Video StudentGuy

Day 14 Editing

Day 13 Shooting

Day 12 Driving home through heavy, sticky traffic

I'm still pulling together the entire story of my film, still in rough

cut mode. I'm just beginning to set boundaries and eliminating

individuals wholesale, because the film isn't long enough to include

more than a certain number of faces and voices. I don't know what that

number is, but I've already eliminated 1 of 4 key interviews I did with

potters.  I found that when I introduced each person at the beginning

of the film, one individual didn't fit. It was an odd experience that I

had never had before and I it hit me like a vague itch as I was

assembling the cut. It was completely apparent when I saw it full

blown, along with my class, during the screening I reported on a few

episodes ago.

It's one of those gut feelings you need to cultivate. As painful as

these choices are, I know that hanging on to scenes, footage or

characters that don't move the story ahead is like driving full speed

ahead into a mud-hole. And nobody wants that.

Wise or not, I chose to give up a night I would otherwise be editing,

in order to attend a series of talks at school by professional editors

and filmmakers. Jay  Rose was one of the highlights, as was Michael Phillips

of Avid. The main message was geared towards the younger students,

about finding your way into the media business, even if it means being

a coffee toting intern. The critical thing to achieve is contacts and

develop a set of work references that will lead you to your ultimate

goal.

Five speakers, they all said the same thing: Be persistent and persevere.

The next day I used my evening to take some hirez stills at Sawmill Pottery,

Dot Burnworth's studio. I have great interview footage of Dot, but I

had to leave early the day of the shoot and got very little B-roll,

particularly of her  work.

One of things I realize I must, must, must do going forward, whenever I

finish a shoot, is right away, within 24 hours at the most, review the

footage. I didn't and a lot of time passed before I reviewed it. When I

did and realized I had little to no B-roll (poor planning and poor

execution) and by then it was too late to arrange a 2nd shoot. The best

I could do was take digital stills and use them in a pan and zoom

effect. I haven't tried this in HD before, so I will have to see how

well it works. It better work, because I'm counting on B-roll to hide a

lot of jump cuts.

Day 16 & 15

I'm quite busy using all available time editing my film. My podcasting solution is to record summaries every couple days and posting them. I'm counting down the days until I have to hand in the project and this show is the second one in the series, days 16 and 15.

Even with this clever idea I still am a little pokey posting these as I still don't have much free time to edit and even write this meager blog post. The days I'm talking about are not in sync with reality, which I think would be much more dramatic, but since I'm not getting paid to do this and my paying job doesn't subsidize my podcast, I'll cut myself some slack. Once the deadline passes and I can walk out my front door and see that big yellow circle in the sky, I'll have time to post them in short order AND finish that symphony I've always wanted to write.

How is it I have time to write this now you say? Well, here's an Avid life lesson. I'm using a G4 Mac, about 1.67 megahertz, 2 gig of RAM and a fast 500 gig Firewire 800 external drive. I'm using Avid Media Composer two. It does the job well enough, I've only been cutting up to now, but I'm dreading working with effects.

Whenever you connect your connect the drive with your media and project file infromation into another computer, Avid will reindex you media when it is launched. Sometimes, like on an Intel Mac Pro workstation with a fast SATA drive, memory, processor etc., it can index pretty fast and only keep you waiting a few minutes. Sometimes more. On a computer like mine, a lot, lot more.

I don't know what I did, since I didn't disconnect my drive and launch my project off another system, but after a taking a couple hours for lunch I turned the drive back on, relaunched Avid and voila, indexing. As long as it takes to write this, maybe post this.

Just be careful to budget time for this kind timewasting, and keep the mylanta at hand.

In this show I'm reviewing the our class screening. There were 4 films shown. Two are essentially done, one is a narrative, excellent, another is a trailer for a documentary, also very very good. One class member was MIA, turns out he never got the date for the screening. His film, a narrative, is pretty much done as well.  The other person in the class showed a portion of her film, which is being edited by another class member and plans to show a trailer at graduation.

My film was not complete, I had put together about 70% of it, no really, more like half of it. Still it was 20 minutes long. I'll explain why in the show, no need to get into it here. I got a lot of constructive feedback and was raring to dig in the next day, but it didn't work out that way.

