Month: September 2010

Categories
HTML5 Item of Interest

Adobe Announces HTML5/CSS3/SVG Pack for Illustrator.

Adobe Announces HTML5/CSS3/SVG Pack for Illustrator http://bit.ly/anOMff

I’ve long said that the company best positioned to supply HDTML 5 tools is Adobe. Glad they seem to think the same way.

Adobe is pleased to announce the availability of the Adobe® Illustrator® CS5 HTML5 Pack. This add-on for Illustrator CS5 15.0.1 provides initial support for HTML5 and CSS3, extends SVG capability in Illustrator CS5, and helps you easily design web and device content. In combination with the HTML5 features available in the Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 11.0.3 updater, these new tools allow web designers to take advantage of the latest advancements in HTML5.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Item of Interest

“During three days of IBC I’ve not seen a single VTR”

RT @kahel: During three days of #IBC I’ve not seen a single VTR. Tape has officially died.

A Tweet from Knut Helgeland from IBC, that I couldn’t help but share given the previous discussion about dropping L&C.

For modern workflows, tape is pretty much dead. However, there is 50 years of tape history that will still need to be captured, and not everyone works with the most modern (tapeless) gear, so tape capture can’t go away yet.

There is a report that a VTR was on the Root6 stand. One.

Categories
Item of Interest The Business of Production

The Terence and Philip Show Episode 8

The Terence and Philip Show Ep 8 is now available. http://bit.ly/buAnvV

The movie studios are pushing to release movies to cable, on-demand much closer to theatrical release. Starting with the fact that cinemas are not in the movie business and the cinema release is promotion for DVD sales. Plus what is the effect of the aging Television audience on the Networks, along with time-shifting (and skipping commercials)? Appointment Television is dead. The one common theme is changing business models: you can only sell scarcity so what are the implications for production?Are Apps the future of viewing content and providing an experiences around the content? Is the democratization of production going to lead to the end of production as we know it? What can we learn from the outliers? Is branded entertainment the replacement for advertising support?

And finally, do we have to care less about quality and finish, if budgets drop further?

Categories
Item of Interest

If you’re not paying for it,…

If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you are the product being sold. http://bit.ly/cwgr4x

This is (yet another) reason why I don’t like advertising. Effectively whoever makes the program (website, etc) is not interested in me, only that they can sell me out to advertisers who’s content I do not want to see (99% of the time).

I am not a product to be sold.

Categories
HTML5 Item of Interest

Boxee Embraces HTML5, Switches to Webkit.

Boxee Embraces HTML5, Switches to Webkit http://bit.ly/bVtAsX

Not, as you might think another Flash refugee, but a switch from the Mozilla Gecko HTML rendering engine to the more popular Webkit HTML rendering engine. Webkit is fully open sourced and used in almost all mobile browsers, Safari and Chrome, but heavily subsidized by Apple with its development.

The switch to Webkit was:

The switch is an attempt to make full use of HTML5 within Boxee, but it should also help with accessing a wider array of video content that’s not yet available through dedicated Boxee apps.

Categories
Item of Interest

Interpreting Criticism of your ideas

Interpreting Criticism http://bit.ly/afHmK4

A good read from one of my favorite marketing-oriented writers.

Heartfelt criticism of your idea or your art is usually right (except when it isn’t…)

When people criticize a new approach, new product or new service, it’s from within the context of their existing assumptions. I’ve been dramatically wrong about technology trends, taking a little time to “get” the benefits of pay-at-pump in gas stations, or even ATMs, because my assumptions about what I wanted were wrong.

The useful element of this sort of criticism isn’t that the fact that people in the status quo don’t like your idea. Of course they don’t. The interesting question is:what about the world as it is would have to change for your idea to be important?

Categories
Assisted Editing

Breaking up clips to subclips using prEdit

Breaking up clups to subclips and adding log notes in prEdit for the first time on a real job. http://bit.ly/9nQv07

This week I started (belatedly after feeling off-color late last week) breaking up my interviews into subclips and adding log notes. One thing about working with a piece of software in production compared with in development, is that you usually find bugs or irritations that didn’t come up in development. Such it has been with prEdit. I’ve found, and Greg has fixed a number of bugs. He’s also made some changes to make the auto-complete items a little more logical. Of course, I have “privileged access” to the developer, but I think we’re as responsive to any of our customers who find issues.

prEdit, in case you don’t know, is designed to speed up the process of paper cuts in documentaries. We use the Adobe suite to get time-stamped text (more in a moment) locked to the media file. Adobe places that metadata in the file using their XMP metadata structures and we read the transcript directly from that file.

We found the Premiere Pro/Soundbooth speech analysis to be very variable – more so than Adobe would expect so we’re providing them some examples. What has worked exceptionally well is a “Transcription > Adobe Story > OnLocation > PPro for analysis. This keeps most punctuation (paragraph returns are ignored) and names and provides a great result. A half hour interview takes about 5 minutes to tag in Adobe Story, and less than a minute in OnLocation to associate the script and the media file to embed it.

