Art History: Postproduction on The Cool School

by Jon Silberg @ Videography

From 1957 to 1966, the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles was a hub of the modern art movement on the West Coast. The space and the eclectic group of artists who showed their abstract paintings, collages and "assemblages" of old car parts and pieces of bent plastic never quite found the international renown of their New York counterparts, but, in retrospect, they clearly did have a lasting impact on the art world. The documentary The Cool School, directed by Morgan Neville, combines elements of the gallery founders' rise and acrimonious fall and also touches on the artists, their work and their difficulty finding appreciation in the conservative movie colony that was mid-century Los Angeles.

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Exporting Markers from FCP

By Ken Stone

When working in Final Cut Pro we can add Markers to our timeline. Adding markers to the timeline gives us the ability to 'export' special metadata along with our video. For example, when building a sequence in FCP that will be used in DVD SP, we can add Chapter markers to the timeline that will pass through on export to Compressor or directly to DVD SP, and will be available for us to use when authoring our DVDs. In addition to Chapter markers we can add Compression markers and Scoring markers for use in SoundTrack Pro.

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Adventures in HD Authoring: From NLE to Blu-ray

By Philip Hinkle @ EventDV.net

In February 2007 I upgraded my cameras from SD DV to HDV and proceeded to sell upgrades to an HD edit for later delivery. After a year of shooting and editing with this workflow, my archives were starting to fill up with projects archived in HD and ready to be delivered in some HD delivery format. When Toshiba recently threw in the towel with HD DVD and Blu-ray won the next-generation optical disc format war, I knew it was time to start getting some archived projects delivered.

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Holographic storage ships next month!

@ Robin Harris / ZDnet

Even since astronaut Dave Bowman disconnected the HAL 9000’s holographic memory in 2001: A Space Odyssey techies have been wondering when we could buy real holographic storage. Now we know: May, 2008.

Promising super-high density and excellent media flaw resistance, holographic storage has been an ever-receeding technology for years. You can buy nifty 3D skull and crossbones holograms - technically a form of storage - but no one had figured out how to turn a lab project into a product. Until now.

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When to stay in the native codec of the source, and when to convert to something else.

By Philip Hodgetts @ Ken Stone

There is some confusion, and probably more than a little difference of opinion, in when to stay in the native codec of the source, and when to convert to some other codec for editing and output. There's a good reason for the confusion, because there isn't one simple answer. In this article I plan on providing some reasonable guidelines, specific examples and what the exceptions might be.

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Calling all college students

@ Apple

Apple’s Set to Screen Series is your chance to learn about filmmaking from Baz Luhrmann, Oscar-nominated director of Moulin Rouge! and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. Every few weeks from now through October, a new podcast episode from Baz and his production team will take you behind the scenes of their upcoming movie Australia, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.

Get inside the creative process as you explore still photography, costume design, scoring, editing, and more. Then create and share your own projects inspired by what you’ve seen. Your work could win you some big-time prizes, from a MacBook Pro to a trip for two Down Under—or even the chance to join Baz on the film’s promotional tour and have your project included on the DVD release.

Baz’s introduction to the series and the first episode are both online now. You’ve got until May 5 to watch them, post your first project, and start packing for Australia.

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Reducing Background Noise in Soundtrack Pro

@ Genius DV

By setting a noise print in Sountrack Pro, you can pin point a particular noise in your scene for removal. Let's say that after filming a scene, you discover in post that the drone of road construction is competing with your onscreen personalities dialog. Let's face it, you can't always control what's happening in the background of a scene that's being shot guerrilla style. Soundtrack Pro will let you select the problem area, create a noise print, then go back and pin point that noise for reduction in your scene. This technique will take some practice due to the fact that it is possible to reduce the overall sound quality of the scene by performing a noise reduction.

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YouTube Encoding: Locked & Reloaded

By Brian Gary @ Ken Stone

It's been just over a year since I wrote the "Encoding for YouTube Using Compressor" article for Ken's site and I first want to thank everyone from all parts of the world who sent in comments.

A considerable amount has changed with Internet media in the last year and not just with broadcasting video via YouTube. For example, the entire Flash Video landscape changed when Adobe announced the inclusion of H.264 in Flash Player 9. Now, you marry that with the YouTube/Apple announcement detailing the conversion of YouTube content to H.264 and you've got the ability to broadcast high quality video to computers, mobile devices, and television sets (via Apple TV). Wired magazine even wrote about this convergence last summer. Google is a key player here as well: a major player in fact. I mean, they own YouTube after all.

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