Mastering the Dallas Screenwriter’s Association – 2011 Short Film Showcase

What does it take to master 11 DVD’s, 4 WMVs, and 3 .mov’s onto one disc? Not a lot. But it does take a thorough of understanding what goes into mastering a DVD and what the shortest distance is between Source and Delivery.

The Dallas Screenwriters Association had gathered more than 12 movies for it’s 2011 Showcase. Add to this some PSA’s and some new media created specifically for this program, and you have the makings for a special challenge. But there’s a way around this potentially tricky multiformat maze that enabled the finished DVD to be delivered in just a couple days- and that includes delays for work on other projects, and the need to create a few new media bits.

What does it take to compute?

As tablets begin to overtake desktop and laptop computers as the “go to” piece of hardware for getting a job done, the need for a big OS and big apps falls into question. Case in point, you can shoot HD, edit and upload to your favorite web repository from an iPod Touch, Android phone, Windows Phone, etc. Apple’s latest OS- Lion, pulls liberally from the iOS devices, and Windows 8 is rumored to be a lot like their Windows Phone OS. It is with this background that I checked out how big the apps were in my Mac OS Applications folder, and I was pretty surprised by the results.

Apple’s new iMovie Pro. (aka Final Cut Pro X)

Say goodbye to the Pro Apps as you know them. The writing has been on the wall for several years, yet many Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Studio users continue to cling to the hope that Apple will make a major leap with Final Cut Pro and bring it into 64-bit computing, and finally address the numerous issues that have been on wish lists, sometimes for an entire decade.

Well, Apple demoed iMovie Pro at the FCP SuperMeet this past Tuesday April 12th and made absolutely no qualms about visually signifying the end of the Pro apps as we know them. There was no talk of Color. Soundtrack, Motion, Compressor, DVD Studio Pro, Blu-ray authoring, 3D authoring, feature film features, etc. No the focus was solely on Apple iMovie Pro.

How did we get to this sorry state? Well, I think there was a conversation in January that sort of went like this:

Apple v. Adobe. – FCS v. CS5. – The choice is pretty clear.

Adobe has really been pushing the limits when it comes to what the software package can do. From CS3, which was nice, but had a few carryover PC apps from a recent purchase, to CS4 which broke new ground in terms of authoring DVD’s for Flash, video in a PDF, and more.

Now CS5 jumps a whole new direction with 64-bit ONLY computing. This cuts some old computers off, but with a decent system, you can access tons more RAM. Add to this the new Mercury Engine using GPU to handle video processing and you can handle multiple streams of heavily compressed video where one stream used to choke a computer. Specifically I mean H.264 and AVCHD, which seem to becoming defacto standards in tapeless acquisition these days.

In an article in EventDV Magazine, Jan Ozer does a pretty nice head-to head comparison and

SmartSound for FCP

SmartSound has released their plug-in for Final Cut Pro that allows Smartsound to see open FCP projects, including all the different sequences, and import markers from that timeline into SmartSound to make the process of adding music to your project a breeze.

The demo from Larry Jordan is up on the SmartSound web site and we’ve got it for you here as well.

Smaller, More Powerful Computers.

As computing becomes ever more powerful, and “Netbooks” offer mobile computing power on the road with low-power chips, diminutive boxes with powerhouse capabilities are not only inevitable- they’re already here. While home theatre machines may be a “hobby” to some electronics companies, others are taking it seriously and offering some horsepower under the hood…

Switching from Mac to PC. How?

As regular readers know, I use a Mac. But the lack of a midrange model really has me fuming and I need a machine that does the job, at a price that doesn’t kick the buyer in the face.

I received a brochure for Dell the other day which showed off a nice little quad-core machine for pittance compared to a quad core Mac Pro. I could upgrade the dual internal drives to 1 TB drives, drop in a Blu-ray burner and, with Adobe CS4, I could be editing and burning HD video with aplomb, compared to standing around with my thumb up my Mac ass waiting for Steve Jobs to get past his “bag of hurt” feelings and make Blu-ray authoring on the Mac a reality.

But what sort of machine should I get?

Secret MacBook Upgrade = FW400 & nVidia!

Apple sure pissed off a lot of Macintosh users when the addressed the key limitation of their MacBook computers- namely the shared graphics processor- when Apple introduced the unibody MacBook… and completely removed the FireWire port. This made the new MacBooks completely unable to import DV or HDV footage from almost every such camcorder and deck on the market because they all do so over one interface: FireWire.

Well, perhaps Apple has actually listened to their customers this time and provided this same powerful graphics capability in their polycarbonate $999 MacBook, which still has FireWire 400.

Focus’ FS-5 looks good!

I have pointed out how outdated Focus Enhancements FireStore line of recorders had become over the years. Initially, revolutionary, they had become quite dated and wickedly expensive for the technology you received.

Now, six months after I compared the FS-4 to a glorious Archos portable video recorder, Focus Enhancements showed off their forthcoming FS-5 which addresses many of the issues I brought up.

FCP / QT still export bug.

Adam Wilt has uncovered an error in Final Cut Pro’s still image export to still image routine- it fails to properly render applied filters before exporting the frame you want. The filters were used to correct for the fact that it also fails to properly “round-down” YUV video that goes over 100 IRE when exporting still images. It clips the whites. Yea, it’s about as dumb as the fact that FCP has to “render” MP3 audio dropped in the timeline, yet fails to do it correctly and you get garbled audio. Isn’t the point of “rendering” to make it work in FCP?

Thankfully, Adam has a simple workaround, which you can find on his Blog post here.