After Terry Curren’s round up of last year’s Hollywood Post Alliance Retreat I decided I should attend this year. While I was working on marketing for Lumberjack – our real time location logging tool – I got an email from the HPA offering spaces in the demo room during the retreat. It was immediately obvious that this was the time and place to reveal what we’ve been working for the last 8-9 months.

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Anyone who knows me, knows that I’ve been preaching the value of metadata for longer than I’ve been writing this blog. Usually to a very quiet house!  Certainly when I started there was very little recognition of the value to postproduction of production metadata. In fact I’ve coined the term “pre-post” to describe how metadata from the set can be used to save time in post.  (more…)

One of the more interesting press releases coming  this week out of CES, was from RAMP, a company I’d not heard of before, but with some interesting technology if the press release is to be believed for automatically generated metadata. (I say let’s give them the benefit of the doubt!) (more…)

While logging the Road to Ra material I’m working on, I’ve developed a pattern for the Content Logging part of the process, so I can do it all with the keyboard. The process was: (more…)

In my continuing desire to analyze what types of metadata we use, and how we use it, I think there’s another useful distinction to be made, within the Added Metadata section. Long term readers will know I categorize metadata into six types: (more…)

Last night we arrived back from the Solar Odyssey as our involvement finished on Sunday (long story shot, “creative differences”) and today my welcome home present to myself – a nice new MacBook Pro retina. Naturally I immediately updated to Mountain Lion. (New machine, new OS, might as well get it all over together).

One of the first apps I was looking at was Final Cut Pro X – very nice to see a full size 1080P signal in the Viewer window 1:1 and still have a whole heap of screen real estate. (My confession is that I’m using all the pixels 1:1 not in Retina mode. I already have to wear glasses for a computer screen so I might as well capitalize on it.)

Of course I look through the menus and what do I find in the Edit menu but: (more…)

Video Metadata Drives Engagement Rates As Much as 300 Percent, RAMP’s CEO http://t.co/VmdsmcRE Metadata is valuable!!

The presence of tags and transcripts in and accompanying video on the Web can drive engagement rates by anywhere from 40% to 300%, says Tom Wilde, CEO of content optimization platform RAMP. Beet.TV caught up with Wilde for a discussion of the growth of metadata in video and how it’s driving ad opportunities.

In addition to engagement rates, rich metadata can also help with more refined ad targeting, he explains in this video interview. He expects more growth in the availability of metadata in video due to the pending September deadline requiring IP-delivered video to include the same amount of closed captioning as TV, asmandated by Congress in the 21st Century Communications and Video Visiblity Act.

Get with the program now, or get with it later. Whichever way, there’s metadata in your future!

There are many kinds of metadata, and previously I’ve noted six that are important to production. There’s a whole second category of metadata that’s more related to asset management, but they share the common goal of being able to find a specific shot, as quickly as possible. In this post I’m talking about what would be Added Metadata of the six.

For scripted material, this is relatively easy, particularly with tools like QR Slate, Movie Slate, and the like now available. For scripted material you have known assets: Scene, shot, take, character, etc., as well as one or two free form fields like Comment. It is with un-scripted material that we run into problems not solvable with those solutions (at least in their current forms). (more…)

So, as I think I’ve mentioned, one thing we’re doing for Solar Odyssey is to find a way of entering metadata at the time of shooting, and then use time of day to match metadata and media. Metadata logging doesn’t require the accuracy that synchronizing cameras or double system audio does – for that you need Timecode.

June 14th’s shoot day was the first day I started to use it, once I got a better understanding of how it works. So during the day I logged (knowing I’d made mistakes along the way) the day’s shoot, using a web browser interface to the online web application that does the logging. (more…)

Like many people I questioned the metaphor of “Events” in Final Cut Pro X, but ultimately decided it wasn’t that crucial an issue and just let it be. Now that Greg and I are working on our metadata logging app for Solar Odyssey, we have had to solve the same naming question. It turns out that Event isn’t such a bad name after all. (more…)