All posts by Philip

Episode 85: Is it Time To Retire?

A recent article in The Atlantic Your Work Peak Is Earlier Than You Think started this discussion, which is particularly relevant with so many layoffs happening through mergers among the Studios.

Terence and Philip discuss the implications and how we should react.

Episode 84: What does money “buy” in production?

Recently Wistia published an original series “One, Ten, One Hundred” that examined what happens when you have $1,000, $10,000, $100,000 in a budget for – essentially – the same concept for a video.

Somewhat ironically, Wistia make a video presentation tool – Soapbox – that is the featured product in the three videos.

As well as the three videos produced by an LA Advertising Agency, the Wistia video crew created a very entertaining view of the production and drew the conclusions as to best value.

Episode 43: The trend to reality TV

Terence and Philip start with a discussion of why we’re trending toward reality Television away from scripted. What are the implications for workflows? Where is the distinction between documentary and reality?

There’s a discussion on reality TV production techniques. Followed by some of the ideas Philip has for saving time on the Solar Odyssey Challenge show using metadata using Time Associated Metadata inspired by OnLocation/Adobe Story workflows. Philip discusses some of the software ideas he has for metadata acquisition.

Philip mentioned a sports logging tool: the company is iCoda.

Thanks to Alpha Dogs intern Alex Talavera for editing the show and making us sound intelligent.

Episode 31: Is Branded Media the future of Production Finance?

Sponsored movies of the 70’s and 80’s were the precursor to Branded Entertainment, and it’s a major way of getting funded today. But is it the future?  Terence and Philip discuss examples and why it might be more successful.

Many thanks to Isai Espinoza for editing the show again and making us sound smart.

Episode 13: Deliverables!

Terry starts the discussion about audio levels and the perception of loudness, in the wake of the recent FCC ruling. This leads to the main discussion of deliverables: aka “pining for PAL vs NTSC”! Formats and deliverable metadata add to the complication that delivering a program has become.

The discussion veers into the endless discussion of generalist vs specialist before ending on the value of value.

Thanks as always to Zach Spell for editing the show and making us sound intelligent.

Episode 6

The episode when Philip explains how QuickTime’s flexibility caused difficulties when imported to Final Cut Pro, which leads to a discussion on what is QuickTime; how the event-based nature of QuickTime isn’t ideal for video and what would need to change. Plus what is a framework, QTKit and what development has happened in the Cocoa-ization of QuickTime, necessary for any future Cocoa 64 bit Final Cut Pro. And a short discussion on the pleasures of Flash.

Note: Although Philip says “no QuickTime on an iPhone” the player shows the QuickTime icon but that’s the only thing in common with QuickTime on Mac OS X.

UPDATE: Just came across a Cocoa Heads presentation on AV Foundation on Slideshare that doesn’t seem to be covered by an NDA. From what I understand AV Foundation “replaces” QT in the iOS. Check out page 14 and 29 in particular.  Also slide 9 – how far has QTkit come with Classes and Methods and how far has AV Foundation came.

I wrote more at my blog Introducing AV Foundation and the future of QuickTime.

Episode 5

Terence and Philip talk about “What to do if you’re starting out now” in production or post, and why Advertising is a “bad deal for everyone” and what the alternatives are. The growth of Internet broadband and what’s happening in Australia coming full circle back to what to do if you’re starting out now.

Episode 4

This week Terence and Philip start in on format wars and how we deal with them, particularly acquisition formats vs editing and delivery formats. Is native better? Terry tells us about Super LoiLoScope, which apparently can play anything.

Discussion moves to the advantages of “new code” and the role of Randy Ubilos at Apple.  Then on to the relative merits of ProRes and DNxHD codecs, including “offline” quality. Plus working from multiple sources.

Then conjecture on what happens if we took all the metadata (including location) for cameras from a concert, and let every person watching switch their own view, which leads to discussion of latency.

Eventually the discussion reaches iMovie on iPhone and the role of location metadata.

Update: In this episode Philip refers to an amusing presentation at the MediaMotion Ball by Brian Maffitt. Carey Dissmore provided the link. http://imugonline.com/events/2008/video.shtml Video 1 about 2’20” in Brian starts to discuss how much better everything was going to be in the future.