It's amazing what you can find digging deep into the corporate portals of the major software developers.
I've written several times this month of quality resources on technical and creative elements of production that have been developed by the various creative software companies. This time it is again Adobe who seem to have taken their excellent detailed guides and curriculum learning documents and buried them deep in the metaphysical basement of their website.
'Foundations of Video Design and Production' is a complete curriculum guide open for implementation and adaptation in your particular learning environment. In their own words:
"The Digital Video project-based curriculum develops career and communication skills in video production, using Adobe tools. You can use the Digital Video curriculum in career and technical education courses as well as courses involving video use in academic courses. "
Now, of course Adobe wouldn't be developing such a detailed resource if there wasn't somethign in it for them. Creative software and hardwae developers learned long ago that drug dealers targeting young people were on to a proven winning formula for long term success - that if you 'hook' young people early with a 'taste' for your product they'll stay loyal addicts to you for life. Apple turned this into an art in the 1990's in Australia with their 'Apples for the Students' program where particpating supermarket shopping receipt dockets could be totally up and for every $100,000 odd dollars in receipts you could get a free Apple computer. Schools with enthusiastic parent groups leaped on the offer and just about sent Apple bankrupt in the short term but cemented loyal Mac-Junkies long term.
Evidently Adobe see similar value in designing such resources that inherently focus specifically on the use of Adobe software. But if you can peer through the proprietary haze, underneath is a sound pedagogical framework and a body of knowledge dealing with core creative technology ideas. This is driven by the association in developing the course with the International
Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) National Educational
Technology Standards (NETS) for Students (2007).
It feels like a hot new topic - the demise of Avid amid corporate shuffling and cryptic press releases - but the truth is that the demise, and the discussion of the demise, began a long time ago....
Avid was built to replace tape-to-tape and flatbed editing. And this is indeed what it did. At the time Avid were smart, smarter than their competitors and predecessors such as Quantel, they designed a paradigm for digital post-production that mimicked, emulated and utilised the language, nomenclature and paradigm of analogue editing. The result was that old-salt editors who had slaved their lives over analogue systems, could make the step to the digital landscape very easily. The great cleverness of Avid was to bridge the digital divide at the narrowest and most accessible point. It worked and they were greatly successful.
But the same successful approach was their undoing and the writing has been on the wall since the gap was bridged. The analogue paradigms Avid emulated in the digital, its workflow built on hardware and stoic linear assembly (despite being technically a non-linear tool), was a system constructed around how editing Was, how editing Had Been and not what editing Could and Would be. The Avid interface, the Avid mentality, is one born out of keeping traditional editors relaxed and comfortable, designed around ensuring traditional broadcasters felt secure in their major financial outlay on hardware.
But every year since Avid's inception there have been less traditional editors to keep relaxed and comfortable. Every year there were new editors to take their place. Editors who were Digital Natives, not Digital Immigrants. Editors for whom the analogue language, the tape-to-tape paradigm, the hardware base, the stoic mechanics, made no sense - seemed simply old, archaic, inflexible and even irrational. The Digital Native editor whose life centres around a laptop so powerful they barely understand the idea of an 'off-line' edit, looks at the Mojo and the Adrenaline with the same quizzical smile as computer nerd looks at a 'mainframe' computer as big as a room from the 1970's.
Avid Failed.... Every year since Avid began they failed to evolve, failed to account for what was to come, failed to look forward rather than back, failed to change their language, failed to predict new mindsets. No matter how good their product was, no matter how reliable or successful, no matter how many they sold, Avid Failed year after year after year. They Failed to re-think the Editor.
When the original Première proved a domestic computer could edit video how did Avid respond? They raised not an eyebrow. When Final Cut Pro comoditized the professional editing environment from the bones of its Première ancestor to deliver a capable NLE, free of costly hardware, how did Avid respond? They created new hardware for their software. When Vegas matched Avid's format agnostic and resolution independent real-time timeline with software-only how did Avid respond?A condecending scoff and throw-away remarks about 'real professionals...'. When every year Final Cut Pro captured the imagination of the Editor's of the Future how did Avid respond? By appealing the editors of the Past.
