Categories
Business & Marketing

Production CONN 2011

One of the inevitable trends about trade shows is that the big show is slowly eroding away, while smaller regional shows – like Production CONN 2011, Createasphere, etc – are growing in influence and quality. 

Categories
Business & Marketing Item of Interest The Business of Production

10 Signs Internet TV is Ready to Disrupt the Industry

10 Signs Internet TV is Ready to Disrupt the Industry http://t.co/OpURKa1o

The ten bullet points from Mark Suster’s talk at The Future of Television. There’s good detail in the text summary, and the full 10 minute talk is available on video.

1. The promise has been made for too long, People are cynical

2. The right factors are finally in place

3. YouTube is the new Comcast

4. The distributed ad platform enabled this industry to evolve

5. Internet TV is following the CLASSIC case of the “Innovator’s Dilemma”

6. Cable & Satellite packages will become music albums

7. Mass adoption of Internet video has already taken place

8. TV is the medium people prefer (whether we like it or not) –

9. Video is different than text. It requires unique, creative skills

10. This revolution is starting in Los Angeles.

 

Categories
Business & Marketing Item of Interest Media Consumption

This is How Apple Will Eventually Defeat DIRECT TV!

This is How Apple Will Eventually Defeat DIRECTV http://t.co/tjCVRNgP Bad technology compounded with a “don’t care” attitude.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Item of Interest

Final Cut Pro X 10.0.1, XML. data structures and how fast is FCP X?

Final Cut Pro X 10.0.1, XML. data structures and how fast is FCP X? http://t.co/kCf3AQRs

The discussion starts with a discussion of the release of Final Cut Pro X 10.0.1. We know what features are in this release and what else is coming in “early 2012″ but what will Apple do for Version 2?

Categories
Business & Marketing The Business of Production

SOPA/PROTECT IP must die to protect the MPAA/RIAA from themselves!

I’ve been trying to find a way to write about his appalling piece of legislation for some time, and I realized why it must be opposed.  It must be opposed to protect the film, television and music production businesses. To protect the future existence of the MPAA, RIAA and Record Labels.

But, you say, aren’t these the people buying off the politicians and forcing this Internet-destroying legislation through?

They are, but they have such an appalling track record of adapting to technology and knowing how that technology will benefit them, that they must be protected from themselves (and we need to be protected from the damage these bills would inflict on the Internet). I mean it quite seriously.  If Thomas Edison would have had his way, there would be no movie projectors as his business was in Kinescope booths.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Assisted Editing

Should we put Event Manager X in the Apple App Store?

We currently sell a little utility called Event Manager X directly from our web store, which was really designed for selling much more expensive software, where the ability to log back in and check serial numbers and other status was useful. As it’s a $4.99 tool it seems perfect for the App Store and it has always been our intent to get it there, in among other projects.

Finally, some time has become available and we’ve been exploring what’s required and there’s a problem.

Categories
Assisted Editing Interesting Technology Item of Interest Metadata

Who’s looking at you? Apparently everything!

Two stories today that caught my attention are:

Facial Recognition App Detects, Captures Smiles Technology intrudes more & more into “human” territory

Meet Swivl, The Motion Tracking iPhone Dock That Always Keeps You On Camera More and more automatics!

Now, it would be really cool if Swivl tracked you and kept you on camera using facial detection but it does not: instead it uses a hand held transmitter/controller to “know” where to point the camera.  Even with that it will make a great addition to a video blogger, web episode producer as the producer/talent can move and have the camera follow them as they do.

Categories
HTML5 Item of Interest The Business of Production

Adobe’s new strategic direction

Adobe’s new strategic direction. http://t.co/GuVwzrhT Beyond the layoffs, the real news:

Moving forward, Adobe will offer customers the ability to make, manage, measure and monetize content and applications across all devices.  The company has long been the leader in content authoring solutions with its Adobe Creative Suite® product franchise. Its Digital Media growth strategy revolves around its recently announced Creative Cloud and will enable the company to rapidly deliver new product capabilities and services; penetrate untapped market segments; and increase overall engagement with customers.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Video Technology

Three companies, three different approaches to 64 bit.

During the week I got this email, and it’s a really good question, so I decided to clean up my response and post it here.
I figured you could answer this question, one which has been knawing on me since I first saw the beta of MC6.0.  How is it possible that Apple, and Adobe had to rewrite their apps virtually from scratch in order to switch to 64 bit, but Avid didn’t?  Is MC6.0 really 64 bit?

It’s a really good question. When an application needs to move from 32 bit to 64 bit, there are many approaches, but one thing is certain: all the code has to be 64 bit, including any dependencies or plug-ins. By dependencies I mean where the application relies on OS frameworks or libraries, such as QuickTime or AVI or other OS level service.  All these must be 64 bit or the application can’t compile to 64 bit. So all three companies had some rewriting to do, but because of their histories it’s actually different for each app.

Even though Premiere Pro is the most modern app of the three (Premiere Pro, Media Composer and Final Cut Pro) having been completely rewritten ahead of the 2003 release, it still largely depended on AVI (Windows) and QuickTime (OS X) for media handling. Neither have been adequately rewritten for 64 bit: AVI because all development stopped in 1996 (the zombie format that will not die) and QuickTime because Apple decided to transition to AVFoundation for media handling in applications, after attempting a partial rewrite of QuickTime as QTKit in 64 bit.

So, Adobe decided to write their own media engine so they could go to 64 bit without the external dependencies. (Premiere Pro still imports and plays QuickTime media by use of a complex workaround.) Most of Adobe’s code is C or similar with only an OS level wrapper around the cross platform code. So it’s “true” Cocoa on OS X because the interface is a heavily subclassed Cocoa frameworks (subclassed to make it look like an Adobe app, in the same way many Cocoa frameworks are subclassed in FCP X for its unique look).

Avid also decided to rewrite all their code from scratch, but instead of one big hit, they have been progressively rewriting their code for the last  three or four releases, if not longer.  You can write the code and have it compile into a 32 bit application (MC before 6) and then when you have all the app ready in 64 bit, you recompile it into 64 bit. Avid did not need to radically change the application, although there are two very major changes from the original code base. Avid Media Architecture was Avid’s approach to the multiplicity of non-tape sources, and it was all new code ready to recompile to 64 bit when the main application did. Avid also appear to have changed their approach to hardware interfaces with Media Composer 6, integrating a hardware abstraction layer so that third parties can integrate with Media Composer without needing to make any changes to Media Composer code. (Previously the Media Composer code needed to be rewritten to talk to each piece of changed hardware.

Apple had to rewrite because their media engine – QuickTime – was only partially rewritten to 64 bit and was lacking most of what the Pro Apps team needed for a modern video application. The solution to the media engine was AVFoundation originally created as the media frameworks for iOS and ported back to OS X with 10.6.7 and Lion,  which is why FCP X requires 10.6.7 or later.

Adobe relies on its own proprietary media engine. Avid relies on its proprietary media engine.  Final Cut Pro  X relies on AVFoundation, which only exists on OS X and iOS and is very, very new to code to0. (This was the likely reason that broadcast video out was delayed, because they had to wait for AVFoundation to be finished before BMD, AJA etc could even start work on drivers no longer based on QuickTime.)

All are really 64 bit, but they’ve taken different paths to get there, as they had different needs.

Categories
Assisted Editing Interesting Technology Item of Interest

How I automated my writing career!

How I automated my writing career http://t.co/Q7ld3YHH

Naturally, any automation of “creative” processes interests me because I believe that some parts of the creative process of video postproduction can be automated. However, author Robbie Allen is right when he says: