I was working in Final Cut Pro X today and discovered a little trick with Smart Collections.
Smart Collections can be dragged from Event to Event. Â You probably already knew that, but it was new to me.
Author: Philip
Brad Bird: Hollywood isn’t brave enough to copy Pixar process http://t.co/Gliw27s
It’s an interesting interview about Brad Bird’s (and Pixar’s) creative process, but I flagged it for the headline, which leads to the second question:
Three authors, three examples of the disruption in publishing http://t.co/ldzT3lx
Both book publishing and film/television are industries that were built on scarcity, that are being disrupted n an age of non-scarcity. That’s not to say that there isn’t success and money to be made in the traditional businesses, but book publishing is an interesting place to look for parallels to television (particularly).
How much money does it really take to make a documentary? http://tinyurl.com/3hu6abx
A good take on budgeting and how the “It takes at least $300,000” rule may not be as rigid now as it once was. Writer Edward J Delaney goes through six fundamental shifts that have changed the equation:
A matter of Mynd over movies – Â http://tinyurl.com/3le8bh3 Sorry about the Variety Paywall if you get hit with it.
Clearly reading brainwaves is getting a lot more advanced than I otherwise would have thought. This project reads “something” from the collective minds of the audience to influence story.
What are the editing concepts in FCP X and who is to for? http://tinyurl.com/3lamwnu
Another episode of The Terence and Philip Show where we attempt to decode the editing paradigms in Final Cut Pro X and who it is for. Â I admit, when Terry tries to push “prosumers” as the target market, I got frustrated and agitated because we both agreed Final Cut Pro X was for professionals but not “hollywood’ professionals.
iTunes 10.4 is now AV Foundation based, not QT http://tinyurl.com/3b2auaj
As I’ve written before, AV Foundation is the modern media playback framework for OS X. Originally developed for iOS and OS X it came to OS X with Lion, but Final Cut Pro X uses it, even on Snow Leopard (where AV Foundation is installed as a private framework in 10.6.7 and 10.6.8).
I think Apple are sending a strong message that QuickTime – as a framework for applications to use to play media – is not the way of the future. Â Particularly if you want a 64 bit application. While many parts of QT have been rewritten with a 64 bit wrapper as QTkit, the future is clearly away from QuickTime on OS X.
In fact, the use of QuickTime has been fading over the last decade as Apple moved to H.264/AAC in an MP4 wrapper for distribution purposes early last decade.
And now another of Apple’s media-rich applications appears to be built on AV Foundation now, instead of QuickTime, only falling back to use old QT codecs not supported under AV Foundation.
Storytelling: digital technology allows us to tell tales in innovative new ways http://tinyurl.com/3pwthvc
Author Aleks Krotoski starts out with the importance of story.
Stories are memory aids, instruction manuals and moral compasses. When enlisted by charismatic leaders and turned into manifestos, dogmas and social policy, they’ve been the foundations for religions and political systems. When a storyteller has held an audience captive around a campfire, a cinema screen or on the page of a bestseller, they’ve reinforced local and universal norms about where we’ve been and where we’re going. And when they’ve been shared in the corner shop, at the pub or over dinner they’ve helped us define who we are and how we fit in.
The Trivialities and Transcendence of Kickstarter http://tinyurl.com/3emfl46
The question of how to fund our various independent projects is a constant question in an era of democratized production. I’ve already written (and done a Terence and Philip Show about) branded media, because I believe that will be an important part of the funding future. But at the grassroots level, fan funding has proved successful for many artists, and in the case of Kickstarter, for projects other than music and video based.
So what kind of “creative projects†does Kickstarter enable? Well, a couple of artists raised $2,181 to send funny handwritten letters to every household in Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill neighborhood; someone pulled in $8,441 to help finance the creation of “a searchable ethnographic databasebuilt from the lyrics of over 40,000 hip-hop songsâ€; a couple of people got $30,030 to publish a version of “Huckleberry Finn†that replaces Mark Twain’s use of a notorious racial epithet with the word “robot.†At times the sums have been a good bit larger: $67,436 to build a statue of Robocopin Detroit; $161,744 to make a computer-animated adaptation of a Neil Gaiman story; and nearly $1 million in pledges to finance a band to wear iPod Nanos as wristwatches.
It’s a long article but if you care about fan funding, it’s well worth the read.
Can a computer Predict a Hit Movie or Song? http://tinyurl.com/3g8ovfk If you mean profitability, yes. Fascinating use of neural networks.
This is a long, and not new, article that rambles through a fascinating story of how a lawyer, “Mr Pink”, “Mr Brown” and “Mr Bootstrap” collectively cracked the code for predicting the profitability of movies, TV shows and (separately) another team shows the likelihood of whether a song is going to be a hit.
The specifics of how they achieved both breakthroughs is interesting: have the computer software (usually some sort of neural net) analyze existing successes – music or movie. Â It then analyzes new music or movie proposals to determine whether it is likley be be a hit (music) or how much money it will make at the box office (movie).