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January 31, 2006
Moving Time
Ok, for all of you who don't know, Lucien and I are moving. Now, before you get too excited, we are not moving far; we are basically moving from West Linn to Beaverton.
Things are progressing on the new house just nicely, it is almost finished and in fact will be ready for a walk through on Feb. 17th.
So what is happening with our old house, you may be asking yourself. Well, it is sold. God has a way to make things come together. We will be closing on one house on Thrusday, Feb. 23 and then signing on the other house on Friday, Feb. 24 and the movers are coming on Saturday, Feb. 25. By the time Feb. is over we will be in our new house!!!
Posted by crumrine at 11:41 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 14, 2006
Macworld - Day 4 - Final Cut Studio (Con't)
By the time I got back to my hotel last night, I was too tired to update my blog. So here goes the post that I should have done yesterday.
For the past 2 days, I have been sitting in a very intensive Final Cut Studio Session lead by Steven Martin of Ripple Training. And I don't know if intensive is the right word for it, it was more like overwhelming. I have about 17 pages of notes that cover the 2 day session and there was a lot of time that I didn't take notes, (a) because the demos were so fascinating that I forgot to type notes and (2) some of the information was way beyond my grasp.
The first day started with the concept of Power Logging. There were a couple of good ideas of how to capture content from a source and tricks on how to get rid of the bad stuff with one quick pass. I now need to go home a practice a lot before I can adquently describe the method here, plus I don't know if I want to completly disclose of all my secerts. ;-)
Once we have video captured, then we can move onto editing. The next part of the session covered Editing, specifically the concept of 3-point edits. It was really cool to watch and learn about the different ways to do a 3-point edit within Final Cut. I think I now understand the concept and can work on my own. The session also covered Patching and the Slip and Slide Tools.
Next we moved on to Storyboard Editing. This can be accomplished in Final Cut Pro by first creating a new bin and looking at the Thumbnail View. Then organize the thumbnails in the desired order and drag and drop all the thumbnails at one time to the timeline. It's pretty cool to watch someone do it and a great timesaver.
I also learned about segment editing, which can be done right in the Timeline. It can be used to deleted unwanted items quickly by marking the stuff you don't want and using shift-delete to remove the unwanted material.
Multi-cam editing, time re-mapping (getting the Matrix Look), color correction, and secondary color correction (the Pleasantville Look) were also covered at a very high level. I can't wait to get home and actually play with these features.
And that basically covers day one. There was a lot of good information that hopefully I will remember when I really start working with video.
On day 2, we started covering the other tools.
included in Final Cut Studio, Motion, DVD Studio Pro, Soundtrack, and Compressor. Now, I have really been interested in Motion, especially since I love Live Type (and was able to figure it out myself). And after watching the demonstration of Motion, I feel that I will really have fun with Motion. It is very Live Type like with a lot of cool extra features including the ability to see and work in Real Time.
DVD Studio Pro was also covered at a very high level and I actually don't remember much about this topic from the class. Brain-Overload was beginning to set-in.
OK, so what was really cool and something I will never use, Green Screen editing. Unfortunately, in order to really do Green Screen Editing (or Chroma Magna Editing) easily in Final Cut, you need to buy a plug-in from DVD Garage that makes it much easier than using the tools available in Final Cut. Within a short period, Steve was able to complete a Green Screen edit a woman standing in front of a cave. It was sweet to watch.
The concept of nesting of tracks was also covered. A nest is basically a container of other sequences. Nesting allows the editor to one task on a set of tracks/media that have been nested together. It also makes it easier to work with longer movies with multiple tracks. Let's say you have a 90 Minute movie that you are trying to make. You can create 3 different sequences nest the tracks of the sequences and then drag the 3 nested sequences to the timeline to make the final movie. So basically, you will only have 3 segments within the 90 minute movie. Cool.
Now, at this point in the day I really started to space out and not completely understand the topics being covered. The rest of the afternoon covered Media Management, Soundtrack Pro, and Compressor. The Compressor discussion was when it got really geeky and I did not understand have of what was being said. I really need to read up and learn about different formats and compression rates. The nice thing is that Compression can complete multiple compressions on the same file using batch operations. There is also a setting that allows you to compress a small segment of the file so that you can verify that the compression looks good before compressing a 90 minute movie.
After sitting through 2 days of Final Cut Studio, I discovered that I do understand a lot of the concepts and that there is a wealth of stuff out there that I don't know. The good thing is the fact that I do have a couple of wedding videos that I still need to edit and the knowledge that I have now will make them look 100% better than if I had finished them before Macworld.s
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January 11, 2006
Macworld - Day 3 - Final Cut Studio
It is definitely hump day, I am feeling the effects of being in class all day for the past three days. Today was day one of the Final Cut Studio presentation. I took 9 pages worth of notes and there was a lot of times that I just had to sit and watch the demonstration. There is way too much information to re-cap what I learned in today's weblog entry, plus I am tired and just want to go to sleep. ;-)
All I can say about today was that it was awesome. The conference room was full and I personally learned a lot. I can't wait to get home and put some of my learnings to work on the videos that I need to finish editing.
