to offer today's independent filmmaker, but I think they're shutting people out by raising the learning bar too high at the point of entry.

I'm going to check out the book by Diana Weynand, Final Cut Pro for Avid Editors. I haven't been able to find any books for people who use Final Cut Pro and want to use what they know to learn Avid, but I have found a few sites. Avid's site has video tutorials geared towards FCP users, Editing Organazized has a useful blog post about how specific editing actions are invoked in either program, Final Cut Pro to Avid and the Avid Community site also has tips and tutorials.

I'm committed to this course regardless of wolves, snowstorms or bandits, so any helping hand you can lend would be kindly appreciated. Thankye.

#115 CDIA Screening and Graduation

2008-09-28T23:00:00.000-04:00

As you know I've handed in my final project and this show is about my class's screening and graduation at CDIA. Yes, I'm done, but it's not over, it's never over.

Working up to and over the last minutes of my deadline left me very tired. As a result the remainder of the week's activities were a blur. I should have been able to talk about events in greater detail, but the truth is that I had very little capacity to absorb the experience. In some sense I was living in the moment, not anticipating the future or recalling the past.

I'm not much on ceremonies or "special events" in any case. They are what you make of them. I think the people who share them with you carry more weight in your memory, so I guess you could say that what I recall here is what I considered the important part.

I certainly was nervous about the screening and showing my film in front of a lot of strangers, it went off well though. People laughed in the appropriate places and I got a number of kind and constructive comments, which demonstrated more than anything else, that some people were paying attention.

The I want to give a special nod to Bob Daniels, the guy who runs the school, for some intelligent and brief comments about what lies in the future for the graduates.

What's next. As I said, it isn't over by a long shot. I'm doing a little polishing of the film so I can submit it to a local film festival, coming up shortly in Boston, called the Ruff Cutz Festival. As the name implies, you can submit the film where ever it is process. Some money is on the line, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm more interested in preparing my film for submission, and if it makes the cut, having the chance to watch another crowd of strangers judge my film.

Independent of that, I plan to meet with several instructors over the next month and discuss ways to enhance the film. Essentially I'm going to have the critiques I didn't have time for, before I handed it over for graduation screening.

Once that's done, I'm not completely sure what to do with it, other than use it as a calling card. I plan to create a site for it as well as other videos that I produce about craft - all crafts I hope.

There are two reasons I want to do this:
I want to continue to exercise all the skills I've been exposed to and hone this filmmaking craft. I don't want what I've learned to atrophy due to disuse. I don't have any plans at all to set out on a filmmaking career, I don't know yet what the next step for me is.
I really like this subject matter, it's really a big part of who I am and finding the stories are sort of like discovering parts of myself. I also think there's a lot of people out there who have the same feelings and creating a link between us seems like a the way to begin this odyssey.

#114 Panic on Day Zero

2008-09-24T09:22:00.000-04:00

Day Zero - Project Due

It's fitting that this show, which is about the final day of my film project for the Film program at CDIA at Boston University ends with a lot of energy and emotion, because, up 'til now I've been holding it in, quite well I think.

I wouldn't say I lost it, but it was close, it was more like clawing my way back onto the cliff edge that I was sliding off. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I only want to say that over these past 4 weeks the excitement and fun of editing and completing a film has completely leached away to frustration, stomach gnawing stress and all other kinds of unpleasant feelings due to having too much to do in way too little time. In the end I have to confess to dreaming too big.

I'm not apologizing for that, nothing I've experienced so far will change that about myself, but I have learned that I never want to do a film this way again. We'll see if I can hold true to that promise.

Today was a race against time, right up to the wire to complete color correction and titles - how many times have I talked about getting those two things done.

I seem to have gotten on a rag about various features of Avid, GUI in general, but Titles really took me for a beating. In the end I had to bail on using titles in Avid and did something quickly in Final Cut Pro. Don't do this at home, it's very, very painful and time consuming. Bringing an exported Quicktime file from Avid into FCP requires that you render the entire timeline and the titles will have to rendered each time you tweak them. But it was necessary to meet the deadline. I would be better to know how to use the tools within Avid. I'll let you know how difficult that really is in the next few weeks, once my head clears and I can approach learning it with a little more time.

I also plan to do a review of working in Avid, talking about the pros and cons. I know that most people listening are not using Avid, maybe not even using Final Cut Pro, but it is an industry standard tool, for the present, and I would like to give the benefit of my experience, as painful as it sometimes has been, so that you know where it sits in the pantheon of NLE gods.

Tags:
Avid, FCP, FCS, titles, color correction, transcode, tape transfer

#113 Abiding by Murphy's Law

2008-09-21T17:52:00.000-04:00

Day 2 & 1

As a result of excellent feedback from Linda, my wife, I've made some significant changes to the order in which speakers are introduced. I had begun with discrete, self contained blocks, where an individual presents themselves. Of course I intended to mix individual's comments together where they touched on the same topic as the film progressed, but it was made clear to me through Linda's perspective that I could begin that earlier, so there wasn't an obvious transition from one person speaking at a time to many people speaking.

It was a real structural problem for me and I'm grateful for the insight she provided. You know, I know what I want to do and could have acted alone, but I had nagging doubts that my perspective was too inside, too familiar to be trusted as far as how much I could ask the audience to accept as they were introduced to the film's characters and ideas. Things such as the pacing, I'm using a lot of rapid cuts. It really pays to have someone you can trust who can offer concise, intelligent comments.

Day 1 ends and I still don't have the film transfered to tape. I spent a number of hours but between working with HD footage in Avid and moving it to HDV tape, or SD for that matter, there were lots of unresolved problems. And I lost a lot of editing time in the process.

Not that this isn't my own fault for starting late in the first place.

I mention a number of suggestions made by one of my constant instructors, Howard Phillips, for enhancing the movement of the story and I did a poor job of explaining J & L cuts, so follow the link to find out a little bit more. I've added them throughout the film to ease the audience from one cut to another. It's a subtle thing. The difference it makes is not so much what it adds, so much as what it removes, which is often an abrupt, gawky cut between two speakers, or scenes.

Another point I missed in the excitement of reciting my day, is that the 90 second segment where I introduce a new character and I thought I was going to have to scrap it because I didn't have B-roll to cover several jump cuts. I forgot to mention the solution, which was to use dip-to-color between the cuts. It's only a second where the clip fades in, then out to black, but it heals the jump cut wound quite nicely.