The complete sinking of the Avid ship will happen very slowly. But the water in-take in the bilge began a long time ago when the ship left the harbour with holes in the hull. Those who have invested great sums of money in Avid systems did so because expense breeds comfort; the more you spend the greater the perception of security in what you have bought. A process of self-justification, of justifying your professionalism by the expense you can afford. But, like an arrogant ship captain, those same buyers will refuse to believe the ship is sinking until they have to jump in the life boat and row for the smaller, leaner, faster, cheaper ship on the horizon. A new ship that doesn't look at all like the big sinking Titanic they are fleeing.
This discussion and speculation on the future of Avid is all over the web. The cryptically depressive survey issued by Avid some months ago did little but make the company look tired.... Some may feel sad about Avid's demise. Perhaps feel that a great tool was brought to an untimely end by cocky young upstarts and the 'cult of the amateur'. It strikes me as somewhat like the feeling you have when the company making amplifier valves finally closes the door conceding that their time has passed.
I don't feel this way. I feel a little angry. I feel angry that a company with such dominance, such power, such influence over the creative artform of our age was so condescending of its users as to refuse to grow with them, refuse to let them grow, refuse to aknowledge new ideas from new younger minds. I feel somewhat angry such a company would not seek to be more accessible, more efficient and instead trade their business on excess, superfluousness and a culture of snobbery whose only means of distinction was to forge a hard line in the sand and declare Real Professionals on their side and Child-like Wannabes on the other.
Fortunately that warning, so inherent in the Avid culture, has been ignored by the digital native and we find ourselves at this juncture; speaking of the great Avid sell-off / buy-out that so many think is near.
But maybe that's just me.....
When an institution such as the BBC move away from Avid to leaner, meaner solutions like Final Cut Pro many obviosuly point the finger at 'Cost' and the all pervasive dollar factor. But it would be a mistake and a simplification to think that the only ill-concieved element of the Avid structure is the expense. This from the BBC on their move away from Avid :
"What drives a broadcaster to implement a radical new concept in
programme production? One of the most obvious answers is cost, but in
this case, there was far more to it than that. All organisations,
whether public or private, need to function efficiently to meet the
demands of media-hungry audiences; procedures must be streamlined
without hampering productivity, resources and skills must be flexible
and transferable without compromising creativity.
This vision of the future of broadcasting, along with the
aforementioned cost savings and tight deadlines, is what motivated the
BBC to make use of predators - part producer, part editor..."
In other words, cost aside, what has changed is a cultural shift in what we percieve the Editor to be, how we percieve the role of the Editor in creative process. Avid every year since it began failed to re-imagine the Editor's job. And they are now, and will continue until their demise, pay the price for their short-sightedness. Whether an Avid system, as a tool, is good or bad, better or worse, is irreleveant when they have become so out-of-tune and out-of-touch with what the Editor as a creative role has become. Avid could well be the greatest system on the planet but it wont matter one iota when the paradigm by which they have defined the Editor no longer matches the inherent digital-native sensibilities of the "Prod-Editors".
Over on the Creative Cow, Tim Bird has written an eloquent but forceful post about the demise of Avid and I shall end on his words rather than mine.
About 15 years ago, my old film prof suggested that although Avid had the popular GUI at the time, their approach to system configuration was deficient and the company had a fairly self-centered business model (my words, not his.) At some point, he suggested, another manufacturer will come along with a better interface, better business model and a more open platform and Avid will decline in popularity.
Since that time, the issues of openness and corporate business model have been the major gripe of Avid's customers. This is manifest in Avid's lack of response to customer feature requests, openness of the systems, ease of integration with 3rd party software, overall cost of product etc. The Dec. issue of POST Magazine carried an article describing Avid's new CEO's plans to re-invigorate the company and respond to user concerns.
