Category: Item of Interest

YouTube to increase upload limit from 10 to 15 minutes http://bit.ly/962Bgl

Overall an evolutionary move with YouTube, which has progressively increased the file size limit, the highest quality limit (although I don’t buy “4K”) and now an extended duration for those who aren’t YouTube Partners. YouTube Partners have been exempt from the duration limit for a while now.

Just think about it: the move would bring 50% more “haul videos,” from shopaholic teen girls; 50% more crazytime rants from random dudes; 50% more hamster montages; and 50% more double (whoah that’s almost a triple) rainbows.

Why now? I don’t know. Why not? But I’d put my money partially on the company’s recent win in the Viacom case, and a sense that they’ve now figured out more effectively how to help the big content owners (labels, movie studios, TV networks) identify infringing uploads, which might tend to fall largely in that longer-form category.

RT @walterbiscardi: San Francisco firm to buy Grass Valley Group | TheUnion.com – http://tinyurl.com/26fw9zw

Interesting move to buy Grass Valley out from French-owned Technicolor (Thompson). I didn’t realize there were so many parts to Grass Valley.

The binding offer from Francisco Partners is for 100 percent ownership of the current Grass Valley Broadcast & Professional business, which would operate as “Grass Valley” going forward. This includes the camera, content repurposing, editing, master control, modular, news production, production automation, routing, servers, storage, and switching product lines including their entire product portfolios, the R&D centers and factories around the world, the Sales & Systems activities and Customer Support organization worldwide, as well as the management and administrative support functions dedicated to the business. This business perimeter and associated product lines for which the offer was made by Francisco Partners represent the core of what the market historically knows as Grass Valley products.

MXF -a progress report http://bit.ly/aBR3UC

MSF media is commonly used and read. Know what it’s about.

Announcing The Terence and Philip Show http://bit.ly/b9E8Yg

Terry Curren and Philip Hodgetts bring their not-politically-correct opinions on Avid, Adobe, Apple, post production, production, distribution and pretty much anything they want to talk about.

The show has no fixed duration or schedule, taking the form of a free-form discussion between the hosts, who bring their years of industry knowledge to the discussion.

If you remember back to when I hosted the Digital Production BuZZ and the last segment – the BuZZ in Depth officially – that Michael Horton generally referred to as “the rant”, then this is kind of like that but with Terry Curren’s perspective as well. For any of you that don’t know Terry:

Terence Curren has had a passion for filmed entertainment since the age of 12, when he began creating home movies with an old eight-millimeter camera.

He began his career in the early 1980s by directing, editing and producing music videos and a direct-to-video feature film. In 1986, he spearheaded the evolution of a major post-production facility’s edit bays, where he became senior editor in short order. His reviews and tutorials of emerging post technologies have appeared in Post, DV Magazine and other publications.

His extensive knowledge of the Avid along with his rich editorial and color-correction experience, has earned him the recognition of his peers and a legion of loyal clients.

And if you like the new show, thank Keith Larsen who first came up with the idea and name of the show. If you don’t like it, you know who to blame!

The new show has no connection with the Digital Production BuZZ. I will continue to contribute there as and when Larry Jordan would like me to.

CloudCanvas Launches HTML5 Image Creation And Editing Suite http://tcrn.ch/dkuE6P

While Adobe have given some indication that it’s moving to provide the creation tools for HTML5, with their Lab project add-on to Dreamweaver for HTML5, the addition of a competing comprehensive tool is good news for the HTML5 ecosystem and long term prospects for even more widespread adoption. More interestingly this is a browser-based “cloud” application.

CloudCanvas allows both novice doodlers and expert designers to create, store, edit and embed images into the suite. The suite, which supports both vector and bitmap images, includes a standard roster of simple image tools similar to offline image editing suites (i.e. Photoshop), including polygons, circles, painting, layers, brushes and others. And the suite includes more advanced editing tools such as bezier curves, blurring, drop shadow and bevel filters.

Additionally, CloudCanvas is integrated with Google Images search and DeviantArt libraries to import images into the suite and includes over 30,000 clipart and templates within the suite. The suite also includes 500 fonts ready to use on the web and support saving in PNG and SVG formats

What a reason to buy”! http://bit.ly/bThyDa

I think I’ve mentioned here before of Techdirt’s CwF+RtB=profit where Connect with Fans who you give a reason to buy (something, not necessarily the media) is the modern secret to profiting from creative endeavors.

Well Indian cricket star Shirshendu Mandal is writing a book that has a special edition, for only $75,000, has one page that is partly printed with his blood. So far 10 people have signed up, which makes the income a whole lot better than the average publisher’s advance!

An odd ‘reason to buy’ and probably another in the “gimmick” category (brilliant but wouldn’t work for everyone) but it shows creativity.