Now, I know how to do this and had used it sparingly in other parts of the film, but I thought it was too much in your face, it would be too jarring to the viewer if I did it several times within 90 seconds. I was assured by people whose opinions matter that it was fine and acceptable. I don't know if they meant in general, or under the circumstances of the looming deadline, but I gladly accepted it like a get out of jail card. We'll see how people react at the screening.

#112 Room to breathe

2008-09-20T15:35:00.000-04:00

Days 5, 4 & 3

Still working on the rough cut, focusing on story pacing, removing things that take you out of the story.

I'm reflecting a lot on the meaning of craft, the subject of my film, and being as tired as I am I'm afraid I'm not completing whole thoughts. I'm gaining spontaneity at the price of coherency when I'm not reading off a script. You tell me if it's worth it!

About five and a half minutes into the show I'm trying to make a point about the life craftspeople try to lead and I'm using a sports competition metaphor and it utterly fails. What I'm trying to say in this instance is that the measure of success is the process of work and learning they're engaged in, their life's journey, not a specific accomplishment or feat.

Trust is a perennial issue for me, and exercising trust in the audience is what I need to do as I continue this edit. Just as Jay Moonah said At Podcaster's Across Borders this past June, the content is the audience. They create meaning out of the context of their experiences, in this case, watching this film when it's done. Learning to trust that people are paying attention and pulling all the disparate pieces and ideas within the film to create a whole that leads them to… what, my way of thinking.

No, this film is not like driving cattle through a narrow, fenced in path (don't know the name of the path, sorry), but I do hope that it will direct people to think about specific ideas with new understanding. Providing some understanding, that's sufficient for me.

Tags:
editing, video, filmmaking, rough cut, craft,

#111 Holistic Film Editing

2008-09-18T08:59:00.000-04:00

Day 7 & 6

Originally I thought I'd name this show Recognizing Mortality. I've heard that if you want people to find your posts you need to give them names that reflect the general nature of your content. I thought that fit because editing requires you to face the death of so many things, ideas, hopes, illusions, favorite bits, not to mention your own inflated ego. However, oblique, inside-joke titles, while clever, don't have much value if no one gets them, or listens. So I decided to change the title to something that at least will show up in a search on film or editing. Am I selling out my art for convention or monetary sake?

I don't know if Holistic Film Editing is any better, but I think it's appropriate because in this show I'm all about working the entire story on one timeline, making sure everything works together. There I go repeating myself. Forgive me if it seems like I'm continuously in search of what I mean, but, well, I am.

One of the requirements for graduation, besides finishing this film, is to give up a minute of the film, uncompressed, that will be shown during graduation. It's a great idea, but I begrudge every distraction at this point in time. My film is very rough still, so I had to pick a minute of footage and clean up the audio, do a little color correction and make sure i t was coherent before I could export it. Fortunately I had a segment that I had already done some finessing. Still, a distraction.

Right now I'm taking the segments I've created and place them in order on the timeline so they work as a whole. That involves making changes at the beginnings and endings of each, so there's a comfortable, natural transition in terms of ideas. This is pretty tricky and I'm finding that, where it's difficult to accomplish that, I may have to choose to radically change one segment or the other to make the transition coherent. Either that, or I need to add more footage to make the transition, or lead-in make sense. And you know, by transition, I don't mean a transition effect, I mean adding clips that allow the viewer to make the leap from one idea to the next.

Here's a couple lessons that I've been learning during the past few days while editing. I'm pointing them out here because doing the edit is where they've become real. All the preparation, classroom instruction, friendly advice wasn't enough to take this to heart. Editing, especially against a tight deadline is what has really brought it home to me.

Try not to edit with blinders, you have to always keep your eyes open to the entire story, not just individual segments
Getting feedback early and often helps a lot. Early because it's then that you can afford, ego-wise, to surrender ill conceived ideas that are apparent to others, but hidden from you.
Trust the intelligence of the audience. Once they are engaged in the ideas you're presenting, they will be able to follow on their own, they don't necessarily have to be lead to conclusions.

#110 Critiques: Scaling Illusions

2008-09-16T08:30:00.000-04:00

Day 8

Over the past year I have been trying, without success to figure out how to use a calibrated monitor to display video coming out of the computer, as I color correct. Today we had a color correction class for Final Cut Pro, something that was arranged outside of the program, based on specific requests from our class. I think that speaks volumes about how flexible and generous the school and the instructors are towards meeting the needs of students.

Anyway, I'm going to create a screen cast, post it on YouTube and you can link to it to see how it's done.

The unfortunate thing is that you can' display HD footage through an SD monitor. So there you are, I have HD footage and I can't monitor my color correction, I have to go solely by the scopes, the Waveform or RGB Parade monitor, VectorScope and Histogram. Of course the trick is making sure you're viewing your results on a calibrated monitor.

Of course, that's not nothing, it counts for 90% of the way home, but that last 10% is the difference between a vacant stare and a smile.

I've used a monitor for color correction on SD footage shot for a Practicum film back in May. (Show 91) It made a big difference, not only in terms of quality, but also in building my confidence in my own color correction technique.

Howard Phillips, a frequent instructor screened my latest revision and gave me a very good critique. There's so little time, so every intelligent comment is greatly appreciated. The big problem is that I'm making the same point over and over again. I couldn't see it myself, but once the scales were removed from my eyes it was embarrassing how obvious it was. That's half the value of having others review your film. And getting that input before you're too attached to the cut is the other half.

#109 How the days run down

2008-09-14T06:24:00.000-04:00

A really long, typical, frantic day

Arrive early at school to pick up equipment and I trigger the alarm

Once back at work I quickly set up for the shoot at 1:00, so the shoot in short order, quickly tear it down and capture it before I run off to school to return the equipment

I'm trying to squeeze in a little editing and hand off copies of a rough cut and end up wasting most of my time.

Really, the day is an example of how lack of time leads you into making stupid mistakes that waste more time.

After wrapping up the day I include a few comments about coping with the stress and allowing the film to work itself out in the moments between getting things done.

#108 Editor's Confessional

2008-09-12T21:19:00.000-04:00

Countdown to final project delivery. Days 11 & 10.

A lot of hand wringing, but there's hope too!