Having been a dedicated Avid user, multiple system owner, ACSR, beta tester, and instructor of more than 400 Avid editors over the last decade, I was tickled by the POST article. How many times has such a publicity campaign been waged by this company with little or no change in corporate mentality or customer satisfaction? Yet, they are still perceived as the industry LEADER?
Meanwhile, the Avid system I used everyday for so long has not been turned on in nearly a year and will soon show up on eBay (I've adopted a more capable and cost effective platform.) If Avid is to remain a leader in this business, they have a lot more to decide than just answers to the questions posed Harcharan.
A few years ago, Oliver Peters suggested to me that "Mojo is just a dongle for uncompressed." True. It is not capable (as is) of HD output of any kind. Mojo and Adrenaline cripple the the very systems they are meant to enable. Mojo was introduced as an I/O add on to Xpress Pro. This combination of crippled hardware to accompany crippled software was Avid's answer to the growth of Final Cut Pro... but it came nowhere near the capability of FCP with an AJA I/O (for example.)
Now we wonder what Avid will do two years from now? Responses seem to favor Mojo as a suitable interface for Avid for the future. Ridiculous.
Stop drinking the kool-aid.
Everything customers are asking Avid to provide by 2010 is offered NOW by other manufacturers. Avid is over.
There is a widely held belief that different mediums (TV, film, mobile, on-line, book, magazine, blog etc) have inherent, in-built, parameters dictating acceptable length; the duration and density that a viewer/reader of that medium will accept from that medium. We very often hear this in regard to on-line streaming video; that the YouTube aesthetic demands everything be under 5 minutes or viewers will switch off and move on to something else. I've heard pundits of mobile media technologies talk about the 30second threshold, that people wont watch anything on their mobile phone for more than 30seconds. And all this spills over into (or perhaps indeed spills over from) Print where there is the widely held belief from editors and writers that writing on-line cannot engage the same depth, length or breadth that could be 'sustained' in print publications newspapers and magazines.
To this I say Bullshit...!
I say a work will be watched or read for as long as it is engaging, useful or interesting.
I say it's in a large part a self-fulfilling prophecy where by the assumption is that on-line media needs to be shallow and short and therefore it is Made shallow and short.
I say just because a homemade YouTube video of a pet dog taking a shit in a pair of shoes cant be sustained for more than 30seconds does not mean that the medium itself has such restrictive paradigms.
I say these concerns are artificial constraints derived from short-sightedness on the highly transitory 'now' rather than forward-thinking visions of what's to come. Constrains borne of temporary technical limitations (bandwidth, connection speed, screen size) which are everyday being washed away to obsolescence. 5 years from now will any on-line video be delivered at pixelated 320x240..? Of course not.
I say that writing on-line demands that content dictate form far in excess of any other medium ever known and so long-form writing is more at home on-line than anywhere. An open-ended, infinite publishing platform cannot help but drive towards new definitions of long-form detailed writing. Not least of all because on-line allows for viewer interest specialization en-masse that the economies of scale in print publishing can never accommodate.
I say that anyone singing the mantra of what on-line media Can and Cannot accommodate when it comes to length, duration or complexity is living in a very narrow and backward thinking world.
As a small element of proof in such a verbose diatribe I present an article by Dan Brockett entitled
The article examines sound, locations recording, microphone technology and reviews a vast array of different microphones makes, models and types. The article is long, deep and wide and is a fantastic resource as well as fine example of on-line journalistic reviewing tha moves beyond the Fluff mentality and expectation.
Just as audio is the great neglected art of video production with too many movie makers focusing on the image and treating sound as subservient, so too do we similarly neglect our hardware. Well happily spoon out large sheckles for widescreen monitors but too often leave sound to a tiny set of PC speakers or cheap and nasty headphones.
