Formats & Frame Rates & Codecs, Oh My!

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Last night, I was a panelist at the Women In Film & Video session, “Formats & Frame Rates & Codecs, Oh My!” along with Virginia Quesada and Chief Engineer Sam Crawford of Henninger Media Services and moderated by Editor Mickey Green. It was a great evening covering a wide range of technical topics. The turnout was phenomenal. I was surprised and pleased to see a large number of producer-types there. I wondered if maybe the producers had come out, because of something that may be shifting in our industry. Being the Super-Tech-Geek that I am, I have noticed an increasing interest on the part of typically non-technical producers. These are folks who, in years past, have stayed away from the complex technical issues surrounding production and post-production. My theory is that (maybe) many of those folks are coming to the realization that tech is not going away nor is it getting any less complex. Lack of understanding of the technology used in our productions can be directly translated to higher costs and missed deadlines. The energy of last night felt like things were shifting slightly and that even the non-technical folks have a rising interest in getting a grasp on the technical stuff. Its a refreshing thought & I hope I’m right. WIFV is interested in doing more of these sessions and I hope to be involved again. Stay tuned.

As promised, here are links to some of the items I presented:

Presentation Slides - my slides on Backup Plan and Project Asset Management

The slides on HD formats were taken from a presentation I gave back in 2007. Here is a PDF of those slides. There is more in the PDF than what I covered and (thankfully) most of it is still valid even 5 years later.

Here’s a direct link to my Generic Assets Folder Template. And the post where I explain it all in more detail along with many other Asset Management techniques is “Man Crushed Under Weight of 34Terabytes.”

Thank you Mickey & WIFVers for putting this event together. Thanks to those who attended. And keep your eyes out for info about upcoming events like this, there will be more!

And we’re back…

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Just a brief note to say that buttonpusher.tv is back up and running.

We got hit with a “base64 hack“. It infected every single PHP file on the server that hosts buttonpusher.tv. So its been a pain to get everything re-installed. The only back up I had was from just after the infection hit on March 15. It did give me a chance to clear out a bunch of old theme and plugin files, but what a hassle.

The site is back online and it looks like I didn’t lose anything important. I did discover that my favorite theme – K2 is now only sporadically updated, so I may be in the market for a new WordPress theme later this spring.

Mostly just posting this to see if everything is back in working order. Thanks.

Avid Studio for iPad – quick take

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Super quick take on Avid Studio for iPad:
- much more intuitive than iMovie on iOS.
- it reads ALL media on your iPad. All your music. All you photos. All your videos. And all your iTunes U content (that won’t last, I’m sure – so easy to rip off that content)
-very good set of editing tools – surprising for a version 1. Good Job Avid
-you cannot (as far as I can tell) take a video with married audio and then cut shots into it without stepping on the audio. (i.e.-no master shot with audio and then cutaways). The only way I see to make it work (so far) is to rip the audio off of a movie and then bring it back in as an audio source. This needs to be fixed.

Very impressed with this first effort though. An editor for $5 that can send projects to a professional desktop editing app…wow.

UPDATE: So it only sends projects to the PC-version of Avid Studio. But its a step closer.

Speak out against SOPA/PIPA

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While you are waiting for the next part of the “Faster. Better…(not necessarily) Stronger” series, take some time to educate yourself about the Stop Online Piracy Act(SOPA) & The Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). These bills are bad ideas. I’m all for protecting the rights of creators of material but SOPA and PIPA are the result of allowing a group of self-declared non-experts, who are being guided by companies who aren’t satisfied with only 40%+ market growth over 10 years to legislate something as wild and untamable as the Internet. It is a bad idea.

Educate yourself. Watch this video:

Visit killsopa.org – The EFF’s clearing house on what to do to help stop these bills from becoming laws.

Contact your representative and make them aware that you don’t want these bills to become law.

And check back tomorrow, because we’ll be here. We aren’t going dark. We’ll be posting part 2. Maybe in all that extra time you’ll have *not* surfing Reddit or Wikipedia, you can drop by here!

Faster. Stronger. . . (not necessarily) Better. – PART 2

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If you recall from Monday’s post, I related an example of a very complicated and convoluted set of media files related to a one hour-long nature documentary. 10 camera formats. 1080 & 720. 23.98fps. 29.97fps. All delivered on 25 external hard drives.

With all the the recent advancements in cameras and acquisition technologies, the expectation is the process of media production should become faster, easier and more stream-lined. We associate improvement with advancement, right?  If it’s new then it must be better. As I mentioned in part one of this post, though, as media production has moved into the digital space, it has become bogged down by the plethora of choices available to creators. The work  feels more complicated and time-consuming, and it doesn’t necessarily result in a better product.

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