Creative Cow Magazine #17 by Vanguardia Interactive

More Than Just I/O

Faster than realtime H.264 HD file creation

for Blu-ray, the web, and mobile devices

for Mac and PC

Fast H.264 encoding too! Take your input, output, monitoring, and encoding toolbox with you wherever you go – in the studio, on set, and on the road. Use it with a laptop or desktop, Mac or PC. Work with virtually any camera, codec, monitor, or deck. Streamline editing with your favorite applications including Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and many more. Turbocharge your H.264 encoding with Apple Compressor, Telestream Episode, and Adobe Media Encoder using the unique Matrox MAX technology. Deliver files for Blu-ray, the web, and mobile devices faster than ever before. For the ultimate in quality, convenience, and flexibility, chose Matrox MXO2 Mini, MXO2 LE, MXO2 or MXO2 Rack – whichever is right for you.

How many times in your quest for the right high-tech product have you been told “good, fast, inexpensive – pick two”? Well, when it comes to encoding your video projects for Blu-ray, the web, and mobile devices, you don’t have to make that compromise. If you’re a professional content creator you need a fast, flexible, high quality encoding workhorse. A bandwidth limited USB device just won’t cut it. Matrox CompressHD is the first implementation of Matrox MAX technology in an amazingly affordable H.264 accelerator card. It lets you create H.264 files, for resolutions from iPod to HD, faster than real time. It works in systems with or without a video I/O device and extends the life of your current system investment, giving you the power you need to deliver today’s premium H.264 formats faster than ever. This low profile, half-length PCIe x1 card fits into Mac Pros, Intel-based Apple Xserve systems, and PCs. Turbocharge your H.264 encoding with Apple Compressor, Telestream Episode, and Adobe Media Encoder using the unique Matrox MAX technology.

Speed – Quality – Affordability You CAN have it all!

Matrox is a registered trademark and Matrox MXO and Matrox MAX are trademarks of Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Matrox is a registered trademark and Matrox CompressHD and Matrox MAX are trademarks of Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

THE MAGAZINE FOR MEDIA PROFESSIONALS WORKING IN VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO, MOTION GRAPHICS, IMAGING & DESIGN

Creative COW

C R E AT I V E CO M M U N I T I E S O F T H E W O R L D

M A G A Z I N E NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2009

CREATIVE COW MAGAZINE A CREATIVE COW LLC PUBLICATION

PUBLISHERS: Ron & Kathlyn Lindeboom EDITOR-IN-CHIEF/ ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER: Tim Wilson magazine@creativecow.net CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Niyi Akinmolayan Neil Feldman, Jigme Gaton, Dave Howell, Tony Hudson, Ron Lindeboom, Tim Wilson LAYOUT & DESIGN: Ron Lindeboom, Tim Wilson MAGAZINE ADVERTISING: Ellen Parker eparker@creativecow.net WEBSITE ADVERTISING: Tim Matteson tmatteson@creativecow.net TECHNICAL DIRECTOR: Abraham Chaffin abraham@creativecow.net CONTACT US: magazine@creativecow.net (805) 239-5645 voice (805) 239-0712 fax Creative COW Magazine is published bi-monthly by CreativeCOW LLC (Creative Communities of the World) at 2205 Villa Lane,, Paso Robles, CA 93446. (805) 239-5645. Postage paid at Hanover, New Hampshire. U.S. subscription rates are free to qualified subscribers. Creative COW is a registered trademark of Creative COW LLC. All rights are reserved. Magazine contents are copyright © 2009 by Creative COW Magazine. All rights are reserved. Right of reprint is granted only to non-commercial educational institutions such as high schools, colleges and universities. No other grants are given. The opinions of our writers do not always reflect those of the publisher and while we make every effort to be as accurate as possible, we cannot and do not assume responsibility for damages due to errors or omissions. LEGAL STATEMENT: All information in this magazine is offered without guarantee as to its accuracy and applicability in all circumstances. Please consult an attorney, business advisor, accountant or other professional to discuss your individual circumstances. Use of the information in this magazine is not intended to replace professional counsel. Use of this information is at your own risk and we assume no liability for its use.

In This Issue:

NOW FOR CS4 !

Tim Wilson’s Column ............................................. 8 The Back Forty with Ron Lindeboom ............... 50

Non-Linear

Creativity CRAFTS, PRODUCTIONS, CAREERS

10 In-Three’s Stereoscopic 3D Solution

New System Begins with a Single Camera. Yes, One.

16 The Making of: Welcome To My World

A small team in Nigeria creates a project that saves an orphanage planned for destruction

24 A Non-Linear Career

A top VFX artist’s journey to the jobs that ignite the big screen

32 From LiveType to the iTunes Apps Store

One of LiveType’s creators returns with a new iPhone-focus

38 The Journey To A Nepali Recording Studio

How a New Yorker found peace, music and media in Nepal

44 Industry News

A look at some of the big news items in our industry

50 A Welcome To Our International Print Edition While many magazines continue to cut back in the face of hard realities for many print publications, Creative COW is growing again, with the addition of first-class mail service to both USA and international subscribers

New DeckLink HD Extreme has Dual Link 4:4:4/4:2:2 SDI, HDMI and analog connections in SD, HD and 2K! Advanced 3 Gb/s SDI Technology

The new DeckLink HD Extreme is the world’s most advanced capture card! With a huge range of video and audio connections plus a hardware down converter, and Dual Link 4:4:4/4:2:2 3 Gb/s SDI, advanced editing systems for Microsoft Windows™ and Apple Mac OS X™ are now even more affordable!

With exciting new 3 Gb/s SDI connections, DeckLink HD Extreme allows twice the SDI data rate of normal HD-SDI, while also connecting to all your HD-SDI and SD-SDI equipment. Use 3 Gb/s SDI for 2K and edit your latest feature film using real time 2048 x 1556 2K resolution capture and playback!

Connect to any Deck, Camera or Monitor

Microsoft Windows™ or Apple Mac OS X™

DeckLink HD Extreme is the only capture card that features Dual Link 3 Gb/s SDI, HDMI, component analog, NTSC, PAL and S-Video for capture and playback in SD, HD or 2K. Also included is 2 ch XLR AES/EBU audio and 2 ch balanced XLR analog audio. Connect to HDCAM SR, HDCAM, Digital Betacam, Betacam SP, HDV cameras, big-screen TVs and more.

DeckLink HD Extreme is fully compatible with Apple Final Cut Pro™, Adobe Premiere Pro™, Adobe After Effects™, Adobe Photoshop™, Fusion™ and any DirectShow™ or QuickTime™ based software. DeckLink HD Extreme instantly switches between feature film resolution 2K, 1080HD, 720HD, NTSC and PAL for worldwide compatibility.

Hardware Down Conversion If you’ve ever wanted to monitor in both HD and SD while you work, then you’ll love the built in high quality down converter. Use the Dual Link SDI outputs as a simultaneous HD and SD output, or you can switch back to Dual Link 4:4:4 when working in the highest quality RGB workflows. Select between letterbox, anamorphic 16:9 and even center cut 4:3 down conversion styles!

DeckLink HD Extreme

$995

Learn more today at www.blackmagic-design.com 4

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

The Modern Guide to Nonlinear Editing — and Living

W Tim Wilson

Boston, Massachusetts Editor-In-Chief, Associate Publisher Creative COW Magazine

Our ability to create meaning from our experiences changes everything. It makes all things possible.

hat most people mean by “nonlinear editing” has nothing to do with editing. It simply refers to working with digitized film and video media — yes, a big deal, but the outcome isn’t necessarily different from anything we have seen in the last 100 years. The basics go back at least as far as Edwin S. Porter and his films “Life of An American Firefighter” and “The Great Train Robbery” in 1903. He pioneered using changing perspectives, including close-ups, within a single scene. He found that, with just a little care, audiences could even follow him as he cut between parallel stories happening in different places. Not so long after that, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov regularly demonstrated what became known as the Kuleshov Effect. He alternated a single shot of a mostly expressionless actor with shots of a bowl of soup, a woman in a coffin, and a little girl playing. Audiences were moved by the actor’s profound “responses” to each of these: his wistfulness, his sorrow, his joy. But the actor never changed! It was the same shot every time. None of this was real — except to the audience. The Kuleshov Effect has been scrutinized virtually nonstop since then by psychologists and film nerds alike. Über-nerd Alfred Hitchcock even repeated the experiment using James Stewart. He used a variation of this to create one of the most famous murders in film history with a close-up of a woman in a shower screaming, her belly, a knife that never touched her, and blood running down a drain. Kuleshov thought that this kind of thing worked because of the power of editing. I think it works because we are hard-wired to reflexively combine experiences, including what we see, into stories. In other words, nonlinear editing doesn’t change anything. It only makes editing easier. On the other hand, our ability to create meaning changes everything. It makes all things possible. One of the great pleasures of working at the COW is hearing about the sometimes ridiculously nonlinear lives and approaches to creativity that have brought many of us here. I was able to gather a small handful of my favorites into this issue of the magazine, but there are many others. For example, Roger Bolton has been part of the COW for years, and you have most definitely seen the effects and compositing work that brought him here: the first two “Lord of the Rings” pictures, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” and “The House of Flying Daggers” among many others. He now develops the powerful and popular CoreMelt series of plug-ins for Final Cut Pro and After Effects, all springing from his degree in psychology and mathematics. Likewise, COW forum hosts Pierre Jasmin and Pete Litwinowicz were visual effects artists. They developed an Academy Award-winning technology for manipulating the appearance of time and space that they turned into paint effects for “What Dreams May Come,” which itself won an Oscar for visual effects. COW leaders Chris Poisson and Bob Zelin detoured through music: Chris created memorable album covers for Santana and The Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Bob interrupted his career in broadcast engineering to play keyboards on the historically epic “Kiss Alive” tour in 1977. Mark Allen uses what he learned as a magician to direct a viewer’s eyes where he wants them to look in a frame. Sarah Hallett went from being a police officer, to a hostage negotiator, to a grief counselor for workers cleaning up at the World Trade Center in 2001, to stand-up comedy before making her way to the COW. Not many straight lines here. Before Ron Lindeboom founded Creative COW, he moved from finance and managerial consulting into desktop publishing in the 80s, and on into desktop video in the 90s — with a detour along the way playing power-pop rock on the Sunset Strip. My graduate degree in religion led to teaching, bookselling and houseflipping (buying houses, fixing them, and selling them fast) before it led to video production. You won’t be surprised to find that I spent my undergraduate years as a film nerd. For me, that was about watching movies, not making them — although it turns out that some of what makes movies mean anything is simply our watching them. We take the experiences we are given, and we tie them together. We do the same thing with our lives, as we somehow bind their twists and turns together to tell a story. Oh, and the #1 Modern Guideline to Nonlinear Living: there are no guidelines. We’re all making it up as we go along. n The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

Professional Storage Solutions for Video Editing

Performance. Reliability. Style.

High-Speed, Low Cost eSATA Storage Solutions for Creative Professionals Editing SD & HD

Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 Production Premium Master the production challenges of today and tomorrow with Adobe Creative Suite 4 Production Premium software, a tightly integrated preand post-production $ 00 toolset for Windows and Intel based Mac OS systems. Use it for video and audio editing, still and motion graphics, visual effects, and interactive media, as well as DVD, Blu-ray Disc, and mobile authoring. Includes: • Adobe After Effects® CS4 • Adobe Premiere® Pro CS4 • Adobe Encore® CS4 • Adobe OnLocation® CS4 • Adobe Photoshop® CS4 Extended • Adobe Illustrator® CS4 • Adobe Flash CS4 Professional • Adobe Soundbooth CS4

Speciﬁcally designed for professional content creation applications, G-SPEED eS features a high-speed 3Gbit/sec eSATA interface and provides RAID 5 data protection when used in conjunction with the optional G-Tech PCI Express (PCIe) RAID controller. G-SPEED eS supports multi-stream video editing workﬂows on Mac Pro and Windows workstations at an unprecedented low cost per TB.

1,499

When used with the G-Tech RAID controller, G-SPEED eS can easily be conﬁgured as a RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 or as a JBOD. This ﬂexibility enables the system to be tuned to the required level of performance and faulttolerance necessary to support your application. G-SPEED eS can also be set up as a software RAID or JBOD when used with third party port multiplier aware eSATA host adapters.

G-RAID

4 TB Bundle

1,299

8 TB Bundle

2,22900

22995

Easy to Setup G-RAID is ready right out of the box for use with Mac OS X and appears to the system as a single, big and fast disk drive. A simple reformat is all it takes for use with Windows.

22900

Now with Apple Final Cut Pro 7 with Blu-ray!

949

G-RAID is designed speciﬁcally for professional content creation applications like Final Cut Studio, and the new fourth-generation G-RAID features a high-speed interface - 3 Gbit eSATA, FireWire 800 (FireWire 400 via cable) and USB2.0 ports - and is available in storage capacities up to an amazing 4TB! When connected via eSATA, G-RAID provides data transfers rates in excess of 200MB/second to support demanding post production environments. G-RAID supports multi-stream HDV, DVCPro HD, XDCAM HD, ProRes 422 and uncompressed SD workﬂows.

1 TB

ATTN ADOBE EDITORS: Go to videoguys.com for upgrades to CS4 and realize your creative vision quickly & efficiently with the countless new features & enhancements for pre and post-production!

Apple Final Cut Studio 3 Six applications give video editors all the tools they need to edit, animate, mix, grade, and deliver $ 00 — at a price that’s more affordable than ever. Upgrade for Final Cut owners now only $27500

NEW! Fourth Generation Professional Storage Solutions

The Best Warranty & Support in the Business G-RAID is backed by a standard 3-year factory warranty and unlimited free technical support by representatives experienced with the latest content creation applications..