#107 Roughcut on the run

2008-09-10T21:09:00.000-04:00

Day 14 Editing
Day 13 Shooting
Day 12 Driving home through heavy, sticky traffic

I'm still pulling together the entire story of my film, still in rough cut mode. I'm just beginning to set boundaries and eliminating individuals wholesale, because the film isn't long enough to include more than a certain number of faces and voices. I don't know what that number is, but I've already eliminated 1 of 4 key interviews I did with potters. I found that when I introduced each person at the beginning of the film, one individual didn't fit. It was an odd experience that I had never had before and I it hit me like a vague itch as I was assembling the cut. It was completely apparent when I saw it full blown, along with my class, during the screening I reported on a few episodes ago.

It's one of those gut feelings you need to cultivate. As painful as these choices are, I know that hanging on to scenes, footage or characters that don't move the story ahead is like driving full speed ahead into a mud-hole. And nobody wants that.

Wise or not, I chose to give up a night I would otherwise be editing, in order to attend a series of talks at school by professional editors and filmmakers. Jay Rose was one of the highlights, as was Michael Phillips of Avid. The main message was geared towards the younger students, about finding your way into the media business, even if it means being a coffee toting intern. The critical thing to achieve is contacts and develop a set of work references that will lead you to your ultimate goal.

Five speakers, they all said the same thing: Be persistent and persevere.

The next day I used my evening to take some hirez stills at Sawmill Pottery, Dot Burnworth's studio. I have great interview footage of Dot, but I had to leave early the day of the shoot and got very little B-roll, particularly of her work.

One of things I realize I must, must, must do going forward, whenever I finish a shoot, is right away, within 24 hours at the most, review the footage. I didn't and a lot of time passed before I reviewed it. When I did and realized I had little to no B-roll (poor planning and poor execution) and by then it was too late to arrange a 2nd shoot. The best I could do was take digital stills and use them in a pan and zoom effect. I haven't tried this in HD before, so I will have to see how well it works. It better work, because I'm counting on B-roll to hide a lot of jump cuts.

#106 Rough Screening

2008-08-31T14:01:00.000-04:00

Day 16 & 15

I'm quite busy using all available time editing my film. My podcasting solution is to record summaries every couple days and posting them. I'm counting down the days until I have to hand in the project and this show is the second one in the series, days 16 and 15.

Even with this clever idea I still am a little pokey posting these as I still don't have much free time to edit and even write this meager blog post. The days I'm talking about are not in sync with reality, which I think would be much more dramatic, but since I'm not getting paid to do this and my paying job doesn't subsidize my podcast, I'll cut myself some slack. Once the deadline passes and I can walk out my front door and see that big yellow circle in the sky, I'll have time to post them in short order AND finish that symphony I've always wanted to write.

How is it I have time to write this now you say? Well, here's an Avid life lesson. I'm using a G4 Mac, about 1.67 megahertz, 2 gig of RAM and a fast 500 gig Firewire 800 external drive. I'm using Avid Media Composer two. It does the job well enough, I've only been cutting up to now, but I'm dreading working with effects.

Whenever you connect your connect the drive with your media and project file infromation into another computer, Avid will reindex you media when it is launched. Sometimes, like on an Intel Mac Pro workstation with a fast SATA drive, memory, processor etc., it can index pretty fast and only keep you waiting a few minutes. Sometimes more. On a computer like mine, a lot, lot more.

I don't know what I did, since I didn't disconnect my drive and launch my project off another system, but after a taking a couple hours for lunch I turned the drive back on, relaunched Avid and voila, indexing. As long as it takes to write this, maybe post this.

Just be careful to budget time for this kind timewasting, and keep the mylanta at hand.

In this show I'm reviewing the our class screening. There were 4 films shown. Two are essentially done, one is a narrative, excellent, another is a trailer for a documentary, also very very good. One class member was MIA, turns out he never got the date for the screening. His film, a narrative, is pretty much done as well. The other person in the class showed a portion of her film, which is being edited by another class member and plans to show a trailer at graduation.

My film was not complete, I had put together about 70% of it, no really, more like half of it. Still it was 20 minutes long. I'll explain why in the show, no need to get into it here. I got a lot of constructive feedback and was raring to dig in the next day, but it didn't work out that way.

You'll have to forgive Day 15's segment. I've tried a number of things in Soundtrack to help it out, but I couldn't combat distortion which is due to wind on the mic. I argued with myself to take it out completely, but, for the sake of documenting my progress, I left it in.

#105 Subclipping Hell

2008-08-23T13:03:00.000-04:00

Subclipping is a necessary part of organizing your project, creating structure. Doing that will allow you to rip through your media as you pull the story together. With the deadline I have, about 3 weeks when I recorded this show, what I feel I really need to do is begin editing, but that would be disastrous and lead to chaos with the amount of footage I have to work with.
Editing

I'm using Avid over FCP. I've chosen to use Avid for this project even though I have more experience using FCP. I've discovered a few drawbacks that could negatively affect meeting the deadline.

Finally I have begun editing the footage, starting with discrete topics, keeping a general story order in my head. I find this process works for me. Once I got enough footage cut together I moved the contents of these sequences into a single timeline sequence to see how well everything pulled together to tell a cohesive story. It's still incomplete, but I'm very encouraged.

#104 Transcribing

2008-08-13T17:03:00.000-04:00

21 days left.

I've used my time during the past week transcribing all the interviews I recorded using a tool called MacSpeech Dictate. It does a good job of converting the spoken word to text. It's a new program that uses the dictation software engine developed by the people who created Dragon Naturally Speaking, a PC only program.

It took me a week, but I was able to do it during my hour plus commute. I still have to go back and review the text and correct any errors.

The best part of all of this is that I'm reacquainting myself with the words of my interviewees and I've fallen back in love with my story and my film. I don't know where I went, but I'm back.

So the next step is to subclip the footage based on topic and then I can use that to build my story.

#103 Wk75 DVD Authoring

2008-08-08T06:31:00.000-04:00

Well, at last, the final week of classes. I talk about compression in DVD Studio Pro and Color Correction in Avid, including some suggestions for improvement on the DVD authoring class.

I'm finally out of my lethargic funk too. I have 30 days to complete the edit, pick up a couple shots and finish the film. I'm way behind, so I'm making plans and thinking focused.

