Check out the 3 minutes entry video which says it all:

Then go grab a semi-public beta at Colin Devroe, or just wait a few hours until it’s public beta.

Heh. But today a friend of mine called and asked:

What do I buy if I want the most crazy wipes out there for Final Cut Pro?

Fair enough. He makes a children’s program, so he DOES need them. It’s part of the deal to make wacky transitions every 6 seconds.

So I made a list of some interesting things:

The Final Cut Pro wipes list

GeniusDV has a tutorial called “Utilizing Gradient Wipes in Final Cut Pro”. It shows how to use a matte image as source for crazy wipes in FCP.

CHV Electronics has a collection of plugins for FCP. One of them is called “The AlphaWipe-collection V1.0″. I have never tried it, but it looks like you get a lot for your $.

CGM also has lots of FCP plugins, and many of them have crazy transitions. Have a look at the demo movies (links are on the top of the page).

Mattias in Sweden makes a great bundle of free FCP plugins. You can download them at mattias.nu. They are not wipes, but they are free and should go into any FCP setup. Donate him some Paypal $ if you use them!

Digital Heaven in UK has some great quality FCP plugins. I use the DH_Subtitle – a subtitle plugin myself. And when it comes to transitions they have the nice DH_WhipPan. The plugins are cheap, and they are great quality.

And finally: Toolfarm has a list of FCP plugins that does transitions.

Do you have any suggestions? Things that actually work?

I think the new version of Motion will be Motion on steroids. Apple will put lots of the stuff Shake can do inside Motion, and now also include the great color tools from Final Touch. I’m not even sure they will continue FinalTouch as separate product. It depends whether they manage to get a work flow for colorists inside Motion.

Yesterday Apple showed their biggest upgrade of Final Cut Pro ever; the Final Cut Studio 2. With new versions of abot everything (except Livetype).

Let me start off with the single most important thing to me as a video editor: Open Format Timeline. With this new feature in FCP, I can drop all my most used video formats in the same timeline… (drum roll) with no rendering!. I’m going to save hours and hours just with this feature. All these formats are supported by this feature:

FinalTouch = Color

Apple bought FinalTouch last autumn, and now they are throwing it into Final Cut Studio 2 – for free! Yes, it’s part of the package. Either you pay $1299 for the a new package, or $499 to upgrade from Final Cut Studio, or $699 from any previous version of FCP – including version 1 from 1999. That’s a very good deal. Applause for Apple, who have sold more then 800,000 copies of Final Cut Pro so far, and will sell tons more with this upgrade.

Have a look at the new features of FinalTouch, now called Color.

I’ll have a full rundown of all important new features of the new Final Cut Studio 2 package soon.

Special invited guests saw the NBA All-star game in 3D HD on February 18th, and now attendees to the NAB exhibition in Las Vegas, get to see the game and hear about the advanced technology behind it.

“Thomp”, at NowPublic saw the All-star game. And is convinced this is the new thing:

…made me feel like I paid 6,000 dollars to sit among the stars on the floor of the hardwood court. The up close FUSION 3D HD action made me forget I was miles away in a theater wearing 3D glasses and the sound was to as if I sitting at courtside. I felt I was so close that when Jay-Z bent over to whisper to Beyonce, I wanted to tap his shoulder and say she with me! Action seemed so close that when a loose ball flew in to the crowd, several people in the theatre (including me) put our hands out to catch it!

He also has some thoughts on the future of the system:

In summary I can see this technology being a big hit in the future especially to the common folk like me who can not pay the large sums of money to partake in these events live. PACE should not limit itself to major sports events like the Super Bowl or the NBA. This technology can be used to see high priced concerts or highly publicized Las Vegas shows. This can be another viable revenue stream for artist and promoters. Instead of booking a plane and hotel ticket, you can jump in your car, drive to your local IMAX Theater and save a couple of thousand dollars.

And – saving the planet while having a great time, I might add.

How is it done?

The technology behind this is exciting. James Cameron is shooting both his forthcoming movies with the same 3D cameras. The $200 million “Avatar” (2008) and the movie adaption of the manga series “Battle Angel Alita”, called “Battle Angel” (2009), are both shot in 3D HD. Cameron and Vince Pace are the founders of Pace 3D technologies that makes the special versions of the camera. Vince Pace is also director of photography, second unit on both movies.

The cameras are customized versions of the US$115,000 Sony HDC-950, in a specially designed rig. The camera sensors are placed 70mm apart to capture left-eye and right-eye imagery seperately. Pace is also developing the camera system to include the newer Sony HDC-1500 HD cameras.

NBA used six Sony cameras to capture the All-star game:

These camera feeds were distributed via fiber to a portable HD fly-pack system (provided by Bexel) in the arena that included a Sony MVS 8000A switcher and an EVS XT[2] server.

The Sony switcher includes a feature that allowed the director to aggregate multiple camera feeds and lock them together. The director then switched the multicamera production as he would a typical game broadcast; but, to get the full 3-D effect, he often held on shots longer than usual. Instant replays and graphics were also presented in 3-D, using the EVS server.