While powered bookshelf audio speakers are the ideal for mixing your soundtrack, the truth is that many home studios are simply not conducive to such setups. Likewise the editor working from laptop can't very we'll carry speakers with them.
When it comes to watching movies, a home theatre setup might be optimal for many, but a thumping subwoofer in the lounge room may not be appreciated by partners and sleeping children. So with these scenarios, it is that most of us find ourselves turning to the humble headphones for our audio production work and quality audio listening experience. The new XFones from Hauppauge seem aimed at satisfying a very broad spectrum of user needs.
In the 21st century Every filmmaker needs to be a Machimator. Every filmmaker needs to understand the core concepts that underpin Machinima.
The reasoning is simply that in the digital age every form and process of cinema invokes Machinma methodology and practice. At one end is of course machinima itself - the 'shooting' of a movie within a realtime virtual environment. Neither animation nor live-action, machinima is a hybrid between.
But outside of pure machinima, right along the continuum of cinematic media forms and formats, machinima processes appears as key components :
Pre-Visualization for directors 3D sets for designers Virtual cameras for Cinematographers 3D Z-space for editors and compositors 3D environments for Animators
All these traditional non-machinima forms engage proactively with digital tools, concepts a process that are directly encapsulated in machinima. Being a filmmaker in the 21st century who doesn't know about Machinima, who doesn't grasp the idea of a virtual camera or virtual 3D spaces and objects is the equivalent of a filmmaker who doesn't know about montage or deep focus. The virtual space and the virtual camera are THE concepts for all cinema of the digital age regardless of whether they be computer generated or not.
Once the domain of game-engine hackers, there are array of software tools now available for machinima derived animation, simulation, game design, previs and 3D. Over the past couple of years i have taken most such tools through their paces, exploring what is possible, what they are capable of and, more importantly, what new conceptual opportunities and processes they represent? Tools that blur the line between traditional animation and storyboarding through to dedicated game design; FrameForge 3D, Moviestorm, FPSCreator, Toonboom and iClone
And now Antics with a very holistic perspective on pre-vis and virtual production. Antics attempts to satisfy all forms of users with a very open system viable for animation, pure machinima and very effective pre-visualization for live-action (or any hybrid combo of the above).
In the coming months ill be writing a detailed review Antics for DMN; in the meantime their base-pack is free and they have a huge array of free model resources to get you started.
You simply cannot be a filmmaker in the 21st century without an understanding of the cocnepts of Machinima. So do yourself a favour and go download... NOW..!
The history of cinema there have been an array of seminal moments that represent major turning points in the artform. Colour and Sound obviosuly strike as the most profound but there are others no less impactful but often far less obvious. The move to building and shaping cinematic form and moving images in 3D space represents such a shift.
In his work-in-progress essay series, Velvet Revolution (word DOC), Lev Manovich regards the encompassing of 3D space into motion graphics tools as the driving element of a new visual language; "it offers a new method for representing physical reality... With 3D computer grapics we can represent three-dimensional structure of the world versus capturing only a perspectival image of the world, as in lens-based recording." Manovich sees 3D space compositing as influencing all media making "the way 3D computer animation organizes visual daya - as objects positioned in a Cartesian space - became the way to work with all moving image media." All media objects - 2D, 3D, moving, still, animated and live action, can all occupy this singular space. In the context of the 'frame' which remains the base of cinematic composition, Manovich comments that "frame based representation did not dissapear - but it became simply recoded. An output format rather than the space the actual design is taking place... not simply a mechanical sum of the previously existing parts but a new species."
What Manovich skirts around here is the impact on viewers and their aesthetic expectations. He speaks effectivly of Composition happening in 3D space but delivery (and by proxy utreception) still occupying a 2D space. Yet inevitably a sismic shift in the space of composition cannot help by profoundly impact aesthetics and in doing so change reception and viewership.