#102 Podcamp Boston 3

2008-07-25T11:00:00.000-04:00

I attended the Sunday sessions of Podcamp Boston 3, which was held at the beautiful Harvard Medical School conference center. I met a lot of generous, interesting people and really put the work in networking. There were a lot of presentations, about 4 or 5 every hour, about 5 times during the day, but I spent more time talking to people outside of these sessions.

One of the cool features of this conference was something called a BrainTorrent, which was a beautiful oval room full of tables with name tents on them, each one with a different topic or concept and anyone was welcome to sit down and join the conversation. That's where I met Mary Anne Davis and Guido Stein. Mary Anne is a potter and Guido is a knitter and we got into a conversation about social media and craft and before you know it, I was recording it.

My own feelings about the even were very positive. I'm so happy I met as many people as I did. More people than I can remember and credit. Meeting Keith Burtis was very fortunate. His live woodworking video cast is very cool and I'm looking forward to conversations with him about the production aspects of creating video shows.

I'm always impressed by the number of people who blog but aren't yet podcasting who attend these shows. It's a good sign that the events don't put off an exclusive feeling and it's healthy to talk to people who are just as passionate about new media but aren't in the podcasting fish bowl. Sharon Couto is one blogger who attended the event with an eye on moving into Podcasting.

I moved into a new media space that I hadn't intended to become involved in, at the encouragement of Mary Anne. I now have a Twitter account, the user name is Bermamot. I haven't posted anything, anything at all since Sunday. I'm a busy guy, but I'll give it a chance. There are definitely two camps, people who are infatuated with Twitter or microblogging, and people (and one of them) who don't see the sense at all and don't have any time for it. I feel as though I'm standing at the door to the Twilight Zone.

Finally let me mention a cool site I saw at a BrainTorrent table. I'm going to use it when I set up my upcoming website. It's a program that analyzes your website for Search Engine Optimization - SEO. It explains what each suggestion means and it appears very thorough. It's free at websitegrader.com. Thanks to Mike Volpe from Hubspot.com for coming to the conference and showing it off.

#101 Wk74 DVD Authoring

2008-07-24T09:41:00.000-04:00

2nd week of the last module in the Filmmaking program at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University.

We're going through the Apple Pro Training series book, DVD Studio Pro 4. It's an excellent book, all the books in the series are great tutorials and are a good introduction to the Pro Tools suite. They lead you through a series of projects focusing on different parts of the authoring process, using media from professional projects.

It's interesting stuff, but we're all a bit tired and looking forward to being done in a week.

#100 Podcasters Across Borders

2008-07-17T19:30:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the longest show I've posted to date. On average these shows run about 15 minutes and when they've gone over 3o minutes I tend to break them into parts. The main reason for the length, which is about 52 minutes, is the inclusion of multiple comments and excerpts from presentations from PAB. My main goal here is to give you a sense of the event, which is quite unique among conferences. But the downside is how much time it adds to the show. And editing multiple interviews complicates the production process. Even up to the last few hours before posting I found some errors that required me to rerecord some sections. Most of the changes are changes in attributions, another time sink in production, which I got wrong on the first recording pass.

I'm satisfied with the final show, even though it's long. If it's a bother, let me know, I'm compressing it down as much as I can. In the future, I'm thinking about using Apple's AAC format, which makes mp3 files smaller but retains higher quality. It also allows me to bookmark and add graphics, but, as far as I know, AAC files only play on iTunes and iPods and I don't want to exclude any listeners. Any thoughts?

Because I am including a number of voices besides my own I've added a note at the bottom of the blog that indicates the type of Creative Commons license I'm using, which is attribution, non-commercial, share alike. I'll talk a little more about CC in a future show, right now understand that you can use all or part of this show as long as you include the name of the speaker and where the audio came from. You can't sell it and if you include any part of it in your own podcast you are bound by the same license. Thanks to Connie Crosby for pointing me the the right direction on this topic, for some reason I find the legal aspects of publishing baffling.

This show is about my experience at Podcaster's Across Borders and begins with my personal thoughts about the event. Halfway through I have some excerpts of presentations and some brief commentary on what I took away from the experience and then I finish with a series of interviews I recorded at the end of the weekend as the room slowly emptied. It was a great experience and I've put in a lot of effort trying to put into words what it all meant, because, as I try to explain, PAB wasn't your regular new media conference. Lots of people were trying to figure it out besides me. Check out the comments on David Peralty's blog and you'll see a wide range of reactions.

If you're just interested in the excerpts I've got the timecode listed below. In addition, all the presentations will be posted at Podcaster's Across Borders throughout the summer. Subscribe!

I've also listed the names and URLs of all the people mentioned or heard in this show. Some have podcasts, some blogs and some are thinking about it.

If there was any message or call to action people took away from the event (and there was plenty) one of the most important was find your voice and share it. I second that.

Contents:

00:27 - About me and the show
06:45 - Tim Coyne presentation
09:56 - Tim Coyne interview
16:51 - Tod Maffin presentation
20:50 - Jay Moonah's presentation
26:46 - Me trying to make sense of Marshal McLuhan
33:51 - Chris Brogan's Jolt
41:30 - Attendee final comments
50:11 - Closing remarks

Links:

Conference attendees and presenters who have kindly allowed me to record and post their comments in this show:

Tim Coyne - Hollywood Podcast
Tod Maffin
Jay Moonah - Media Driving
Chris Brogan
Whitney Hoffman - The LD Podcast
Connie Crosby
Dave Fleet - davefleet.com
Bill Deys - The Country Music Cast
Murray McGregor
Francis Wooby - Wooby Communications

#99 1/2 - Whoops!

2008-07-14T20:36:00.000-04:00

Here's the deal, normally I test the links in the show notes by posting it and then taking it offline, until I'm ready to post the audio. This is what I was doing this morning just before I rushed out of the house to take care of some errands. Obviously, I forgot to take the blog offline and while this isn't normally a crime, since I was talking about THE PODCAST, and it's not ready to go up, I took the notes down in order to avoid more confusion.

I'm sorry for those you who have been looking for episode 100 online. I'll be posting it in the next day or so.

