Fair Use Explained

via Sheila Curran Bernard, author of Documentary Storytelling: Making Stronger and More Dramatic Nonfiction Films:

Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use is a useful handbook from veteran filmmakers to help other filmmakers understand some instances where using copyrighted material without clearance is considered fair use.

Wikipedia on Editing

Wikipedia has a good sections on editing, like Movie Making Manual-Scene Editing, the list of winner and nominees for the Academy Award for Film Editing, and this from Film Editing:

According to Walter Murch, when it comes to film editing, there are six main criteria for evaluating a cut or deciding where to cut. They are (in order of importance, most important first):

• emotion — Does the cut reflect what the editor believes the audience should be feeling at that moment?
• story — Does the cut advance the story?
• rhythm — Does the cut occur "at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and 'right'"? (Murch, 18)
• eye-trace — Does the cut pay respect to "the location and movement of the audience's focus of interest within the frame"? (Murch, 18)
• two-dimensional place of the screen — Does the cut respect the 180 degree rule?
• three-dimensional space of action — Is the cut true to the physical/spacial relationships within the diegesis?

Motion by Design: book with DVD

I saw a copy of this today and it looks pretty cool, but I'd rather have DVD video:

Motion by Design "is the first combined book and interactive DVD package to present the works of some of the world s leading motion graphic studios."

Sneak peek at NoiZette filter

Taron333 of Taronites, maker of Zborn Toy, posted text and samples of a new filter at CGTalk:

"A little sneak peek at the upcoming NoiZette filter for AE. It's completely map- and texturable fractal noise. All parameters are animatable and controllable through layers. Several turbulence types, mapping methods and blending options make it truely different from from AE's internal solution."

AE filters Normality and Reality are now free!

These were the ones from The Plausible Impossible: useful for 3D people, but he's holding off on releasing Mac OSX versions for awhile.

from Stefan Minning's journal:

"For personal reasons I no longer have the time to actively continue developing my After Effects plugins Normality & Reality as commercial software products. Real life has finally caught up with me and there’s simply too little time in any given day for me to waste on the business side of things - I’d much rather spend the little leisure time I have on my artwork and side projects."

Color Stabilizer, GBDeflicker, or Tinderbox T_Deflicker

(May 2015) this article was updated on Pro Video Coalition as Flicker removal in Creative Cloud and beyond.

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DV Guru reported on a new AE/Premiere-compatible Windows filter, GBDeflicker, to reduce flicker in time-lapse footage (see video below). Besides the free beta, Granite Bay, makers of the filter, also have a nice guide on what causes flicker in time-lapse as well as cures to fix it.

AE Pro [RIP] already has a filter called Color Stabilizer to fix this sort of problem. I'm not sure how results compare, or if other filters like Tinderbox DeFlicker [now Sapphire] used in NBC's 'My Name is Earl' are even better.

Use Milgram for Good

Onegoodmov posted a video on the Milgram experiment, "a series of famous scientific studies of social psychology, intended to measure the willingness of a participant to obey an authority who instructs the participant to do something that may conflict with the participant's personal conscience."