I’m still going back and forth with some programmer friends on just how reckless I should be in
my approach to “simplifying” FLVs in iWeb, so I’m afraid I’ll have to string you on for a bit longer on that article.  But rest assured — I’ve not forgotten, and the Frame Controls article is coming up relatively soon as well.

In the meantime, here’s a piece that’s hopefully more useful than most “filler” — the technical story behind Portable Network Graphics, or PNGs.  Read on for what they are, where they came from, and (most importantly) when they’re a good idea in the video production workflow.

You can find more compression settings articles in our Supercharging Compressor series index.

You can be plenty good at video work if you only know that bigger bitrates are usually better — but if you’re going to be a guru when it comes to the quality of your video output, it’s worth taking a closer look at the concept from the ground up.

Luckily, it’s a fairly simple concept.  Let’s take NTSC video as our example: 30 frames per second, each 720 pixels wide and about 480 high.  Each broadcast-safe pixel, in RGB space, could take up 235 values for each color (red green and blue), so it needs 24 bits of information to describe it.  If we were to try to store a second of NTSC-type video completely uncompressed using this bitmap scheme, we would need

30 * 720 * 480 * 24 = 248,832,000 bits, or about 30MB — per second!

Try slapping THAT on YouTube — or a DVD, for that matter.

Indian filmmaker Suman Mukhopadhyay recently visited Blacksburg to screen his two features and speak with filmmaking students at Virginia Tech. Talking with Mukhopadhyay about Herbert and Chaturanga was a real highlight of the semester, and a great way to end to the year.

Today, Mukhopadhyay shares Herbert, his debut feature, with New Yorkers as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s ContemporAsian film series.

Nathan Lee, writing in today’s New York Times, calls Herbert “mad, messy, and frequently amazing.” It is.

Showtimes are as follows:

Mukhopadhyay’s newest film, Chaturanga, which is still playing cinemas in India, is even more impressive. It trades Herbert’s surrealism and self-reflexivity for a more contemplative approach, as befits its story of spiritual searching. Chaturanga is currently screening in theaters in India. Catch it on the festival circuit if you’re lucky right now — and let’s hope that a smart American distributor picks it up.

SRF reader Jeremy Parker recently alerted me to a website he’s been building called Join My Crew.

Just as it sounds, it’s a completely free website that hopes to help independent filmmakers find cast and crew for their next productions. The site Beta launched last week and will only get better as more and more filmmakers start to use the site.

In the old days of digital video, choosing text for titles and other
supers was easy: Arial, Times, or Comic Sans – will “size 48″ work? 
But as the lines have blurred between all types of creative software,
we video types are constantly getting more control over our text.  And
that’s a good thing: a professional approach to typography improves
most video, and in some cases, makes or breaks the deal.

So here’s a quick glossary of font-related terms, along with a handful of best practices.

Being able to easily find media files, like Quicktime movies or photos, is an important step in an effective Final Cut Pro editing workflow. Adding data (metadata) that describes a file will allow the Spotlight feature to find the file, even if you don’t remember what you named it or where you stored it. The Spotlight is a great tool to quickly find the file you need.

Chris Cagle at Category D tagged me for the Alphabet Meme.

Here are the rules:

1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.*

2. The letter “A” and the word “The” do not count as the beginning of a film’s title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don’t know of any films with those titles.

3. Thanks to some clarification by The Siren, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number’s word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under “T.”

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type “alphabet meme” into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.

6. If you’re selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

I have rejected Cagle’s new guideline that with foreign titles one should “rely on the original title if in Roman alphabet, the translated title otherwise.” This rule had me making even more tough choices than I wished, so I threw it out. I’ve cheated, in fact, by using foreign titles or translations whenever it helped with difficult letters, tough choices, etc. My guilt is nil.

And to make the choosing even less painful, I have created two lists: One satisfies the theme of this website, the other lists more general favorites. Of course, MANY of my favorite films — a ridiculous number of them beginning with the letters “M”, “T”, and “G” — are left off of both lists. And if a film got listed on one list, I tried to list a different film on the second list.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder)
Black Ice (Brakhage)
City Lights (Chaplin)
Dance Party USA (Katz)
Edvard Munch (Watkins)
Frownland (Bronstein)
The Gleaners and I (Varda)
The Hours and Times (Munch)
Isle of Flowers (Furtado)
Jo Jo at the Gate of Lions (Sjogren)
Killer of Sheep (Burnett)
Last Chants for a Slow Dance (Jost)
Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren)
Night of the Living Dead (Romero)
O Dreamland (Anderson)
Pather Panchali (Ray)
Les Quatre Cents Coups (Truffaut)
Rome, Open City (Rossellini)
Shadows (Cassavetes)
Thirteen (Williams)
The Unchanging Sea (Griffith)
Les Vampires (Feuillade)
The Whole Shootin’ Match (Pennell)
Xala (Sembene)
Zorns Lemma (Frampton)

Harrill’s list:

The Awful Truth
Best Years of Our Lives, The
Chinatown
Diary of a Country Priest
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Fly (Cronenberg)
Grand Illusion
The Hours and Times
Isle of Flowers
Jacquot
Killer of Sheep
Love Affair
The Mortal Storm
Night of the Living Dead
Ordet
The Parallax View
Les Quatre cents coups
Ruggles of Red Gap
Starship Troopers
Tender Mercies
Unforgiven
Vivre Sa Vie
Woman Under the Influence
Xanadu
Yi yi
Zero for Conduct

Finally, I want to hear from David Lowery, AJ Schnack, Darren Hughes, Alison Willmore, and Karina Longworth.