#99 Wk73 DVD Authoring

2008-07-03T11:44:00.001-04:00

Another new module and the final one of this Program. This week plus two more and I will be done with school, but not with my film. Finishing the film will be my priority once school is finished. It's sort of like graduating and then having to go to summer school, or cleaning up after the prom. Or something.
There's no time to rest though, until I finish my film my stomach is going to be churning and adrenaline is going to be pumping.

This final class is shoe horning in two ideas, DVD Authoring and Color Correction. We're using Apple's DVD Studio Pro for the authoring and we're looking at color correction in Avid, which has superior tools for the job over Final Cut Pro. Not so Color, Apples newest tool in the Final Cut Suite. I address them all in this show, including reasons why Color, which is the deepest and richest of the three tools for professional color correction, should not be the first thing you reach for when you correct color. Take a look at the T L Cooper Eclipse, an expensive sophisticated keyboard/input device that allows you maximize the color correction workflow. There's a great review of using this tool at Ken Stone's site. In the show I refer to Pitch Black, Titanic and the Lord of the Rings series are good examples of using color throughout a film to evoke place, mood and time.

Macaela Vandermost is the instructor for this module. She introduced the idea of color correction at the beginning of the class, because we're going to be spending a full day on Saturday, the last day of the class, learning about color correcting in Avid. A lot of people in class felt they should get an overview of color correction in FCP and she kindly obliged. Color Correction is a difficult concept to grasp and it's even harder to do well, so getting an introduction at the beginning of the class and then more in depth instruction at the end should make it easier to get it.

We spent the entire class Tuesday looking at color correction and Thursday we did a quick run through of using DVD Studio Pro 4 to author a DVD. Classes for the remaining module will go into depth on the critical aspects of authoring, such as compression, creating menu navigation and menu graphics and developing an efficient workflow.

#98 A Tale of Two Conferences

2008-07-01T16:27:00.000-04:00

There's an interesting event coming up towards the end of this month in Boston. Podcamp Boston 3 takes place July 19th and 20th. You can get directions and other information, including a list of sessions that will take place through the links I've provided here.

I attended this event last year, and I talked about it in episode #56. The conference founders, Chris Penn and Chris Brogan, both attended Podcasters Across Borders last weekend and I was fortunate enough to interview Chris Brogan and asked him to weight the advantages of each.

I was fortunate enough to interview Chris Brogan for a few minutes between sessions at Podcasters Across Borders and asked him to comment on the two events.

I hope you get a better sense of both events through my comments and Chris' interview. There was only a few minutes to chat between some sessions, so our conversation was rushed. I think you'll find if you attend Podcamp Boston 3 that there will more time and space for conversations and meeting new people.

I want to say thanks to Chris for talking with me. I know he's going to be at Podcamp and I hope you'll be there too.

#97 Wk72 Post Audio

2008-06-27T09:01:00.000-04:00

Vacation week coming up. That means time to edit my final project. Woo hoo

Since I took off the last days of this class I got an F. But, but once I hand in the assignments it will be turned into a pass. If I do a really good I may get a high pass, or, gulp, a very high pass. Lots of motivation there.

There's 4 weeks left to the end of class. I'm going to miss it once it's gone. I am looking forward to finishing my film without the distraction of class attendance and assignments. I guess you could say I've already checked out.

Once again I'm talking about Podcasters Across Borders without providing any clips from the interviews I recorded. Coming up, I promise. Check out and sign up for Podcamp Boston 3 if you're in the area. Take a look at the sessions being offered. It's just a good, only different.

Speaking of good conversation in a hallway, I end the show with some perspective I got from Federico about the whole point of this filmmaking program, which is getting a job being a filmmaker.

This was a familiar message, but I saw something new that I hadn't before. I got it that I don't need to treat this like the last film I will ever make. It won't be if I end up using it to get a job making the next film. People are going to recognize, regardless how much time and attention I lavish on this project, the essential value I add to the filmmaking process. If they are professional they'll filter out the flaws and see the potential. Its hard to have that much faith in yourself, or other people.

But I don't want to leave you on a downer man. Right now I'm excited about editing my film and I'll probably be at school as often as I have been, so I can concentrate - and knowledgeable people will be available to help me see a clear path to the finish. Just like in production, you don't make a film with just one person.

#96 Wk71 Post Audio

2008-06-25T13:44:00.000-04:00

This is a very short show because I recorded it as I was exiting the house on my way to Podcaster's Across Borders in Kingston, Ontario Canada. It was a great weekend of of learning and conversations with a lot of really interesting people. As I was getting the links for the previous episode I noticed that Podcamp Boston 3 is in a few weeks. I was caught completely off guard. Last year it took place at the end of December, so barely 6 months has passed. During PAB, I was fortunate enough to interview Chris Brogan, one of the cofounders of Podcamp and a key organizer of Podcamp Boston. Look for the interview in an upcoming show and seriously consider attending the event on July 19 and 20 (Saturday and Sunday).

Catching up with past classes, this week is the 2nd week of the Post Audio module. With a little help from instructor Doug Plante, I finally understand the process of spotting and scoring.

Spotting is the process of identifying the location of music along the timeline that would help support or anticipate the mood you want a scene or action to convey.

Scoring is using the spot marks and comments to place music along the timeline that fits the moods you want to support.

I'm surprised how my view of the edit of the film I used changed as I went through this process of spotting. Looking at the film, which I had created in a previous module, I was surprised to discover the moods it presented were not what I had originally intended. It's an interesting way to look at familiar footage with more objective eyes.

Of course, you don't make changes once someone begins scoring a film. You score a film, that is it's locked down, editing is completed, so that the editor won't make changes that would require the music director to completely rewrite the score. After all, the score is tied directly to the timeline.. Change the film - change the music.

Oh well.

#95 Wk70 Post Audio

2008-06-25T13:26:00.000-04:00

Been at PAB, expected to have posted this and the next show before I left. No time, as usual.

This episode and the next was in the can and waiting for post before I left for Canada last week. I thought about post dating these episodes, but that seems a little dishonest.

Podcaster's Across Borders was a great event, met a bunch of people and got a lot of ideas to chew on. It wasn't a technical conference, it was more about networking and idea sharing. I've never been to the Portable Media Expo, now called New Media Expo, which will be out in California later this summer, August 14, but I have been to Podcamp in Boston.

All three events are different in how they approach social media and there's something valuable to be learned from attending all of them. Podcamp and PAB are within driving distance, but California is too far for me to travel this year. I would say that PAB was the most informal. The schedule was packed though and most conversations I had were short and had to be followed up at the end of the day's sessions.