A comparative analogy might be seen in architecture - the flying buttress of gothic church design allowed for an architectural shift in the space of construction of buildings such as Notre Dame. The church was designed and 'composed' in a different conceptual space made possible by a shift in technology. The result however was not confined to the act of Composing, the space in which the composition took place, but also very much in the experience of that architectural space. The church building itself was still engaged in the same manner by the congreation, still idetified as a church, but the experience of that engagement, the shift in what was spatially possible for such a building, altered forever the expectation of what a building of that type could be and could do. And buildings were never the same again.
We live in a very different age than that which has passed. We live in an age where the world's corporations have told use emphatically that we NEED a 'digital lifestyle' and should have it NOW...! And so, like dutiful little lemmings, we went out and did just that - we bought all those machines and devices they insisted that we buy and we hooked them up to the 'information super highway' that they said we had to connect to... But now they're angry at us; they're very afraid of what we might do with the devices of the digital lifestyle that they told us we had to have.
Turns out the devices and machines we bought have only ONE purpose, only ONE function, only ONE true ability - the ability to Copy, the ability to Replicate and the ability to Diseminate. Whether big or small, thats what a computer does. It makes copies, it stores copies and it distributes copies. But now the movie studios and record companies and software developers are all very grumpy at us for using the devices to do exactly what they're intended to do....?
Arguments about Right and Wrong a largely irrelevent - the computer 'tool' is designed for one purpose - to copy - and so when we flood the world with copy machines we really shouldnt be surpirsed that they start... you know.... Copying... Much like America's gun-laws - If you're going to have a national community flooded with 192 million guns which have no purpose other than to maim and kill you really shouldn't look surpirsed when 30,000 people per year are maimed and killed by firearms. Its bleeding obvious.
But this is the very different age we live in - an age where laws of 'ownership' and 'copyright' developed in the industrial revolution suddenly find themselves hard pressed to be relevent in an age of mass-duplication.
Agan, this is not about theft or morality its simple pragmatics. We - creators - need to re-think some of the paradigms. Not because we want to but simply because we'll have to. We live in a very different age with very different sensibilities driven by the technology that knits our society together.
In this context we get Steal this Film. A documentary that made headlines in 2006 now has a sequal in 2008. Whether you're a staunch believer in copyright protection or a futurist looking for alternatives like Creative Commons - this film is certanly worth the watching.
A solid, intensive and detailed pre-production process is sadly all too negelected in contemporary media production; particularly at an indie level. Too often we get focused on Camera, Location and Edit and forget that for every minute you spend in pre-production is 5 minutes you save in shooting and post - that kind of saving is time and money - both of which add up to more creative flexibility if accounted for properly. For Machinima makers the culture of neglecting pre-production is even more widespread and sadly it shows all too often in under-developed scripts and poorly planned production of many Machinima movies..
In an effort to address the issue the good folks over at ILL Machinima Production have put together a very fine article outlining the pre-production process of traditional filmmaking applied to the production context of Machinima. They even supply a set of well thought out documents to download and use in your next Machinima project....
But something about this article bothers me.... How could 21st centruy machinima cretaors working in computer-generated virtual environments have missed the bleeding obvious...? Whilst their PDF and Word DOC templates are well made surely it would be better to just load up the free, open-source screenwriting and pre-production software system Celtx ???! A software tool that handles every possible angle - from a database script breakdown system, to scheduling, storyboarding, production items and media asset management.!
If you're going to work in an all-digital 21st centruy medium such as Machinima then surely there's room to work with an all-digital pre-production software enviroment. I cant believe the guys at Ill Machinima dont know about Celtx.!