THE HARDWARE ADVANTAGE for Adobe Editing Systems

Complete Post Production Software Solution

VIDEOGUYS’ BUNDLES Include G-SPEED eS with eSATA PCIe RAID Controller

2 TB

32500

We just completed our new & improved web site! Our goal was to make it easier for YOU to ﬁnd the products and information you need with the same great articles and reviews that made us the video editing and production experts for the past 25 years! The new Videoguys.com features: • Guide articles on the newest technology including HD formats, Blu-ray Disc, 64-bit OS & more • A daily-updated Blog, expanded product pages and, of course, our Exclusive Money Saving Bundles

• 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE • KNOWLEDGEABLE ADVICE • LOW PRICES & BUNDLE SPECIALS! • FREE TECH SUPPORT

NEW! G-SPEED eS

Supports the Latest Video Editing Gear! G-SPEED eS supports the latest and greatest professional video editing systems from AJA, Avid, Blackmagic Design and more. Our testing lab is stocked with all the latest gear to ensure full compatibility.

Visit our New Web Site at www.videoguys.com

4 TB

55500

G-TECH STORAGE BUNDLES!

Go to www.videoguys.com for our special discounted bundles featuring G-TECH G-RAID and G-SPEEDeS storage solutions with Apple Final Cut Studio 3, Adobe CS4 Production Premium, Avid Media Composer and more!

NEW! Pioneer BDR-205 Blu-ray Disc Writer with External USB Housing & Media Bundle This BD/DVD/CD Writer will write up to 12x on BD-R (25Gb) and BD-R DL (50Gb) media. Author hi-def Blu-ray Disc videos or take advantage of the high-capacity data storage. Go to videoguys.com for our Blu-ray Disc Bundles Bella Professional Series 3.0 Keyboards with NeoLite The ultimate convenience for video editors - the Bella Pro Series features color & icon coded keycaps for most popular editing $ 95 programs, a patented, built-in jog/ shuttle controller plus the NeoLite task light and two high-speed USB 2.0 ports! Available for Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro, Avid, Vegas & more

129

Professional Film & Video Editing & Finishing Solutions NEW! Avid Media Composer 4 Software

44900

Introducing the NEW Matrox MXO 2 Mini Affordable High Definition HDMI and Analog I/O Device for Mac and PC This sleek little device for Mac & PC is more versatile than an I/O card, giving you the added advantage of portability. You can take it with you wherever you go. Use it with a laptop or a desktop system and your favorite applications including Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro and Photoshop, and many more. Capture and playback HD video via HDMI and analog component; or NTSC & PAL via analog component, S-Video, and composite. Convert your standard definition videos to HD, or vice versa, while capturing or playing out, using Matrox MXO2 Mini’s high-quality dedicated hardware. Turn your HDMI screen into a professional-grade video monitor with Matrox’s unique color calibration tool. Easily edit AVCHD footage by capturing into an edit-friendly compressed or uncompressed format.

NEW! Cineform NeoScene for PC or MAC Do you have a new compact HD $ 95 camcorder that records to AVCHD? If so, CineForm Neo Scene is the Perfect Add-On for Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Studio 2, and Sony Vegas Pro!

ATTN Avid Media Composer & Xpress Owners: Upgrade to MC4 for only

Discover storytelling on the cutting edge. With the new Avid Media Composer 4 Software, you get the speed, flexibility & confidence you need to achieve your creative vision & deliver compelling content— on time and on budget. Having a rock-solid system that helps you quickly sort through your material is crucial. Mix and match formats, frame rates, and resolutions in the open timeline. Edit XDCAM, P2, and GFCAM media directly with AMA for the fastest HD Workflows. Find the footage you need quickly with Avid’s Media Management tools. This complete boxed set includes Media Composer 4 plus Avid DVD, Avid FX, Boris Continuum Complete, SmartSound Sonicfire Pro and Sorenson Squeeze.

Vegas Pro 9 Pro Bundle with Production Assistant & Training Vegas Pro 9 offers an efficient & intuitive environment for $ 95 pro video & broadcast production, as well as DVD & Blu-ray Disc. Vegas supports most formats including AVCHD, XDCAM EX & RED ONE, and more. Production Asst enhances the funtionality of Vegas

679

SPECIAL BUNDLE! Matrox MXO2 Mini with Cineform NeoScene only..

52900

New! Pro Tools Recording Studio Plug in your standard guitar, microphone and other instruments to $ 95 the Fast Track USB audio interface and use Pro Tools M-Powered Essentials software to play and record guitars and microphones directly to your PC or Mac. We also carry M-AUDIO Studiophile Speakers!

Boris Continuum Complete AE Plug-In for Adobe CS4 With over 180 filters & 1500 presets BCC will give you a decisive advantage over the built in Adobe effects with features such as Optical Flow, Open Gl rendering, Film Processing, higher $ 95 quality image scaling, and more. It works right in After Effects so you can access filters & features that let you create unforgettable effects at an affordable price. Go to videoguys.com for Boris software

949

49500

2,495

94995

NEW! Focus FS-H200 Portable Compact Flash DTE Recorder FS-H200 brings ultra-reliable solid state acquisition with Direct To Edit Technology to your DV/HDV camcorder. FS-H200 utilizes standard Type 1 removable Compact Flash which provides fast, reliable, & low-cost recording. Go from acquisition to editing in one easy step!

www.videoguys.com

10-12 Charles St., Glen Cove, NY 11542 • Local phone: 516-759-1611 • Fax 516-671-3092 • Email: sales@videoguys.com

Grass Valley HDSPARK with EDIUS 5 If you’re working in a file-based, networked environment & need to see your $ 95 projects in realtime, using affordable HDMI monitors, HDSPARK hardware solution is ideal. Based on the PCI Express form factor, it includes the full version of EDIUS 5 nonlinear editing software.

799

Grass Valley HDSTORM Plus with STORMBAY A single PCIe form factor board and packaged with a full version of the EDIUS 5 editing $ 00 software & the StormBay breakout box, HDSTORM Plus allows you to work with HDMI & AV in & outs, and has a Canopus HQ hardware codec for Hd capture.

1,299

High Performance Storage Solutions for Video Exditing Professionals G-TECH G-RAID New Fourth Generation RAID Solutions G-RAID modules are designed specifically 2 TB for digital content creation! $ 00 G-RAID is the ONLY 4TB = $599.00 eSATA, FireWire 800/400, USB2 storage solution designed to support multi-stream uncompressed SD, DVCPRO, HD, HDV & DV systems. • Unique design, compact aluminum enclosure • Mac & Windows compatible

339

G-SPEEDeS eSATA Storage Solution for SD/HD Video with PCIe Controller Card G-SPEED eS RAID solutions provide professional content creators with outstanding 4TB with PCIe card performance, high $ 00 storage capacity & fail-safe operation at an unprecedented low cost per TB. Features a high-speed 3Gbit/sec eSATA interface and provides RAID 5 data protection.

1,529

Professional & Affordable Mic Solutions for Videographers

84900

with Sony battery

Ikan V8000HDMI Monitor with Deluxe Kit The V8000HDMI LCD monitor features pass through’ inputs for composite, S-Video, and SD/ HD component, as well as a new HDMI input. It also has multiple power options, using the DV battery adaptor plates for prosumer batteries from Sony, Canon, Panasonic, V-mount & more.

WE ARE THE HD VIDEO EDITING & PRODUCTION EXPERTS!

800-323-2325

Professional Video Converters for the highest picture quality!

800-323-2325

10-12 Charles St., Glen Cove, NY 11542 • 516-759-1611 • Fax 516-671-3092 • sales@videoguys.com

NEW! Azden 105LT $ 00 On-Camera UHF Wireless Lapel Mic System with Free Carrying Case The 105UPR receiver is an all-new, compact case design with attached shoe-mount & pivoting, high-gain antenna. Unlike the entry-level models of its competitors, the 105UPR receiver offers 92 user-selectable channels in the 566-589MHz band. 105LT includes receiver & lapel mic with transmitter

279

21900

with Free Carrying Case

Azden SGM-2X Professional Shotgun Mic We carry Azden’s complete line of on-camera shotgun mics. Go to www.videoguys.com for more

Freeing artistic vision from 3D’s limitations

In-Three’s Stereoscopic 3D Solution

begins with Single-Camera Footage I

n-Three originally developed its technology to revivify dormant film libraries. We call our process “Dimensionalization®,” using patented software tools and techniques to create a second view from any two dimensional image. With delays in the rollout of 3D theater screens and platforms for 3D video in the home, we have had only modest opportunities with legacy films. However, as our R&D has continued, we have seen a strategic opportunity to solve problems in the creation of live action 3D features. We believe that these problems, particularly around the hassle of using two cameras to get a 3D picture, are among the reasons why so few 3D features have been released. Let me preface this by saying that I don’t want to be perceived as dumping on shooting. Shooting has

its natural domain, which includes anything related to broadcast – ballgames, operas, and other live events that are already being presented in 3D in theaters, to great success. That’s natural. Those kinds of presentations don’t need Dimensionalizing, and they don’t need CG – which also has its natural domain of course. To begin with the difficulties around multiple cameras for 3D production, one is lens differential. There are inevitably subtle physical differences in things like lens refraction. There are differences in perspectives for things like specular highlights and reflections that may be fully visible in one eye, and not present at all in the other. Each of these is exaggerated by vertical disparities in the lenses. Our eyes obviously handle horizontal disparities just fine – this is how we see in 3D as we

Neil Feldman

Westlake Village, California USA Neil Feldman is CEO and owner of In-Three. He is also the owner of Dallas-based Video Post and Transfer. Beginning in early 2000, he saw the potential for digital image-based 3D conversion technologies. Additionally, Video Post and Transfer is the leading film and video post production firm in the Southwest USA, and has built a reputation for innovation: the first independent post-production facility to offer 1” Type C editing, to build all digital on-line editing bays, and the first in the country to provide unified digital audio and video editing suites.

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

look at the world, by resolving horizontal differences in perspective. But resolving vertical disparities would require one eye going up as the other is going down! Even if each of these errors is small, they accumulate over the length of a movie, and become disturbing. Your brain is telling your eyes to adjust to something that they can’t quite sync. It wears you down. The challenges become even greater when shots have to match. If two shots inside a room are converged on a different point in space, the room can look like it is a different size in each shot! It is shallow in one shot, deep in the other. Even if your eyes can figure out what is going on, it’s not very believable, and it’s certainly not very comfortable There are some powerful warp engines and other sophisticated tools to make things a little better, but really, there is no way to fix them. Once you take the pictures, these things are locked in. DIMENSIONALIZATION We start with the footage from a single camera. We take that 2D footage, and we copy it to create a right eye, left eye view. Every pixel is mapped perfectly, with no discrepancies from lens effects, no misalignment. Now we can begin to add perspective, shape and depth. When I say add depth, I mean to move one eye’s view relative to the other eye’s view. Each eye tracks independently. We give shape first by rotoscoping, then by morphing. As we extract depth, we expose an area in the background footage that was previously occluded, and have to recreate a background that does not exist in the footage. We also create a kind of binocular disparity that your brain interprets as shape. But no vertical disparities, no light balance disparities, no pixel disparities. You eyes are tracking the way that they do in nature. If we do what I just described well, we can achieve what I call “perfect 3D.” We are also not just limited to a single set of 3D characteristics for a given shot. Our system can isolate 20 elements in a scene, each with its own camera, so to speak. Which means that, for each of these individual elements, we have a unique set of those three controls — perspective, shape and depth. Instead of those three “knobs” on a single camera to cover an entire scene, we have 60 “knobs” to turn: perspective, shape and depth for each of 20 objects that we have isolated. Our original software was called In3 Depth Build-

Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue

Footage shown above is undergoing Dimensionaliztion, and is a scene from James Cameron’s Titanic.

er, and we’re just starting to deploy a new package called In3gue — pronounced “Intrigue.” This allows artists to keyframe the individual elements that they have identified to have unique depth, shape and perspective. The software propagates those values, interpolates through the shots, makes it all practical, and our software spits out an occlusion map. Each of these elements can now be treated individually, apart from the shot as a whole. Now, let’s say we go to the next shot, and it’s a different view. We can isolate elements that we DON’T want to change, so that the internal depth of a scene

Directors see this and are amazed. They tell us, “This is the first time I’ve been able to have this kind of control over depth. I know what I’m getting.” As we work, all changes update in the blink of an eye. I have signs all over our facility that say, “Blink Time.” Our engineers are driven to keep things moving just that quickly in depth grading sessions.

