Adobe Anywhere released

Early today announced the immediate availability of Adobe Anywhere for video, which was previewed in April at NAB. There's more at PVC in Adobe Anywhere released.

FX industry troubles: Lee Stranahan, Scott Ross + editing

Recently 2 news stories on the FX industry in China and California attracted wide attention (see VFX offshoring unpleasantness), and were followed by an Open Letter To James Cameron: Fairness For Visual Effects Artists by Lee Stranahan in the Huffington Post.

Today Fxguide posted background info and an interview with Stranahan in fxpodcast: An Open Letter to James Cameron.

If you like this, be sure to check out the December 2009 Fxpodcast with industry pioneer Scott Ross on history and the future of the visual effects business as outsourcing away from the USA accelerates.

Update: even editors are worried about outsourcing now, with remote collaboration tools available like iChat Theater in Final Cut Pro 7 or Fuze.

Update 2: on 03/05/2010 Mark Christiansen asks, Is a Visual Effects Guild to Materialize this Decade? Fxguide has a few more items in Visual Effects link roundup.

Fuze Movie: SyncVue Gets a Facelift

Kendal Miller at PVC takes a quick look of a newish approval tool in Fuze Movie Announced: SyncVue Pro Gets a Facelift.

For previous AEP looks at review & approval and management tools, click theapproval tag.

Note: spacesimon says, "But what happens when Skype is down like right now?" Fuze responds in a comment below that they plan to add the use of Fuze Meeting.

PVC Review: Post-Production Management with ShotRunner

Over on PVC, Mark Christiansen is profiling two online post-production management tool alternatives to manipulating Basecamp templates that are in beta and already used in production environments, Shotgun and ShotRunner. His first review is Online Post-Production Management with ShotRunner.

Those apps and a few alternatives were mentioned briefly here in May in Shotgun, Shotrunner + more production scheduling & collaboration. Introductory movies are available for most of these solutions aimed at review & approval and management.

The Basics of Screenwriting

FilmmakerIQ mentions AFI’s The Basics of Screenwriting (hosted on Fathom):

"In this seminar from the American Film Institute, Amy Dunkleberger guides both novice and professional writers through the creation of an engaging screenplay. The seminar clearly and concisely leads you through the creation of an effective premise, compelling characters and a structure for your work. Throughout the sessions, writing techniques, presentation do's and don'ts, screenplay terminology and film clips juxtaposed with their shooting scripts help you develop your initial whim into your final screenplay."

FilmmakerIQ has related posts too (scroll down), like What’s Wrong With The Three Act Structure? -- and of course there's news & analysis from John August and Mystery Man on Film, and more on Wikipedia (Pre-production, Screenplay, Screenwriting) & all over.

There's already a market filled with script-oriented apps like Celtx (open source pre-production software), Final Draft, Gorilla, and others, as well as the forthcoming Adobe Story.

Also, AFI has short intro videos on filmmaking at ScreenNation Learn. Here's Scriptwriting (AFI's Lights, Camera, Education!):

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.

Client review of movies

If you've got a project that you need to show to a few people, and only them, there are a number of ways to do this. A range of solutions, some free and private, were discussed in a previous post, Review and approval.

At the very least you can use streaming services like YouTube and make the videos private. But dedicated systems can have advantages. Xprove should be easy to use and they have a free plan to get you started on smaller projects. Another system is SyncVue Pro; if you have time see FreshDV's tutorial movie SyncVue Pro 2.0 New Feature Tutorial Pt. 1 and Studio Daily's Create a Reliable and High-Res Review Session with Skype and syncVUEpro.

BlipBack video comment widget

Mashable has a story on BlipBack, a new video comment widget that lets you or your visitors record short video comments directly to your web page. Blipback also can receive video messages from cell phones, "so if you have a video enabled phone you can post directly to your widget while out and about or hand out the address to your friends and family and they can post to your page while they are out."

I can imagine several services for post production with modifications to services like this, or improvements to various review and approval solutions and planning systems like CeltX. A small market, high cost, and upload bandwidth are obstacles though. Then again since there are at least 9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network each freelancer can tailor a network space to a range of purposes. Live video is easier now to implement and should soon be part of the mix.

