As a sometime producer of original narrative content, I’ve had an ongoing interest in online business models for content distribution. In particular, I’ve been trying to figure out how to move forward with an episodic series for the web for some time now. And by move forward, I mean solve the puzzle of how to pay for the help I need in its creation without bankrupting myself. This entire article presupposes “budgeted” programming, where writers, editors, actors, and others involved…
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While I was in the UK last month, principals Andy Knox and Chris Rose of Tangent Devices invited me up to their offices in picturesque Toddington (about an hour outside of London) to check out what they’ve been up to. Touring their offices, with prototypes and stacks of CP-100s (the last 3 they have in stock), CP-200s, Waves, and various parts, it was interesting to see the evolution of their designs from product to product. They’d already contacted me almost…
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I try to refrain from pimping my book too much here, but now that DaVinci Lite has become freely available to colorists and post professionals one and all, I thought the time was ripe to point out that DaVinci Resolve Lite has finally caught up with the Color Correction Handbook’s primary teaching interface. Why am I mentioning all this now? Because if you’ve just downloaded Resolve Lite and asked yourself, “now what?” then you’ll really like the Color Correction Handbook’s…
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This blog is a rewritten version of a creative cow post I made on July 25th, 2011. Since the Color Correction Handbook was published, a single error of a tenth of a percent has emerged to cause me some small regret. I’m referring to the display gamma value I cite for digital Rec. 709 displays in chapter 1 of the book. I’m an advocate for standards in all of the postproduction work that we do, and it pains me that…
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You take a trip and realize that someone beat you to it a hundred years ago… This last winter my wife Kaylynn and I took a trip that ended in Prague. As we toured the city, we went to the cathedral within Prague Castle, the Basilica of St. Vitus (the patron saint of dancers, actors, and epilectics). It’s a magnificent structure, and I recommend it highly. As I walked around, I came upon a truly stunning stained glass window by…
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I’ve been out of the country, presenting at the SuperMeet, dashing about the UK having meetings and doing training, and then finally crossing the channel into France for a much-needed vacation in Saint-Malo and Paris. More on all that later. For now, I’m rather pleased that I’ve finally gotten my new Panasonic 55′ VT30 series plasma delivered to my Saint Paul suite. Everything is now mounted, hooked up, and working. In fact, I’m so pleased with myself that I wanted…
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The Diamond brothers approached me last month about a music video they were about to shoot for Jackson Harris, and while I always enjoy grading music videos, another big draw was the fact that they had just taken possession of a RED EPIC, and I was eager to see how the media would handle. When the media drive arrived and I loaded the project into Resolve (I used the Resolve v8 beta for this project, with zero problems), I had…
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Preparing for my trip to London on the week of June 20th made me reflect on the fact that my very first post on this blog was about another trip to London; a trip during which I pitched a feature/web series project to the director of development of a storied English production company. At the time I was still waiting to hear back, so I didn’t go into specifics. However, enough time has passed that it seems time to tell…
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Here’s one for my Resolve-using brethren. I’ve been trying for some time to come to terms with Resolve’s wonderful, yet at times terrifying auto-linking feature. I’m talking specifically about the fact that, when you first conform an EDL to a Media Pool full of files, any session’s clips that are linked to the same Media Pool file are automatically linked together in the Timeline, such that changes to one clip are automatically rippled to the other linked clips. It’s all…
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An Open Letter to Developers of Software Tools for Specialists I’ve worked with a number of software companies over the years, on various applications invariably relating to media creation. I’ve never been able to settle on which is more fun, participating in the development of new tools, or using those tools to actually create media. In my case, I like both too much. It’s just so satisfying to make a suggestion to an engineer, and watch it get implemented knowing that…
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I finally got my hands on the new Flanders LM-2461W thanks to Dan Desmet, owner of FSI. Alas, being in the middle of a move and with many obligations at NAB this year, I didn’t have as much time to work with the monitor as I would have liked, but I still managed to fire it up, run a few scenes on it, do a bit of grading, and get a solid sense of the monitor’s performance. If you’ve been…
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NAB was great fun this year. Lots of new announcements for the color grading crowd, and a visibly big jump in attendance from previous years. As always, it was good to catch up with colleagues from around the world whom I only see at either NAB or IBC, especially at after-hours events like the Media Motion Ball (made sweeter by my winning a copy of Sapphire plugins for AE and all, apologies to Scott Simmons who was eyeing it from…
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NBC’s catchphrase gave me a chuckle, not the least bearing in mind that the Peacock logo was originally intended to promote the “new” color programming available back in 1956. This title appears at the end of a Law and Order promo that I saw on Vimeo (thanks to Graeme Nattress for pointing it out on Twitter). First, I just want to get the fact that it was shot using the RED Epic out of the way. Yes, the Epic is…
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I’m moving! Those of you following me on Twitter saw my announcement a couple of weeks ago, but as my wife Kaylynn and I are closing on our new house next week, it seemed appropriate to mention it here. Specifically, we’re moving to St. Paul, Minnesota. A place where snow freely falls during long, long winters (as evidenced in the picture above). Fortunately, I originally grew up in Wisconsin, so winter doesn’t really bother me that much (although I anticipate…
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You may have noticed I’ve not updated in a while, due to an unexpected (yet delightful) spike in my workload at the moment. However, in between gigs, I managed to put in an order for the full-blown DaVinci Resolve control surface. Yeah, the expensive one. When it arrived (at my home, as I’m getting ready to move), my first thought was to simply get it set up as quickly as possible in order to try it out. However, it occurred…