Once we determined that was the most optimized workflow retained speaker names, I asked Greg for prEdit to automatically subclip those speaker paragraphs, since it seems obvious that we’d eliminate the Interviewer sections and having a long interview already subclipped makes life easier and results faster. That led to a feature request (now in prEdit) to be able to add metadata (log notes) to multiple subclips together.

Having used it on a real job for a full day, I have to say, it is everything I hoped and more. It’s so easy to enter log notes: probably 5x or more faster than entering them in Final Cut Pro.

I’m working on creating subclips: the real action happens when I get to building the story, but even making subclips based on text (and optional video playback in prEdit) from the blocks of text is so much easier than any other method I’ve used.

Categories
Distribution Item of Interest

Iron Maiden Connects With Fans and the Fans Buy.

Iron Maiden Connects With Fans And The Fans Buy http://bit.ly/dbtEup

I believe that the secret formula for monetizing media is based on Techdirt’s CwF+RtB=profit. Connecting with Fans and giving them a Reason to Buy. Iron Maiden have known this for years as they had to connect with their fans instead of relying on radio promotion to get the word out.

Now that the traditional revenue channels are drying up because they don’t serve the market well, that fan connection seems to be working for Iron Maiden, where there latest CD is selling very well on CD and has limited unauthorized download.

Then again, when you consider the advice from the band’s manager on why they’re successful…

“Invest in the long term. Apply an image. Give the fans what they want. Tour and keep touring. Play the festival circuit. Embrace new technology. Be innovative. Be honest. Be original. Write good songs.”

…you realize that maybe the product from the MPAA studios and RIAA labels just isn’t that great any more.

Categories
Business & Marketing Distribution Item of Interest

Why Waiting Until A New Business Model is Proven Doesn’t Work.

Why Waiting Until A New Business Model Is Proven Doesn’t Work http://bit.ly/bcybin

Technology changes business models. That’s a given. The problem is, the business models that are being disrupted are often very big businesses, with good profits and the company doesn’t want to disrupt those nice, regular, current revenue streams in order to accommodate a new one. The new revenue is (at least during these phases of disruption) very much below what they are now. No doubt you recall NBC CEO Jeff Zucker’s fear that that the Web will turn “analog dollars” into “digital pennies”.

The examples quoted include Netflix (who innovated and disrupted because they had no stores to protect) and Blockbuster (who had stores to protect; and Kodak who saw digital coming, new it was important but failed to act in time leading to massive layoff and factory closures.

The problem with waiting until you see a clear path forward to the sorts of profits that will be available in a disrupted industry, it’s almost always way too late for the disrupted to catch up. This is why disruption does not come from the major players in an industry, but rather from the small innovator who has no legacy to protect.

There are a few reasons for this:

  1. Companies always misjudge the speed of trends, especially the rate of change. Things like digital revolutions start out slowly, and the quality seems bad. So companies in legacy businesses figure they have a long time to make the change. But the rate of change increases rapidly, especially once it “tips” and reaches a critical threshold. At that point, if you’re not fully invested in the new business, you’re, way, way, way behind.
  2. It’s difficult to really understand the new technology/market unless you’re playing deeply in the space. This is the same thing we noted with people who claim that patents are necessary because once a good idea comes along others will just copy it. In many cases, that’s not possible. That’s because the truly innovative ideas require some real hands-on experience. Watching others do it is not the same thing.
  3. It’s very difficult, culturally, to build up businesses that cannibalize your existing cash cows. The skill sets may be different, and people begin to recognize that these “new” people may be working on projects that replace the “old” people. That leads to a lot of resentment and makes it really difficult to actually hire the good new people — since they recognize they’re going to face those kinds of institutional restrictions. For them, it’s just easier to go to a “native” company that has bet entirely on the new offering.

Categories
Distribution Item of Interest

How Many Times Will Content Industries claim the sky is falling…

How Many Times Will Content Industries Claim The Sky Is Falling Before People Stop Believing Them? http://bit.ly/bUNPOi

I think we’re ready to stop believing them now. From Jack Valenti’s infamous comparison of Betamax/VHS to the Boston Strangler to today’s complaining about unauthorized distribution, the content production industries have fought every technological change. And every time that technological change has opened new markets for them. Instead of VHS/Betamax and DVD being the death of the MPAA studios it’s been the salvation.

It may, in fact, be the case that the sky is falling. But, if you claim that the sky is falling whenever a new technology threatens an existing business model, the rest of the world can be forgiven for not believing you when you claim that this time around it’s going to be different than all of the other times. Now, let’s be clear, each one of these technologies changed the business model of the industry. They caused certain revenue streams to decline. But they also opened up new ones.