I mentioned Tools on Air in an earlier blog post, but now I have an audio interview to go with it.

Tools on Air describes itself as “A TV Station on a Mac.” Currently, they are only distributed by NMR in the UK and have only been shown at the Broadcast Video Expo in London in February. However, they will be attending NAB 2010 in Las Vegas in April, so those of us attending that show will have an opportunity to see them.

This product has the potential to completely alter the options for live video production on the Mac. Prior to this product, QuickTime limited the number of live video streams it could record to one. Tools on Air has found a way to increase that to sixteen HD cameras or video feeds, plus the ability to switch between video feeds live, add graphics, and create multiclips for Final Cut Pro.

Listen to this interview with Neil Anderson, Business Manager for NMR, about what Tools on Air can do and decide for yourself.

Click here to listen to the interview (TRT: 6:20 — 3.0 MB — QuickTime movie).

Larry

Tonight, on the Digital Production Buzz, Mike Horton and I interviewed Ken Miller, formerly the #2 executive – and 20-year veteran – at Aaron Spelling Productions, and now head of his own production company – My Media Productions.

It was great fun to talk with the producer of such massive hits as “Love Boat,” “90210,” “Charmed,” and dozens more. He had a very simple philosophy – focus on the story. However, in this case, we got him to describe his process in more detail.

Ken’s background was film. He started as a music editor and worked his way up. Toward the end of our interview we discussed the impact tapeless media is having on episodic production, as well as the changing dynamic of funding production.

Mike and I both found the interview fascinating. I’ve created a special excerpt of it, which you can listen to here: (TRT: 14:41)

Ken Miller interview on Digital Production Buzz

Or, click here to listen to the entire show:

Digital Production Buzz – Jan. 28, 2010

Thanks,

Larry

Tonight, on the Digital Production BuZZ, Mike Horton and I interviewed Brandon Miller, producer and filmmaker of a soon-to-be-released film titled “Homeless in Los Angeles.”

In many ways, Brandon is like the other young independent filmmakers we talk with on the program. Passionate, talented, and committed. However, in this case, Brandon is something they are not – he is homeless, too.

“Homeless in Los Angeles” is an autobiographical documentary on what it’s like to be homeless in today’s world. Covering Brandon and several other homeless individuals, the film is a look at a part of society many of us would rather ignore – veterans coming back from the war with mental problems, dispossessed families who ran out of money before they ran out of mortgage, and children living with their parents on the street.

What struck me about Brandon, though, was his courage. By day he works as an editor and special effects artist to earn the money to complete his film. He lost his place to live last December. Yet, he kept working on his film. Whenever he was paid for a free-lance gig, he poured it into his film. And wait till you hear him explain why.

Both Mike and I were captivated listening to Brandon speak. I think you will be, too.

You can hear the entire interview by clicking here. (TRT: 14:18 – QuickTime – 7.3 MB)

www.larryjordan.biz/Brandon_Miller_buzz_091015.mov

You can hear the whole show by clicking here.

www.digitalproductionbuzz.com/Archives/10-15-09

Larry

Larry Jordan and Mike Horton are bringing the Digital Production BuZZ to DV Expo – Sept. 22 – 24, 2009 – at the Pasadena Convention Center.

Visit the show floor – check out the latest news – stop by our both and say hello!

The Digital Production BuZZ is the Official Podcast of DV Expo and will be originating at least seven different programs live from the show floor during the Event.

Starting Sept. 22, Digital Production Buzz will interview key industry leaders for each show which will be streamed live, distributed via hundreds of websites, and downloaded via iTunes.

As the show gets closer, we will post more details here: www.dvexpobuzz.com.

Click here to add The BuZZ player to your website (its FREE!).

Click here if you are going to DV Expo and would like to be interviewed for the show.

DV Expo is an exciting time to see how our industry is doing. Stop by our booth – #130 – and say Hi!

I’d love to see you there!

I spoke with Richard Townhill, Director of Video Application Marketing for Apple, the day the new version of Final Cut Studio was released.

Not only is Richard the public face of Final Cut, probably no one in Apple has more direct control over the future of these applications than he does. For this reason, it was good to get his take on the latest release. What follows are my notes from our conversation.

Apple’s goal for this upgrade was to integrate user requested features, improve performance, and increase stability for all the applications.

From his point view, the key big features are:

* New versions of ProRes, including support for alpha channels
* Improved export from Final Cut Pro
* Blu-ray support within FCP
* Improved collaboration tools with iChat Theater
* And over 100 new features

Many of these are detailed on Apple’s website, so in my conversation I wanted to dig a bit deeper.

One of the questions I ask Richard every year is whether Apple has improved the interface. This year, Richard’s answer was the same: they did not change the interface because “it works great just the way it is.” However, I finally realized that Richard and I are thinking different things when it comes to the interface. I suspect when Richard hears that question, he’s thinking about the operation of the program; while I’m thinking usability. And, based solely on what I’ve read on Apple’s website, they’ve done a lot to improve usability.