Give me a few days and I'll have a post up for that, along with some brief interviews I recorded.

Talking about whining. What do you want from me? Well, that's the question this time around.

I would like to know how real I should be reporting the student experience; it's not just the subject matter in class. I believe that how you cope with the demands of school will tell you how you will deal with the pressures of production work in the real world. Just another undocumented learning opportunity in the curriculum of life.

I've reached the point where I have enough material to begin editing and begin shaping the story of my film. I've got a lot of work ahead of me with almost 300 gigs of video, about 12 hours of footage. Organizing this much footage is going to be critical in order to meet the September deadline for the final cut.

Over the past week I had the following shoots and classes:

Two days shooting a Raku firing
Shooting B-roll at Sturbridge Village
Interviewing Dot Burnworth at Sawmill Pottery

The class this week was the beginning of Post Production Audio
We're going to score music for a film we've already created
Using sound effects and foley on a commercial
Using the audio tools in Avid and FCP
Outputting the audio form a film to OMF for editing in a dedicated audio application, like Pro Tools.
The physics of audio, including the inverse square law

Last day of the week I met with and interviewed Ron Sbardella, a veteran potter of 25 years.

#94 Podcasters Across Borders

2008-06-17T12:56:00.000-04:00

I'm attending a new media conference called Podcasters Across Borders in Kingston, Ontario Canada this weekend. There's going to be lots of interesting people to meet and things to hear and learn. There's not much else in this show except my expectations.

I created this episode so that I could pare it down to under 3 minutes and submit it to the PAB site as a teaser for this show. They're taking audio submissions from attendees that represent their own show. I figured I would just use the opportunity to talk about my expectations of the event, how I feel about the potential of new media and tie in what my show is about.

It is an interesting experience cutting down something to meet a another purpose - sort of like creating a trailer of a movie.

Take a look at the teaser page and listen to my audio and compare it to this show. And listen to the other shows, there's a lot of great entertainment and information represented on that page.

I'll give you updates when I get back next week and hopefully include some interviews.

#93 Wk69 Editing II

2008-06-09T10:50:00.000-04:00

Continuing shooting.

A Raku firing class with Susan Gerr of Birch Mountain Pottery, Old Sturbridge Village, a recreation of a New England village in Sturbridge MA and another potter, Dot Burnworth at Sawmill Pottery. This puts me over the hump as far as enough video to begin editing.

Check out the Digital Production Buzz episode for May 22 and listen to the first interview of Norman Hollyn, an editor and teacher at USC, he has a lot of interesting comments on learning how to edit. At 11:50 or so into the podcast he makes a comment that strikes me as both simple and profound when it comes to summing up the message of a film when you begin editing.

#92 Wk68 Editing II

2008-05-27T14:51:00.000-04:00

I've updated the show listing on this duplicate blog, videostudentguy@blogspot.com and I will continue to keep it updated until I can wrestle RSS to the ground and combine both feeds into one.

Lots of shoots this week, follow the links below to see who I've been talking to.

Huntington Theater

Cornwall Bridge Pottery - Todd Piker

Paradise CIty Art Festival

Debbie Miller Designs

JAK Designs - Jennifer Armstrong / Tanya Alsberg at Paradise City

Kelly O'Briant at Paradise City

Linda Huey

Birch Mountain Pottery - Susan Gerr

#91 Wk67 Editing II

2008-05-21T21:12:00.000-04:00

Color Correction tips, SSNSC Practicum and shooting the She Loves You promo video at the Huntington Theater

List of links to subjects mentioned in this show:

South Shore Natural Science Center

Huntington Theater - She Loves Me

#90 Wk66 Editing

2008-05-18T19:47:00.000-04:00

Links in this Show:

Birch Mountain Pottery - Mug Day

Old Sturbridge Village

Fort Point Art Walk

South Shore Natural Science Center

Huntington Theater

Huntington Theater - She Loves Me

Gabrielle Schaffner

Linda Huey

Avid ScriptSync

#89 Wk65 Editing

2008-05-11T18:40:00.000-04:00

I'm discontinuing posting on the Blogger site. It's just a duplicate of the Libsyn site and that seems to have the most traffic. I'll leave a note with a link to the Libsyn site.

I lost data because of a damaged drive, which I hadn't backed up. Don't do this at home okay?

At the same time I was digesting this trauma I was conflicted over which camera I should use which CDIA loans out. You can try to follow my various colliding trains of thought that led to the ultimate decision. I did decide, but the real issue isn't the camera, so much as it is trying to grasp the phantom of security when it comes to assuring I will always have a camera to shoot with when I need it.

It appears that getting comfortable with insecurity is the lesson of the week.

Just to make sure I learned my lesson I had to shoot an open house at Birch Mountain Pottery and I hoped to interview some of the customers. It makes my stomach ache to have to ask complete strangers to sign a release form and talk to me on camera. I managed to walk through that fire, thanks to Susan, her family and everyone who attended. I don't see the fizzy feeling is going to go away over time. Man up, right?

#88 Wk64 Editing

2008-05-05T18:36:00.000-04:00

Nikki Bramley is our instructor for this module. She was assistant editor on The Price of Sugar and has a lot of experience editing in both FCP and Avid.

I spent this week trying to nail down my workflow with Avid Media Composer and P2 media There was a problem bring in the media. It comes down to a very specific workflow.

I also had technical problems working with Avid due to the presence of the unsupported versions of QuickTime and the Mac OS. She provided me with a table that contains all the versions of Avid, Quicktime and the OS and what works with what.

When you're working on a production system don't update iTunes, it automatically loads the most current version of Quicktime.

You can find information on the Avid forums at Avid, Creative COW and the LA Final Cut Pro User Group

I'm behind on defining a narrative arc. Nikki gave me some suggestions such as creating little scenes or stories within your story. I mentioned that in a recent episode. She encouraged me to imagine and write down what they might be before I arrive at a location.

I took a day off of everything and joined my wife in seeing a knitting superstar speak at the Calvin Theater in Northahmpton MA. Her name is Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, otherwise known at the Yarn Harlot. She was very funny and uplifting. Do a search for her name and Northampton and you'll find dozens of blogs that documented the experience.

