I’m not telling you anything new to say times are tough. The problem is, we still need to pay the rent.

Last week, on the Digital Production BuZZ, I spoke with Steve Cone, author of “Powerlines: Words that Sell Brands, Grip Fans, and Sometimes Change History.”

We began by discussing tag lines – phrases that describe the unique benefits of a company. Steve shared a number of examples – both good and bad – from the large corporate world of Coke, American Express, and many others. It was fun listening to how many times “the big boys” screwed up.

But that didn’t help someone trying to market a small business, like a production or post-production company. So, I asked Steve for advice that would help smaller businesses improve their marketing. I was so struck by what he said, that I wanted to share it with you here.

Click here to listen to Steve’s comments (TRT: 4:29, 2.1 MB QuickTime movie).

Click here to listen to the entire interview.

Click here to learn about Steve Cone’s book.

Click here to learn more about the Digital Production BuZZ.

John Putch told me about this.

Ptarmigan Designs, Inc., a Japanese iPhone developer, has released a file size and codec calculator for the iPhone.

Its called “Codec Calc” and is available through the AppsStore, you can learn more about it here.

You may have already noticed, but YouTube is now displaying all its videos in 16×9 format.

4×3 material is now displayed as pillar-boxed, and 16×9 material which was formerly displayed as letter-boxed is now both letter-boxed and pillar-boxed.

Thanks to Steve Martin for calling this to my attention.

(By the way, if you know the new image dimensions for submitting videos to YouTube, please let me know and I’ll share them here.)

One of the most popular requests during our recent PowerUP Seminar Tour was to make our seminar information available to folks that weren’t able to attend a seminar. So, we started doing just that with a series of PowerUP Tutorial videos. Currently, I’ve created about 14, with more on the way.

My goal in creating these was to find new information to present. My training on Lynda.com is extensive and I didn’t want to simply repeat what was already available. So, here, I’ve tried to provide information that isn’t available anywhere else, or supplement existing training with new information, or present new technology.

All my tutorials are short – less than 10 minutes – and tightly focused on just one topic. This way, you can quickly get exactly the information you need without wasting time.

There are three tutorials that I especially want to call to your attention:

Ten Tips for Faster Editing is free so you can see what these look like with no risk.

Preparing Stills for Final Cut Pro is brand new. NOTHING confuses people like working with stills. It has taken me two years to finally figure this out. This video will teach you specific image sizes and techniques for prepping images to avoid stretching, abnormal scaling, or other weird effects. I’m really proud of this title!

Retouching Video in Photoshop showcases ways to clean-up problem video using Photoshop’s tools — not just still images, but video too! You can accomplish near miracles in virtually no time once you’ve seen this training.

All my tutorials are $4.99 each.

Click here for a list of all available titles.

Click here to view my free editing tutorial.

Click here for the “Preparing Still Images for Final Cut Pro.”

Click here for “Retouching Video with Photoshop Extended.”

We add new titles each week, so please check back often and let me know what you think!

This afternoon, Apple released updates to the following software:

Final Cut Pro 6.0.5
Compressor 3.0.5
Color 1.0.3
Shake 4.1.1

Here is a link to the release notes:

http://www.apple.com/support/releasenotes/en/Final_Cut_Studio_2.0_rn/

My suggestion is to wait a week or two before upgrading to make sure there aren’t any unpleasant surprises in this version.

And NEVER upgrade in the middle of a project.

Ron Diamond wrote me about a new Final Cut Pro Preference Manager that he’s developed that I wanted to bring to your attention.

Ron writes:

Take control of your Final Cut Pro preferences at last!

EditGroove’s UserMatic(TM) solves FCP Preferences hassles once and for all, encouraging and facilitating experimentation in the thousands of ways Final Cut Pro can be customized. It leverages the editor’s time and creativity — by enabling multiple versioning, rollback points, easier troubleshooting, multiple users, and even accessing the same preferences across multiple edit bays.

Download and more info available at http://www.EditGroove.com

This looks like a very cool application. I’ve been playing with it for a day or two and it has a nice look and feel. I especially like the fact it allows me to have multiple preference configurations, then easily switch between them.

Important note: Be sure to quit out of Final Cut BEFORE switching preferences!

If you are interested in learning more, visit here.

Also, Ron tells me you can save 15% off the purchase price of $34.95 by adding the code DPBUZZ08.

One of the requests I got a lot during my recent PowerUP seminar tour was to make my seminars available to people that were unable to attend.

While not everything in my seminars could be presented easily in a video, some of it could, so I got to work creating a series of tutorials based upon my seminars.

I have the first twelve done and want to introduce them to you — you can see the complete list of PowerUP Tutorials here.

My goal with these is not to replicate work that can be found elsewhere, but to provide timely information on key aspects of working with Final Cut Studio. I selected topics based upon the response they got at my seminars, or because of the volume of email I get on these issues, or because this is an interesting piece of technology you need to know about.

In all cases, I’m interested in your reactions and what you’d like to learn. Send me an email, or add a comment below, and let me know.

By the way, I’d be grateful if you could tell your friends about these tutorials. Thanks.

For the last few days, I’ve been corresponding with Andrew Findlay about his problems with Compressor 3.

While I use Compressor on a daily basis with no problems, Andrew has been having problems with Compressor unexpectedly quitting at the worst possible moments.

Today he sent me a note with a solution that I wanted to share with you.

Andrew writes:

SUCCESS!

I thought you would like to know I just fixed my Compressor “quitting unexpectedly” problem – thanks to you and the guys at Digital Rebellion. However, it was slightly more complicated than just downloading Compressor Repair. This didn’t fix the problem.

What DID work was downloading their other software called FCP Remover. (I had previously tried using Pacifist to no avail.)

All I had to do was uninstall Compressor and (the real culprit, apparently) Qmaster, then re-install from the FCS 2 discs, run the update software and, bingo! Even my old projects and media were untouched and continue to work fine. I hope this might work for other folks out there.

Below I copy the mail from the very helpful and all round nice guy Jon Chappell at Digital Rebellion:

Andrew,

Glad to hear you got everything sorted out.

Yes, by all means let Larry know what works because I know a lot of people have experienced that problem. I actually posted a tutorial on how to reinstall those components a few days ago:
http://www.digitalrebellion.com/blog/posts/how_to_reinstall_compressor_and_qmaster.html

This is not a problem with Compressor; it is a problem with Qmaster. I happen to think Compressor is perfectly fine in terms of stability but Qmaster has never ever worked, not even in previous versions. In my opinion, they need to either rewrite it or sever Compressor’s ties to it.

So thanks to you and Jon.

Best regards, Andrew

Andrew, thanks for writing and letting me know.

Two difficult editing concepts for many students to learn are “slip” and “slide.”

Recently, August Miller sent me two pieces of animation along with this note:

At our training center, we’ve noticed that, often times, students struggle to understand the Slip and Slide tools. For that reason, I’ve created some short animations to help visualize the functions of these tools.

With his permission, I’m posting them here. Each is very short and does a great job explaining these two terms.

Click here to see slip animation (TRT 0:10 2.5 MB).

Click here to see slide animation (TRT 0:10 2.4 MB).

August continues:

These animations were made to help people learn, so the more they get seen, the better! Feel free to download and redistribute them as well.

Thanks, August!

Philip Hodgetts sent me the following link.

Just when your head is spinning with all the different HD formats, trying to wrestle quality from the chaos of production, or stewing about whether your videos look good enough on the web, read this.

http://picayune.uclick.com/comics/db/2008/db081114.gif

Sigh…