Video StudentGuy

On my way home in the rain on Thanksgiving eve I stopped in at the local turnpike service center and spoke my mind.

You get what you pay for and tnstaafl (there's no such thing as a free lunch)

Excerpts from a podcast recording session.

Journal entry about my current frame of mind about what to do next.

If you want to put your video on the web and you don't know a lick about website creation, look into Wordpress.

Producing media and distributing it online requires a platform that

provides a base from you can attract interest and develop a community.

I think its fair to say that self promotion on the internet is not a

common skill set of most production oriented media producers. One of

the best ways to step into this critical space and feel as though you

have some control over the process is to produce a blog using Wordpress.

Wordpress is one of many different blogging software platforms, such as Typepad, Blogger and Drupal,

however I think it is the best combination of flexibility, power and

accessibility for non web developers. There's a tremendous amount of learning resources for the uninitiated, with tutorials for the beginner

at Wordpress.org and online in general. Even easier, you can go to

Wordpress.com, create an account and start blogging in 10 minutes.

There is even a video channel, Wordpress.TV that offers up a hefty dose of information for newbies.

There are meetups that take place all over the country, all over the world! I just found a Wordpress meetup in Boston that I'll be attending next month. Last month there was presentation by Adam Wood on how to customize a theme called Atahualpa which you can follow here. I found an interesting review of Thesis, another popular theme, containing lots of information about how a good theme simplifies blogging.

The really valuable thing about Wordpress is that is is more than just

a blogging tool. It's a content management system (CMS) the organizes

your content, tracks your marketing efforts and does other things CMS software does.

Finally you can attend, for next to nothing, Wordpress Camps all over the country. I just found one will be in Boston,

close to where I live, in January. Even if you can't attend one, or you

want to know what kind of sessions occur you can check out past

unconferences online. A recent Wordpress Camp in Phoenix has some video of some their sessions, including how to put video online. Last week, about 700 attended WP Camp New York City and going by the list of sessions it must have been amazing.

I have a few thoughts I want to share, somewhat motivated by an article I read on TalentZoo, a hub for people who work in the Advertising field.

Knowledge of who you are and how to promote your value to clients are

important factors in creating and sustaining a successful business.

Handmade in America

Producing a podcast includes creating a destination. There are lots of

things to consider if you want to create a community around your

content and demonstrate to potential sponsors you can keep them around.

Hosting sites:

A loose review of an event I attended this evening focusing on the launch of Avid Media Composer 4.0, Avid's mainstream digital video editing tool. At two thousand plus dollars it's not for everyone. But for anyone interested in a career in video and especially feature motion picture editing, it's the gorilla in the living-room.

A lot of technical stuff was presented but I've chosen to talk about a few features that I thought were particularly interesting and useful, including an open plug-in format that allows Avid to ingest media directly from AVC, P2, SxS and other solid state camera media cards without converting it to the Avid MXF file format - saving time and space on your drive.

Media Composer now allows you to store files it's using anywhere on your computer, but there are risks involved. The tracking feature allows you to stabilize the picture on the frame and it automatically resizes the image so it completely fills the width of the frame. The remarkable thing about this stabilization tracking feature is that instead of the standard practice of using one or several bright spots in the frame as reference points for holding the image in the same location, it uses the entire screen. This is better because, depending on the footage, reference point objects, usually very bright points of lights, like reflections off shiny objects, can be blocked from view during capture. Not a problem now.

The last new feature I mention is the ability to place clips on the same timeline with different frame rates. Something Apple has been able to do for a number of years. Avid says it does the conversion in realtime, faster and with better results than Final Cut Pro. There's certainly enough settings to adjust to make it so. Providing you have the time and money to figure it out.

   

I have overcome and more than happy to tell you about it. The DVD portion of this project I'm working on has come to a close and you can reap the fruit of my head-banging efforts in this post about DVD Studio Pro.

Not definitive by any means, but there are a few problems you could learn to sidestep if you're interested in learning.

I'm busy, I only noticed I hadn't taken care of feeding this podcast

when I looked at the time and it reminded me I haven't done a thing for

the show. That's how busy is.

Maybe when I'm done tomorrow I can put things in perspective. Right now

I'll make another cup of tea and keep my frustration to myself.

In case you didn't know, you should get a library card. It's free, you

can get just about any book, magazine, movie and lots of other stuff.

If you're a student you could probably get books from outside your

school delivered right to your room.

Okay, right to your dorm room is stretching it a little, but still, almost.