Shooting broadcast sports + HDV camera review

Tom Guilmette is a prolific communicator and a director of photography, cinematographer, and editor. Here's a few of his videos:

Sony HDR-SR11 Camcorder Video Review - 120 Frames Per Second from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

Shooting sports from Fenway Park from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

Lightroom's Golden Ratio & Spiral guides

Teh interwebs have noted The Tremendously Lazy Rule of Thirds and comments, but the most interesting tidbit so far, via tgaul, is that Adobe Lightroom has Golden Ratio/Curve guides in the Develop crop tool (hold down the o key).

There's more on the use of the Golden Ratio at Pendery.org (in Lightroom) and in Layers magazine. Layers has another tutorial, a video that shows you how to construct of the Golden Ratio and spiral; see Illustrator: Golden Section.

For tips on creating your own spirals, see the AEP post Taming the Spiral. [update: see Ellipse Tool Plus from Hypoly too]

It's a wild world, so there's no reason to get stuck on one schema. There's whole other orders of pattern available in Penrose tilings and Islamic patterns. But some roads can be too ethereal for suit everyone, like Christopher Alexander's ideas on design, complexity and order, or film editor Walter Murch's observations on the similarities of between the Pantheon, the ratio of planetary orbits, and musical scales.

Shotgun, Shotrunner + more production scheduling & collaboration

Here's a tour of a new web-based media production tracking and collaboration system called Shotgun. More info and links can be found via Final Cut User, which has a backlog of updates queued.



Another system recently twittered is Shotrunner, which has some QuickTime tutorials. The blog vfx.netzfilter posted some other options found in research Research on visual effects production databases and Random Links - Visual Effects Pipeline Design and Production Databases.

Update: VFX Nexus is another entrant in this niche. "It's specifically designed for tracking shots and enabling collaboration between artists and supervisors, allowing both a clear view of the status of their projects, shots and tasks at all times. This ideology - coupled with report creating, deep search abilities and customized views - is our version of Project Management." Here's a summary:


Update 2: There's a number of newer services that could branch into this niche too, even if they mostly do review and approval: Xprove, CineSync, FilmFlip, PIXSytem, MediaBatch, and MESoft. Let's hope someone does a proper roundup that compares these options and includes other software like Celtx.

Enhancing Video Resolution with Stills

Only long shots in a very down economy, but the many graphics research efforts seen in computer vision papers and demo videos make it seem like new game-changing features are getting closer. Here's another research report out of the University of Washington nexus (via aescripts), Enhancing and Experiencing Spacetime Resolution with Videos and Stills:



The video is related to another project blogged around last year, Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene.

Star Trek transporter effect

Via Make Better Media is the fun Star Trek transporter effect, below, from Videopedia. There's some interesting tidbits of info and a quick peek of another version effect in the new movie.

Among a variety of other things like The 24p Conspiracy, Videopedia has specific short Trek transporter tutorials for those who need them in Sony Vegas, Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere, and for Traveling Mattes and Masks. Videopedia even gives you a particle clip for free, if you can't imagine ever using the built-in Particle World filter again.



Update: another style is from After Effect Tutorial StarTrek by Robin Cranson,

CS4 tips in Layers magazine

Todd Kopriva notes a Layers Magazine collection of generic Creative Suite tips from Adobe product managers, and goes beyond to link to the relevant After Effects Help pages. See After Effects CS4 tips in Layers magazine for details.

All Bets Are Off: skewed still motion + better light wraps

Aharon Rabinowitz has been making tutorials for years at Creative Cow and more recently at Red Giant Software. But he's also got additional ones at his site All Bets Are Off Productions.

Some of these add value to similar tutorials that require 3rd party filters, like More Techniques for Better Light Wraps, or just share techniques like Creating 3D Cloud Motion From a Still Image, which uses the Slew property in the Transform filter (an old DVE trick via Noel Powell).