DIMENSIONALIZATION WORKFLOW The specific placement of Dimensionalization in the production pipeline depends on our client and their schedule. We generally receive the .dpx image sequences in log space before they have been color graded, but on a single project we can work with files both before and after grading. We prefer to work on locked shots with handles, but we have often had to work as the cut, and even the final image, is in flux. We recently worked on the Jerry Bruckheimer film, “GForce,” directed by Hoyt YeatSEEING IS BELIEVING man, distributed by Disney. Our [Ed. note: The following are quotes from a panel held at ShoWest in 2005, introducing In-Three’s stereo work fell into three major process to 2000 cinema exhibitors.] categories: full live-action shots to be Dimensionalized, full CG George Lucas shots to be rendered in stereo, “When I first saw In-Three’s Dimensionalization process I was truly amazed. The 3D was of a and live-action shots with CG elquality better than anything I had previously experienced….When you see some of this test ements. footage, it’s shockingly good, and you can see how people would want to go see it. It means The full live-action shots we can repurpose a lot of old movies, and at the same time it really gives a whole new dimenwere Dimensionalized by Insion to the movies we’re making now.” Three. The full CG shots were George Lucas James Cameron rendered completely by Sony “Though I still love 3D original photograPictures Imageworks. Often, the phy, the technical solution provided by third type of shot was handled In-Three was a welcome addition to our through a combined effort by Inpalette of stereo film-making tools [for Three and Sony Imageworks. “Aliens of The Deep”]. They were able Dimensionalization is ideal to add real depth to the 2D video imfor this, because we store depth ages captured by our robotic vehicles, and metadata and can use it to conthese shots blended beautifully with our form stereo CG with stereo live 3D shots. I predict that their innovative action in real-time. techniques will continue to expand the For these live-action shots possibilities for 3D content.” with 3D elements, Sony would create a temp stereoscopic render of the CG elements, and Randal Kleiser (director, “Grease”) we would Dimensionalize the “After shooting in 70mm for Disneyland’s “Honey, live-action plate to match. The I Shrunk the Audience,” I know how complicated reverse can also work, but this this format can be. With In-Three’s technique, approach was the one predomicompletely convincing depth is created from any nantly used in “G-Force.” Sony two-dimensional film. George Lucas showed me would then do a final render of In-Three’s work at I.L.M. Seeing Star Wars in 3D the CG elements. Then, dependwas amazing enough, but when I saw John Traing on the specific shot, either volta singing “Greased Lightning” in 3D, I was In-Three or Sony would final the blown away. It was just like being back on the composition, and touch up the set. I know every fan in the world would come shot as necessary. back to the theater again to see a complete 3D In other words, we don’t James Cameron version. The possibilities are mind-boggling.” necessarily see Dimensionalization solely as an alternative to

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

Photo of George Lucas courtesy of Joi Ito. Photo of James Cameron courtesy of Richard Burdett. Both licensed under Wikimedia Commons.

stays consistent from shot to shot. Think of it as “depth grading,” analogous to color grading, in order to maintain depth continuity. That is, even if the dailies look perfect by themselves, here come another 200 scenes to cut together. In one of them, the focal element might come halfway out of the screen, and in another only 10%. Your eyes starting ping-ponging back and forth, and in and out, as you’re trying to follow a single object from one cut to the next. The problem for you as a viewer is that it drives you crazy to watch. The problem for the director is that, once the footage is in the camera, those disparities are locked in. It’s hard to get immediate feedback during shooting, and it’s virtually impossible to match 3D composition across shots in the edit. We solve that problem. We make sure that the depth grades smoothly from one scene to the next.

live action shooting or CG. As “G-Force” has shown, it can be an excellent complement to them.

sion in the home – and THAT’s what’s going to make 3D become the financial blockbuster we know it can be. While I’m rooting for stereo shooting, I also beTHE FUTURE OF 3D lieve that directors are always going to want to have There are a lot of smart people in the world, and a the most possible control over their shots. I think that lot of them are working on shooting stereo. As a rewe as a company, and as a representative of conversion sult, I think that we will get past these problems. In technologies, are going to be a key factor in day and the short term, I’m hoping we can sort the problems date releases of live-action features going forward. out well enough to see some really, really good sports When all of that happens, people will truly get events, because that’s what’s going to drive 3D televicaught up in 3D as a new entertainment vehicle. I think that that is when Dimensionalizing legacy movies is going to bring new financial life to film libraries. DIMENSIONALIZATION DESIGN DETAILED In the meantime, our goal is to Every artist station is equipped for real-time Depth Grading with two 120hz 3D encontinue to maintain the quality of abled Samsung LCDs (SyncMaster 2233RZ) or Samsung CRT monitors (SyncMaster Dimensionalization, while driving 1100DF). Additionally, we have several artist QC stations with 60” 3D enabled Samdown costs through technological sung DLP TVs. innovation. In our screening rooms, we use an NEC NC800c 2K Digital Cinema projector with Whether through shooting, the XpanD AE110 infrared emitter, projected on a matte white screen. CG, or post-production DimensionIn addition to using our own proprietary software for screening playback, we alizing, we can all participate in also use Iridas FrameCycler DI for EDL conforms and long form QC screening. The constructing 3D content. By underscreening stations use an appropriate stereo-capable video card with SDI out, dual standing what our strengths and Intel Quad Core Processors, 8 GB DDR-S RAM, and an Adaptec 5085 SAS controller manweaknesses are, we can construct 3D aging two external RAID 0 disk arrays at 16 TBs each, for real-time 2K playback. content together, and work together Each artist is using wired MacNaughton shutter glasses with stereo driver to achieve the highest quality at the (HSG02-dg1), Real D Crystal Eyes with Desktop emitter, or NVIDIA GeForce 3D Vision lowest cost, and the fastest pace. wireless glasses at their workstations. At our QC stations and in our screening rooms we use XpanD X101 Cinema Active glasses.

Want to learn Apple Color? If you have wanted to unlock the real power of Apple Color, then join Creative COW’s Walter Biscardi as he explores Color’s feature-set and demystifies the Color Interface, the biggest stumbling block for anyone trying to use the application. As you’ve probably already discovered, Color is different than just about anything else on the Mac, and before you can really get into colorgrading with Apple Color, you need to understand the interface and the strategies involved in using Color in your projects. The DVD contains 9 tutorial videos that explore the interface, the “Rooms,” and the controls. Everything you need to know to get you started. So if you’re a video editor or someone who has never sat in a color correction suite before, then this DVD is definitely for you.

Great DVD training, and just $49*

www.creativecowtraining.net *plus shipping/handling, and applicable taxes, if any

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

New from CalDigit

"If you are considering any CalDigit product, I would say you cannot go wrong....From packaging, to product, to support that company has done nothing but impress me." -Steve Utaski

It was going to take every production and keying trick he’d learned for Niyi and the team at Anthill Multimedia to finish their music video on deadline — and save an orphanage

W E L C O M E

T O

M Y

course, the generator problems. We run our business with these alternative power sources, and it eats up most of the profit. Ever since we did a video for one of his clients, in which we turned a crowd of 12 into about 200 in post, Adonijah can’t seem to do anything if it is not shot on green screen! In fact, late last year, he sponsored my first movie (still in post-production), in which 90% was shot on green screen, with loads of visual effects and animations. So, when he called concerning a music video, I knew exactly what he meant. We met later that evening, and our conversation went like this. Adonijah: Look Niyi, we’ll just do a simple music video with me and the children singing, and we’ll mix it with clips from the premiere. It shouldn’t take any time — we’ll just shoot in front of a green screen and you can just put a plain background… or some graphics…or some 3D stuff….or…or what do you think?

It all started on a very hot afternoon in the city of Port Harcourt, River State, Nigeria. I was with my entire team, and we had to battle with an electric power generator that had decided to drive us all crazy. Not that I knew anything about generators, but we had some rendering work to do for a client. It was the perfect time for me to lose my temper! This was when I got a call from the CEO of Adonis Production, Adonijah Owiriwa, the executive producer of a new action movie I was working on. “Niyi, we need to do a quick music video for this orphanage using my song.” Of course, I didn’t take him seriously. For me, there is no such thing as a quick music video. Early this year, he produced a movie (“Nnenda”)

about a doctor’s struggle to save an orphanage, and the premiere date was just two weeks away. I had suggested earlier that we do a documentary about an orphanage that was about to be demolished by the government, and show it at the “Nnenda” premiere screening. He had also done a song titled “Welcome to My World” last year, as the launch for an orphanage awareness campaign. This was the song he wanted for the music video. Not that I had a problem doing the video, but we had so much to do for him already concerning the premiere and campaign, including a billboard, brochures and TV ads. Because the campaign was for a good cause that I wanted to be part of, much of the work was free of charge, so it wasn’t easy doing more — and of

Niyi Akinmolayan Lagos, Nigeria

“Most of my days in college were spent skipping classes, just to be at the library,” Niyi told us. “I fell in love with science because I felt I could put a stop to the crude oil problems we have in my country, and provide people with alternative power. Since i couldn’t study abroad, I went back to my other love — media, hoping that I could help inspire a new generation to get involved in change.”

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

Niyi: (thinking) */&%##

These shots are from my science-fiction film, “Blackhole." We had conceptualized robots, flying vehicles and other things that I knew we could not build, so I decided to shoot entirely on green screen. We knew that we were up to the task. A trailer should be ready by the end of 2009, which I will post at reels.creativecow.net.

Adonijah: Remember the magic you did on that video…you know, duplicating those crowds…man…they love that video in Port Harcourt…maybe we can do that for the children too… you know. Niyi: (still thinking) @#$% >?*&& //$%# Adonijah: You are not saying anything. He knew I wasn’t going to replace the green screen with a plain background! Worse still, we had just one week to shoot and edit the entire video! IMAGINING THE WORLD All through that night, I listened to the song, “Welcome to My World.” The song is an invitation to an ideal world, with no more pain and suffering, where everyone loves and shares. The artist had remixed the original song with the orphans singing the chorus and some parts of the verse. Their orphanage was in a terrible state and worse still, it was marked for demolition. As I thought about the video, I also thought of what it would be like to be an orphan. (I actually spoke with some of them.) I thought of how they feel when

Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue

they see other kids on TV hanging out with their parents. I thought to myself, these kids would always be dreaming of a world with so much food, a field to play in, and lots of fun things around. A major fan of fantasy movies and everything Disney, I loved the idea of creating a heaven-like dream world. So I began making a list. • •

•

A magical vehicle to drop fruits and candies of all kinds. A tropical island situated in the clouds with all kinds of animals, mostly wild: elephants, polar bears, sea lions, puppies and even dinosaurs! The kind of animals I would love to play with. An amusement park for themselves.

I approach all of my work (be it a 30 second spot, a title sequence, or an opening montage) with a desire to tell a story. It’s a rule we all follow at Anthill. The most challenging parts of the process for me are the opening and the ending. I quickly called up a creative meeting with my team — just five of us! We came up with all kinds of ways to start the video, from the classic storybook openings, to camera flights from outer space!

Eventually, we decided to convey the feel of a child in a room with the windows half closed, and lots of rain falling outside showing a bit of the neighborhood. A habit I still have, I thought it would be nice if the child scribbled something on the frosted glass inside (“There are over 8 million orphans in Nigeria”), and drawings of a home, a pair of parents with a kid, and a face filled with tears. My Art Director/Matte painter (Bode Adewole) and Lead CG artist (Bisi Adetayo) came up with the idea of a train in the clouds. I also decided to end the video with a thought-provoking question.

See the music video, “Welcome to My World,” at: reels.creativecow.net/film/welcome-to-my-world

CAPTURING THE WORLD Usually, once I figure out the beginning and the end, the in-betweens come very easily. Because we had a very short delivery period, we started creating the CG elements immediately. I already had some footage of the orphanage shot on a Sony FX1 camera. The producer also had a Panasonic HVX200 camera, so that became the logical choice for shooting the chroma bit. We shot in DV because that’s what our editing facility could afford. The producer made a uniform for the orphans and it was mostly green, so I had only one choice — a blue screen, not very good for DV footages. Since I knew I was going to place them in a bright world with clouds, I figured I needed a lot of lighting. Unfortunately, the guy who was given the job to rent lights didn’t deliver. We had to manage with only some kinos, two redheads and one 2K. (Actually, we had just half the intensity, because the hall we rented had a small generator.) I had to use the two redheads with some bounced lighting to light the chroma material, and used a bounced light from the 2K and the kinos to light the artists and orphans. I have become famous around here for being the guy who can “handle a chroma job lit with a candle! And shoot green on green!”—and it usually gets me in trouble. There was a time I was given bluescreen footage of people wearing blue costumes because the producers didn’t know what a chroma cloth was. I ended up rotoscoping everything! It’s always a good idea for the director to also be the editor, especially on small projects. It makes you shoot exactly what you need. In my case, it reduced my creative options, but it got the job done — and with The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

Shared Video Storage for Four No Server. No Switch. No Sweat. Your brain is buzzing. You’re working out digital cinema workflows, creative edits, effects, and transitions. You’re dealing with filters and compositing, editing and conforming audio, encoding and rendering. You’re collaborating with your team to deliver on deadline. You don’t want to sweat the asset storage. Sonnet understands. We do one thing best. We deliver more digital video streams to the post team than anyone else in our class. Open a

chroma work, I know that there will always be options later. Eventually, we got about two and half hours of bluescreen footage, and I knew exactly what to expect in post. CREATING THE WORLD Compositing is my favorite part of the entire visual effects process. It is like painting on a canvas. To create the rain and drizzle behind the window in the opening scene, I used the Tinderbox rain and Tinderbox condensation plug-ins. (Tinderbox makes very fantastic tools.) The scribble on the glass was created in Photoshop. We completed a train through the clouds in Autodesk 3D Studio Max, rendered out as RPF files. These allow you to bring in camera data to After Effects to complete the animation and compositing. Our matte painter did a fantastic job of creating several layers of clouds in Photoshop, which helped in creating a feel of depth to the scene. He also created the Tropical Island and amusement park. For the animals, our Lead CG artist had a tough time. He has an obsession for making things look as real as possible, and I have a knack for getting on everyone’s nerves when a job has a short delivery time. We got references on the internet for the train and

Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue

Sonnet Fusion Fibre package and get up to 32TB of protected storage, and all the hardware and software needed for a four-workstation crew to refine the raw into pure. A few things you won’t find in our box— no server, no Fibre switch, and no MIS guy. Connect a cable to each workstation, install and configure the software and you’re ready. It’s that simple. Visit www.sonnettech.com to learn more.

