#99 Wk73 DVD Authoring

Another new module and the final one of this Program. This week plus two more and I will be done with school, but not with my film. Finishing the film will be my priority once school is finished. It's sort of like graduating and then having to go to summer school, or cleaning up after the prom. Or something.
There's no time to rest though, until I finish my film my stomach is going to be churning and adrenaline is going to be pumping.

This final class is shoe horning in two ideas, DVD Authoring and Color Correction. We're using Apple's DVD Studio Pro for the authoring and we're looking at color correction in Avid, which has superior tools for the job over Final Cut Pro. Not so Color, Apples newest tool in the Final Cut Suite. I address them all in this show, including reasons why Color, which is the deepest and richest of the three tools for professional color correction, should not be the first thing you reach for when you correct color. Take a look at the T L Cooper Eclipse, an expensive sophisticated keyboard/input device that allows you maximize the color correction workflow. There's a great review of using this tool at Ken Stone's site. In the show I refer to Pitch Black, Titanic and the Lord of the Rings series are good examples of using color throughout a film to evoke place, mood and time.

Macaela Vandermost is the instructor for this module. She introduced the idea of color correction at the beginning of the class, because we're going to be spending a full day on Saturday, the last day of the class, learning about color correcting in Avid. A lot of people in class felt they should get an overview of color correction in FCP and she kindly obliged. Color Correction is a difficult concept to grasp and it's even harder to do well, so getting an introduction at the beginning of the class and then more in depth instruction at the end should make it easier to get it.

We spent the entire class Tuesday looking at color correction and Thursday we did a quick run through of using DVD Studio Pro 4 to author a DVD. Classes for the remaining module will go into depth on the critical aspects of authoring, such as compression, creating menu navigation and menu graphics and developing an efficient workflow.

#51 Wk36 Avid Edit Lab

This week we begin the Avid Edit Lab module, continuing to learn how to use Avid as we cut a movie from footage we shot a month ago. I'm finding it very difficult to get this. I'm looking forward to actually digging into a project where I have to cut it from capture to export. Be forewarned, if you've already got experience with FCP, it's going to complicate your brain learning Avid.

The film we shot for the Huntington Theatre demonstrated to me how awkward the color correction tools in FCP 5 are. I know, they're way better in the next upgrade of the Suite. Apple's Color app is a great deal, amazing deal, but I don't have it yet. I asked Howard, our instructor to show Laura and I how to use the color tools in Avid. Cool, powerful and intuitive, at least to someone who's been color correcting digital photographs for years. You use curves, not levels, not unlike Photoshop, only different. Of course I'm used to thinking in CMYK, from years of prepress work, so I'm sure it will be bumpy ride to the top.

Scouring the web for new podcasts I discovered one on wood fired pottery. Oten Maxwell's podcast, The Firing Log about using a woodfired Anagama kiln, was very entertaining for the long drives home from school and it got me to thinking about the divided lives professional crafts people create for themselves due to their livelihood. They produce one of a kind objects in a mass production world, they use 15th century tools in the 21st century and they work outside the mainstream workplace. How do you live when your focus is high touch in a high tech world. I got to wondering how it looks from their perspective.

Our final project is a 10 minute film, give or take, narrative or documentary, subject of our choosing. It's still early, but I'm going to investigate this a little further, so don't be surprised if you read some comments about frits, fluxes and fettling knives.

# 49 Wk34-5 Intro to Avid

I'm running to keep up again. I spent a lot of time recently on a non-class film project for the Huntington Theatre in Boston Mass. We did a promotional film for a play that is running through next week called the 39 Steps, a comedy based on the Alfred Hitchcock spy thriller. It was a lot work in a short time, but I, along with classmate Laura got it in on time and made the client happy, so it was good all round.

This is the end of the Module on the introduction to Avid, but there's another 3 weeks of Avid that follows where we edit our own film. I'm going to spread my comments about Avid over the next few weeks. This week I'll give you a general overview of the program and talk specifically about the user interface and how important it is to organize your files properly in Avid, as opposed to to Final Cut Pro.

We edited the 39 Steps promo in FCP, but it's really difficult to use one program on a job while you're learning a different one in class. There's a lot of lessons we learned, like how difficult it can be for two people to edit one film, dividing up production tasks and working remotely.

I thought you would be interested in the process of setting up for the shoot, so I included that as well as described the equipment we used and why. Towards the end of the podcast I've included a list of things I would do differently, or pay more attention to if we have a chance to do this again, which I believe we will.

Some of the highlights of the post production process was doing color correction, creating and working with a soundtrack and setting the compression values to optimize file quality for posting on Youtube.

#22 Wk14 - Film Project 1 and NAB Wrapup

This episode includes a wrap up of NAB. I focus on Apple and Adobe's new products and a little bit about the Red Camera.

Although I didn't attend the first week of the new Module, "Film Project 1" I lay out the details: get coverage for two 5 minute videos, one demonstrating how to do something, the other is a profile of an individual.

Check out these podcasts that provided a lot of live coverage of the NAB event: This Week in Media, FX Podcast and Digital Production Buzz.