Today I spent about 8 hours reviewing videos for an upcoming event. I had previously viewed all of the videos off a hard drive to be used for projection, and made a list of originals to check. If the original looks better than the MPEG2, then I copy the original to my hard drive for future re-compression. In many cases, the original is in fact MPEG2, and with adding logos and trimming heads and tails, a recompression pass is sometimes a bad thing - especially if the original was not up to MPEG-2 quality to begin with.
Thus, during the 30 or so blocks of 5-7 minutes spent copying video from DVD to hard drive, I browsed the COW. I mean, what else could I possibly do in such short chunks of time?
But I receive updates from the Business and Marketing Forum and the Film History and Appreciation Forum on my Blackberry, so I am all caught up in those forums. Thus, I took a tour of the forums that I visit less frequently or not at all.
We use exclusively Premiere, so I never really visit the FCP forum, or forums for FCP related kit such as AJA. However whether I use the gear or not, it can be educational. For example, a newer forum is for Core Melt plugins.
http://forums.creativecow.net/coremelt I have never heard of this software, so I thought I'd check it out. Turns out, this is a pretty cool suite of transitions. It's like Magic Bullet for transitions. And it is CS4 compatible, so it just goes to show that you can't judge a forum by its title. Check out these demo videos:
http://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/271/5
I then browsed the Audio Professionals forum, the Lighting forum and discovered a Motion Graphics forum that I did not even know about.
http://forums.creativecow.net/broadcastdesign
So you see, even someone who spends much of their free time on this website can learn new things and discover new places to go.
I also make a habit of reading new blog posts as they appear on the COW. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that fellow blogger Ken Harper
http://blogs.creativecow.net/blog/977/one-head-many-hats in fact worked at Cine-Med years before I did.
And did you know that Creative COW now has free video hosting, and some really entertaining reels, demo videos and trailers. It's great to see not only seasoned pros but also folks just getting into the business posting their work for all to see.
Well, looks like that strange HD file (1844x1073) has finished copying - now to figure out what to do with it.
Thanks for reading.
Mike Cohen