the elephant. He created lots of detail on both, and we were losing time. By the time we got to the polar bear, electric power struck again, and we couldn’t use our 10-quad core render farm to handle the fur. As a creative director, I had to start coming up with options. We forgot the idea of the bear and the puppies (our artist has refused to forgive me on that one!), and we fine-tuned the elephant even more. We also created a walrus and dolphins. The dolphins in the clouds were inspired by a British Airways commercial I once saw. To animate the elephant, we referenced Edward Muybridge’s photos of animals in motion. The animation was fantastic. Once the CG elements were ready, it was up to me to put it all together. Most books and tutorials will tell you that the most important part of doing chroma work is lighting the chroma material appropriately. In fact, I got tired reading and watching keying tutorials because their reference footages were too perfect to be true. You end up doing the steps in the tutorials with your own footage and achieving far different results. The reality for many small studios is that you might be handling work with low lighting conditions and rough screens. In Nigeria, we don’t even have studios dedicated to greenscreen work. You’ll have to go to the market, buy the cloth and set it up yourself. 19

www.aja.com

This is why you must not limit yourself to a single set of rules when it comes to handling chroma work. For this project, I used the linear color key filter and Keylight in After Effects CS3. Keylight is a very great plug-in, but the big mistake you’ll make is to just drop the filter on the key color, tweak the screen gain, and render. When it comes to DV footage, you have to use Keylight with a lot of caution. It was designed to preserve shadows and highlight detail on the screen — if

BLUE SCREENS, BLACK SKIN, AND DV Much of the noise information that a CCD chip gathers is stored in the blue channel of an image. You can toggle your channel display in After Effects to view this for yourself. This makes green the preferred choice for keying, especially for DV footage— although you can cleverly handle this with great filters like Keylight and DVMattepro. We have a popular saying here that the video camera was not made for the black man! This is because it is very difficult to get noiseless footage shooting dark-skinned subjects without overexposing the shots. That’s why most of our movies look flat — the filmmakers throw lights all over the place so that their subjects can come out clearly. I really wish these camera manufacturers would put that in consideration! Knowing how difficult it is to get noiseless images from dark-skinned subjects makes it even more important to shoot DV chroma work on green, to reduce the amount of noise you have to deal with. As I mention in the article, Keylight is great in preserving shadows — but a dark dude is already a shadow! This means that when you try to clean up the screen and remove the shadow preserved by Keylight, it will add noise to a darkskinned subject. I recommend a way out of this problem in the article.

One workflow. From Lens to Post.

you don’t tweak the settings inside Keylight, your subject will have a lot of noise that wasn’t in your original footage. One of the parameters to be careful with is the “Replace Method.” For DV, it is better turned to “Source.” This will ensure that only the background is removed. You will have the screen colour around your footage, but the footage will look as good as it was with the chroma screen. All the lighting and highlights on the foreground subject will be preserved without any extra noise. It is better to have it this way, and then go on to remove the spill and choke the matte. You might also need to do some colour balancing to completely remove the spill. The linear color key is a simple yet fantastic tool in After Effects. Think of it like the magic wand tool in Photoshop. If used carefully, you’ll only be removing your screen color. The only limitation is that it works best on a smooth and well-lit screen. After doing all the color correction work and matching the keyed subjects with the backgrounds, I rendered out as TGA sequences. This is mainly because the electric power here is not stable. If the render of a sequence of frames is interrupted, it is easy to recommence from where you were stopped, without having to re-render the entire thing from the beginning all over again. SAVING A WORLD The client loved the work. He immediately started showing it to some government officials, and eventually the Governor himself. Because the video was very unique and something never seen before in the country, it got a lot of press attention. They loved its originality and creativity. This eventually forced the government to take action. Now, the orphanage has been restored and more: they got so much attention that it has translated into lots of supplies — particularly from those who felt guilty after reading the end message: “When last did you visit an orphanage?”

n Please check out the production and compositing tips offered by the Anthill Team, that you will find on the following spread, on page 22.

Ki Ki Pro is an all new way of connecting production and post. Finally, shoot on the same codec as you edit with, Apple ProRes 422, built natively into Ki Pro’s stand-alone, portable hardware. With its extensive analog and digital connectivity, virtually any video and audio source can be fed into Ki Pro. It also includes AJA’s powerful 10-bit realtime up/down/cross-conversion, enabling instantaneous recording of SD or HD from any camera format. Record pristine ProRes media to a removable Storage Module with built-in FireWire 800, or to 34mm ExpressCard Flash — both instantly mount on your OSX desktop for immediate editing and file access. Ki Pro is tough and rugged, yet small and portable, designed for real production environments. Powered through an industry standard 4-pin XLR, you have flexible AC and battery options. Use Ki Pro on a table, or mate it between your camera and tripod via a bulletproof optional aluminum cage, complete with sliding baseplate and accomodation for 15mm rods. Visit our website to discover the full details of how Ki Pro will change your world.

It was truly an honor to work with the Anthill team to tell this story. It is always fun to create articles about major films and "big" stories, but this one was about saving lives and protecting children in a desperate situation. Thanks guys for entrusting us with your story. — Tim Wilson & Ron Lindeboom

K i 20

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

P r o.

B e c a u s e

i t

m a t t e r s .

Record natively to Apple’s ProRes 422 codec for full raster 10-bit 4:2:2 HD and SD. Record to a removable Storage Module with built-in FireWire 800 or 34mm ExpressCard Flash. Built-in WiFi and Ethernet for complete control via a web-browser, or your iPhone. Connect any digital camera via SDI or HDMI, or any analog camera. Convert in realtime from SD to HD, or 720 to/from 1080. Ki Pro is your hub for all types of sources, regardless of format or connectivity.

THE INVERSE SQUARE LAW The inverse square law governs the relationship between the intensities of outward radiation sources (light or sound) to the positions of the objects they act upon. For those who skipped high school math, the surface area of a sphere is 4 pi times the radius squared (4πr²). Because the radiation spreads outward, its power is distributed over larger and larger spherical surfaces as the distance from the source increases. Hence, the intensity reduces as the radiation covers a larger area. Mathematically, this is called an inverse proportion. Because 4 and pi are constant, we can conveniently say the intensity is inversely proportional to radius The Anthill crew at the opening of the film, “Nnenda." From left to right: squared. Rume Omojituko, Charles Paulinus , Niyi Akinmolayan, Bisi Adetayo, Bode Okay, enough with the headache! Adewole. When it is applied to light, the inverse square law means that an object that is twice the distance from a point source of light will receive a quarter of the illumination. What it means to us filmmakers is that, if you move your subject from three meters away to six meters away, you will need four times the amount of light for the same exposure. While that might require too much brain work on a set, it is very useful when working with 3D applications. It helps add realism to your scene. I take this seriously because most time, I get to put my foreground subjects in believable 3D environments. Most 3D programs will give you a linear representation of light if you just drop the light in the scene. Find the right parameters to tweak to give you some inverse square falloff, and you’ll appreciate the results.

MORE TIPS FOR COMPOSITORS & SMALL STUDIOS • •

Never color correct without an external video monitor. In After Effects, go to Edit-Preferences-Video Preview to use that feature.

•

Try using a tool to achieve something it wasn’t made for. You’ll be surprised by how much discovery you will make.

•

Save! save!! and save!!! And always render movies as sequential TGA files or TIFF files. This is especially true if you live in a third-world country like I do.

•

Never approach keying with a single set of rules. Every shot will pose a different challenge.

save up some RAM. So close one program, and open the other. •

Don’t get too excited with plug-ins. In color correction for instance, using the After Effects collection of curves, levels and HSL adjustments might be all you need to get the job done.

•

In a small studio, every member of the team should learn everything: 3D software, Photoshop, a compositing tool and a video editing tool. As your studio becomes larger, each of you can start specializing.

•

Try exporting your 3D scenes as RPF files, or any other format that allows you handle depth, object IDs and Camera data separately. If you have a small computer, stop opening all the Adobe application at once. Yeah, I know you watch it in many tutorials, but those guys use very powerful systems to work. The reality is quite different. You mostly want to

•

Learn more about what goes on inside your software. Even if you only work in compositing software, learn about how cameras, lenses and lights work. You have to know the science as much as the art. This has really made me stand out in the five years of experience I have had. Before you think of starting your business in this field, get to work in a professional studio — even if you have to do it for free. This experience has taught me to handle tough deadlines and to listen to other people’s opinions.

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

Avid Media Composer 4

The World’s Most Advanced Film and Video Editing System—For Your Mac There are many reasons why the best and most successful editors around the world trust Media Composer® systems to help them create the most watched, most loved media…

“I haven’t heard of anyone cutting a $200 million dollar movie that isn’t using a Media Composer system. At that level, where there’s so much at stake, it has to be bulletproof.” – Roger Barton, editor, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

“In comedy, you are always looking for jokes to work, for funny reactions. It’s a lineby-line thing. One take is not going to do it. With ScriptSync, we could see all the versions we had… I can’t think of any scene in the movie that doesn’t have Robin’s [Williams] best take… ScriptSync was a lifesaver.” – Jason Stewart, editor, World’s Greatest Dad

“Avid systems are really affordable now for all kinds of films, and they are just as portable as Final Cut Pro. You can use [Media Composer] software on a big-budget movie or on a really small-budget film at a reasonable price.”

$295 education pricing + amazing student upgrade offer *

– Elliot Graham, editor, Milk

With prices starting at just $2,295 ($295 for education), Media Composer has never offered so much for so little.* Come discover the new Media Composer 4 and download your free trial at www.avid.com/mc4 * For special student and educator pricing, visit www.avid.com/creativecow

© 2009 Avid Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Promotions and discounts are subject to availability and change without notice. Product features, specifications, system requirements and availability are subject to change with out notice. All prices are USMSRP for the U.S. and Canada only and are subject to change without notice. Contact your local Avid office or reseller for prices outside the U.S. and Canada. Avid, the Avid logo, Media Composer and ScriptSync are trademarks or registered trademarks of Avid Technology, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. Final Cut Pro, Mac and the Apple logo are trademarks or Apple, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

There’ s more than one way to get where y ou want to go...

a Non-linear career An FX veteran’s unexpected, non-linear career path, from puppetry to painting, to ILM and beyond, offers insights into the art and business of film creativity — and a killer reel. We came across Tony last year, when he first began to use Final Cut Pro to assemble VFX shots in some of his latest productions. He started looking for advice in the COW forums, and joined Creative COW’s LinkedIn.com group. We later got an idea of the incredible range of his work when he posted his reel at reels.creativecow. net. He was happy to add some details about it when asked in the comments section of his page, but when we asked him to go even deeper for this article, he was a little more reluctant. Both on his reel page and in our conversation, he was quick to point out his role within teams, and told us that he had no interest in writing anything that sounded like a self-promotion piece. As he told us how he found these jobs and developed his career, we were also struck by the turns his career took as he followed the film industry into the

overwhelming conversion to digital visual storytelling. Tony shares his eyewitness account through the lens of his work, and exemplifies how artists can prepare themselves for the unexpected turns that the industry, and life, might take. — Creative COW

he summer before I started college, I began working at a local film company in Atlanta called “Oglesby and Hardin.” I painted animation cels and conformed negative — an amazing opportunity to get right out of high school. My next job was for “John Hardman Productions,” a puppet theater company doing shows at all of the Six Flags theme parks. This was a fulfillment of a dream of mine from when I was very young, and saw the Krofft

Tony Hudson

Petaluma, California USA In addition to the projects mentioned here, Tony built models and supervised effects on “Willow,” “The Golden Child,” “Backdraft,” “Die Hard 2,” and “Back to the Delorean,” which is currently in post production. He has posted in COW forums including Final Cut Pro, Particle Illusion, After Effects and the Sony CineAlta F900 & PDW Series camera forum. You can see his reel at: reels.creativecow.net/tony-hudson-2009-demo-reel

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

taught for CG, learning the craft initially on an Amiga Marionettes in the very same theater. The show was 5000 with Lightwave. I used my new talents working gigantic, with over 300 puppets in a 20-minute show, for a while for Ron Thornton at Foundation imaging performed eight times per day. These puppets were until I created enough work to have a Demo Reel, at big and heavy — the average marionette was 3 feet which point I was hired again by ILM to work on “Dragtall and was strung to a height of 12 feet. I was in much onheart” as a modeler. I eventually rose through the better physical shape in those days! ranks to become a Model Supervisor, beginning with I did that for a year, then worked at the Center “Mars Attacks.” for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, with the touring companies of “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Pinnochio.” The routine was to drive 100 miles or so to some town, set up the stage, do two or Innerspace ©1997, Amblin Entertainment, Warner Bros. Pictures three shows, pack up and drive another 100 miles or so — all for the amazingly high pay of $120 per week! When I was 19, I told my parents that I was moving to California, to go to art school in San Francisco — but my secret plan all along was to work for George Lucas at Industrial Light and Magic. I relocated to Marin County California, hoping that proximity, if nothing else, would get me my dream job at ILM. Amazingly, this plan worked, but not from any great talent on my part. I was living in a house that rented rooms, and a guy Above, from “Innerspace.” These are actually scallions stuck named Escott Norton moved in for the suminto clay, of which I then made a latex casting of. Below, from mer. It turned out that he had come up from “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home:” four foot long, free-swimLos Angeles to work at ILM on the second ming radio-controlled whales. I worked on creating these for Ewoks movie (“The Battle for Endor”), and about nine months, and served as their puppeteer during the just happened to be working in the Crea2 week shoot. The title graphic for this article features a conture Shop — the very place I hoped to land. cept painting, “Crystal Cave,” created for an un-produced When he left to go back to L.A., he recomvirtual world. mended me as his replacement. Getting the job was in retrospect very ©1986 Star Trek PARAMOUNT PICTURES CORPORATION. STAR TREK and related marks and logos easy. I just had to wait around Marin Counare trademarks of CBS Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved. ty for eight months until it fell into my lap. Keeping it was a different matter. Showing adaptability and initiative, I quickly outgrew going on beer runs, and was transferred into the Mold Room to work with Sean Casey making molds and castings for “Howard the Duck.” I spent the next 17 years working my way through various roles at ILM: puppeteering on “Young Sherlock Holmes” and “Witches of Eastwick;” building what I called “maximatures” (the inverse of minI really miss those days of doing real FX with my iatures) for the movie “Innerspace;” and being one of hands, though. “Innerspace” was the most fun of them the principals for creating and operating the four foot all, making giant fields of fat cells out of lemon jello, long remote-controlled free-swimming whales for and chopping up scallions to serve as lung alveoli. I also “Star Trek: The Voyage Home.” Later, I was a modeler think that “behind the scenes” photographs of people for the new Enterprise in the “Star Trek: The Next Genmaking real-world miniatures is much more exciting eration” TV series. than photos of people looking at CG on a monitor! During the recession of 1990-92, there was very little film production happening, so I spent a few years THE REEL at Walt Disney Imagineering, where I worked on ride I have always used my demo reels as an entertainment development for Disneyland and Disneyland Paris. piece in itself, as opposed to just a collection of clips After working in “traditional” visual effects for strung together with electronic music. Perhaps it is my nine years, I migrated with most of the rest of the inlatent insecurity that my work would not stand on its dustry over to working in Computer Graphics. I am self

Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue

own, but I want my reel to be as interesting at least as a music video. I have always enjoyed editing, especially to music. Normally, if I am cutting something, I will put a music track to it, even if the final product will not have music, as I like to work within a rhythm. I also like to have something new and fresh in my reel, so I create a little intro sequence. With this reel, I really wanted to get some of my non-CG work from the 1980s into it, so I structured the intro around them floating in a time/space void. Plus, it was a great opportunity to try out the latest version of Trapcode Particular. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: AI When pre-production began on AI in 2000, I was one of the first at ILM to begin work on it, and was in charge of creation and animation setup of all Character and Hard Surface elements. I first was working with Dennis Muren on using the then-new technique of image-based modeling. We wanted to see if we could save some time and effort by photographing the New York miniatures used for “Baby’s Day Out” and creating CG models from them. That did not work out the way we hoped, but it was an interesting experience. I then spent a great deal of time working out the design of the “Specialist” Robots featured at the end of the film. The UK-based artist Chris “Fangorn” Baker had developed the Specialist as pen and ink concepts when he was working with director Stanley Kubrick in the years before Kubrick passed away, but there was a lot of work to be done to finish the design. I was tasked with figuring out how to represent the volumetric interior of the Robot, as if you could see through the skin to the circuits and wires inside. After that, I supervised all of the modeling for the film, including Rouge City, New York underwater and in ice, “Teddy,” “Dr. Know,” and the Blue Fairy. I also

designed what was called the “Cube Ship,” the little vehicle the Specialists travel in. It had to disassemble itself in an interesting way, but make sense as a whole as well. I had fun working on that film. MEN IN BLACK I designed, match-moved, modeled and animated the Jeebs transformation effect. This is my favorite shot ever, and the shot I have gotten the most attention for. (Perhaps there is a connection there.) I had just finished my work on “Mars Attacks” in the fall of 1996 when I was asked to create this effect. I had the pleasure of coming up with the technique and animating it all myself, using Softimage and ILM’s Caricature software. Basically, it was a series of blend shapes atop an animated rig, with the final blend sculpted to match the first frame of Tony Shalhoub’s action. It was originally to be a very short transition from CG to Tony Shalhoub, but the director, Barry Sonnenfeld, enjoyed it so much that he kept lengthening the shot. Five years later, I was asked by Sonnenfeld to make a special guest appearance (I was working on “Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets” at the time) and re-create Jeebs for the second film.

tic job on the modelling. I served as Digital Character Supervisor, and was in charge of creation and animation setup of all Character and Hard Surface elements for Dobby the house elf, and the Quidditch match. For the Quidditch sequence, I had a brainstorm that saved us much cloth simulation time. I created a cloth sim of a cape blowing in a breeze, made the sequence into a loop, and then baked the sim into blend shapes. Cary Phillips wrote this incredibly complicated expression that would loop the shapes and animate the strength of the wind. We then created a rig that would allow us to swing the cape around behind the Quidditch player, and we were able to do all of the wide shots without any subsequent sim work.

MAGNOLIA As Digital Character Supervisor, I was in charge of the creation of frogs. “Magnolia” was the best movie I ever worked on. At the time I did not know that this would be the case, as I was not familiar with director Paul Thomas Anderson or Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, ©2002 Warner Bros. Entertainment “Boogie Nights,” and I could not figure out Inc. why we were dropping frogs from the sky. cloth to any extent. We did not have a cloth sim sysThis was actually quite common. We often worked tem at the time, so I spent most of the second half of on specific shots in films, and did not know WHY we the show hand-animating cloth using blend shapes in were doing the work. Caricature. MY PEOPLES HARRY POTTER AND THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS I left ILM in 2002 to go to Florida and help convert DisThis was my last film for ILM. I was very aware at the ney Animation/Florida to CG production. They were time of the coming CG challenge from Weta Digital finishing “Brother Bear” while I was there, and it was with Gollum, so we worked very hard to make Dobby wonderful to see all of the hand-animated work in proas realistic as possible. He was the first ILM character to duction. use sub-surface scattering. Frank Gravatt did a fantas“My Peoples” was to be a combination of hand-

MARS ATTACKS I supervised all Character and Hard Surface modeling; designed, built and animated the “Martian Thing-Maker;” and animated the head-popping shot This was my first big CG show. I created the Martian model based on sculptures created by, I believe, the Chiodo brothers, back when it was to be a stop-motion film. This was also the first film ILM did that featured 26

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue

drawn 2D animation for the “hu©Ray Kurzweil & Terasem Motion Infocuture Presentations man” characters, and CG for the magical come-to-life folk art characters. As Digital Character Supervisor, I was in charge of creation and animation setup of all Character and Hard Surface elements for this uncompleted Disney Animated feature. I also provided concept design for characters. I had a very small but talented crew, and together with Tony Plett doing backend supervision, we put together a pipeline to handle the CG producRamona, “The Singularity is Near.” tion. Unfortunately, Disney under Michael Eisner was in turmoil at the time. After a few starts and stops on “My From “My Peoples.” Peoples,” they closed the Florida studio, and I went to Burbank to work on “Rapunzel Unbraided” with Glen Keane. Working with Glen Keane I consider to be the renaissance of my career. Glen was so very good at bringing out the best in people and encouraging artistic perfection and, more importantly, artistic confidence. Glen taught me how to trust my artistic instinct. I was no longer in a strictly technical role, but was a part of the Story Department. I worked alongside the story artists, creating 3D animatics for sequences that were difficult to visualize as traditional 2D story reels. For those who may not be familiar with animation production, the first phase of creating an animated feature is the “Story Reel,” which consists of 2D storyboards edited together with temporary dialog tracks. The Story Reel serves as the “bones” of the film during production. I then used drawings on cards in a 3D space with animated camera to describe complex action sequences. It was heartbreaking when “Rapunzel Unbraided” was shut down in the fall of 2005 and I had to go back to working in the real world, but I will always remember ©2003 by Disney Feature Animation that time with fondness, and remember the lessons Glen taught me. (Note: Disney’s current “Rapunzel” is a completely different project.) over 400 greenscreen, set extension and matte painting shots in 8 months. The elephant animation is by THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR, Miguel Fuertes. A TRUE STORY ABOUT THE FUTURE When I say “Supervised,” I actually mean that I did Based on Ray Kurzweil’s New York Times bestselling most of the work myself. There was no budget to hire book, this is a documentary scheduled for release in anyone to help me, so I just worked as quickly and as late 2009. It is a documentary with a storyline woven efficiently as possible. There was so much to do that, through it, similar to “What the BLEEP Do We Know?” early on, I gave up attempting to do “film-quality” efI was the on-set Visual Effects Supervisor, the Effects. Instead, I tried to do something a bit more stylfects Art Director, and Supervised the completion of ized. 28

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

each subsequent shot. There was a great deal of rotoscoping necessary due to the unfortunate expedient of covering the lovely green floor with sand for 5 sequences. I used Mocha for my roto work, and it works fantastically. I separate the roto as sort of an articulated paper doll, with one spline for upper arm, one for lower, etc., then use the planar tracker to follow the body motion, and finally, clean up the outline. In addition to Ramona, there was also Ramona’s digital helper, Samantha, who is represented as a sort of pixie type. For close up there was an actress, but the wide shots used a digital model I created. There were probably a hundred of those shots.

“If Looks Could Kill”

I worked on the storyline portion, which concerns a digital person named Ramona, portrayed by Pauley Perrette, as over time she develops from something similar to a Second Life avatar to a full-fledged, autonomous human. My work was mostly in the realm of greenscreen plates with digital sets, but I also developed the look transforming Pauley into Ramona’s simple avatar. There were roughly 15 sequences, of which the majority was effects shots. One of the biggest issues on the film was the FX editorial work. The production used Final Cut Pro, but had no budget for FX editorial, so I had to do all of that myself too. Unfortunately, Final Cut does not lend itself to manufacturing shots for effects production with handles. The “Media Managed Export” would not trim shots to length if the source file was used more than once on the timeline — it would span the shots instead. Most of what I was doing would involve every shot in a sequence as an effects shot, so I had to break the sequence down and export to separate shot directories, all by hand. I would try to structure my Shake scripts so that shots that were “same as” could be reused for

Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue

IF LOOKS COULD KILL I did this music video for the San Francisco group Music for Animals, directed by Jordan Livingston, who was the Digital Imaging Technician and Post Production Supervisor on “Singularity.” I handled on-set plate supervision, Art Direction and Visual Effects. Jordan shot this video at the same time as one for darkwave group, Lilofee, using the RED. We had a great number of greenscreen shots that needed to hook up, and due to the issues I had had with FX editorial on “Singularity,” I decided to use After Effects and a bunch of scripts that would allow me to bring the FCP timeline directly into After Effects (like Automatic Duck, but free). There, I could use pre-comps to work on the video as a whole. THE PRANKSTER This was great fun, a locally produced and directed feature by Tony Vidal, a coming of age high school

APPLE MOTION TRAINING DVD JOINS THE CREATIVE COW MASTER SERIES

LOOKING TO MASTER APPLE MOTION? • OVER 4 HOURS OF IN-DEPTH TUTORIALS • INCLUDES THE PROJECT FILES & FREE HD FOOTAGE • WWW.CREATIVECOWTRAINING.NET

comedy. I was Visual Effects Supervisor for on-set plate photography and Supervised the creation of 70+ shots including matte paintings, particle animation, screen replacements, rig removals and set extensions/ enhancements using Maya/Mental Ray; Shake, Particle Illusion, Mocha, Monet, SynthEyes and After Effects. A NON-LINEAR CAREER This illustrates some of the important principles that I have returned to throughout my career. One is continuing to adapt my creative toolset. Don’t think you ever know enough about computer graphics. You have to be open to constantly learning new software to keep on top of the changing effects environment. In addition to the ones I just mentioned, I have used many others, including PFTrack, and inhouse packages designed by ILM. Most recently, I have been using Nuke, from The Foundry. If you were to ask how Nuke fits into my bag of tricks, I would say that Nuke IS my bag of tricks now. I love how integrated the 3D component is, and how you can seamlessly blend the 2D and 3D worlds, up and downstream of the scanline render. Another guiding principle I have followed is organization. In a single year, I completed over 600 effects shots: 420 for “Singularity,” 110 for “If Looks Could Kill,” and 75 for “The Prankster.” For how I managed to do that much work, there is no easy answer, other than to say that I am pretty organized, and have experience putting together production pipelines — and that I worked myself half to death. Even though I was doing all the work for “Singularity” myself (except for the animation by Miguel Fuertes for the Elephant and the Mermaid), I used my first two weeks to set up working methodologies and directory structures to handle all the data. Finally, I have never settled for filling only a single role. Before I used CG software, I was a painter and puppeteer, two skills that remain instrumental for me.

I hired, trained and supervised teams of artists to work on the creation of digital characters, sets, props and vehicles. I painted storyboards and created animatics, designed layouts, built and lit sets, created camera moves and originated overall cinematic styles. I worked closely with directors, producers and production managers to develop schedules and budgets for the delivery of digital assets, while maintaining integrity of creative vision. Note that none of these roles has very much to do directly with CG software. They are related to people skills, communication, understanding creative processes, organizing and keeping schedules, and being aware of how all of these affect the budgets of the people paying for the work. It is essential to develop these alongside your artistic skills if you are to survive in a rapidly evolving creative landscape. In the meantime, I am working on titles for a documentary on the life of poet Gary Snyder produced by Will Hearst, and teaching a class in matchmoving at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. I am also working on another music video. This one will be much more intense than the last, with a great deal of fire and smoke dynamics necessary to create the look of a video taking place during a nuclear holocaust. The video, as directed and edited by Jordan Livingston, already looks great, shot in 2:1 “Storaro Vision” on the RED, and looking like a feature. It will be amazing once we have completed the effects. I am also working on taking my own advice, as I continue to develop my skills, and find new ways and places to apply them. Working on gigantic productions at large studios in the past was fun, but these days, I am much more interested in working on smaller productions, and applying my skills to allow producers to give their movies the look and feel of an expensive Hollywood production, without the expensive Hollywood price. n

Hands down, the fastest, most affordable RAID solutions you can buy. www.jmr.com

Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue

From LiveType to the Apps Store C

reative COW’s group at LinkedIn.com features 5000 working pros that hail from every aspect of media production. They have joined to expand their networking among the world’s largest community of media creation professionals, by identifying themselves to both peers and prospective employers as being a part of this community. (For details, head to LinkedIn.com and search the groups for the word “Cow.” You won’t miss us.) The diverse professions within our field that are represented in the Cow’s LinkedIn group include broadcast engineering, VFX, cinematography, lighting, directing, editing, matchmoving, colorgrading, stereoscopy, motion graphics, web and interactivity, animation, game design, senior management, and much more — including software development.

