Woody Allen on the Writer’s Strike

I think Brightcove could use faster loading and a Flash player that gives you a playlist of episodes (like others have had for awhile) -- there's more at United Hollywood's Speechless series.


Video via Crooks and Liars via WGA Strike: Same Old Same Old. More comments and metacomments can be found through FreshDV's CrispyFeeds RSS aggregator.
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7 Deadly Sins - Simpson's style

From the recent Treehouse of Horror via Hulu (better sound than YouTube)... starting around 18 minutes...

13-hours of AE Basic Training for free

In the old days we had to walk miles through blizzards to pay for AE tutorials if there were any, but now there's tons of worthy free stuff. Video Copilot is offering their 13-hour Basic Training series for free over the web.

Thermo: Adobe's new RIA design tool

Adobe Edge is featuring a sneak peek video on Thermo, code name for an RIA design tool under development at Adobe. Flash the app is enervating for someone used to After Effects, and I've tried using it in every version since Future Splash Animator 1. I'm not sure why Flash never moved to the way of mTropolis with it's easy to use messenger model.

Thermo is the sort of technology metaphor I'd like to see in the Production Premium suite. Instead of limited templates for producing Flash versions of a DVD, I'd like to see new tools more like this, even as an Adobe Elements "Flash Toy" with only branching and looping at first, then migrating to more complex setup with effects and nodes/pipes/flowcharts. Or even better a reimagining and rewrite of After Effects and maybe Flash. If video over the web continues to grow, new tools that share creation metaphors and integrate media creation and interactivity could be useful. Aviary seems to be inching towards this with their RIA/AIR apps.

Adobe ships Flash Player with H.264 video

Emmy Huang and Tinic Uro , Justin Everett-Church, and the Flash Dev Center have the Flash Player 9 news with tons of further references.

And it's already being used by a big player; see NewTeeVee's Hulu Adds HD. Beet.TV noted details on the Hulu blog.

The release covers h.264/AAC audio on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and "improved performance through multi-core support for rendering, hardware scaling in full-screen, multi-threaded video decoding, a new algorithm for image scaling, and the Flash Player cache for local caching of common platform components to reduce SWF sizes and app loading times." Also, there's new stuff on Flash Media Server.

As noted here a few days ago, Tinic Uro previously mentioned a 'fast-start' trap on files compressed as h.264 in tools like AE and Premiere. For now "the moov atom (which is the index information in MPEG-4 files) is at the beginning of the file....you have to wait until the file is completely downloaded before it is played back. You can use tools like qt-faststart.c written by our own Mike Melanson to fix your files so that the index is at the beginning of the file." In Apple tools (or in CS3 with File>Export>QuickTime), you just check the "Fast Start" box.

CS3 Production Premium and Final Cut

Terry White hosts a Dave Helmly video explaining how to Integrate CS3 Production Premium into your Final Cut Pro workflow.

Hopefully Adobe will someday expand support for XML/OMF, etc export and import so Adobe users can share work across audio and video editing platforms.

The plugged-in family

No it's not another indictment of TV... As reported by Digital Content Producer, plug-in sharpies are joining forces: Toolfarm Inks Exclusive Distribution Agreement with Red Giant Software.