(As a note, I’m writing this after our interview, but before I’ve installed the new software. I’ll have a detailed report on the new version in a later posting.)

The new version is Intel-only system, requiring both OS X 10.5.6 and QuickTime 7.6.2. So, this rules out using my trusty G-5 for editing. I’m already shopping for a new MacPro.

(As a note, I can’t recommend purchasing the new MacBook Pro 15″ for Final Cut, principally because Apple has removed both the second FireWire port and the ExpressCard/34 slot. Yes, you can connect a FireWire external drive, but nothing faster. Why should I limit myself to data rates that AT BEST hover around 50 MB/sec, when an eSATA drive is almost double that and a PCIe drive is four times faster? This is a severe limitation as we move into HD and multi-camera work. I see no reason to reward short-sighted hardware development with my money.)

I asked whether this version supports Snow Leopard. Richard said: “I can’t comment on unreleased products.” I then asked the same question differently; does that mean that editors should hold off upgrading until Snow Leopard is released in two months? Richard replied: “We have been testing this version of Final Cut Studio with current builds of Snow Leopard and we don’t anticipate any significant problems when the new OS is released.”

According to Richard, DVD Studio Pro remains an application that creates Standard-Def DVDs. They have not added Blu-ray support to it. However, FCP and Compressor can create Blu-ray discs — with some limitations. If you need multiple movies and full motion menus, you’ll still need to use Adobe Encore. However, to export and burn a sequence out of Final Cut – say for a client review – you can now do that easily.

Richard made a point to describe how you can create a Blu-ray-playable disc using the red laser burner in every Mac. This is similar to what DVD Studio Pro used to do with HD-DVD, it can now do something similar with Blu-ray. In talking later with Brian Gary, author of the up-coming book on Compressor 3.5, he agreed that the current implementation of Blu-ray authoring in Final Cut Studio is limited compared to Adobe Encore, but there is still value in the new features; especially for creating client-review discs.

The ease of getting files out of Final Cut – what Apple calls “Easy Export” – is very exciting. It now requires only a single click to publish your project to YouTube, or Blu-ray, or the web. You can even establish post-encode options that compress a file, then FTP it to the website of your choice.

Much to my personal sadness, LiveType did not make the cut. However, it is not completely dead. The text effects in LiveType were integrated into Motion and the text capabilities of Motion were significantly beefed up. The good news is that FCP 7 will support existing Livetype projects. This means that if you now own LiveType, you’ll be able to create animations for the new version. However, new purchasers of the system won’t have access to LiveType. Richard tells me that when you install the upgrade, existing LiveType files are not removed.

There is no change in rendering speed or the video processing engine. FCP 7 does not take advantage of the GPU, though Motion 4 does. What I learned is that FCP rendering is codec-dependent and most codecs don’t support GPU rendering.

However, ProRes has been optimized for mulit-core processing. Where possible, transcoding video formats like AVCHD, HDV, XDCAM HD, or XDCAM EX to ProRes will significantly, according to Richard, improve both speed and quality. ProRes now supports both YUV and RGB video, along with 4:4:4:4 (uncompressed Red, Green, Blue, and alpha channels) color sampling.

Apple has done significant work inside Soundtrack, which is a program I use daily, as well as the other applications inside Studio. However, I’ll save that for another report at a later time.

I’m already working on a detailed report for my next Final Cut newsletter – subscriptions are free, so please sign up! In the meantime, as I’m researching my report, please let me know your comments and questions.

Finally, the last Digital Production BuZZ podcast had extensive coverage of the new version with extended conversations with people who have been beta-testing the product. You can listen to it here.

THOUGHTS ON UPGRADING

The new version looks very promising, but it is brand-new. My feeling is that unless a client is rushing up to you, waving a checkbook and demanding you edit using the latest version, you would be fine to wait a month or two to make sure the third-party development community supports the new version. Also, Snow Leopard adds another level of insecurity that needs to be resolved before committing mission-critical projects to the new software.

What I read looks very good. Over the next few weeks, we’ll have a better understanding of how it works. I’ll report back when I know more.

Larry

Because of all the news related to the new Final Cut Studio release, we are changing our coverage for the Digital Production Buzz tonight to focus on all the news.

I just finished talking with Richard Townhill, Director of Video Applications Marketing at Apple, about the latest release of Final Cut Studio. I’ll have a report on what we discussed at the top of the show.

Steve Martin, of Ripple Training, then joins us. Steve has been working with the software for several months. He’ll share his insights on what’s new and improved.

Bruce Nazarian, president of the International Digital Media Alliance, stops by to talk about the new Blu-ray features in Final Cut Pro.

We’ll take a side trip to Australia to talk production with Grant Burton, then, at the end, Brian Gary, author of the upcoming Compressor 3.5 book, joins a round-table discussion with Mike Horton, Bruce Nazarian, and me about Compressor and Blu-ray.