Dave Howell was the engineer who wrote India Pro Titler for Prismo Graphics, an application that redefined the cutting edge of advanced title animation. When Apple bought the company in 2002, they relaunched the product as LiveType, and Dave became LiveType’s managing engineer. LiveType was bundled into Apple Final Cut Studio starting in April, 2003. This is when Dave started answering questions in the COW’s Apple LiveType forum. When he joined our LinkedIn group in April, 2008, he told us, “Now, I’m writing iPhone software for creative professionals at my new company, Avatron Software, Inc.” When we asked exactly what he was working on, he replied, “I don’t know yet, exactly. My last day at Apple was Friday. Now it’s Monday, and I’m looking for engineers. “If you have problems you wish you could solve

Dave Howell

Portland, Oregon USA Dave really has been at this a while. He wrote the Master Tracks Pro 4 Macintosh MIDI sequencer in the late 80s, which won Electronic Musician’s “Most Innovative Software Product” award, and which he later ported to the Apple IIgs. He was also writing video components and I/O before QuickTime existed, and wrote a crossplatform graphics library for use in the pioneering Kai’s PowerTools. Dave holds US Patent #7199805: “Method and apparatus for titling.” 32

The Non-linear Living Issue — Creative COW Magazine

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

Photo of iPhone in charger courtesy of Adrian Ilie, licensed under Wikimedia Commons.

Useful. Fantastic. Essential.

on a handheld device like an iPhone or an iPod Touch (or whatever comes next), please let me know!” We didn’t have anything specific in mind yet either, but we knew that we’d stay in touch to see how Dave’s story with Avatron Sofware unfolded. Here’s the story he told us 18 months into his journey.

time title artists. After managing the FxPlug SDK for Apple, I was well prepared to write an FxPlug-based titler. My FxTitler plug-in was going to work in Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express, and Motion. Even Apple doesn’t have a titler that is usable in all of those apps. I even registered the fxplug.com and fxtitle.com domains. (Know anybody who might want to buy those?) After FxTitler, I had other ideas about writing an FxPlug-based online media store for clip art, stock footage, and LiveFonts. And then, the iPhone SDK was announced. I realized that I had to follow this unique technological inflection point and write iPhone apps instead of plugins. I decided to keep the name. There are now seven of us here, with over a hundred years of collective Mac programming experience, including eighteen years in Apple’s Applications Division.

BEGINNINGS For eight years, from 1994 to 2002, I ran a small Mac software contracting company called Pablo Media. Pablo Media wrote all kinds of Mac software, including game ports, various kinds of plug-ins, QuickTime components, and full applications. Our most ambitious project was writing India Special Effects Titler for Prismo Graphics from 2001 to 2002. Then in 2002, Apple purchased India, including both the application and content from Prismo GraphSERIOUS APPS ics, and some libraries from Pablo Media. Back when the team started last summer, we spent the After having only worked at startups and other first few days brainstorming about ideas for products. small software companies, my tenure at Apple gave We came up with around sixty different ideas, ranging me my first taste of organizational process and hierarfrom voice-activated adventure games to hardware chy. To my surprise, I rather liked it. peripherals. Some of them, it turned out, were not Sure, there were moments when the culture of possible. Some didn’t make business sense. But a few secrecy drove me crazy. I contributed to the Aperture were quite viable. team, which had a feature for exporting a web page, As an aside, the idea I was most proud of, but while the folks down the hall from me were working which I’m glad we didn’t pursue because it quickly on iWeb, which lets you design a web page. Had we became obsolete, was this: we wanted to hook up an been allowed to talk to each other about our projects, iPhone to serial devices like a barcode scanner, a credit we could have collaborated, shared code, and enabled card reader, and MIDI gear — but the iPhone doesn’t integrated workflows. Instead, we were all surprised to have a serial port that’s accessible through the iPhone see our respective product announcements. SDK. While at Apple, I decided I wanted to start a softWe figured out that you could take a modem chip ware company of my own, and apply to it some of the — which has analog audio in and out ports at one end, management principles I had learned. To help prepare and serial digital ports at the other — and plug it in for that, I went back to school on weekends. In 2008, BACKWARD. Now you’d be connected to the iPhone’s I earned an MBA from Cornell University’s Johnson audio out and microphone in, and have a serial port at Graduate School of Management. Soon after that, I the other end. We calculated that you could support a left Apple, and incorporated Avatron Software. 4800, maybe 9600, bps data rate. Not fast enough for When naming my company, I wanted something MIDI, but adequate for a lot of other hardware applicathat started with an A, like Apple, Adobe, Autodesk, tions. and Avid. And of course AV is a good start for an audio and video plug-in brand. Below left, the icon for Avatron Software’s Air Sharing Pro. The “atron” suffix just sort of invokes an Below right, Avatron Software’s Whiteboarder. optimistic retro-vision of the future, with shining labor-saving robots and hovercrafts with fifties-car fins. My first thought was to build a titler. Apple hadn’t done much with LiveType, or for that matter with titling in general. The Final Cut Studio package contained a mess of different incompatible titlers, including LiveType, Motion’s titler, the built-in Final Cut Pro titler, and Boris Title 3D, not to mention those in Shake and DVD Studio Pro. But none of them really targeted the niche of professional, full-

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

Real-Time HD and 2K DPX ...on your Desktop.

Solutions starting at $2,199

G SPEED eS PRO The G-SPEED eS Pro by G-Tech brings blazing performance to your desktop. Enough speed and agility to easily support dual-stream uncompressed 10-bit 1080/60i and 2K DPX playback in RAID 5 protected mode. All this with two small, whisper quiet desktop enclosures that sustain over 700MB/sec! The G-SPEED eS Pro features a powerful PCIe x8 RAID controller, locking mini-SAS connectivity and expansion up to 16TB. Real-time HD and film production has never been easier - or more affordable. For more info visit www.g-technology.com/creativecow.

The G-SPEED eS Pro technology is also available in a 12 or 16 bay rack mountable chassis that can be easily daisy-chained to support growing data storage needs.

The G-SPEED eS Pro PCIe x8 RAID controller features an advanced web GUI, RAID 0,1,3,5,6 support and 512MB of onboard RAM.

Performance. Style. Reliability. Learn about special offers for Creative Cow readers at www.g-technology.com/creativecow

G-Technology by Hitachi

We needed something else. The main criteria we considered when choosing a more practical first project were: Does it leverage functionality that Apple has already built in the SDK, but that has not yet been exposed to users? Will it force us to build our own platform of frameworks that can be redeployed in other future products? Is it possible, yet difficult enough that it erects an adequate barrier to entry? Does it match our skill set? Air Sharing was the one app that best met all of those criteria. Air Sharing is a document-viewing app. It hosts a little HTTP server on your iPhone, with WebDAV extensions, which means that you can connect wirelessly to your iPhone from a computer, using Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux, and mount the iPhone as a sort 36

NEW DEVELOPMENTS In addition to Air Sharing and Air Sharing Pro, we now have fifteen apps in the app store, with two more waiting for approval and several others in the pipeline. One new app, Whiteboarder, lets you capture photos of whiteboards in meetings, and then enhances the white levels, removes noise, and lets you locate the corners to remove perspective skewing. Then it lets you organize, print, and email those images. We also formed a new business division called Avatron Publishing. This division works in partnership with content owners to produce apps built on the Air Sharing frameworks. For example, Avatron Publishing has teamed up with Informed Guides to produce five medical and reference apps based on Informed’s very popular line of printed pocket guides. The subjects range from Registered Nurses to EMS to Homeland Security. We plan to release more of these in the future. The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

focal press books l e a r n

•

m a s t e r

•

c r e a t e 9780240812632

Air Sharing ranked as the Top Paid App in Japan

of Wi-Fi hard disk. You can drag files and folders onto the mounted volume as you would onto a USB thumb drive. You can then take your iPhone with you and view your documents offline. The iPhone has a lot of built-in support for viewing documents, which it uses in its Mail and Safari apps. But the built-in functionality is pretty limited. It crashes when it encounters high-resolution images. It doesn’t provide a scrollbar for navigating through long documents. It has buggy support for some formats. So in Air Sharing, we worked around some of the Apple limitations when that was possible, and wrote some of our own viewers when it wasn’t. Because we’re programmers, we also added support for viewing source code with syntax coloring. Air Sharing recognizes keywords and syntactical constructions in different programming languages, and colors them to make it easier to scan them visually. When we started work on Air Sharing, there were no other document-viewer applications on the App Store. By the time we were done, there were already three others. Fortunately, each of those had serious flaws. Still, because they had a head start on us, we introduced Air Sharing with a special promotion. We gave the app away for free for two weeks. In that period, over a million users downloaded Air Sharing. In retrospect, while we lost a lot of potential revenue with this introduction, it has been a very successful way to kick start our brand and get people talking about Avatron Software. Now, there are hundreds of document-viewer apps in the App Store. Air Sharing is leading the pack by a long margin, having been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.

THE REVIEWS COME IN Gizmodo’s Essential iPhone Apps: Fall 2009 “Most of them are crap. Some of them aren’t. Here are the 50 iPhone apps you actually need, all in one place… AirSharing: Our favorite file storage app-shoots files to the iPhone’s flash memory via Wi-Fi for storage, transport, and easy retrieval..” “Most Useful App.” -2008 Best App Ever Awards. “Editor’s Choice.” - PC Magazine. “App of the Week.” -Apple Inc. “It’s so easy to use.” -Chicago Tribune. “A fantastic file storage app.” -iPhone Alley. “Editor’s Pick… Score: 10/10.” -AppCraver

We’ve also partnered with Level X Hoops, which was formed by an ex-Disney Music exec who owns a line of basketball training DVDs, to release eight Go behind the scenes of producing video-based instruction apps for learning moves dazzling visual effects! and team plays. We plan to release dozens more of From pre-production to final delivery, this is your complete guide to visual these within the next year. effects production, providing insight on VFX budgeting and scheduling In the future, our goal is to find more partners (with actual forms for your own use) and common production techniques who own rights to video and print properties that such as motion control, miniatures, and pre-visualization. might be adapted for the iPhone — and I’ll bet a lot of folks in the Creative Cow community have something like that. The video projects that would work best are those that are made up of a set of short clips. Our Ganon Baker series of basketball apps has about 20 clips, each demonstrating some move. w w w . f o c a l p r e s s . c o m I think our best content is in the app “23 Ways to Destroy Your Defender.” Each clip shows you a single move, and shows it in slow motion, with a pronext few years. Our mission is to be the leading develfessional NBA trainer breaking it down into steps. oper of useful apps for the iPhone platform. Any kind of training video like that should work, While there are nearly 100,000 apps in the App whether it’s sports (although we’ve already entered 2M90177_AD_CreativeCow1109_036_1200.indd 10/14/091 9:39:25 PM Store, the competitive landscape for useful apps is still exclusive partnerships for basketball and golf), mufairly sparse. Now, we just hope Apple will just keep sic, magic, dog-training, painting, martial arts, etc. gaining smart-phone market share, and that they will The point is that the Avatron Publishing platdeploy the iPhone OS platform on new devices, like form is perfectly suited for building reference and Apple TV, a combination HD camcorder and digital instructional apps. We are building up our team, camera, a tablet computer or netbook, and embedded as well as our software frameworks and tools, to devices. streamline the repurposing and publishing process. I’m really excited about our Avatron Publishing initiative. n

Order Online Now!

USEFUL APPS I left Apple in April 2008, rented office space in June, hired engineers in July, we shipped Air Sharing that September, and have been running full speed ever since. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind! So far, we’re bootstrap-financed, so our growth and product evolution has been organic. That has been much easier to manage than if it would have been if we had taken venture funding, and suddenly found ourselves in a gleaming new office full of strangers. Moving forward, we have a roadmap that leads us to a broad, yet cohesive product line over the Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue

Over 2 Million People Served. Monthly. Source: Google

WWW.CREATIVECOW.NET 37

From Trek To Tracks:

The Journey To A Nepali Recording Studio There aren’t many straight lines leading to Nepal, and not many once you arrive, either. Here is an inside look at the challenges and triumphs of running an A/V studio in the Himalayas.

hen I realized that I would be making Nepal my permanent base camp, I had no idea what to expect as I began to organize my professional life here. I had originally come as a well-packed trekker, complete with a 3-chip camcorder, laptop, digital camera, and a bag of lenses. Also stuffed inside of wool socks were cables, dongles, and requisite doohickeys. I was still wholly unprepared for what I found inside my new neighbourhood cybercafé. From the outside, it resembled a Wild West telegraph office. In fact, there even was an electrical telegraph machine, although I never saw anyone pounding that key. Instead, there were rows of underpowered ancient rollyour-own desktops, with crowds of Nepalese pounding away on something a little more up-to-date.

