Category: General

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Item of Interest Metadata Presentations The Business of Production The Technology of Production Video Technology

My DV Expo Topics

My DV Expo topics

9-5 September 20 Basic Tech for Producers (and recent Film School Graduates)

In this session, technology expert and DV magazine contributor Philip Hodgetts will cover the technological choices in production and post in a non-geeky way to help producers — and others without a technical background — make good technology choices for their productions. From formats to software choices; selecting cameras to creating Web video; designing graphics that will work and much more.  PRICE: $195 ($245 after Aug 31) Click here to register now.

9-5 September 21 Using Metadata For Production and Asset Management

Metadata is becoming increasingly important throughout the production cycle–from camera to asset management. In this session learn about the types of metadata in use; how each major NLE (Final Cut Pro 7, Final Cut Pro X, Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and Media Composer 5.5) handles metadata and how we can use that metadata to speed postproduction and VFX. Once post is done, assets need to be management through through distribution and repurposing. What tools are available, how are they used and how do they fit into the metadata structures promoted by SMPTE and other standards bodies.  PRICE: $195 ($245 after Aug 31) Click here to register now.

9-5 September 22 Avoiding Postproduction Nightmares

Post expert and DV magazine contributor Philip Hodgetts details the most common (and costly) problems inadvertently created during production that will be “fixed in post.” From color correction to audio, and editing to the final QC pass on deliverables, he’ll not only reveal the tricks of the trade that he’d use to save your production, but also explain how you can avoid these costly issues in the first place. PRICE: $195 ($245 after Aug 31) | Click here to register now.

In the light of full disclosure, I certainly expect to be paid but I always deliver good value. There will be some overlap between the Basic Tech and Avoiding Postproduction Nightmares sessions as they both seek to make the technology understandable, but with a different focus to each day’s class.

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Interesting Technology Item of Interest

Prius Project bicycle can change gears with a Thought!

Prius Project bicycle can change gears with just a thought http://tinyurl.com/3rt66zc

This is pointed to more as an indicator of the distant future – one where direct brain control takes over from keyboard, touch pad or voice control. Still, it’s interesting what’s being done now as an indicator of what will be the future. Will it be control of software by thought, or will it go beyond that to imagining the edit or look and having the software work off our brain waves to results?

For the Prius Project bicycle, a team from Deep Local is working on a helmet with built-in neuron transmitters that allow the rider’s brain patterns to trigger the electronic shifters to move gears up or down. The system is said to take just 10 minutes to learn, after which the rider will be able to shift gears by just thinking about doing so.

In this context I’ll once again point to Tan Le: A headset that reads your brainwaves – Tan Le (2010) – a TED video – to consider in the context of this Prius Project. Direct brain control of software is much closer than I ever thought.

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Interesting Technology Item of Interest

Google Acquires Facial Recognition Company PittPatt

Google Acquires Facial Recognition Software Company PittPatt http://tinyurl.com/3dworyl

Facial Recognition – actually identifying the person – is more advanced than facial detection – simply determining how many faces are in a shot – and is going to become an important source of postproduction metadata.

Final Cut Pro X attempts to analyze shots (optionally) for facial detection, as does Premiere Pro CS5 and later. Final Cut Pro X also attempts to derive from the size of the face, the type of shot: Wide, M, MC, etc. Right now the technology is a little “hit and miss” or basically unreliable. For now.  These technologies will get better. Apple purchase a Swedish company last September to boost it’s efforts in Facial Recognition.

Meanwhile Google are also building up their portfolio of recognition technologies with the purchase of PittPatt.

When we get reliable Facial Detection, we’ll be able to find shots of individuals across our source media wherever they appear in a shot, and we’ll only have to apply a name once. When we get reliable facial detection, which is not yet, today.

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Business & Marketing Item of Interest Media Consumption

Hollywood is about to repeat the mistakes of the music industry?

Hollywood is about to repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the music industry. http://tinyurl.com/3spfm4o

Slate magazine’s Bill Wyman argues that the movie studios are repeating the mistakes of the record labels of the last decade, by refusing to adapt business models, suing customers and trying to make their business model problem a legal one.

Right now, in fact, the movie and TV business looks a lot like the music one did in the early 2000s. And as we’ve seen, that decade didn’t work out too well for the labels. So it’s worth looking at the situation and wondering how things are going to fare in the TV and movie world in the decade ahead. It can all be summed up in one single sentence. I’ll get to that in a minute.

He goes on to demonstrate how the legal offerings are inconvenient (at best) for the legal customers making unauthorized distribution not only cheaper but a significantly better product:

The trouble facing the movie industry right now is the same one the music industry had to confront 10 years ago. This is the summing-up sentence I referred to above:

The easiest and most convenient way to see the movies or TV shows you want is to get them illegally.

and

Again, to belabor the obvious: The illegal version isn’t just free. It’s better.

He goes on to suggest the solutions, but read the whole article (please), before commenting

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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.”

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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
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.

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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.

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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.

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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.