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…)

I have a strong interest – personally and professionally – to want to automate the boring parts of post-production away from humans to computers, extending to some of the basic string-outs. This seems to infringe on the “human” role in postproduction, at least according to some of my associates. Well, lately I’ve come across a whole range of stories on how traditionally human roles, like doctors (and assistant editors), can or will be automated out of existence. That’s led me to think about what is the essential role of the human that can’t be automated? It’s not a simple question. (more…)

Pixels – those little dots that make up all our video images – are hard to encode and push down pipelines, even with ever-increasing encoding efficiency. On the other hand, vectors are small and very efficient, but so far have proved difficult to apply to video content. (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…)

You know how the end of the year comes up and you wonder where the year went? Well, Greg (my partner who writes our software) calculated where his year went:

Event Manager X,  released July 2011 (7 updates over 6 months in 2011; 9 updates in 2012)

 Xto7 for Final Cut Pro  a.k.a Project Xto7, released October 2011 (8 updates in 2 months during 2011; 17 updates in 2012)

7toX for Final Cut Pro, released  January 30, 2012 (16 updates over 11 months)

Sync-N-Link X, released April 2012 (5 updates over 8 months)

Sequence Clip Reporter , 7 updates in 2012

With updates to our other Final Cut Pro 7 software, it’s a total of  63 releases or updates to apps in a year, or more than one a week.

2012 has been one of the most interesting years I’ve had in a long time. The year started with the release of 7toX for Final Cut Pro followed by Sync-N-Link X to mark our fourth piece of Final Cut Pro X software. Then came the intense planning for the Solar Odyssey journey and production, followed by the disappointing reality that it descended into. Fortunately a lot of good has come out of the experience. It’s also been a year where the maturing of Final Cut Pro X has won over more people, and the consensus is favoring big sensors. Terry Curren and I took a look back on the trends of 2012 and Larry Jordan also did a good take on the trends on his blog. This is much more my subjective take on my year.

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I recall seeing the first of the training films from John Cleese’s then company, Video Arts and realizing that they were a cut above what I’d come to understand as “training” videos. High production values, great writing and amazing talent. John Cleese and the founding partners sold out decades ago, but current CEO Martin Addison spoke with beet.tv  about how the role of video has changed since Video Arts launched thirty years ago.

Addison says, “The role of video has changed. When we began it was very much a specialist market and the cost of entry of having a film camera was very high.  That’s changed completely now.  All of us have the potential to be filmmakers with a camera that we have in our pocket on our smartphone.”

Or, in other words, democratization has occurred and video is just another literacy.

Another episode of The Terence and Philip Show – Episode 48: Who should be using which NLE?

I recall this as a very interesting discussion and a good follow on from my own thoughts with Terence’s unique perspective.

From its simple beginning as the first third-party Final Cut Pro X application, Event Manager X has evolved into a complete Event and Project Library management tool. The 1.2 release adds Sets: saved combinations of Events and Projects for instant reload based around projects or clients. (more…)

The latest release of 7toX for Final Cut Pro available today in the Mac App Store includes:

• Bug fixes for Premiere Pro XML
• Bug fix for detecting unparsable .xml files
• Bug fix allowing translation to continue with missing media files