#87 Wk63 Shooting

2008-05-02T18:31:00.000-04:00

Once I got back from NAB I got a little sleep, did a little non-film garden work and learned the value of the Assistant Director. It's their job to budget time and and make sure everyone is on schedule.

During a recent night shoot I got some ideas about budgeting time on the set. You need to respect the needs of other people, set a stop time and stick to it and be prepared to stop even when you're not ready. You can't push people to work beyond their limits and not pay a higher price later on.

#86 NAB Conference Pt3 Wednesday and Thursday

2008-04-22T19:48:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday, the last day of seminars at NAB I attended a series of classes on Flash Video as well as an introduction to the Adobe Media Player. You should google the AMP because I believe it has significant implications to independent content producers.

Thursday was the last day of the exhibition and I chose to look at prosumer cameras from JVC, Canon, Panasonic and Sony in order to see what the state of the art is for filmmakers such as myself and what the future might hold.

There's also been an interesting back and forth between myself and Mike Jones in the comments section of episode # 84 about new codecs and cameras and the larger picture of how to evaluate and choose the right camera for you needs. You'll see a counterpoint on this subject between Mike and a reader on his blog.

I have to confess that after an entire day looking and handling cameras from the above mentioned 4 manufacturers the most important thing I leaned is that I barely have a clue as to what the determining factors of an effective video camera. The debate rages on without a clear winner and I'm just beginning to realize I what it is I need to know.

#85 NAB Conference Pt2: Sunday through Tuesday

2008-04-15T18:26:00.000-04:00

Here are the classes I've attended over the last 3 Days

Sunday Classes
Keyframing in Avid
Understanding Podcast Metrics
Long Form editing in Avid (Documentary Production)
Main Title Design for Film and Video (in After Effects)
Mastering Media Management for Avid Editors

Monday Classes
Emerging Web 2.0 Technologies
(walked the show, saw Panasonic)
Broadcast Worfkow on Avid (Documentary Production again)

Tuesday Classes
In Depth PS CS3 for Video
In Depth Color Correction in Avid
Looked at XD Cam at Sony
Blender at Lowell - blenderlights.com

Color Correction and Avid Production. Lots of on lighting in earlier classes

I'm just giving a quick overview of my state of mind and the classes and show booths I've seen. I've included a superficial comparison between Sony's XD CAM and Panasonics HVX200 and newer HPX 170 (arriving sometime in the summer) Also info about the new AVC Panasonic.

Please excuse the pops, I chose not to rerecord so I could get this out quickly.

#84 Wk62 Shooting

2008-04-14T18:24:00.000-04:00

The week before I took off for Vegas and NAB, I got in some shooting, in particular on my documentary.

I began my film project by shooting two interviews, one at the Wesleyan Potters, a craft coop and the other of a professional potter at Birch Mountain Pottery.

Both shoots gave me trouble with the lighting, but overall I got a lot of good footage and excellent sound bites.

I also dedicated my weekend to handling the lighting on a classmates film, John.

#83 NAB Conference Pt1: Friday and Saturday

2008-04-13T16:15:00.000-04:00

In this show I'm talking about the classes I attended and some general commentary about Las Vegas.

Here are the sessions I sat in on, check out the full schedule

Friday Seminars
Fast Start with Apple Color
Digital Video Production: Lighting

Saturday Seminars
Practical Triming for FCP
How to build a blog to support your podcast
Making a living off of your podcast
Under Podcast Metrics
Effective Documentary Production

#82 Arriving in Las Vegas

2008-04-12T18:21:00.000-04:00

I thought I'd pass on a few notes and travel tips as I make my way to Las Vegas for NAB.

#81 Wk61 Shooting

2008-04-12T18:17:00.000-04:00

Lots of episodes this week and not a lot of time to write notes.

In this show I run down the film project status of each person in class. I also managed to get in two days of shooting for my own film and I try to describe the lighting work I did over the weekend for John's film.

#80 Wk60 Preproduction II

2008-04-07T12:58:00.000-04:00

Projects are accelerating

A classmate, John is in the lead with his film project. He has a shoot on the weekend and I'm handling the lights.
We've done a lot of planning, but due to unknown space restrictions, and a lot of unknown unknowns, we're going to have to play it by ear as far as framing and lighting are concerned. There's going to be lots of communication back and forth between the DP and lighting

Tuesday we discussed our shooting schedules in class. I'm scheduled to shoot Thursday and Friday. What a relief to have something to shoot before I go to Las Vegas.

One week left, let me know what you would like me to report about NAB

#79 Wk59 Preproduction II

2008-04-02T10:50:00.000-04:00

Lots of activity this week, but little to do with my own film project. Almost all my attention was devoted to Directions, the annual networking event sponsored by my company. I spent four days shooting interview spots of about 30 people. Add to that a lighting gig I'm doing for John's film. John is a classmate, we've worked together on a couple of class projects in the past. He's way ahead of the curve as far as film projects. He's already rounded up his cast, location, got the crew and is shooting throughout April beginning the first weekend of the month.

Somehow I've become the lighting guy. I did a significant light role in our last class project, the Killer, I obsessed about the lighting for the Directions promotional interviews and the video I just shot at the event. That's only because I felt it was a really weak facet of my skill set. Now I think I'd like to work with the camera.

I'll have time to work with the camera on my own project. I'm anxious about getting some footage shot before leaving for Las Vegas. NAB is putting a huge who in my schedule as far as shooting is concerned. I'd feel better taking off the time knowing that I've begun. With all the distractions and obligations it's difficult to get started, but it's harder on my stomach if I don't.

NAB is beginning next week. The exhibition begins Monday April 14 and the seminars start the Friday before. Let me know if you want me to check out specific vendors and you're interested in learning more about a particular technology.

#78 Wk58 Preproduction II

2008-03-27T09:17:00.000-04:00

Whether to use the Canon XH-A1 or the Panasonic DVX200 is more than just HDV versus HD, or tape versus P2 solid state. It comes down to what you know, and I know the Panasonic better than the Canon. Brand wise, I'm all over Canon. The first film SLR I purchased with my own money was a Canon FTb. Tough as a tank; I loved that camera.

It's just that I believe that it's easier to create when the tools being used are transparent, that is, they're so familiar that they're effortless to use, acting as an extension of your body. At this point I can't say this is true for any video camera I've used, but the Panasonic is the closest. In the show I give a little detail on the advantages it has over the Canon.

