September Blogwad

Hard Disk Warning!
Larry Jordan says don't leave a hard drive sitting on your shelf for more than a year with data that you want to keep. Explains why and gives some suggestions on how to keep old hard drives from losing data.

The Freesound Project
Sound effects here. They are available under Creative Commons licenses. Not sure if that would include any of Link's work. As I understand it, Creative Commons means that you aren't doing the project for money and your work will also be available to others under the Creative Commons agreement. But I'm not an expert.

DA Font
Some fonts here some are in the public domain, others are available under Creative Commons licenses. Again, I'm not an expert in Creative Commons licensing. But public domain is obviously cool.

Ripple Training
Some good tutorials in the Ripple Training section of the ProVideo Coaltion website.
Remove the Jitters - Covers the SmoothCam feature in Final Cut Pro 6.
Photoshop & Motion - Simple way to do a quick animation on a multi-layered Photoshop document in Motion 3 by using its 3D features.
Color Workflows With Different Video Formats - Covers how to use different codecs with Color. Warning here about working with Long-GOP formats, like HDV.

HDV video to SD DVD Using Compressor 3 and DVD SP
Exporting HDV Video from the Timeline to Standard Definition DVD
Man, working with HDV can be slow. Hopefully these tutorials will save you some time if you need to make a DVD from some HDV footage. They are over at kenstone.net
Also at kenstone.net, a tutorial on making a Blu-ray high-def video disc on a Mac. Takes you from FCP through Compressor to Adobe's Encore:
Blu-ray with Final Cut Pro, Compressor and Encore

ProRes 422 was one of the big features of Final Cut Pro 6. It was essentially a QuickTime codec, but Apple wasn't going to give it away. Too bad, because it's an efficient codec and very useful, especially for high-def footage. Well, Apple is finally letting people playback ProRes 422 footage on systems without FCP 6 installed (but you still can't create ProRes files without FCP 6.) Here are the links to playback ProRes on Mac's and PC's.

Mac OS X 10.5: Creating and maintaining a bootable "universal" external disk
I didn't know you could do this:
You can make a "universally bootable" external hard disk that will work with both Mac OS X 10.5-compatible PowerPC-based Macs and Intel-based Macs.

Bluetooth Earpiece--2-way radio
Do production? Need to buy a bluetooth head set? Then consider the Dragon. It will work as a 2-way radio with another Dragon headset. They even sell a device that will allow you to link up to 5 Dragon headsets together. Probaby not the cheapest way to communicate with a crew, but it's nice that it will do double-duty as the wireless headset for you cellphone.


Making Compressor Multiprocessor Aware
This one of Larry Jordan's Tips of the Day. Uses QMaster to make virtual clusters on multi-processor systems.

Impressive SmoothCam Example

This is a cool example of what SmoothCam can do. Before, shooter handholding a Sony Z1 while walking backwards as actors stroll. Afterwards, looks like it was shot on a dolly. Very impressive. Scroll down the page to see the before and after movies.

My concern about SmoothCam is that the footage must either be progressive or high-def. Standard-def, interlaced video would take too much of a hit from the processing that SmoothCam would have to do--namely deinterlacing and then scaling up the video.

If you didn't know already, SmoothCam is a new feature in Final Cut Pro 6 and Motion 3.

Final Cut and SmoothCam

"Final Cut Studio 2 SmoothCam Tested: Fix Those Shaky Shots"

An overview with examples of using SmoothCam in FCP. SmoothCam uses "Optical Flow", which is technology imported from Shake, to the new Final Cut Suite. Gives some good advice on working with HDV--transcode to ProRes422 to dramatically reduce processing time. Very impressive what it does with shots from a car. Seems like Apple's SmoothCam is providing a great tool for removing unwanted motion in a shot. However, I think its value for interlaced standard-definition video is low because you lose so much resolution from the de-interlacing and the scaling that SmoothCam does. But I guess I should try it out before I make any judgments.

UPDATE: There are some more in-depth tests at The Edit Blog. Apparently, when you execute SmoothCam, FCP analyzes the entire source clip and not just what is cut into the timeline. The Edit Blog notes some improvement from using ProRes422 over HDV (36 min. vs. 53 min. on a 12.5 sec clip). But it looks like the big improvements in analysis time cited above are probably confounded by the creation of a smaller source clip when the video was transcoded to ProRes 422. [via FreshDV]

Bottom line: The results are good but the analysis time on SmoothCam is slow. Dual 2.7 G5 estimated 5 hours to process one and half minutes of HDV. Did I mention that the analysis takes place in the background, so you can keep working while FCP analyzes the clip?