The video production industry is incredibly diverse and it’s expanding at an incredible rate.  Anyone can now compete in the business. The technology has become very affordable.  No longer do companies need to invest in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment.  The playing field is now level, and there are more job opportunities than ever before.

 
That being said, new schools are popping up that specialize in the video production arena.  In some cases, high schools and even middle schools have video production equipment that rivals professional production facilities. From the early stages, these schools are training kids while producing some amazing video content.  Some schools even have their own television channel. It sounds crazy, but the competition is now becoming quite fierce. This is because of the volume of new candidates that understand the software.

So, if you’re looking for work, what does this mean to you?  Well, as ridiculous as it sounds, you may be competing with candidates that are fresh out of highschool.  Not to long ago, It use to be that freelance video editors could easily demand $70.00 hr or more.  This hourly rate is rapidbly disappearing, and is now limited to some of the larger markets.  Now, in a medium size market, freelance video editors have been forced to bring their hourly rates down to $40.00 hr.  In smaller markets, expect to earn less than that to remain competitive.

So, what are some key elements that employers are looking for?  In the professional video editing business, there are three major players with a large host of other software manufacturers.  These players are:

Apple (Final Cut Studio)

Avid Technology (Avid Media Composer)

Adobe (Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium)

First off, concentrate your energy on learning these software products. If you have to choose one to start with, take a good look at Final Cut Pro,  which is included within Apple’s Final Cut Studio bundle.  If you don’t own the software, consider purchasing an educational license.  All the manufacturers have amazing educational pricing to help you get started.

Second, start a website and upload your video content and demo-reel.  In this business, you might as well forget about a traditional resume.  If someone asks for one, I wouldn’t hesitate to simply point them to your website. If you do not have a website, consider purchasing a mobileme account from Apple.  Even better, if you are Macintosh owner, you can use Apple’s iWeb application to instantly create your website and upload your video content.

Third, you can dramatically increase your value by also learning Adobe Photoshop as it applies to video.  Then, you can really hit a home run by learning After Effects , which is one of the world’s leading visual effects software packages. 

I realize all this sounds relatively simple, but mastering these software applications takes patience, dedication, and a lot of time.  Don’t expect to become a master overnight.  Of course, GeniusDV offers training services to help you get up to speed relatively quickly.  In particular, we offer training courses for Final Cut Studio and Avid Media Composer.  In addition we offer an amazing After Effects training course.  These courses can be taken in a classroom environment, or in an interactive online training environment. 

Quick Feet, Soft Hands will be screening at the Dallas Video Festival this evening at 7pm. Details for my screening are below, but the main reason I wanted to post about this was to draw attention David Lowery’s fantastic trailer for the festival:

Just wanted to drop this as a follow-up to my last post, which concerned Video The Vote.

For me, the day began at 6am, when I walked to my polling place in Roanoke and stood in a 40 minute line to vote. The line was the result of an electronic voting machine that didn’t work and some poll workers who were getting on the job training about how to use the machines. Needless to say, it wasn’t reassuring. I had a Flip video camera and took some very rough footage from my spot in line of the problematic machine. Needless to say, this was an inauspicious start to the day.

Thankfully, things did improve. The lines to that polling place shrunk by 8am, and I remained “on call” for Video The Vote for most of the day. I did drive out to Cloverdale, Virginia to document a woman whose voter registration address change had been lost; she had to vote provisionally.

The real story of the day, though, was in Blacksburg, where students from Virginia Tech were having to wait for several hours at one polling place. I heard about this late in the day, and a few minutes after reading the story (oddly, on Huffington Post instead of via The Roanoke Times website or from friends), Video The Vote called me from NYC, asking me to document the situation. Ashley was already in Blacksburg, so she went to capture footage. She got some great stuff with her Flip camera (videos 1, 2, 3).

NOTE: My name, not Ashley’s, is on the footage because I was the one that registered for Video the Vote.

When Ashley returned home, we spent the evening uploading her footage. Video The Vote’s website was SLAMMED, so uploads took forever. The fact that we were hitting the “refresh” button on our browsers to see election results wasn’t helping.

Pennsylvania was called for Obama around the time that we were close to done uploading all of our videos from the day. We knew what was coming, so we headed over to an Election Day party.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Literally.