Following quickly on the heels of the user-generated video content explosion was the on-line video remix website boom. There's plenty of them - jumpcut, youtube remixer, motionbox, eyespot - but in truth they all struck me as somewhere between gimmick and tacky. I dont expect them to be full featured NLE's but they should invoke a concerted engagement with editing process.Drawing on a deep well of amazing source footage it's Discovery Channel that seem to have made a very good effort at the on-line video editor. In particular one that potentially serves as a fantastic teaching tool for understanding how documentary video is assembled for drama, meaning and rhythm. Shark Week :: Discovery Channel :: Shark Video Mixer With the source content being mind-blowing footage of sharks in full-flight-feeding-frenzy you're off to a good start. I found myself immersed in this task of making a 60second video for SharkWeek for a good deal longer than I would usually be engaged by such a site.
Game Probe explores the artistry of the video game; aesthetics, drama, technique, meaning, experience and story. The
Game Probe video episodes focus on individual games and examine how they
work and what makes them an engaging and dramatic experience.
I have now given the Game Probe series their own BlipTV channel and hope to add two new episodes to the series over the coming months. The channel is called gameprobe.blip.tv
and along with the Game Probe videos themselves the chanel also includes a Journal collecting together a range of writings Ive assembled over the past couple of years dealign with ideas,
observations, commentary and concepts related to gaming aesthetics,
culture and technology.
After quite a few years working in digital media education, production and research at the the Powerhouse Musuem of applied arts and sciences I am, as of today, taking up a new role as Head of Technological Arts at the International Film School, Sydney.
IFSS is a relatively new and dynamically exapnding instution, I am very excited by the chance to put in practice some of the broad spectrum of the ideas I have written about in the filmmaking manifesto Holistic Thinking - Integrated Making.
The school has a strong focus on screenwriting, directing and storytelling and to this I hope to bring a holistic apporach of integrated production process to make for self-sufficient, technologically empowered and forward-thinking filmmakers of the future. Filmmakers who think beyond traditional theatrical paradigms and are ready to embrace the myriad of possibilities for what filmmaking is and can be.
Head of IFSS, Duncan Thompson, speakes in this video about the culture of IFSS and what it represents.
A while back i wrote about the very useful series of documents put out by Adobe that addressed Not sofware specific elements but the broader underlying technical base of all digital production. Avid likewise has a similar set of documents that look at HD specifications in clear language and also soem of the workflow processes involved. These documents from post-producion dinosaur Avid are remarkably free of corporate spin or marketing speak and serve well as informative refences.
I particularly liked the way Chris Jones summed up the hyperbole and bullshit often surrounding HDV and compressed formats in context of production history:
"The disadvantages are less apparent though, and rumour and myth don?t help either....I come from the days of film when all sorts of problems could occur, so for every single shot we took, we would also do a second take, whether we needed it or not. We considered the job mission critical and the technology NEVER 100% reliable. In fact, the more I think about it, film and old TV cameras were extremely restrictive and limited, and the complaints I hear about HDV are insignificant in comparison. All formats require care and attention when shooting, and HDV is no different."
With 2008 now upon us and DigitalBasin chalking up more than 200 entries in 2007 I thought it time to reflect on some of the better posted moments on the blog since it started in the first half of 07. So here's the list of my selected best post entries of the past year. If you have a favourite, let me know.
For some time now the video making populous has been sniffing the sweet scent of a tape-less recording future. And while many consumer mums-and-dads have long since ditched tape for the convenience of hard-drive and DVD recording cameras, professionals and indie movie makers have moved a much slower pace of adoption. The reasons for their reticence have been largely well founded with solid-state potentially presenting as many issues as benefits.
Panasonic lead the charge in the tape-less arena introducing the P2 memory card system in its HVX series camera some time back. But up until now they have been rather lonely on a solid state island. Now Sony, obviously having bided its time to see how P2 panned out, has come to the party with its own tape-less, memory card-based HD recording system; the EX1.
This review is in two parts : Part 1 Here and Part 2 Here - which includes a series of full res HD frames direct from the camera showing the rather exceptional dynmaic range and detail clarity of this quite extrodinary camera.