If you are looking for some training in Final Cut Studio, check out www.rippletraining.com. Steven Martin (not the famous Steve Martin), lead today's class and his knowledge and presentation skills ensured that I did not fall asleep. ;-)
Ok, so that is it for today's post, hopefully tomorrow I will have more energy and brain power to get a full over view on Final Cut Studio.
Posted by crumrine at 11:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 10, 2006
Macworld - Day 2 - Digital Photography Day
So today I attending a digital photograph day sponsored by Olympus. There were two sessions to choose from Advanced and Beginner. I, in my infinite wisdom, decided that I was not good enough for the Advanced Session so I decided to sign up for the Beginner Session. Boy, was I was wrong. I was bored and frustrated just about the whole day. My time would have been better spent attending the second day of the Aperture Class.
The first part of the day was spent talking about the technical concepts of digital photography, battery life, film speed, file types, file size, and Histograms. Now, the part about the Histogram was interesting and I did learn a little. Then the instructor, Jay Kinghorn, talked about composition, lighting, and emotion. It was very basic stuff and not anything that I didn't know already.
After the short class room instruction, we then went out to Yerba Buena Gardens and took a little photo safari. I started out using an Olympus camera that was provided by Olympus. I soon grew tired of it and wanted my own camera. So Lucien was nice enough to bring it to me. I did get some nice instruction from a couple of the Olympus reps and learned a little about depth of field and some of the features of my camera. I also had comments about my good technique on taking pictures, i.e crouching down low or standing on items to get a different perspective.
After the photo safari, we went back to the conference room and downloaded the pictures. Now, keep in mind I am in a beginners class, most people in my class are not proficient with a computer and had trouble with some basic skills. They had us use Photo Mechanic to download the photos. We were told that this is the application that the pros use, especially those in the newspaper business. Personally, I think this was beyond the capability of most of the people in our class and iPhoto should have been used. I like iPhoto; it's a great entry level photo and image editing application. I personally could have had the photos downloaded and a CD created within 5 minutes, but we had to go through each step slowly, so it took a little longer.
After lunch, we had a session on indoor lighting. This was probably the most interesting and the least applicable to what I want to do. The instructor brought in a lot of equipment and was showing where to set-up the lights. He also talked about colored filters.
Next, Jaky Kinghorn, returned and talked about the digital workflow. Most of his talk centered around Photo Mechanic and iView. I personally am excited about Aperture and currently use iPhoto, so this is the part that I liked the least and I actually walked out of the session and went to the Exhibit floor.
I did go back to hear from Kevin O'Connor who talked about Image Editing. This is another part of the day that could have had more time as we only touched the surface of what is available in Photoshop Elements. He showed a little bit of the image editing options in iPhoto and then moved on to Photoshop Elements. I did learn a little in this session and think with more time, I could have gotten a lot more out of the session.
Overall, I don't feel I got much out of today. Tomorrow should be better as I am going to a Final Cut Studio 2 day session. I am really looking forward to it and hope that they day is better than today.
Posted by crumrine at 11:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 9, 2006
Macworld Expo - Day 1 - Aperture
Today was an awesome day. I went to the Aperture session and loved it. I actually understood a lot of what they were talking about; I was very surprised. I guess I am smarter than I think I am. ;-)
The session was lead by two great presenters, Derrick Story and Scott Bourne. Derrick lead most of the session by describing the features and the advantages of Aperture while Scott add some color commentary and should some really cool Aperture Tricks.
Aperture is definitely an App I want to learn more about. Unfortunately, I don't have a computer system that will run it (even though I do own the App, it runs on Lucien's work machine). I think I will be using the select and compare features a lot. I tend to take a lot of pictures of the same image with the hope that at least one of the pictures will turn out OK. With the stack feature of Aperture, I will be able to group the like photos and compare the photos in order to get the best image. I also love the feature where you can change the time zone of the image on import. I needed that last year because often when I traveled to Asia I often forgot to change the time zone on my camera and there is not an easy way to batch change the time on an image in iPhoto. I could go on about all the stuff I learned today, but it's late and I have a big day tomorrow also. ;-)
Tomorrow, I will be attending the Digital Photography Day. I signed up for the beginning sessions, since I don't think of myself as an "Advance" Photographer. I think I may end up regretting that decision, I will let you know tomorrow.
Hopefully, tomorrow I will have some pictures to post. I have not taken a single picture yet this week, which is unusual for me. ;-)
Posted by crumrine at 11:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 8, 2006
At Macworld Expo
I am sitting in my hotel in San Francisco, eagerly awaiting for Macworld to begin tomorrow. I am a little nervous that I signed up for conferences that are going to be way beyond my knowledge/talent. Also, I am kind of frustrated that I can't get my badge, etc. until tomorrow when my first session begins at 9:00 AM. I like to be prepared and know what to expected. I have no idea what to expected tomorrow and I don't know if I have the right tools. For example, I forgot to bring/buy a notebook to take notes in, it would be helpful to have my packet then I would know if they are providing a notebook.
I will try to blog about what I am learning and my impressions of the expo. The following is my schedule, we will see how I do:
Monday - Inside Aperture
Tuesday - Digital Photography Day
Wednesday - Final Cut Pro Studio - day 1
Thursday - Final Cut Pro Studio - day 2
Friday - Hands on Lab - DVD Studio Pro
It should be an interesting week, I just can't wait to get it started.
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