Category: Item of Interest

Something I found interesting written by someone else.

Categories
Business & Marketing Item of Interest Monetizing

Are Corporations back to funding creative endeavors?

Looking to a Sneaker for a Band’s Big Break http://tinyurl.com/25q3dvy

A shoe company giving away studio time might seem peculiar. But with its new project, Converse — whose sneakers have been worn by generations of bands, from the Ramones to the Strokes — wants to become a patron of the rock arts. The company is not alone: lifestyle brands are becoming the new record labels.

This is remarkably like the sort of patronage a King, Lord or Knight would make of an artist in return for the artist creating the art for the patron’s benefit.

Not long ago most youth-minded brands’ pop strategies were limited to tour sponsorships and licensing songs for TV commercials. Now they compete to offer bands the kind of services once strictly the province of record companies: money for video shoots, marketing, even distribution. Red Bull and Mountain Dew have record labels with credible rosters. Levi’s, Converse, Dr. Martens,Scion, Nike and Bacardi have all sponsored music by the kind of under-the-radar artists covered in Pitchfork and The Village Voice, and they blitz the blogosphere with promotional budgets fatter than most labels could muster.

Overall, I see this as another positive step in the direction of financing independent production. One sponsor is less intrusive than many advertisers and it’s a better deal for both audience and advertiser.

These deals certainly seem to be better for artists than traditional record labels who now want “360 degree” deals where they get a cut on every dollar earned by an artist:

Major labels’ 360 deals, he said, are “way more of a sell-out than doing a collaboration with a brand where you have full creative control and you give free content to your fans.” (Many artists on Atlantic have extended-rights contracts, but a spokeswoman said Chromeo does not.)”

Categories
Business & Marketing Distribution Item of Interest Monetizing

Fallacy Debunking: Successful New Business Models are ‘Exceptions’

Fallacy Debunking: Successful New Business Model Examples The ‘Exception’ http://tinyurl.com/35znl9a

So often I’ve heard that new business models for music, game creation and other creative endeavors are all exceptions because the majority of money is still being made by the record labels and the successes of the new business models are not typical of the “average musician”.

Except, when you consider it carefully, so few artists ever made money from their Record Contract, that the few successes were indeed the exceptions.

Less than 10% of signed artists recoup. Take Maximo Park for example. They have by their own admission never made a penny from record sales and make their money from DJ sets in the main. An example I have first hand knowledge of, Embrace, have sold millions of albums, they were a genuinely massive band; they performed from Glastonbury main-stage to Top Of The Pops and everywhere in-between. When they split from Virgin, they owed their label three quarters of a million pounds. I guess my point is that if we promote the Trad Music Biz’s model as “The model” then the message we’d be sending is:

  • less than one percent of musical artists are part of the music business
  • only a tenth of those will recoup and make money from their record sales, and that’s good
  • an artist should be saddled with debt, the rate at which they pay that back is equivalent to a credit card with a 900% interest rate

Categories
Business & Marketing Item of Interest Monetizing

When A Humor Site Understands the Implications of Abundance better than the “Experts”.

When A Humor Site Understands The Implications Of Abundance Better Than The ‘Experts’… http://tinyurl.com/2bn6zuv

Here’s the bottom line: you can only sell scarcity. Digital files are abundant: they can be replicated indefinitely at minimal to no cost. Yes, various attempts at creating a Forced ARTificial Scarcity or FARTS, but they only ever succeed short term.

The key point, raised at the beginning of the article, which is the point we’ve been trying (and most likely, failing) to make for years, is that this isn’t just about music and movies. Issues of abundance where there used to be scarcity is going to impact all sorts of industries, even beyond what many people expect.

If you are interested in how the next generation of creative endeavors will be funded both the Techdirt article and the original piece at Cracked.com  – 5 Reasons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S. – are absolutely essential reading.

Categories
Item of Interest The Business of Production

Jim Jannard asks “What is professional to you?”

Jim Jannard asks “What is professional to you” http://tinyurl.com/344nbgs

The minimum definition of “being professional” would mean “Getting paid to provide a service someone will pay for.” but there’s more too it than that. I think being professional involves an attitude to the work and an attitude toward your fellow creatives of respect and being able to do your job and do it well among those people.

But how does that translate when we’re talking about “professional gear?”

Categories
HTML5 Item of Interest

Adobe announces HTML 5 Video Player Widget.

Adobe announces HTML5 Video Player widget http://www.tuaw.com/2010/10/21/adobe-announces-html5-video-player-widget/

Good to see that Adobe are being practical about HTML5. They have always been in the best position to provide the tools for HTML5 because essentially we need the same functionality to create HTML5 Rich Media as we do to create Flash Rich Media – just that the output will be different.

Techcruch’s take on why this is a big deal.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Item of Interest

DVFilm Releases DVFilm EPIC

DVFilm Releases DVFilm EPIC http://tinyurl.com/29qa5u7

Comes from a very good pedigree and is a very clever solution.

Categories
Apple Item of Interest

iLife 11 still 32 bit

iLife 11 still 32 bit. http://tinyurl.com/27dckw3

Seems like all Apple’s Apps – pro and not – that have QT dependencies are 32 bit. Just because most of QuickTime (other than fairly simple playback) is still based on 32 bit C APIs and Apple haven’t worked on QTkit (the 64 bit Cocoa version of QuickTime) since the release of Tiger OS X 10.4 some three years ago.

So it’s not just Apple’s Pro Apps that are having trouble moving to 64 bit Cocoa – it’s any of their apps that have a heavy dependency on QuickTime.

