Author Archives: admin

Quick Update

April 29, 2011 – 7:29 pm

For those of you that know, I’m from Dade County, GA, which recently was hit by several tornados. My family is all safe, thank God, but there was much destroyed in the county, as well as the cities in Alabama and Tennessee… and many lives lost. Our prayers go out to all those communities trying to rebuild. As for me, I’ll be headed up this weekend to help clear a couple of trees my dad and brother have been working on getting off of my grandmother’s lawn. It will be sad to see the devastation.

In other news, I’ve been extremely swamped with work recently. I’ve had simultaneous projects with Caterpillar and Coke through Indigo Studios, as well as a Comcast Bands on Demand episode, and music video we’ve been working on for awhile with Twin Lens Productions…. sigh.

Oh, and last month Indigo asked me to edit their 2011 reel one afternoon. So you can see that below. Has exceprts from a couple projects I worked on for them. Enjoy:

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Final Cut Pro – X

April 13, 2011 – 12:00 am

New FCP-X was announced tonight at the NAB FCP Supermeet. Overall, it looks like a much needed overhaul.

Highlights are: 64bit, background render, new media management, updated timeline, audio sync for multicam, independent res timeline, new timeline features (keyframing in timeline, audio editing nice features, etc. etc.), native H.264 editing, plus a good bit more.

Overall, it seems like a good update and overhaul of FCP. However, no word on Color, SoundtrackPro, Motion and DVDStudioPro. And this version of FCP will be released in June, only in the AppStore for $299, which, last year, was the upgrade price for the whole suite. Not sure if they’ll offer an “upgrade” price of less than $299 (that would be nice), but I doubt it.

My complete and total guess, is that they are in complete overhaul mode of the entire Studio suite (except for DVD Studio Pro, which will only exist in legacy versions after this year…again, my guess, but there is no reason to update the program). But everything else is currently being updated to 64bit, and whatever feature set that they want to be cross-app… but it’s not ready yet. So they release FCPX in the interim period to satisfy their core user base, while next year we get a full Studio update….but released on the AppStore (like everything else) and split up, so users buy what they want. FCPX gets a ~$299 price-tag.  Again, just a guess, but it makes sense. Theres no real reason why Apple would dump a fantastic program like Color (or at least sell it). Soundtrack Pro gets a ~$199 price tag…. Motion a ~$199 price tag… Color a ~$399 price tag…. who knows. But it makes sense.

Anyways, my two cents. I will be upgrading in June. Will still have FCP 7 on my system for any issues that crop up. But the updates seem worth it to me.

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Bronze Telly – ACS Transformation

April 11, 2011 – 5:21 pm

Just found out I won a Bronze Telly for a piece I did last October called “Transformation” for Indigo Studios and American Cancer Society.

Don’t know if they’ll post it online, but if they do, I’ll share the link. Here are some frames from the piece:

This project was interesting. At the time, there was a video floating out there for earth day that they wanted to emulate. So I shot actors holding cards with my 7D to create a timelapse feel, then using Mocha, I somewhat motion-tracked the footage to the card. It was a little wonky, since the movement frame to frame was so dramatic, but mostly worked… Animation was all in AFX. We had a pretty tight turnaround, with some last minute changes day-of. But it was fun, and for a fantastic cause.

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New Commercial

April 10, 2011 – 10:14 pm

Been super-busy over the past month or so, but I thought I’d at least get one new thing up on this site. I recently did the editorial work on a commercial for Tech-Net Auto Services with Indigo Studios and The Stone Agency. They’ve put it up online, and you can watch it here:

Even got to shoot a few things… in production they never got a tight shot of a rev meter, so I went outside with my 7D and shot it in my own car! Also, all the key handoffs and product shot was shot with my 7D on greenscreen. All the 3D work was done by Indigo people and compositing was done by Yesael with color work done by AaronK. The client was very happy with the piece. Another fun shot was the end shot, the wide shot where everyone is clapping. I roto’d the people and cars, and Yesael did a great job fixing the pavement from the cracked, oil stained crap that is was to a nice clean surface, and he fixed the color too.

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My Thoughts on Starting Over

March 8, 2011 – 3:26 am

I had a creative director ask me today if I felt frustrated by starting over. The context is: I was working on a commercial project, and we’d been through a few rounds of cuts, ended up changing a major element in the mix, and I basically went back to a blank slate editorially.

You know, there is a very real reason why my tagline at the top here is “delete is my favorite key.” I find Select All > Delete to be refreshing. Some Producers/Directors are really put off by that concept (fortunately the people I was working with weren’t). But I look at it this way:

1) In this digital age of back-ups/revision saving, etc… me hitting delete on a duplicated sequence means nothing in terms of work being ‘lost’. (Which is almost unfortunate!)

2) All of the past revisions have led me up to a point. It may be a point of throwing out everything I have and starting from ‘scratch,’ but I still, fortunately, have a memory of those, and what I’ll re-build is a reflection of that. BUT, the blank slate means anything is possible. It reminds me that for every edit I make, there are crazy-numbers of OTHER possibilities! Moreover, it helps me to define problem areas, simply because I avoid them in the re-edit. If something didn’t work the first time around, I’m not going to re-build it like that; I am forced through the lack of anything being there to change it completely. And I love that.

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