In 2001, the fastest any Nepali cybershop ran was 56K modem speed, and that was shared with a dozen or more users. Today, we are on the information freeway with a typical top speed of 256kbps, with a residential cost of $40 per month. Dedicated and faster lines (1 MB) can be had, but run upwards of $400 per month. With the average monthly Nepali salary in Kathmandu just over $100, it is safe to say that not many folks are enjoying streaming media or multimedia chatting. But for the entrepreneur expat, a fast Internet connection is your lifeline, unless one wants to check into a monastery and become a monk — which is exactly what I did, but that’s another story. Also part of that story is meeting my now-wife and musical family, all of whom dreamed of opening a recording studio just as I did. As a writer and filmmaker who had come

Jigme Gaton

Phoenix Studios, Kathmandu, Nepal “I flunked out of film school, if that’s imaginable,” Jiggy told us, “but still wound up leading the now-defunct IBM Creative Laboratory, where I wrote such hits as ‘People and Automation in Action: The Story of IBM’s Robotic 5 ¼ Disk Manufacturing.’ After 20 years of that cheese, I checked out of Cubicleville and into a monastery for three years. After that, there was no going back.” You can find his posts in the COW’s FCP and Apple Motion forums, his tutorials and reviews at library.creativecow.net, and his “Cow BOG” (not BLOG - “because I live in a cow BOG”) at blogs.creativecow.net.

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

to Nepal to find the “story,” this was seemingly a match made by Buddha himself. So we all began to plan our home business: an A/V studio to cater to the budding recorded music scene, the documentary film crowd, and the digital media advertising market, all of which were sprouting like rhododendrons on a terraced hillside. TRAILS AND ATTENUATION: A HIMALAYAN ADVENTURE While Nepal offers some of the world’s most fertile soil for rice, bananas, oranges and apples, the environment is hostile to anything related to technology. For example, once we overcame the slow-speed Internet problem, we were still “404 Not Found” until we overcame the power problem. Nepal faces a severe shortage of hydroelectricity most of the year, despite the fact that Everest CyberTelegraph Café: a great place to share a modem line with 25 glaciers are melting faster than the others, and make your long distance phone calls, as well. last of the Nepali River Dolphins can swim. build our editing and recording bays with wattage and To ensure that the nation has distributed power amperage high in mind, and we have auto-switching across the grid, a system of government load shedding that powers down to just the essential services when has pulled the plug from almost all households and running with the Energizer bunnies. businesses. From 4 to 18 hours per day, you have no We also converted to an all-Apple recording stujuice for your TV, your refrigerator, or your A/V studio. dio using iMacs and MacBook Pros soon after openThe government-run electric utility issues an insanely ing, as our custom built PC desktops were using far unpredictable and ever-changing schedule, so you don’t even know when the lights are going out — well, until they do. As you can imagine, the market for generators, inverters, and UPS systems in this city of almost two million people is thriving. There are candle shops here like you would not believe. So, in order for us to set up our own shop and record our first job, we had to jump that dark crevice. Loud emergency generators and A/V recording rarely mix, so instead of dealing with sound barriers and auto-size engines, we went with quick-charging inverter systems: banks of lead-acid truck batteries to power Pro Tools machines and all the rest. It’s lucky that we went down that path — as soon as our studio construction was complete, Nepal was hit with an oil shortage that has not yet quit. Diesel and petro generators lie silent in the city now, but our inverter banks are humming along, and work well if they get at least a 12hour charge. This set of batteries will power a large bay for 12 hours When there is less time to charge, we on a charge of 8 hours or so. We have 3 sets now, one seriously start counting our watts. We had to each for video, sound, and the live room. Crazy, eh?

Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue

too much juice to stay operational on such limited battery reserves. While it seems like every kid on the city streets has an iPod or jailbroken iPhone, we are the only creative business we know of that runs anything Apple-like. And just as soon as we had decided to make the transition to Macs, we actually met an ex-Apple Genius Bar employee in the middle of the jungle. What are the odds? Considering that we are 1000 kilometers from anything that resembles an Apple Store, I chalk it up to good karma. You are probably wondering, why not solar? Well, while solar power heats all water, and for some, does all cooking, there are very few commercial or residential applications of photoelectric panels. We are looking on the bright side, however, and look forward to the day when the panels do arrive, as the sun shines here most of the year. As quiet as our battery banks are, it was still a challenge to construct a RWAR We were lucky to have power for the opening night party (room within a room), as well as the rest of Phoenix Studios in Kathmandu. (Our home is on the top of the studio, with just the materials at floor.) It’s a one-stop shop for arranging, composing, rehand. There is no QuietRock™ in Nepal, cording, mixing and mastering, as well as a place to get unless you count concrete walls that your website and album covers done. As we say, “Come in never say a word. Nepali architecture is a a singer, leave a star.” mix of mud & brick technology from the 5th century, with a little 20th century earthquake-proof concrete and rebar technology thrown in. We were lucky to start with 12” poured exterior walls and 8” interior walls, which we fitted with independent plywood and studded walls on each side. Insulation was used to fill in the cavities, and the control room and live rooms were finished off with diffusion/absorption material. Our studio musicians in Damak Nepal, playing for a crowd of 6000 Bhutanese To our advantage, refugees, who have been living in temporary quarters for over 15 years. The carpet and labour is dirtevent was organized by the United Nations High Council on Refugees. cheap, about $1/sq. yard and $1 per hour for the labour. We are also a bit off from the rolling 10ton Tata byways, and far enough away from the constant blaring of motorbike horns. Yet, if someone forgets and leaves the front door open, we get Tata air horns and wild cow bellows recorded in with our

music and video. But all in all, we managed to achieve a sound environment of about STC 75. This Sound Transmission Class score indicates that we have been able to reduce outside levels of up to 75 dB down to zero, very good indeed.

Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

Forget Sneakernet -Use Ethernet to share your ProRes 444 data for less than you’d expect!

ON GETTING OUTFITTED WITH THE RIGHT GEAR My Nepali wife Jessy exclaims every time we go trekking, “Every step is a torture!” This also accurately describes the beginning of our business climb. For example, we imported most of our equipment “We recently switched from SD to HD production using Small Tree’s GraniteSTOR. from Singapore with no joy, as cusI’ve seen NO DIFFERENCE between editing toms duty for electronics ranges DVCPro HD over Ethernet and editing SD from 30-40%. There are long and over the Local Drive” unexplainable delays that you just - Greg Wolfe Media Services Producer, have to live with. Tempe 11 Television We are allowed some quota of personal electronics when returning from vacations abroad, so we are always humping hard drives and computers instead of seashells Small Tree - Making work more like play everyday and duty free booze like everyone www.small-tree.com • 866.STC.4MAC else. Small Tree • 7300 Hudson Blvd., Suite 165, Oakdale, MN 55128 We also make a lot of our own equipment for lighting, booming, and dollying, and do most repairs ourselves. If you are Nepali, it’s not like you can leave the country on a business trip and dios went online and began producing materials for gather the goods for your new business, as travel is both local and international artists, as well as for local severely restricted by the government. businesses and development organizations — all with Living within sight of the Chinese border, you the only all-Apple studio in the country, and with a would expect that electronics would be easy for us to western-style environment, complete with a dressing find for pennies on the dollar. However, prices for Chiand shower room, full kitchen, and a space for clients nese imports into this part of the world do not comto relax. pare with prices for the same items when shipped to Our clients are split between musicians, and cormore affluent centers in the west. porate/Non-Government Agency (NGO) types, all A note on product (un)safety: no one within 1000 wanting to use our A/V services to get a message out. kilometers of our Studio has heard of Underwriters The climate here for rock musicians is stormy, as Laboratories® or ETL SEMKO — especially not the the market has not developed much over the past sevChinese manufactures of our electric sockets, power eral decades. strips, and other electrified gear. The premiere Nepali band, 1974 AD, sounds like In fact, while there is a resemblance on the outa jazz-fusion rock band from the 1980s and has been side of products to quality brands (sometimes even widely popular for decades. The boys in that band are an exact match), there is nothing reliable on the inlike family to our studio, but like most other successful side. This goes for instruments, amps, compressors, music ensembles in Nepal, they have their own recordsoundboards, and all the rest. I can’t even remember ing studio. the number of times I’ve been thrown across the room That really leaves our studio to new musicians not while plugging something in, or how many times a yet on a label, and some very alternative types, like the power brick has vaporized in a puff of smoke. once underground, now aboveground Alt-F4, Nepal’s I’ve even gotten used to the idea, and am now livversion of Audioslave meets Linkin Park. ing proof that shock therapy is no cure for insanity. AXIS is a band that reminds us all of Bon Jovi. This style of rock is beginning to explode now that the civil REACHING THE SUMMIT war is over, and artists are free to express themselves AND PLANTING THE FLAG without fear. These are the artists now lining up at our Six months and just $20,000 USD later, Phoenix Studoor. SM

Of course, we get our share of traditional Nepali folk music, which makes up the lion’s share of recording sales. Nepathya is a folk-pop client that is unique, as they hunt the hills of Nepal in search of traditional village tunes which they then transform into pop hits for the iPod generation. Their “Bhedo Ko Oon Jasto” is not only a song, but a hilarious documentary on Nepali music making. Then there is our staff and close friends, all recording artists in their own right. For example, Shubu Thapa is poised to become Nepal’s Avril Lavigne, and also acts as our customer service rep. For the most part, our role in the recording biz here is mostly behind the scenes, even though we are now offering music video productions and other promotional services to our clients — web work, packaging, etc. The reality is that most Nepali artists self-produce, using studios like ours. The money for recording comes from the artist’s own

ended a bloody civil war in a matter of days, a conflict that had been raging for years in the most impoverished parts of the country, and in one of the poorest regions in the world. I actually feel privileged to have witnessed the outcome, and my love for all things Nepali has deepened after my observation of real democracy in action. Heck, we even got to record some of it. Now that the war is over, and the constant Bandhas (worker’s strikes) have stopped, we can finally get back to work.

A new lineup - all metal drive tray products.

PCIe RAID

PRO RX

760MB/sec Super Fast 16 drives rackmount

A place to buy shirts and Adobe CS4 software.

SURVIVAL IN THE HARSH HIMALAYAN ENVIRONMENT Whether you are delivering aid or A/V recordings, operations are a bit of a problem. I often feel safer swaying on a flimsy bamboo and rope bridge crossing a 500 ft. gorge, than I do sitting in our studio’s control room chair. At least when you are 5000 meters up and on the back of a Royal Enfield motorbike, you don’t have to worry about being caught in the middle of a communist revolution. We actually survived the last communist revolution during our getting-started phase. In the spring of 2006, the capital’s streets, usually awash with cows, sewage, and cheap Honda motorbikes, were full of Nepali youth burning tires and demanding an end to the royal monarchy. Lots of red hammer and sickles waving, as the Maoist movement marched from the hills into the metropolitan hub of Kathmandu. That spring, the People’s Movement The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

PRO DQ

580MB/sec Very Fast 8 drives tower

Fibre Channel

PRO FC

550MB/sec SAN Ready 4Gb Fibre Channel

limited pockets. On the other side of the house, we help NGOs with public service announcements and other forms of what they call ICT (Information Communication Technology). For an A/V shop, that means multimedia, and educational courseware that influences social change.

Phoenix recording artist Shubu Thapa.

PRO Storage for the Pros Generation 2 is here

PRO IDC 900MB/sec

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Super Fast SAN RIGHTS Independent Dual Controller Vendors openly (and quasilegally) sell the very latest PC software in street stalls and in Kathmandu’s newest shopping malls. I am left wondering if anyone really 9620 Topanga Canyon Place - Suite E - Chatsworth, CA 91311 sees this as a crime. The govwww.dulcesystems.com 818-435-6007 ernment has not signed on to the WTO, and respectable tax-paying shops (which are also government licensed) sell working, pirated softWE WILL BE LANDING SOON. PLEASE RETURN ware ,like Adobe CS4 Suites and Maya 2010, for less YOUR TRAY TABLE TO THE UPRIGHT POSITION then $1 a disk. Anyone who has ever been on a Himalayan trek will This is all very bad news for all of us in the Nepali tell you that the ending of the journey is always bitrecording industry. Up until last year, there was not a tersweet. On one hand (and one foot), you are sore judge in the land that would hear a case of copyright all over and feel like a herd of angry yak has trampled infringement for Nepali folk, pop or rock music. you. But on the other hand (and on the last foot not However, this year, one case was brought to the blistered), you feel like you have achieved a tremencourts over a lyrics/music remix, where an artist bladous accomplishment, against all odds. tantly rerecorded someone else’s hit single — down to (You would be surprised by how many trekkers in the very note and word — and made a bundle of cash Nepal turn back early, or hitch rides with passing mule to boot. packs.) The case was settled out of court, but the court This is pretty much how our team feels. We did made a landmark decree. Artists now have protected not turn back, despite dribbling electricity, non-exisrights over their work — forever! tent petro, dry water wells, horrible public infrastrucWhile some see this as a blow to the social sharing ture, high hardware costs with import hassles, low of classic national treasures, others feel relieved that profits, and an even lower-than-bad economy. We are producers of the next Bollywood movie won’t steal exhilarated from the journey, and happy we made the their work for their next soundtrack, and legally get climb. away with it! After all, the songs of struggle and triumph will Nepal is catching up with the rest of the world in always play on, and we are right here doing what we IP rights in other regards, albeit slowly. In fact, for exlove: recording them. pats, the major appeal of Nepal is that this country is n so very far behind the rest of the world. Anyone who remembers 50s America, when every shop was familyFor more of Jiggy's adventures in Nepal, visit the blogs owned, and every business owner would offer a cup section at Creativecow.net and search on “Jiggy” for of Joe and a friendly chat – right along with some real more insights and reports from Our Man in Nepal. customer service — would wax nostalgic here.

Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue

INDUSTRY NEWS:

TAKE YOUR AFTER EFFECTS SKILLS TO A HIGHER LEVEL

BORIS XML TRANSFER BETWEEN FCP AND AE www.borisfx.com

BorisFX has been synonymous with integrated effects creation inside host applications for 15 years, and with the release of Boris XML Transfer, the company now provides integration between host applications. XML Transfer is an After Effects plug-in designed for seamless transfer of Apple Final Cut Pro program sequences to Adobe After Effects, preserving all effects, audio, media clips, transitions, and geometric transformations. All trimmed Final Cut Pro clips remain fully-editable in Adobe After Effects as stepped-up or steppeddown layers. Boris XML Transfer also takes special care to preserve multi-clip edits. User marks, comments and labels for clips and sequences, and all user-defined names are carried across from FCP to AE. “The big idea for this project was to create workflow for FCP/AE users, where they can actually do some effects work in FCP and move over to AE to finish,” says Boris FX founder and CEO Boris Yamnitsky. “While FCP is not your most desirable effects app , you really need to do some effects up front — like up-rez, image stabilization, or chroma key — to make your project look realistic in that environment.” Unlike other project transfer options, Boris XML Transfer accurately moves third-party plug-in effects from FCP to AE. Products like Boris Continuum Complete and Final Effects Complete have had presets that work in Final Cut Pro, After Effects, and even Avid editing and finishing systems. But true project-level integration is a bit more challenging. “There is no way to accurately match all the parameters because of the differences between the same filter in FCP and AE,” says Boris. “Because we own both sides of the effects code, we hand-carve the AE version of each translated effect to make sure it perfectly matches the FCP counterpart.” Boris applies the same intimate knowledge of effects creation to pass the parameters of other third-party filters between Final Cut Pro and After Effects. The company had previously developed XML linkages between Media 100 and both Final Cut Pro and After Effects.

Pete O’Connell has worked on a wide range of blockbuster films like Whiteout, Across the Universe, Stranger Than Fiction, Mister Magorium’s Wonder Emporium and many others. Ask him what he thinks is the single most important technique that he wishes that he knew when he started in film effects, and he will tell you “motion tracking, without a doubt.” In this DVD, Pete not only takes you through a wide range of video tutorials that explore the subject in detail, but he also includes the project files so that you can work alongside him as he guides you through the lessons. “My aim in creating this DVD was to assemble all the most useful 2D tracking skills that I have been using in production over the past few years. There are many examples of the most important ‘real world’ techniques you should have at your disposal as you strive for a perfect result when stabilizing or matchmoving. Enjoy!” — Pete O’Connell

GENARTS INC. ACQUIRES WONDERTOUCH & PARTICLE ILLUSION www.genarts.com

GenArts Inc., the premier provider of specialized visual effects software for the film, television and video industries, announced today a definitive agreement to acquire particleIllusion™ and all related products and technologies from wondertouch LLC. This follows an earlier announcement by GenArts of a strategy of aggressive growth through acquisitions and strategic partnerships. The acquisition of wondertouch includes particleIllusion SE, all Emitters and Pro Emitters, particleIllusion for AE, and all additional intellectual property from wondertouch LLC. particleIllusion is a sprite-based particle effects application that uses thousands of presets and hardware-accelerated rendering to provide comprehensive and efficient particle workflow, and will complement Sapphire’s wide range of visual effects plug-ins. As part of the acquisition, Alan Lorence, the former CEO of wondertouch and creator of particleIllusion, will join GenArts as a full-time developer. While wondertouch and particleIllusion will continue to operate as stand-alone brands, separate from GenArts Sapphire™, Monsters™ and Raptors™, all GenArts products including particleIllusion, will now be sold through the same reseller channels.

Just $49* at www.creativecowtraining.net plus shipping/handling and applicable taxes, if any

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

INDUSTRY NEWS:

FLANDERS SCIENTIFIC 24” 10-bit 4:4:4 Monitor www.flandersscientific.com

The all new LM-2470W monitor from Flanders Scientific is an ultra wide gamut LCD monitor (102% of NTSC) with an advanced color space selection option allowing you to instantly switch between REC 709, SMPTE C, EBU, and Wide Gamut modes. Twenty-four inches wide, it comes equipped with a true native 10/bit LCD panel and RGB LED Matrix Backlighting System, capable of reproducing over 1.073 billion colors. The LM-2470W comes standard with 3Gbps SDI Inputs, which allows 4:4:4 and 1080p50/60 source material over a single serial digital interface.

QUANTEL: 3D LUTs, Improved Conform, RED Rocket support

— www.quantel.com Quantel has just released a new version of software for its eQ, iQ and Pablo systems which, among a number of other useful new features, also includes support for the RED Rocket accelerator board. Quantel is the first manufacturer to release software that supports it, allowing Quantel users to benefit from the much reduced loading and conform times RED Rocket enables with RED-originated material. The new software release V4.1rev6 - also includes the Cubebuilder, which enables Pablo users to build, manipulate and apply 3D Lookup Tables (LUTs) entirely within Pablo. It also supports process re-ordering in multi-layer timeline effects for more flexibility in effects creation, nine new blend modes, improved conform and file handling features, and new export modes to simplify Blu-ray and DVD generation.

AJA Launches KUMO Compact SDI Routers — www.aja.com

The new KUMO line of compact SDI routers joins the lineup of professional video interface and conversion solutions from AJA Systems. They are available in two configurations: the KUMO 1604 supporting sixteen SDI inputs and four out, and the KUMO 1616 supporting 16 channels in and out. Both KUMO routers are reclocking, non-blocking, and support SDI, HD-SDI, and 3G SDI small 1RU form factor. They also support all ancillary data, including embedded audio Running embedded Linux, KUMO routers support powerful HTTP control and monitoring via a built-in 10/100/1000 Ethernet LAN. KUMO’s internal web server allows immediate configuration and operation via any standard web-browser on any OS, without any additional software. Their redundant, isolated power inputs make the KUMO routers ideal for mission-critical broadcast and postproduction installations.

Harris Embraces BXF

— www.broadcast.harris.com The international communications and information technology giant, Harris Corporation, is looking forward to even wider adoption of the recently-developed Broadcast eXchange Format (BXF), a data exchange format that standardizes interfaces among systems dealing with content metadata, content movement, schedules and as-run information. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) has recently published “SMPTE RP 2021-9:2009,” a Recommended Practice guide that supplements the existing BXF Standards and simplifies the creation of interoperable BXF applications. Its authorship took place under the SMPTE BXF Working Group chaired by Chris Lennon, director of integration and standards, Harris Broadcast Communications, which has successfully implemented BXF into 11 of its own products. “Because BXF enables adopters to achieve increased operational efficiency and significant cost savings, as well as increased and all-new revenues, broadcasters have been highly motivated to press vendors for implementations of this new SMPTE standard,” Lennon says “While we’re already seeing considerable use of BXF in the field now, I expect the publication of this Recommended Practice to expand implementations both in scope and across broadcast operations.” Harris Broadcast Communications offers products, systems and services that provide interoperable workflow solutions for broadcast, cable, satellite and out-of-home networks.

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

A FIRST CLASS MAGAZINE DESERVES FIRST-CLASS DELIVERY ™

Tired of waiting for your COW Magazine to arrive? Join our First-Class Mail delivery program and end the #@!?! waiting! $14.95 for USA addresses $24.95 for International

includes the next 6 bi-monthly issues delivered direct to you by first-class mail

www.creativecowmagazine.net

AD INDEX: 16x9 Inc. . .................................... 49

Dulce Systems .......................... 43

ACE-Cases.com ........................ 49

DVPA ............................................ 49

AJA . .............................................. 21

Elsevier / Focal Press .............. 37

Andersson Tech SynthEyes . 48

G-Technology ........................... 35

Artbeats ...................................... 13

Glidecam .................................... 48

Avid .............................................. 23

JMR Electronics ........... 27, 29, 31

Blackmagic Design ................... 5

MAM-A ........................................ 49

CalDigit........................................ 15

Panasonic .................. back cover

Condre ........................................ 47

Rovi (Macrovision) . ................... 7

Convergent Design ................ 33

Small Tree . ................................. 41

Creative Cow DVDs . ...14, 45, 51

Sonnet Drive Systems . .......... 19

Digital Juice . ............................. 30

Tape Online ............................... 49

Discmakers ................................ 48

Videoguys.com ...................... 8-9

Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue

THOUSANDS OF FREE VIDEO TUTORIALS, WEB TUTORIALS, PROJECT FILES, USER REVIEWS, AND FEATURES TO TAKE YOUR SKILLS TO THE NEXT LEVEL. YES, FREE. ALL IN THE LIBRARY AT: CREATIVECOW.NET

has the answer!

Get Your FREE Film Guide!

Introducing the New EXII Lenses

www.16x9inc.com

GETTING

A HANDLE

ON GRIP TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES FOR

C R E AT I N G C I N E M AT I C L I G H T I N G

To find out about placing your ad in Creative COW Magazine, please contact: Ellen Parker <eparker@creativecow.net>

CREATIVE COW SPECIAL $69.99 RETAIL $49.99 DISCOUNT CODE: COW

Abide by the Cow. Buy TapeOnline.

GET YOUR DVD TODAY

AT WWW.DVPA.COM

TapeOnline.com • 877.893.8273

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

Creative COW Magazine — The Non-linear Creativity Issue

Ron Lindeboom

Paso Robles, California USA

A Welcome to Our 1ST CLASS Print Subscribers, Worldwide WITH THIS ISSUE, WE WELCOME OUR FIRST-EVER INTERNATIONAL PRINT MAILING

orld, as in Communities of the World. It’s a word we take quite seriously here at Creative COW. It’s why from our very first issue in 2006, we have made every effort to insure that our digital version is available without registering or any other restrictions that would hamper our international readers from conveniently benefitting from the stories and articles in it. But from the day we began publishing, we have been hearing from our international members that they would like to get the magazine in print. We regularly get comments like: “Thank you for the digital edition but I love the stories you guys print. Can’t you make the print magazine available to COW members outside the USA?” HONORING INTERNATIONAL REQUESTS:

A 1ST-CLASS MAGAZINE DESERVES 1ST-CLASS DELIVERY

Many international COW members have said that they’d be willing to pay the freight to get the COW magazine in print. And as more and more people asked, we thought about how to do it. Recently, we thought of a way to create a tenable solution. As we began to explore the idea, the concept became clear: a first-class magazine deserves firstclass service. The idea came as Tim Wilson and I sat talking about this phenomenon of international print requests. I asked Tim, “What do you think about offering first class mail subscriptions to our subscribers — both inside the USA and around the world? It gives us a way to make sure that most of them will get there as quickly as possible, and we don’t have to worry about great numbers getting lost due to low priority mailing.” Tim loved the idea. So did Kathlyn. We talked to our printer and to the team in their mail service, and shortly thereafter, we rolled out a test of the idea. In a few days, we had hundreds of subscribers. In typical COW fashion, we didn’t want to leave out our international readers by setting the

subscription price too high. So we set a price point that helps cover the cost. Our international members are a big part of the reason for the COW’s incredible success, and so it was important to us to offer the magazine at a cost that could be borne by a large percentage of them. International COW members seem to like the idea that they can now have their very own print version of Creative COW Magazine — in their studio or on their desk, worldwide. First-class. Our international print subscribership is quickly growing. We’d like to thank our international members. You are truly appreciated and it is why we work hard to regularly include your stories in this magazine. USA BULK-MAIL TURNS INTO BULLET-TRAIN: A 1ST-CLASS MAGAZINE DESERVES 1ST-CLASS DELIVERY

Does our subscription program leave out the USA? No, as many of our members have asked for faster delivery, as the digital edition often shows up weeks before they get their magazine in the mail. Being a newer magazine, we are forced to send it to our USA members by bulk mail. If you want to join our upgraded first-class mail program, you can now get your magazines delivered in just days — first-class. It seems that many of you in the USA like the idea of not having to wait for bulk-mail delivery, as the number of our USA addresses upgrading to first-class accounts is rapidly growing. As we head into our fourth year of bringing you stories and features that you won’t find in other magazines in our industry, we’d like to ask you a question: doesn’t a first-class magazine, deserve first-class delivery? Doesn’t your magazine? If you agree, www.creativecowmagazine.net is where you can upgrade your own subscription. And to our first international print readers, welcome, it is truly an honor to have you with us. n

The Non-linear Creativity Issue — Creative COW Magazine

connect the shots consolidate your acquisition options. sacrifice none. Unifying all your video sources and cameras has never been easy — until now. The AJ-HPM200 P2 Mobile is the key workflow tool on any production because its HD-SDI connectivity lets you record from any camera or device in 10-bit, 4:2:2 independent frame AVC-Intra100 or DVCPRO HD/50/25 and, simultaneously* in long GOP AVCCAM.** So no matter how many sources you have, you can bring them all into one portable unit. With the new HPM200, you can play P2 and AVCCAM footage, as well as full frame rate P2 playback from a disk drive. You can also archive

master-quality footage and FTP low bit rate AVCCAM dailies without ever leaving the set. With the most diverse I/O connectivity of any recorder/player and a bevy of features, like e-SATA and GigE interfaces, split-screen editing, six P2 slots for long record times and full cross-conversion capabilities, it’s easier to list what the HPM200 doesn’t do. The P2 Mobile won’t deliver craft services, but it just might save you from running into overtime. Learn more at www.panasonic.com/broadcast.