new RED color science, and how to make it all work with After Effects CS5 and Premiere Pro CS5 http://bit.ly/bfqaUW
Adobe just released a new RED importer plug-in for After Effects CS5 and Premiere Pro CS5 on the Adobe Labs website. This new set of software supports the current RED firmware (#30) and new color science.
Ten successful Social Media campaigns http://bit.ly/9VMpXV
Very interesting to see how social media has been used for everything than increasing wine sales to 37% of “Generation Y” heard about the Ford Fiesta from social media.
Lots of positive Return on Investment for social media, compared with just 18% of traditional TV campaigns that generate a positive ROI. Ouch.
The stories are showcased in brief in the article, with a link to great video from Erik Qual man (@equalman) at Social nomics.
Video quality less important when you’re enjoying what you’re watching http://bit.ly/bE44lX Not surprising result, gells with my experience.
Although most of us within the production community care greatly about quality of image and sound, it turns out our audiences are probably not paying the same level of attention. Once quality gets “good enough” the average viewer stops caring about quality and watches content.
Using four studies, Kortum, along with co-author Marc Sullivan of AT&T Labs, showed 100 study participants 180 movie clips encoded at nine different levels, from 550 kilobits per second up to DVD quality. Participants viewed the two-minute clips and then were asked about the video quality of the clips and desirability of the movie content.
Kortum found a strong correlation between the desirability of movie content and subjective ratings of video quality.
The Terence and Philip Show Episode 4 http://bit.ly/cXIzex
This week Terence and Philip start in on format wars and how we deal with them, particularly acquisition formats vs editing and delivery formats. Is native better? Terry tells us about Super LoiLoScope, which apparently can play anything.
Discussion moves to the advantages of “new code” and the role of Randy Ubilos at Apple. Â Then on to the relative merits of ProRes and DNxHD codecs, including “offline” quality. Plus working from multiple sources.
Then conjecture on what happens if we took all the metadata (including location) for cameras from a concert, and let every person watching switch their own view, which leads to discussion of latency.
Eventually the discussion reaches iMovie on iPhone and the role of location metadata.
BBC: HTML5 Is Not Ready For Video And Sailing Off-Course http://bit.ly/ckjcQS
The corporation’s future media and technology director Erik Huggers writes:
“The fact is that there’s still a lot of work to be done on HTML5 before we can integrate it fully into our products. As things stand, I have concerns about HTML5’s ability to deliver on the vision of a single open browser standard which goes beyond the whole debate around video playback.â€
I think it’s widely agreed that HTML5 is not a complete replacement for every use of Flash at this time of the technology’s development, but this attack is hard to separate from the fact that there is a long-standing agreement between the BBC and Adobe to transition the BBC’s video to Flash.
The BBC is invested in a long-standing strategic relationshipsigned with Adobe late in 2007, allowing it to move its media delivery away from RealMedia to Flash. So it’s Flash on which one of the world’s most popular VOD services is now built – BBC iPlayer served 100.2 million online requests in June.
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One of the reasons my direct posting here has been light lately is that we’ve been working on a small documentary, partly for the exercise but mostly to a) have demo material for prEdit that isn’t 10 years old and b) prove to myself the prEdit is indeed a great new workflow for documentary editing. Plus a documentary gets made to store the memories of the early 60’s drag racing community.
Inevitably one of the tapes ends up with breaks every few seconds. Final Cut Pro always, always breaks HDV into individual clips, regardless of your settings, so parts of this interview were simply lost. So I tried capturing in Premiere Pro CS5. A little surprised to have to preview on the camera (not inside Premiere Pro CS5) but the capture happens and the entire interview is captured in one piece with no dropped frames.
I’m composing hymns to Premiere Pro’s greatness, until I try an export. (All captured media is being converted to ProRes 422 for the master and editing formats.) Adobe Media Encoder crashes when it hits one of the glitches that tripped up Final Cut Pro. Rinse and repeat and we’re not getting an export. Even an attempt to playback causes Premiere Pro to disappear.
Well, not of picture anyway, but AME will export the audio by itself without a problem. So, while it’s not perfect, I now have that important interview (and the one we travelled furthest to get) with about 99% of the audio intact and laid up with what video I have and I’ll be able to use the interview in the doc.
So thanks to the ability to capture all my HDV material Premiere Pro CS5 at least got me usable material.
Five Rules For How To Make Things Go Viral (TCTV) http://tcrn.ch/dp2AVz
There is no guarantee of virality, but there are some approaches that help improve the likelihood that something will go viral and be spread across a wide variety of audiences.
I particularly like number 1 – “Create media for the bored at work”!
The advice is “as expected” but worth remembering.
Telestream To Acquire Anystream Business From Grab Networks http://bit.ly/bIxyVa
Grab Networks sells an asset no longer core to its business, an Telestream acquires the Agility and Velocity products, which are enterprise class transcoding and media management platforms.
Streaming Media’s Dan Rayburn comments:
This is a perfect fit for Telestream’s core business and allows them to continue their push into the enterprise vertical. While some might think that Telestream and Anystream already compete, there is not much overlap between the two and Anystream’s product line gives Telestream new products to add to their portfolio.
Why asking how much a movie cost to make is the wrong question. http://bit.ly/9xchrE Article also talks of $800 movie shot on Pentax DSLR.
There’s no positive benefit to spending more on a film than is going to be seen on the screen and yet the majors all talk about “$200 million movies”.
A few years back at a Cato Institute conference on copyright, a guy from NBC Universal challenged me with the question of “how will we make $200 million movies?” if content is freely shared. As I noted at the time, that’s really the wrong question. No one watching a movie cares about how much the moviecosts. They just want to see a good movie. The question for a good filmmaker or producer or a studio should be “how do I make the best movie I can that will still be profitable?” Starting out with a “cost” means that you don’t focus on ways to save money or contain costs. You focus on ways to spend up to those costs. That’s backwards, and it’s how you fail as a business.
The article goes on to talk about a new short film from Futuristic Films, which notes in the opening that the whole damn thing was shot with a Pentax K-7 DSLR, which you can find these days for around $800 or so!
Big difference from the $200 million movie, but trying to compare them is probably ridiculous.
5 Questions With…Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone http://bit.ly/bk79Db
Jim Lanzone, who, prior to starting “internet television guideâ€Â Clicker.com, was CEO of Ask.com and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Redpoint Ventures. Below, he submits the phrase “nanocasting†for approval, sings the praises of the Double Rainbow and explains why using Clicker.com is better than having a brain hemorrhage.