Author: Philip

Categories
Distribution Item of Interest Media Consumption

Who Do You Trust On Whether or Not PROTECT IP will Break the Internet?

Who Do You Trust On Whether Or Not PROTECT IP Will Break The Internet? The Guys Who Built It… Or The MPAA? http://tinyurl.com/3v7x4cg

PROTECT IP is a badly worded, very vague Bill being bought and paid for by the MPAA and RIAA that many think will break the INternet and criminalize normal behavior like embedding a video. The problem with vague Bills is that they tend to be interpreted to suit the enforcer of the day.

Trouble is, those that are supposed to balance all the needs of society before passing laws seem to not even have any idea what PROTET IP is actually about!

When these serious questions are raised, the MPAA puts its fingers in its ears and goes “nah, nah, nah, won’t happen, nah, nah” and never addresses the actual issues. Sadly, the Representatives have been bought and paid for and unless all voting Americans get to their Representative, it could pass and really, really screw up the Internet, and your life.

However, the guys who wrote the white paper have been speaking up lately trying to get our elected officials to recognize the consequences of passing PROTECT IP as is. But the really funny part is watching the technically clueless MPAA try to brush off these concerns. It’s almost laughable. Basically, the MPAA stamps its collective foot, and insists that it couldn’t possibly break the internet, and then suggests that “America’s technology community” can fix any problems:

As for the clueless Repreentatives: half of them have no idea what the Legislation is even about, thinking it has something to do with “immigration” or “the Internet Kill Switch” (it is neither).

Last week, we wrote about how Rep. Anna Eshoo (whose district covers much of Silicon Valley) is apparently so incredibly out of touch on what PROTECT IP is about (despite it having a huge impact on the economy of her district) that she thought it was really about immigration. We were willing to chalk it up to a busy staffer sending out the wrong form letter, but there’s growing evidence that our elected officials simply don’t know what PROTECT IP is about at all. 

David Segal from Demand Progress was kind enough to pass on that they’ve been watching the responses from elected officials to letters sent via their form about PROTECT IP and nearly 50% of them seem to be about things totally unrelated to PROTECT IP. Are Congressional staffers really that busy or are our elected officials just clueless? 

As an example, they sent over this letter, sent in response to someone who wrote to Senator Kristen Gillibrand protesting PROTECT IP, which, you’ll note, has nothing to do with PROTECT IP, but is instead about the “internet kill switch.”

Categories
Interesting Technology Item of Interest Metadata

Smile, You’re On Everyone’s Camera

Smile, You’re On Everyone’s Camera http://tinyurl.com/5w2p4qb

The article is about ubiquitous facial recognition spurred by a report of a new app for police that allows facial recognition at five feet away. To be clear, many consumer still cameras, and some software, does facial detection: that is there is one or more faces in the picture. Some even recognize when people are smiling, but they do not identify the individual. Apple’s iPhoto and others try and do facial recognition but my experience to date is that it’s been very hit or miss. Apple purchased a Swedish company last year to improve it’s facial recognition technology.

Clearly others already have better technology and it has been pitched for law enforcement work for a long time. However, it’s the postproduction implications that interest me. If we can have a software tool identify all the people in our footage, at lest to the stage of identifying each instance of the individual. Reading through the article it is likely the name could be discovered or derived from Facebook or other social network or public record. At worst the person would need to be manually named only once.

For a metadata-based application each clip could be tagged with the person’s ID for as long as they’re in the shot.

We would end up with ‘bins” for each individual.

Identifying people in shots is Derived Metadata and then can be used as input into other smart algorithms to take more of the boring out of post.

There are a lot of other interesting applications and implications of this increasingly popular (and capable) technology.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Business & Marketing

“Full-time Editor” or “Pro” is asking the wrong question

Over the last couple of weeks, some of the discussion around Final Cut Pro X is focused on who Apple wrote it for – a discussion I’ve contributed to in more than one place. And I see today in Oliver Peter’s excellent review of Final Cut Pro X he tackles the same question and punts on “full-time” editor as the distinguishing factor. (And yes, yet another Final Cut Pro X post, but one where the main point isn’t really about that piece of software specifically, but relevant to the discussion.)

It strikes me that we might really be asking the wrong question, or questions. It’s not so much what type of work you do, or what proportion of your time is spent doing it, or even the attitude one takes to one’s work – “professionalism”. In the context of talking about the relative suitability of tools, surely the question is on workflows and toolset?

Continue reading ““Full-time Editor” or “Pro” is asking the wrong question”

Categories
Item of Interest Media Consumption The Business of Production

Back to the future: Is media returning to the 19th Century?

Back to the future: Is media returning to the 19th century? http://tinyurl.com/3te5m53 Mass media is going to become a historic anomaly.

analyzes a series of articles looking at the evolution of media in a digital age from The Economist. The premise is that mass media is a byproduct of its era. Before mass media there were hundreds of small media voices, often opinionated (just like blogs) and ultimately that’s where we’re returning with hyperlocal news and altered nature of “news”.

You should read the whole article, because it’s a good summary of The Economist articles:

As The Economist notes, up until the early 19th century there was no “mass media” in the sense that we think of the term now. Newspapers had not really been invented yet, and news still travelled via word-of-mouth, or via hand-printed pamphlets written by people likepolitical theorists Thomas Paine and John Locke. And even when newspapers as we know them started to be published and distributed, they were opinionated — and often gossip-filled — publications that catered to a tiny audience, much like blogs did when they first appeared. Says The Economist:

In many ways news is going back to its pre-industrial form, but supercharged by the internet. Camera-phones and social media such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter may seem entirely new, but they echo the ways in which people used to collect, share and exchange information in the past. “Social media is nothing new, it’s just more widespread now,” says Craig Newmark.