One of them is the ability to shoot in true slow motion. I've put some examples on my YouTube page of slow motion and accelerated motion footage and as well as a video demonstrating rack focus.

We've spent a lot of time in class reviewing the data forms we need to fill out to create our production book. The book, which is a collection of forms signed, lists of names and shots, drawings, sketches and other information that represents the roadmap to our final destination, the finished film. It's a work in progress, but we do have to something to show before the end of the module.

Don't forget to send me questions you want answered while I'm at NAB, the National Association of Broadcasters conference, coming up in mid April. I'm available for meetups if you're in Las Vegas at the same time.

#77 Wk57 Cinematic Storytelling

2008-03-15T10:23:00.000-04:00

In this show, proposal creation and the review process, developing your pitch and getting started.

I forgot to mention a conversation we had during class about the documentary - narrative continuum, so let me talk about it now.. We looked a a variety of documentaries that range from straight talking head to what appears to be a narrative feature.

Errol Morris has long used the technique of dramatizing reality in order to advance his narrative arc. It's very different from something like the History channel where they dramatize a scene within a documentary. And of course there are a lot of feature films that try very hard to represent an event as meticulously and accurately as possible, not only in the look and feel, but also in staying very close to documented record. Zodiac is a good example of that. Certainly there are fictional elements, but the story revolves around the written record of the events as they happened. As a result it has more of a fictionalized documentary feel to it

There is a divisive sentiment in filmmaking, as there seems to be in all things where people get passionate, of choosing sides over either/or - better/worse. Either you are a narrative sell out feature filmmaker, or a libertarian socially conscious documentarian.

Of course there is a middle ground, and it isn't a separated from either extreme . There are documentaries that have strong narrative arcs and there are narrative films that have a cinema verité character.

The reality is that there is no best, truest form of filmmaking; you choose to do what you like. Cinematic storytelling is a continuum. How you tell a story, either through fiction or documentary is a matter of degree. Each has components of the other and the polar opposites are just in a different location along the same path.

To me, that means I can at least mentally escape the label of being one kind of filmmaker and be free to tell a story in the way that best suits it.

Links:
Errol Morris
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001554/

Zodiac
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443706/

cinema verité
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/11/verite.html

Tags:
zodiac, cinema verite, documentary, proposal, pitch

#76 Wk56 Cinematic Storytelling

2008-03-12T20:29:00.000-04:00

Lots of loose tangents of thought this week. I'm continuing the refining process for my documentary proposal. We didn't spend much time talking about scriptwriting since it was covered in previous modules. You can review previous episodes for more information about that practice. Check out the Grim Reader podcast (be aware that this link will open iTunes) for quick, but insightful advice about preparing your script.

Here a link once more to some video that I produced on my company's website.

Some of the topics this week are about creating a proposal; a written document that describes the film's goals and outlines production responsibilities. Others topics are more personal, illuminative. Such as,

You, the client and the film - always choose the film first. There's always going to be conflict, and the client is going to think they can add just one more thing, or they'll insist you act on a really bad idea. Instead of coming back with what you, IYHO as a "professional" would do and further alienate the relationship, take the middle ground. Come in on the side of the film. When you advocate what's best for the film, you demonstrate that you care about the product. That gains you a lot of respect and keeps the focus off what individuals want.

I've included some ideas about interviewing people. Lots of places on the web give advice about interviewing people. I like to listen to podcasts on the subject, they give me insight into different approaches and as well as something to compare my own skills against.

Relax and ask a lot of questions. Listen to the person and instead of running down a bullet list of unrelated questions. Tie each answer to the following question, or ask them a question that expands what they're saying. Find subtle ways to direct the speaker along paths you want to explore, so it feels as though they are a part of the conversation.

It continues to surprise me how willing people can be to talk if you demonstrate you're interested.

A brief note about the minimum for producing video for the web. Don't go too bare bones in production or post if it's going to reflect poorly on the client.

Finally, I'm going to NAB. It's a great training conference and a chance to see the latest and greatest hardware and software for digital film and video. I'd love to meet up, if anyone listening is going to be there. If you're not, you can send in requests for information I can report on. Let me know either way.

I posted a couple shows last year, #21 and #22. I plan on posting a show each day this year.

#75 Wk55 Cinematic Storytelling

2008-03-10T15:39:00.000-04:00

Once again I'm starting another module. This one is called Cinematic Storytelling and its about using visuals to tell the story. The final product for this class is either a script, if we're creating a narrative film, or a documentary proposal.

I just got a Zoom H4 and I have few things to say about it. I'm using it for the next few episodes, so you can expect me to update my impressions.

We've learned some important details about the requirements for our final project. More importantly the class is given a couple of writing exercises that, for me at least, releases me from writer's block. It all comes down to collecting ideas and then refining them until they're in sharp focus.

Grammar Girl has a great episode on writing tips and dealing with writer's block. Check out episode 56. I like this show because it's interesting and practical. I learn a lot about writing clearly and it's pretty painless.

I also heard on a recent episode of Digital Production Buzz a link to an HD Production Workflow Tips. This is a great show to listen to if you want to know what other people are doing in digital video production right now. I haven't had a chance to review the tips yet, but the guy who produced it sounded experienced and knowledgeable.

#74 Wk54 Edit Lab III

2008-02-24T20:36:00.000-05:00

Strapped onto a log, riding the sluice of learning

Check out the links to some interviews and B-roll I produced for a conference put on by the company I work for. It may not look like a lot, but I did it all on my own and it represents most of my life during January. It feels so good when it stops.

I recorded this episode in pieces at different times. Once I met the deadline for my day job I was freed up to complete The Killer edit. At the end of the show I talk about the critique and the different ways other people in the class approached their edit of the story.

I wanted to recommend student screenings to anyone interested in learning more about filmmaking. Your response to the weaknesses of the film provides good insight into what you already know about filmmaking. They're a good source of insight into potential errors and oversights when producing your own film. A cautionary resource, particularly for a student filmmaker like you and I.

The entire experience of producing The Killers has given me a lot of thoughts about getting the coverage you need to tell a story. The fastest path to success is planning through preproduction. Pre-visualization tools like storyboards and shot lists are valuable tools as well. It doesn't matter how you do it, what matters is that you create the edit before you begin shooting.