I haven’t bene able to confirm, from the tiny amount of information that was given at the show yesterday, whether or not AVFoundation has come to OS X but the introduction about bringing technology back from iOS to OS X desktop certainly augers well.

Categories
Item of Interest

‘The Movie Business Is Dying!!

‘The Movie Business Is Dying!! Blame TV!’ http://tinyurl.com/3xgzrm3 Of course this is 1959 but insider predictions have always been wrong!

The industry insiders have been universally wrong about their predictions of “doom” for their industry. This time it’s Mary Pickford in 1959 claiming that TV had already killed the film industry.

If they’re an established insider in any industry, they are almost certainly wrong about technology innovation. Bank on it.

Pickford: Well, that’s true. But it’s very expensive, and we have to face the fact that at one time there was 17,000 theaters — I don’t know what the number is today — but it breaks my heart to go by them today and see them… bowling alleys and skating rinks. Certainly, the motion picture will always be there, but I believe when paid TV comes in, and I’m sure it’ll be less expensive than going to the theater, that it’ll be the real death knell of motion pictures.

Oh, BTW, the US Film Industry just had it’s largest Box Office Gross ever. Nice prediction Ms Pickford.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Assisted Editing Item of Interest Metadata Video Technology

Apple Keynote – Back to the Mac: Implications for Final Cut Pro

There were a lot of features I saw in OS X Lion and particularly in iMovie 11, that I would love to see inside Final Cut Pro. Things like QuickView I already mentioned in my “What should Apple do with Final Cut Pro” article from September.

But today I saw some things I really want in the next version of Final Cut Pro. Like scalable waveforms that change color according to their level! Scalable waveforms (as Media Composer already has and I think PPro CS5) has been a feature request for Final Cut Pro as far back as I can remember. And now the technology is there in the Apple technology basket. We’ll take that, thanks.

Trailers – semi-automatic completion of a trailer – and Themes, fit comfortably with my concept of Templatorization: the use of templates to speed up production. I first mentioned the concept in a blog post of April 2005 titled “Can a computer replace an editor?“. It’s still a good read and remember, that was long before we started actually building that future with our First Cuts/Finisher products. Templatorization is already in the Final Cut Studio with Master Templates from Motion used and adapted (with custom images and text) inside Final Cut Pro.

The concept here is similar. We’ll see more Templatorization over time, even if they are custom templates for a project, like custom Master Templates.

Plus, as my friend Rob Birnholz tweeted during the presentation when some were complaining that Templatorization would drive hourly rates down even further:

I can now sell CUSTOM Professional video design! (vs. template based ‘insta-video’)

But the one piece of technology I most want to see in the next version of Final Cut Pro is People Finder because it automates the generation of so much metadata, that combined with Source metadata is going to really open up Assisted Editing to take away a lot of the dull work of finding footage and a story. (And Shane you can hate me now, but more efficient production is always going to be the driver, but we can automate the drudgery, not the creativity.)

By analyzing your video for faces, People Finder identifies the parts with people in them and tells you how many are in each scene. It also finds the close-ups, medium shots, or wide angles so it’s easy to grab video clips as you need them.

We get shot type metadata – CU, M, Wide and we get identification of the number of people in the shot. That’s powerful metadata. I suspect we won’t get it in the next version of Final Cut Pro because they’ve got enough to do and can’t do everything at once, but I’d love to see this level of automated metadata generation. Remember too, that as well as the facial recognition technology already shipping in iPhoto and now iMovie, it was announced back in September that they had purchased another facial recognition company to improve the accuracy.

The holy grail, from my perspective, of facial recognition would be if the software (Final Cut Pro please) recognized all faces in the footage, and grouped the same face together (like Faces in iPhoto). You’d still have to identify the person once, but from there on basic Lower Thirds (person and location) could be automatically generated (location eventually coming from GPS in the camera – we’re not there yet).

It’s a pity Apple don’t have or license speech recognition technology. Licensing Nexidia’s speech search would be ok (it’s what powers Get and ScriptSync) but it doesn’t derive metadata like speech analysis does. Once you have speech as metadata is makes things like prEdit possible; and ultimately the automatic derivation of keywords.

And it seems like my five year old ruminations might have been on to something.

Categories
Apple Pro Apps Item of Interest

iPhone 4 is more powerful than my first FCP 1 G3!

iphone Spect: 800 MHz A4, 512 MB RAM and 16 GB Flash RAM; I edited with FCP 1 (beta) on T/ware G3 350 MHz G3, 256 MB RAM = FCP on iPhone!

Inspired by this presentation by Chris Adamson Slide 56, but there’s a lot of good stuff in the presentation (just skip the code pages).

Slide 22 shows that AV Foundation has – in the three short years they’ve been working on it – incorporated more Classes and Methods than QTKit, which hasn’t had anything much in the way of new features since OS X 10.4 Tiger. Slide 44 shows the similarity between QTKit and AV Foundation and slide 69 of 79 should be noted in the light of tomorrow’s (Wed Oct 20) Apple announcement

But back to the main point of the post: Chris Adamson’s slide really rammed home just how low powered those first Blue and White G3’s were. And I purchased that specifically to run the Final Cut Pro 1 beta. Now, to be fair, that was OS 9 (which had a lower processor load than OS X) and just with simple FireWire/DV but I do claim to have had a TV Commercial on air, in PAL, the week that Final Cut Pro 1 was announced at NAB 2009. Final Cut Pro did not officially support PAL until a later release. (1.2.1 or 1.2.5.)