02
Jul
09

sailing channel theater episode 1 online now

SCTep01

Awesomely quick turnaround by the folks at WLIW 21.  You can see the premier episode of Sailing Channel Theater 2 days ahead of the broadcast premier by clicking on the link above or right here.  I’ll be getting back on topic with some traditional pro • active • ly insightful tutorials in a bit, but right now basking in the contentment of bringing my first independently produced series to broadcast and beyond.  Love the forward thinkery of WLIW 21 putting the full show up online for everyone to see!  Would love to hear any and all feedback on this show so if you watch it drop me a line.  At the very least, be sure to catch the hand drawn 12 second opening animation by up and comer Katie Better.  Starts at 35 second mark…

Soundtrack Pro was particularly helpful in fulfilling the audio prerequisites for the PBS Red Book, might have a video tutorial coming up here whenever I slow down.  The thing about producing and mastering two 30min shows for air each week is that as soon as you lay two off to digibeta, you gotta get to work on the next two.  And then try and to remember if you ate lunch!

proactively • proud as heck • peter

01
Jul
09

sailing channel theater premieres this weekend!

SCT on WLIW21

Following yet another considerable blog sabbatical, I’m coming back at you with a passionate what-I’ve-been-working-on post.   What the press release won’t tell you is Sailing Channel Theater is a father, son and son production with a lot of love and support from Mom, family friends and the sailing community.  If you’re outside the WLIW 21 viewing area, become a fan on Facebook and get a link to the full show (which we will be streaming following the broadcast premier) on TheSailingChannel.TV.

In the meantime,  I’ll be whipping up that compression and delivering two more episodes before the fireworks go boom this weekend.  Here’s the awesome press release from WLIW21.

proactively •  Happy Fourth of July! • peter

05
Jun
09

rumorama – apple buys nuke

rum or rama

Hot off the FCP-L presses, Ian Wilson posts:

Roomer has it, that their Persuasion product, which was to replace Shake, has been canned and replaced with Nuke.  There has just been a Company buy out at the Foundry announced, which adds some weight to the roomer.  4 more sleeps if you are in OZ will tell the story.

Not quite sure how to read that last line, Ian.  Regardlessly, James Culberston quickly followed up with:

Hmmm. Nuke for $999. Send to Nuke from FCP, Keylight included with FCP … the mind boggles.  I’ll take that over Blu-Ray authoring any day.  Fun to contemplate anyway.

Any validation to these “roomers” being reported out there?  In the meantime, I’ll be putting mocha for FCP through its paces.

proactively • rumor mongering • peter

01
Jun
09

editing for editors, by editors

Two awesome videos have popped up in recent FCP-L posts talking about editing from an editor’s perspective.  Firstly, BBC World News America’s Bill McKenna has been named ‘Editor of the Year” by the White House News Photographers Association.  Mr. McKenna was asked to edit a video to be shown at the event. It offers a rare glimpse into his world to reveal what inspires a top TV picture editor.

bill mckenna 3

Twicely, Joy Moeller (Creative Director/Editor, 19 Below) gives us the do’s and dont’s of edit suite etiquette.

And if that wasn’t entertaining enough, the stories FCP-L’ers shared kept the laughs (or tears) rolling:

I worked with a producer who always kept track of downtime. She considered anything as downtime, including the editor re-doing an edit. She considered only the finished edit was payable. She had a stopwatch and it was always going.  At the end of the day, she would total it up and ask that it be taken off the edit time for that day.  Remarkably, she had a very successful career as a producer that lasted for many years. It’s just as well I was a producer at the time and not an editor, as I would have cheerfully strangled her.

Bill Affleck / Wasteland Productions, Inc.

Back in the linear days, I had a client who sat with a stop watch and actually clicked it on and off for anything. Go to the bathroom, click, call someone to come to the bay, click, get a drink of water, click. Man that was irritating. I always rounded down for clients anyway, but not this guy.
Also in the linear days, I had the finger snapper one time and it was late and I was tired, I finally stood up, offered him my chair and said he get more accurate edits if he ran it himself. Actually cured him and he requested me from there on out.

