There, I said it. I hate Adobe s Activation procedure. Yes, I understand you have to protect your software from all the complete morons and low-lifes who can t pony up the money to purchase software legitimately, but geez, do you have to make this procedure so asinine that it affects legitimate purchases? Three weeks ago I installed Apple OS 10.5 on a fresh hard drive on my editing workstation. A day later I installed my copy of the Production Premium Package CS3 to do some After Effects work. The Activation screen obviously pops up, I tell it to go...
The New York Times reports that Warner Brothers has now lined up in Blu-Ray DVD corner effectively giving the Sony format about 70% of the high definition DVD market. They ll continue to release movies on both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray until May and then switch exclusively over to Blu-Ray. This leaves Universal and Paramount along with Dreamworks as the only major studios backing HD-DVD. As a production company that had to jump into Blu-Ray production in support of one of our clients, this is welcome news for us. I have to say, if you have not seen Pixar s Cars...
Ok, so you have decided to edit a video in Premiere Pro. For the sake of argument let s pretend you are using 2.0, which is rather similar to CS3. If you are coming from AVID or Final Cut, you may be surprised to see some of the choices Adobe has made in their features, or lack of a few seemingly key features. Believe me, you can get used to anything, and once you do, it s no big deal. Coming from Media 100 there were a few features I could not believe Premiere was lacking. But Media 100 used...
No offense to the many awesome FCP users, but I have noticed these blogs are a bit light on Premiere Pro posts. I thought I d write a series of Premiere Tips and Tricks, great for the beginner and hopefully interesting reading for everyone else. A Brief History of My Experience with Premiere Back in 1995 we decided to investigate nonlinear editing. At the time, we were running two Ampex 1 suites, one with a 2 bus Vista switcher, the other with the old standby Grass Valley 100. We visited Expo95, the annual Connecticut video expo, this one held at...
Hi everyone - I ve been pretty silent for the last few months because I ve been hard at work on a new Creative Cow Master Series DVD - Internet Killed the Video Star: A guide to Creating Video for the Web. The 4.5 hour DVD will be available very shortly. Feel free to spread the word. Here s the basic description of the DVD: Whether you’re posting video for a client, putting your demo reel on-line, creating a video podcast, or building video training for the web, the Internet is conspiring to keep your work from looking its best....
This is Part 2 of a 4 Part series on Starting and Running your own business in the creative industry. In Part 1 of this series, I posed the question, “Are You Ready?” A link to Part 1 is at the end of this article in case you missed it. If you’ve thought long and hard on this and your answer is “Yes,” then let’s proceed with Part 2 of this 4-part trilogy. Here we’ll explore a lot of questions on setting up your company and getting ready to open those doors! (Only in Hollywood could we make a 4-part...
So we ve had a lot of discussions on the Final Cut Pro and Apple Color forums about what can we use to replace the current Broadcast CRT monitors that are EOL? I ve not been overly impressed with the current crop of LCD monitors out there. My favorite to date, the Panasonic 1700W and 2600W are both good, but cannot completey replace my Sony CRT Broadcast monitor. Well yesterday I got a demo of the new TV Logic 24 LCD Broadcast display and I have to say, WOW! I think we have a real contender for CRT replacement at...
In response to a post on the Creative Cow Final Cut Pro Forum, my choice for a control surface to run all Pro Apps on a Mac is a Wacom tablet. I run a 9x12 Intuos 3 in my suite and I just can t see working without one. For one thing, carpel tunnel syndrome just doesn t happen with a tablet, so you can work your 14 - 20 hour days and have no wrist pain. Second you get your entire workspace right on your tablet so there s no pick up the mouse and drag a second time...
One question we see a lot on the forums, in fact there was another one today, is How much storage will I need for X amount of video? Our friends at Digital Heaven have created a wonderful free widget for those of you on Mac OS 10 computer systems for this very thing. Call VideoSpace , all you do is enter the video format and the amount of footage you have (in hours and minutes) and voilá! You get exactly how much storage it will take to hold that amount of footage. And keep in mind, this is just the...
As Chi-Ho Lee noted on the Final Cut Pro forum today, Quicktime 7.1.6 has been released in anticipation of Final Cut Studio 2 and you can now read timecode in the Quicktime Player. Wow! Finally! Not sure why it took so long, but here s the proof. If you click on the running time you now get a drop down box which gives you three choices of the Standard Running Time, Timecode and Frame Number. Here s the clip now showing the original timecode off the camera tape. VERY cool and now anyone with Quicktime Player can accurately see timecodes...
Jeff Schell s Premiere Pro workshop, June 9th and 10th (a weekend) looks good. If the class makes enrollment and I can get the time off from work I ll be there. I ve wanted to visit the Pacific NW anyway... http://www.jeffschell.com/class.html...
[Verified for enough clarity] When does awesome become a nightmare? So, there I was. Just over a year left to graduate with a Bachelor s in Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Most of my friends knew that I was really into the film classes and artist video classes I was/had taken. A friend and his bandmates asked me if I d be willing make a music video for them. Quick background info: at the time, I just turned 29; the youngest guy in the band was in his mid-30s; and, none of them had ever seen my...
So a recent thread in the Creative Cow Final Cut Pro forum about Internal vs. External RAID s got me thinking more about the subject. I m a firm believer in external RAID s and really don t have any desire to install 3 or 4 drives inside my Mac Pro tower. Let s think about this. Companies like LaCie, Ciprico, Medéa, CalDigit, Facilis and others spend a lot of time in research and development to produce storage solutions that are not only fast, but reliable. Every board, every drive, every switch, everything about that storage solution has been drawn...
I went to another blog that explained the value of rubber keyboard covers for different programs. I thought that is a very novel idea, protection plus all the shortcut key labels. WRONG!!!! As I did a search I find they are only made for Apple products. Why hasn t someone done this for PC s. It seems more and more editing programs are being built for PC s many of which don t even have an Apple counterpart. No one has thought about creating keyboard covers for PC s? That seems really strange. Charlie...
I don't see everything coming. Not even close. But I saw this one. Google's Picasa has been offering online image editing for a while. It even supports .psd. So Adobe responds with free Photoshop on the web. Really? Yeah, really. I found Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen's conversation with c/net pretty invigorating. He makes it sound pretty obvious, actually: "If we offered a host-based version of Photoshop that's Photoshop-branded (and is) potentially better than Picasa, you'd probably go the Photoshop route because of your belief in the Photoshop brand and the quality associated with the brand," Chizen said. My favorite part...