It’s breaking news on the Digital Production BuZZ!

Tune in here: www.digitalproductionbuzz.com TONIGHT or download tomorrow on iTunes.

Send emails with questions here for us to discuss or join us for live chat during the show.

During the Digital Production BuZZ coverage of the 2009 NAB Show, we conducted more than 200 interviews and created 37 NAB News Briefs.

Here is a list of companies and guests, and the News Brief they appeared in. (Due to time constraints, not all interviews were aired.)

Once you know which News Brief you want to listen to, go to www.NABShowBuZZ.com and use the News Brief Player in the upper right corner to locate and listen to the interview. Each News Brief runs about five minutes.

A list of all our Digital Production BuZZ shows, and their guests, is on the www.NABShowBuZZ.com page, as well.

At 9:00 AM this morning, the 2009 NAB Show opened the doors to its trade show, the crowds rushed in, and the Digital Production BuZZ went to work.

After two days tuning our systems, we were in full operation today – gathering almost 100 short news interviews, and fifteen in-depth reports.

Here, for instance, you see me, in the red shirt, interviewing Pete Schlatter, director of marketing for G-Technologies. Our award-winning producer, Cirina Catania, is standing behind the assignment desk in the back. Hidden behind the audio gear are several audio editing workstations, streaming station, and interview scheduling desk (yay, Debbie Price!).

It is fun watching people walk up to the booth and stand listening to the interviews. While we don’t have the ground-thumping power of subwoofers run amok – as seems to be the case periodically in the Content Theater, it is always great to have an audience reacting to the comments of the guest.

Tomorrow, we have interviews scheduled from about 9:00 am till 3:00 pm — feel free to stop by, sit down, and listen in. (Our audio speakers aren’t quite as big as a theater, but they do sound great!)

Here’s the list of guests that appear on tonight’s show:

Richard Florida, Noted author and NAB Keynote speaker

Bruce Nazarian, President of IDMA

Mitch Jacobson, Director, editor, and multicam expert

David Taylor, President, Cineform

Allan Jaeniecke, President, Imagineer

Shari Barnett, Marketing Director, Applications, Mediaroom

Dan Lutter, Director of Sales, Net Insight

You can hear the entire show here.

You can see a complete list of everything we are doing at NAB here.

Also, as a reminder, now that we are reporting live from NAB, please consider adding our player to your website. You can get all the details here.

Best of all, we set a new speed record for getting everything done. I won’t know what to do with a full night’s sleep…

Larry

Today we discovered just how big a show the 2009 NAB Show really is…

Yup – it’s huge.

We had reporters covering as much as we could and we still felt that we could have used another 40-50 people.

Still, we got a great series of interviews with Chris Brown, executive VP of the NAB Show talking about how everything all goes together and Jessica Sheridan, manager of interactive marketing for the NAB Show, discussing how they we able to successfully use social networking to get the word out about the upcoming event. Along with the other guests listed below.

But, for us, the highlight of the day, was seeing our producer – Cirina Catania – win an Inky Award for her work for the Digital Production Buzz. Cirina has been tireless in tracking down guests and building the incredible team we have here at NAB.

The award was richly deserved and we congratulate her on winning it. (It was, also, one the few times I’ve seen her speechless…)

Here’s our guest list for our NAB Day 2 Special Report:

Chris Brown, Executive Vice President of the NAB Show

Jessica Sheridan, Manager, Interactive Marketing, NAB Show

Robert Sharp, President and Owner, DigiEffects

Fred Fourcher, CEO, BitCentral

Steve Katz, vice president of sales, JMR Electronics

And two of our field reporters – Sue Lawson and Roz McNulty – with their thoughts on NAB so far.

You can hear the entire show here.

Also, as a reminder, now that we are reporting live from NAB, please consider adding our player to your website. You can get all the details here.

Time for a quick nap. Our day starts tomorrow at 8 AM and the doors open at 9 AM. It will be a wild ride.

Larry

Last week, on the Digital Production BuZZ, we spoke with visual effects wizard Chris Zapara about how he creates his incredible effects – including winning two Emmy’s along the way.

First, if you haven’t seen his work, check out these links. They are AMAZING!

Kate Voegelle: Only Fooling Myself

Low vs Diamond: Heart Attack

Vanessa Carlton: Nolita Fairytale

Serj Tankian: Empty Walls

Seether: Breakdown

BattleStar Gallactica season 2 highlights

Second, during our conversation, we asked him what software he uses on a regular basis. While most of his answer was clear, his phone broke-up as he was telling us what tracking software he uses for materials created in 3D space.

So, I asked him again.

“The tracking software I use for 3d is Synth Eyes. It has a great bang for the buck.” Chris replied.

Click here to listen to the interview.

Just thought you’d like to know.