Although we think of “mass media” such as television, radio and newspapers as fixtures in our lives and in the media economy, says The Economist, “the mass-media era now looks like a relatively brief and anomalous period that is coming to an end.” As media and publishing become something anyone can do, whether on their blog or via other social tools such as Twitter or Tumblr, media companies are having to reinvent themselves to take advantage of this phenomenon — and to survive.

A new generation that has grown up with digital tools is already devising extraordinary new things to do with them, rather than simply using them to preserve the old models. Some existing media organisations will survive the transition; many will not.

He also talks about the risks of having only opinionated news but seems to think it’s OK if it is revealed.

Of course, the implications for the mass market media producers would, by inference not be that great. If mass markets (ultimately – not next week or anything) disappear, then the production workflows and support technologies will change as well.

The only thing we really know about the future is that it will NOT be like today.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Item of Interest

Another Perspective on Final Cut Pro X

http://tinyurl.com/3ls73kv A great perspective imho

I rather like this take on the reaction:

Beyond that, the new FCP is supposed to be easier for people who have never done serious video editing before. Pros don’t care about this, of course. In fact, many don’t like the idea of making video editing easier and expanding the pool of people who can do quality video editing. Making a task or software easier to use both makes current users’ jobs easier but also lowers the barriers to entry.

The thing about many Pros is that they like complexity on some levels. They like the idea of being elite and doing something that very few people can do. Or, more precisely, doing something that very few people would put up with. Just look at how complex and ugly Bloomberg Terminals are to see how people and industries like using something that looks complex and hard to comprehend by outsiders. Wall Street veterans have resisted a easier-to-user, easier-to-learn, more attractive Bloomberg Terminal for years.

Categories
Business & Marketing Item of Interest Monetizing The Business of Production

All My Children a killer app?

All My Children a killer app? http://tinyurl.com/3ue2fmr

You may have heard the announcement that All My Children and One Life to Live (cancelled ABC Soap Operas) are heading to Internet distribution. (In this context “app” means use not literally a software application). He runs the numbers on whether or not this could work financially – something I’m always interested in.

Fifty million dollars is $192,000 per episode or $4,370 per finished minute based on 44 minute shows. That’s a lot of money but a lot less than primetime TV budgets. It’s also the absolute most any soap has ever cost with most costing less. Certainly there are some savings to be found in there. Let’s claim a 20 percent labor savings from moving to the Internet, bringing per minute costs down to $3,496.

Actually, there are plenty of additional savings. Some savings will come from lower labor costs as actors accept smaller paychecks as an alternative to retirement or unemployment. But an even greater savings will come from any Internet soap’s ability to offer online every episode ever broadcast — the long tail — at an effective production cost of $0 per hour.

If a third of Internet viewers are watching old episodes that drops the effective cost of new episodes by a third, so we are down to $2,342 per finished minute.

With sponsorship he brings it down to around $2,000 a finished minute and then compares it with the (rumored/reported) budgets for YouTube’s future professional channels.

According toVariety, YouTube will shortly bring some professional channels to its service with budgets of $1000-$3000 per finished minute.

My biggest concern about this particular example – not about the trend to Internet delivery and alternate funding in general – is that the target market for the Soaps may not be technically savvy enough to pick up and continue on the Internet.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Item of Interest

TalkAbout Tech 013: Like Ripping off a Band-Aid

TalkAbout Tech 013: Like Ripping Off a Band-Aid http://tinyurl.com/43uxe8m More from me on FCP X.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps

More on Final Cut Pro X’s monitoring solution

I recently wrote about Airplay as a possible solution to external video monitoring for Final Cut Pro X, and that would indeed be a cool monitoring solution but not for critical work as it’s H264 compressed and 8 bit.

With Matrox’s announcement today of their monitoring solution, which confirms uncategorically that there is no “broadcast quality video” out of Final Cut Pro X, I had to rethink what I thought they were thinking!

Continue reading “More on Final Cut Pro X’s monitoring solution”

Categories
Apple Pro Apps The Business of Production

Who are Apple’s Final Cut Pro X customers?

When you’re designing software you always have a “use case” or typical user in mind. For our Assisted Editing software I can pretty much name every person we had in mind when creating it. First Cuts was definitely made for me. Transcriptize was an idea from Larry Jordan and was made for him. Sequence Clip Reporter‘s inspiration was from my friend Les Perkins.

So, when I had the opportunity to ask Apple who their typical user is, I had hoped for something more specific than “the vast majority of their current Final Cut Pro users”. Without knowing the demographics of their current user base, we have no idea how to work out who exactly is buying Final Cut Pro X, or who ‘should’ be buying it.

It’s hard to point fingers at who the “2 million installs” equates to, or even the year-earlier “1.4 million unique paying customers” (and there are likely a couple more installs that didn’t pay).

Continue reading “Who are Apple’s Final Cut Pro X customers?”

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Item of Interest

Episode 31: Is Branded Media the future of Production Finance?

Episode 31: Is Branded Media the future of Production Finance? http://tinyurl.com/6447cvh A new episode of The Terence and Philip Show.

Sponsored movies of the 70’s and 80’s were the precursor to Branded Entertainment, and it’s a major way of getting funded today. But is it the future?  Terence and Philip discuss examples and why it might be more successful.