Adobe's Bridge Home and purchase of Scene7 signals the importance of services. That's not quite as big as Google and Microsoft infrastructure-building moves but still interesting, and we have to wait a bit more before Adobe Media Player features and other services are announced.

Review and approval

Clients might don't always understand the importance of linking comments to movie times! Adobe's Clip Notes is useful for annotation of comments but people I know find QT Movie NoteTaker (Mac/Win) easier. It opens anything QuickTime can, and there's no need "doing window burns, waiting hours for renders, making DVDs, spending hours encoding, and then there’s the hassle of the review process -- having to continually hit pause on a DVD remote and write down the timecode you see on the screen."

If you just want to share a few files and use those annotations programs -- and don't have the budget for a service or webspace to store them -- you could also use file sharing services like Xdrive, SeeFile, and YouSendIt, although privacy terms may vary. It's also possible to make videos private at video sharing sites like YouTube.

There's a number of new services to do review and approval, among others tasks, including: Xprove, CineSync, FilmFlip, PIXSytem, MediaBatch, and MESoft. Studio Daily has a new short sketch about another system, pictured above: Create a Reliable and High-Res Review Session with Skype and syncVUEpro.

Xprove goes free, to a point

Earth Day announcement: Xprove now offers free online video review and approval accounts.

Frank Capria: "We decided there were two ways to get the word out about Xprove. We could spend money on advertising and marketing, or we could spend that money upgrading our system to handle free accounts. We chose the latter. Now everyone can have a free Xprove account. It's limited to 100 MB (half hour of material with decent WMV 9 or H.264 compression) and a single project, but we think this will be useful to a lot of people with only occasional review and approval needs. The free account has no ads, no Xprove branding. It's completely professional looking. You can use it for real client work.

Everyone wins. Review and approval is now available for free to everyone. If Xprove can save a few thousand people a couple of car trips a month, we all benefit. We've also added some new features. Most notable is custom branding. Your Xprove site now looks like it's part of your web site. Now you too can have one of those fancy 'client log-in' links on your home page."

SyncVue and Xprove: more client review

Other tools helpful in client review, in addition to previously mentioned QT Movie NoteTaker for Win/Mac and WordPress plugin Video Comments, are SyncVue and Xprove. Both solve the problem of the limits of e-mailing large files to clients, and provide some of the benefits of Adobe ClipNotes from PremierePro 2.

SyncVue (Windows version due soon) allows for collaborative reviews via a Skype peer-to-peer connection, while Xprove provides storage, alerts clients material is ready, and passes their comments to you.

Frank Capria (the president of Xprove) elaborates on the AE-List:

"The easiest thing if you want the media on your own server would be to setup a Wordpress blog for each client using the video comments plug-in mentioned below. It's all PHP/MySQL, so you can get under the hood and modify as you see fit.

Here's how it might work.

-- Each client gets a blog like clientname.yourdomain.com.

-- You can password protect the subdomain to keep prying eyes out.

-- Each client can subscribe to the RSS feed of their blog. Thus they get instant notification when you post something.

-- Using the Video Comment plug-in linked to below, they can comment on your clips.

-- Set up every user at the client site as an approved author, so comments don't have to be moderated.

It's a few more steps than Xprove, but if having everything on your own server is important to you, it would work. It all comes down to how much time you want to put into this. Both SyncVue and Xprove are pretty inexpensive and the infrastructure is someone else's problem."

Video Comments, a WordPress Plugin

via Frank Capria, a really interesting beginning to all sorts of uses:

Video Comments allows you to post video in your blog and allows comments to be made on it in-time. A popup window displays the video and commenting area; as a video is viewed the comments associated with a current video time will be displayed, viewers can also see all comments and jump to a specific point in time.

Transcribe with QT Movie NoteTaker

via DV Guru...

QT Movie NoteTaker, a Mac app, seems like it might do eventually do what Clip Notes does in Premiere -- and more.

A free download, it lets you "watch a series of video clips and take notes, or if you need to get dailies or raw footage to clients or collaborators for comments, you know what a huge hassle it can be- doing window burns, waiting hours for renders, making DVDs, spending hours encoding, and then there’s the hassle of the review process- having to continually hit pause on a DVD remote and write down the timecode you see on the screen.