You'll have to forgive Day 15's segment. I've tried a number of things in Soundtrack to help it out, but I couldn't combat distortion which is due to wind on the mic. I argued with myself to take it out completely, but, for the sake of documenting my progress, I left it in.

Subclipping is a necessary part of organizing your project, creating structure. Doing that will allow you to rip through your media as you pull the story together. With the deadline I have, about 3 weeks when I recorded this show, what I feel I really need to do is begin editing, but that would be disastrous and lead to chaos with the amount of footage I have to work with.
Editing

I'm using Avid over FCP. I've chosen to use Avid for this project even though I have more experience using FCP. I've discovered a few drawbacks that could negatively affect meeting the deadline.

Finally I have begun editing the footage, starting with discrete topics, keeping a general story order in my head. I find this process works for me. Once I got enough footage cut together I moved the contents of these sequences into a single timeline sequence to see how well everything pulled together to tell a cohesive story. It's still incomplete, but I'm very encouraged.

21 days left.

I've used my time during the past week transcribing all the interviews I recorded using a tool called MacSpeech Dictate.

It does a good job of converting the spoken word to text. It's a new

program that uses the dictation software engine developed by the people

who created Dragon Naturally Speaking, a PC only program.

It took me a week, but I was able to do it during my hour plus commute.

I still have to go back and review the text and correct any errors.

The best part of all of this is that I'm reacquainting myself with the

words of my interviewees and I've fallen back in love with my story and

my film. I don't know where I went, but I'm back.

So the next step is to subclip the footage based on topic and then I can use that to build my story.

Well, at last, the final week of classes. I talk about compression in

DVD Studio Pro and Color Correction in Avid, including some suggestions

for improvement on the DVD authoring class.

I'm finally out of my lethargic funk too. I have 30 days to complete

the edit, pick up a couple shots and finish the film. I'm way behind,

so I'm making plans and thinking focused.

I attended the Sunday sessions of Podcamp Boston 3,

which was held at the beautiful Harvard Medical School conference

center. I met a lot of generous, interesting people and really put the

work in networking. There were a lot of presentations, about 4 or 5

every hour, about 5 times during the day, but I spent more time talking

to people outside of these sessions.

One of the cool features of this conference was something called a BrainTorrent,

which was a beautiful oval room full of tables with name tents on them,

each one with a different topic or concept and anyone was welcome to

sit down and join the conversation. That's where I met Mary Anne Davis and Guido Stein.

Mary Anne is a potter and Guido is a knitter and we got into a

conversation about social media and craft and before you know it, I was

recording it.

My own feelings about the even were very positive.

I'm so happy I met as many people as I did. More people than I can

remember and credit. Meeting Keith Burtis

was very fortunate. His live woodworking video cast is very cool and

I'm looking forward to conversations with him about the production

aspects of creating video shows.

I'm always impressed by the

number of people who blog but aren't yet podcasting who attend these

shows. It's a good sign that the events don't put off an exclusive

feeling and it's healthy to talk to people who are just as passionate

about new media but aren't in the podcasting fish bowl. Sharon Couto is one blogger who attended the event with an eye on moving into Podcasting.

I

moved into a new media space that I hadn't intended to become involved

in, at the encouragement of Mary Anne. I now have a Twitter account,

the user name is Bermamot. I

haven't posted anything, anything at all since Sunday. I'm a busy guy,

but I'll give it a chance. There are definitely two camps, people who

are infatuated with Twitter or

microblogging, and people (and one of them) who don't see the sense at

all and don't have any time for it. I feel as though I'm standing at

the door to the Twilight Zone.

Finally let me mention a cool

site I saw at a BrainTorrent table. I'm going to use it when I set up

my upcoming website. It's a program that analyzes your website for

Search Engine Optimization - SEO. It explains what each suggestion

means and it appears very thorough. It's free at websitegrader.com. Thanks to Mike Volpe from Hubspot.com for coming to the conference and showing it off.

2nd week of the last module in the Filmmaking program at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University.

We're going through the Apple Pro Training series book, DVD Studio Pro 4.

It's an excellent book, all the books in the series are great tutorials

and are a good introduction to the Pro Tools suite. They lead you

through a series of projects focusing on different parts of the

authoring process, using media from professional projects.

It's interesting stuff, but we're all a bit tired and looking forward to being done in a week.