Terrence Curren / Alphadogs

You can see more of Terry Curren alongside industry veteran editors Billy Weber, Glenn Morgan and Carol Streit on Studio Daily extemporaneously discussing war stories, battle tactics, and all the things they learned on the job that really have nothing to do with editing but are crucial to the job of an editor.

proactively • ediblogournalising • peter

***UPDATE***

Swung over to Shane Ross’ Little Frog In Hi Def blog and found this gem.  Falls under the “nothing to do with editing but crucial to the job” category.  Enjoy!

27
May
09

blog bomb – 5dmkii manual control!

Picture 3

We spoke and Canon listened!  No more need to compromise with inferior workarounds, this firmware update makes the 5dmkii perform like a video camera that also takes ridiculously awesome stills.  Does this added firmware, with the implication of more to come down the road (24p anyone?), effectively trump the release of Red’s Scarlet?  With the 5dmkii’s 1080p and a full frame 24mm x 36mm sensor, all Scarlet has on the it is 3k image capture, 24p, over and under-cranking… ok maybe that comment is more provocative than plausible.  But with the tag line An epic begins with M I do believe Canon has flipped the flame switch to on.

For my new freelance business (have I mentioned I went freelance?) the 5dmkii could totally be the defacto webisode camera of choice.  Knowing that one should always produce with broadcast hd standards in mind, 30p is a great source frame rate for video destined for the web and can be easily dropped into a 29.97 time line and printed to HDCAM SR, IMX, DigiBeta or what have you.  All that with a little bit of ye olde ProRes transcode and Color grading, of course.

LATimes.com, WashingtonPost.com, NYTimes.com; take a page out of the Tyler Ginter combat photographer’s handbook and put these puppies in the field.  The 5dmkii very well could become the video journalist’s weapon of choice. Great stills, great video, and with a little bit of help solid sound.  Check out Tyler’s demo of the 5dmkii combined with a  Sennheiser Evolution G2 100 wireless lavalier mic:

Gotta run to a meeting of the minds, but hope this news gets your engines revved.

proactively • pulling focus • peter

***UPDATE 2 June 2009***

Here’s the link to download the firmware and a quick review of the firmware install by my friend Paul here.

14
May
09

everybody likes free plugins

Andy's Plugins for FCP

Just saw these posted on the FCP-L.  While the plugins may not be everything I’m looking for personally, the write-ups are awesome.  Andy’s got a really cool ease in ease out tutorial well worth checking out.  There’s a bunch of free FCP plugins out there and I will post more as I find them.  And hey, if you know of some share them with a comment.

proactively • peter

09
Apr
09

time lapse dolly

Following up to yesterday’s blog interview, check out this time lapse dolly rig created by Tom from timescapes.org. Fancy, right?

Wrap your head around this timescapes.org video with footage from the dolly:

proactively • wowed • peter

08
Apr
09

blog interview – michael rissi’s swiss winter time lapse

michael

While I was cutting and color grading hot bodies on beaches in bikinis for Travel Channel, Michael Rissi was freezing his ass off making this epic time lapse of winter in Switzerland.  Click on the above pic for a link to his website.

Michael was kind enough to answer a few questions for me, so here ya go:

ME: So Michael, your HD time lapse photography is stunning. What cameras are you shooting with to bring this imagery to life?

MICHAEL: I have a Canon 400D (Digital Rebel XTi) and since 2009 also a Canon 50D. I was a little afraid that after around 200k shutters, the 400D’s shutter might fail at any unfavorable time… As lenses I have the wide angle Sigma 10-20 and the Sigma 17-70.

What is your approach to framing and exposing your time lapse photos?

I like wide angles a lot, as I shoot mostly landscapes. But as in landscape photography, finding the right subject is not trivial, people (me as well) tend to try to fit to much onto their images. Wide angles, however, allow in the post production smooth pans and zooms.

What software applications are part of your toolkit to produce these HD time lapses?

