Overheard:
I like Zune fine but it's not better than the iPod and iTunes (read about MS strategically innovating off Apple Spotlight search for a parallel). The navigation is not quite as easy and the software and the way it works with the hardware is still kludgy, despite having a few features up on iTunes. Integration with WiMP was expected, but the new app is more unwieldy, maybe do to DRM concerns.
DV maestro Adam Wilt of ProVideoCoalition's Camera Log shared his utility on the SF Cutters list:
SF Cutters are meeting tonight, Thursday May 29, with guests that include:
Studio Daily notes What Frank has learned at Avid, thus far. Avid's new frankness is via a new Avid product designer, Frank Capria of Xprove, FinalCutPro-List, ProVideoCoalition, Capria.TV, etc.
Peder Norrby, the person behind Trapcode, announced the release of a new After Effects filter on the AE list:
Forgot to add this one to the list...
As mentioned earlier, Adobe notes: "One important thing about playing an H.264 video file as progressive download is that the moov atom needs to be located at the beginning of the file, or else the entire file will have to be downloaded before it begins playing." You can fix this with QTIndexSwapper (an Adobe AIR app by Renaun Erickson) or with qt-faststart.c (a command-line app by Mike Melanson).
Trish & Chris Meyer have been posting some basic useful audio articles on their Pro Video Coalition blogs:
MacVideo.TV finished posting a new interview series Walter Murch - History of Editing, an overview of editing from the 1960s through Avid and Final Cut experiences.
FreshDV reposted parts of Panavision's lecture on Demystifying Digital Cinema Camera Specifications. Where else can you hear talk of The Nyquist Theorem and linking optical and digital sampling?"Basically it boils down to this: Pixel count does not equal resolution because of Modulation Transfer Function, which has an effect at every stage (light through lens, lens to chip, all the way to the projector lens and it hitting the screen in the theatre.) In addition, single sensor bayer cameras are essentially optically 4:2:0 cameras because they record 1/2 the red & blue data compared to the green channel.
I guess you COULD take their claims as a swipe at Red IF..."
Motionworks posted some preview movies of Trapcode's forthcoming filter Horizon.
Fini comments on the recent post from ProLost that discusses a filmmaker who used both Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks to finish an entire feature:
There a bunch of ways to get movie files off a DVD (mostly covered earlier), and they all use conversion unless you can use the VOB files directly. VOB files can be used directly if they aren't encrypted at the DVD replication factory; sometimes you can just import them into an app like Adobe Premiere (rename them to .MPG first) or Avid Liquid. On the Mac, you'd need Final Cut or Apple's QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component.
Fxguide has an article on Ironman effects as well as a podcast, Behind the HUD of Ironman, which features Dav Rauch from The Orphanage. Rauch led the team that designed Ironman's Heads Up Display.
Preceding the posts on Flash Wars was Ars Technica's popular From Win32 to Cocoa: a Windows user's conversion to Mac OS X (part 1 here) on the failure of .NET and Vista UI consistency.
Who knew that the Magic Wand Tool would become compositing's Holy Grail?
See also a previous post Hitchcock was a drama king which noted Jeff Bays' How to turn your boring movie into a Hitchcock thriller and a newer article Hitchcock Humor ("suspense doesn't have any value if it's not balanced by humor").