Welcome to the longest show I've posted to date. On average these shows

run about 15 minutes and when they've gone over  3o minutes I tend to

break them into parts. The main reason for the length, which is about

52 minutes, is the inclusion of multiple comments and excerpts from

presentations from PAB. My main goal here is to give you a sense of the

event, which is quite unique among conferences. But the downside is how

much time it adds to the show. And editing multiple interviews

complicates the production process. Even up to the last few hours

before posting I found some errors that required me to rerecord some

sections. Most of the changes are changes in attributions, another time

sink in production, which I got wrong on the first recording pass.

I'm satisfied with the final show, even though it's long. If it's a

bother, let me know, I'm compressing it down as much as I can. In the

future, I'm thinking about using Apple's AAC format, which makes mp3

files smaller but retains higher quality. It also allows me to bookmark

and add graphics, but, as far as I know, AAC files only play on iTunes

and iPods and I don't want to exclude any listeners. Any thoughts?

Because I am including a number of voices besides my own I've added a note at the bottom of the blog that indicates the type of Creative Commons license I'm using, which is attribution, non-commercial, share alike.

I'll talk a little more about CC in a future show, right now understand

that you can use all or part of this show as long as you include the

name of the speaker and where the audio came from. You can't sell it

and if you include any part of it in your own podcast you are bound by

the same license. Thanks to Connie Crosby for pointing me the the right direction on this topic, for some reason I find the legal aspects of publishing baffling.

This show is about my experience at Podcaster's Across Borders

and begins with my personal thoughts about the event. Halfway through I

have some excerpts of presentations and some brief commentary on what I

took away from the experience and then I finish with a series of

interviews I recorded at the end of the weekend as the room slowly

emptied. It was a great experience and I've put in a lot of effort

trying to put into words what it all meant, because, as I try to

explain, PAB wasn't your regular new media conference. Lots of people

were trying to figure it out besides me. Check out the comments on David Peralty's blog and you'll see a wide range of reactions.

If

you're just interested in the excerpts I've got the timecode listed

below. In addition, all the presentations will be posted at Podcaster's

Across Borders throughout the summer. Subscribe!

I've also

listed the names and URLs of all the people mentioned or heard in this

show. Some have podcasts, some blogs and some are thinking about it.

If

there was any message or call to action people took away from the event

(and there was plenty) one of the most important was find your voice

and share it. I second that.

Contents:

• 00:27 - About me and the show
• 06:45 - Tim Coyne presentation
• 09:56 - Tim Coyne interview
• 16:51 - Tod Maffin presentation
• 20:50 - Jay Moonah's presentation
• 26:46 - Me trying to make sense of Marshal McLuhan
• 33:51 - Chris Brogan's Jolt
  
• 41:30 - Attendee final comments
• 50:11 - Closing remarks
  

Links:

• New Media Expo
• Podcamp Boston 3
• Bob Goyetche
• Mark Blevis
• Marshall McLuhan
• Maslow Hierarchy of Needs
• This Week in Media #98
• Mitch Joel - 6 Pixels of Separation
  

Conference attendees and presenters who have kindly allowed me to record and post their comments in this show:

• Tim Coyne - Hollywood Podcast
• Tod Maffin
• Jay Moonah - Media Driving
• Chris Brogan
• Whitney Hoffman - The LD Podcast
• Connie Crosby
  

Dave Fleet - davefleet.com

Bill Deys - The Country Music Cast

Murray McGregor

Francis Wooby - Wooby Communications

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.

There's an interesting event coming up towards the end of this month in Boston. Podcamp Boston 3 takes place July 19th and 20th. You can get directions and other information, including a list of sessions that will take place through the links I've provided here.

I attended this event last year, and I talked about it in episode #56. The conference founders, Chris Penn and Chris Brogan, both attended Podcasters Across Borders last weekend and I was fortunate enough to interview Chris Brogan and asked him to weight the advantages of each.

I was fortunate  enough to interview Chris Brogan for a few minutes between sessions at Podcasters Across Borders and asked him to comment on the two events.

I hope you get a better sense of both events through my comments and

Chris' interview. There was only a few minutes to chat between some sessions, so our conversation was rushed. I think you'll find if you attend Podcamp

Boston 3 that there will more time and space for conversations and

meeting new people.

I want to say thanks to Chris for talking with me. I know he's going to be at Podcamp and I hope you'll be there too.