I always shoot in raw (or sraw), with the result that I filled a 1TB disk in about 3-4 months… Usually, I use Adobe’s Camera Raw for the raw images, or directly photomatix when I create an HDR time lapse and then tone mapping with Photomatix. After camera raw/photomatix I rerun the images through Photoshop to correct the colors, remove dust spots if necessary, apply a tone curve or in case of winter time lapses, I also “whiten” the snow slightly. Then I save all images as jpgs and import them into Adobe Premiere Elements (the poor man’s solution).

The most important filter is the deflicker plugin (gbdeflicker). Flickering is a big issue in digital time lapses, especially for HDR processing. I save the movie as quicktime with H.264 1920×1080p. Apple somehow has another definition for the gamma value, so I correct this with Quick Time Pro (explained here)

How did you achieve such smooth zooms and pans? It looks like you do this in post from where I sit, am I correct?

The zooms and pans are done in post with Premiere Elements. That’s why I usually shoot with the wide angle.

As an accomplished HD time lapse producer, what other time lapse videos have inspired you?

I came to shooting time lapse movies from photography. I saw on YouTube the great tutorials and movies from milapse

…and knew that I want to do that too! Last spring, I found the time lapse forum timescapes.org. This is a great forum with awesome people, who have impressive ideas and technical skills, it’s really astonishing! And for sure, I also like the movies from Reggio, mostly Koyaanisqatsi…

and Fricke’s Baraka


What’s the next time lapse you think you will produce?

In my “real” life, I write my phd thesis about gamma ray astronomy. This involves travels to the Canary Island La Palma, where our telescope is situated on top of the volcano (in a rather remote area on 2500 m). I already made last year time lapses from the moving telescope at night…

…but I have lots of ideas for improvements. We also built a second telescope, so I hope to be able to shoot them dancing in stereo. The whole island of La Palma is a great place for shooting time lapses, with very interesting cloud formations, so I hope I will collect lots of footage there!

Another ongoing project is the one from Zurich, where I shoot every day 10 minutes at around 7:45am the same view onto Zurich.


Thanks again for giving me the heads up on your new time lapse Michael, it’s breathtaking. Great choice of music and superior pacing and editing.

Thanks a lot Peter, great that you liked it!

proactively • the pilot episode of blog interviews • peter

06
Apr
09

travel channel – ultimate spring break

Sorry for the hiatus, good lord what a production schedule I’ve been on. Just took the past 4 days to recuperate.

usb-blog-pic

Click on the above pick for a quick preview. It debuted Thursday April 2nd @ 11pm est. Yours truly was credited as Finishing Editor & Colorist. I’ll post if it is scheduled to re-air.

During the recuperation – o – rama, cut a pilot blog for my favorite local comic book shop Third Eye Comics.

Will be getting back to regular posting here so thanks for hanging in there. I’ll most likely be going to NAB and blogging from the show floor so stay tuned for lotsa fun stuff.

proactively • blogging on • peter

07
Feb
09

the orphanage closing its doors…

orph_logo_600

Very sad post from Stu Maschwitz over at ProLost.  His company, The Orphanage, is closing its doors indefinitely. Most recently, Stu and The Orphanage produced Frank Miller’s The Spirit, 300, and Sin City. Along with Shane Ross over at Little Frog in High Def, Stu’s ProLost blog has been a huge influence on my blog game, inspiring me to attempt to walk in his footsteps and share production knowledge for the sake of bettering our community and the industry.

stu-4744

Here’s a short, classy excerpt from Stu’s post:

It’s no accident that our company’s name described a place for people, people who may be thrown together, but who ultimately create their own destinies. Scott once described his vision of an orphanage as “a hundred success stories waiting to happen,” and that is exactly what came to pass inside our offices. We have had the privilege of working with many “Orphans” over the years, and watching them grow and take on new responsibilities has been the single greatest part of coming to work every day.

A message to the visual effects industry: You will never find a better employee than a former Orphan.

Good luck to you, Mr. Maschwitz, and to all the Orphans out there.

proactively • peter




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