The output of the switcher (two uncompressed HD signals at about 3Gb/s) was sent to the Mandalay Bay ballrooms via fiber cabling. The larger ballroom was set up in a stadium-seating configuration, on risers to give the full effect. The smaller space was standing room only. Images were displayed with two stacked Sony SXRD 4K projectors in each room on 47ft and 30ft screens. The projectors were fitted with a special polarizing filter supplied by 3-D specialists Real D. Audience members wore special polarizing glasses to get the full 3-D effect.

Sports and concerts

Both Marilyn Manson and Gwen Stefani has used this new technology for music videos, and Universal Music Group’s Interscope Record has signed a deal with Pace to use the technology for concerts. Expect to see Dr. Dre, Eminem, U2, Gwen Stefani, 50 Cent, Sheryl Crow and Pussycat Dolls doing their things in 3D at your local cinema soon.

That is, if your local movie theatre can show 3D. Only 700 of 37 000 US movie theatres have 3D projection screens (I have not been able to numbers for the rest of the world). But Sony do of course want to change that:

“We are ready to roll into any theater with the two-projector system.”

…said John Kaloukian, director of Sony Electronics’ professional display group to Reuters (note: Some Reuters articles only stay up for three weeks so this link may go dead after some time).

Most of 700 movie screens with 3D projection, are delivered by Real D, which even has a blog with interesting articles like this one about “Composing for Stereo: The Filmmaker’s Point of View”:

The other concern I call the strength of the stereoscopic image. That is determined by two interrelated factors. One of them is completely new to the stereoscopic cinema, and has no direct counterpart in the planar cinema – and that is the distance between the spacing of the cameras or the camera lenses. Whether we’re shooting live action, or we’re in a CGI virtual space, the distance between the camera’s lenses is a critical factor. We’re going to call whatever we’re shooting with a stereo camera. A stereo camera, unlike a conventional camera, captures two perspective viewpoints. So we’re not going to refer to stereoscopic cameras. We’re going to call it a stereoscopic camera, and we’re going to say it has two lenses – a left lens and a right lens.

The distance or the spacing between the two lenses is called the interaxial spacing – that is, the distance between the lens axes. If you think about it, if the lenses are superimposed – in other words, if the axes had zero spacing – you’re shooting a planar movie. The farther apart the lenses go, the deeper the image looks. The use of this control is closely related to the focal length you use. Wide angle lenses tend to stress perspective, because objects that are closer to the lens appear to be proportionately larger, and the background appears to be smaller. The stereoscopic depth sense, which is technically known as stereopsis, is weighted or scaled by extra-stereoscopic cues – that is, by non-stereoscopic or monocular cues. One of the strongest of these is perspective – and perspective is often determined by the choice of focal length. So it turns out that with wide angle lenses you can use a reduced interaxial, and for telephoto lenses you can use a larger interaxial.

New tools = New ways of thinking! This also may be technology that take people back to the cinemas. If you have a 50″ plasma/LCD screen at home, a blu-ray or HD-DVD player, a great chair and your kitchen nearby – why go to a movie theatre? With 3D HD you have a new reason, as I don’t think there will be a home version of Sony SXRD 4K projectors anytime soon. Not to mention the players delivering the actual movies.

Editing?

I’m curious, how do you edit this? HD with two seperate cameras, one for each eye? What are your options for post processing? Do you need special software or do you edit in “normal” tools like FCP or Avid systems? Feel free to comment below if you know!

Update

Camcorderinfo.com made a video from the Sony/NBA event at NAB, as seen below (you may have to click through to brilliantdays.com/3d-hd too see the video if you read this in a newsreader).

The first one is Xsan tuner, that comes with Xsan:

Speed is calculated to 186 MB/second.

We use DeckLink Extreme HD cards in the Macs (10 bits uncompressed SDI). Blackmagic also has their own test tool for disk speeds, the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test:

Now, the same disks show 136 MB/second.

Which one to trust? BlackMagic make dead solid products, but on this one I hope their tools show the wrong results…

If you need to test your drives for speed, whether you use BlackMagic cards or not, download the DeckLink drivers for Mac OS X or Windows XP, and you’ll get the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test application when you install it. If you don’t need the actual drivers, just “hide away” the app, and uninstall the drivers again.

Xsan tuner can be downloaded from Apple.com.

Why a difference?

Do you have any idea why the two apps show different speeds? 136 MB/second up to 186 MB/second is almost two more streams of uncompressed video in realtime. Less rendering, more done.

O’Reilly also has this video that shows how much cooler multitouch has become in just a year. Go back to my original multitouch post and have a look at the video there. Now, Multitouch is a whole wall.

(Click through too se the video)

But – and this is an important but – there’s still no real OS behind it. When will we see a real operating system using this? The iPhone already has multitouch on it, but that’s only a small screen. And on a closed system: You can’t develop your own apps using multitouch on the iPhone (yet). My guess: Within a year.

Revolutionary

As I was sorting lots of old photos on a table today, this image of me doing the same thing digitally on a wall came to mind. Fast-forward a year or three. Huge LCD-screens are now at a price level where people not driving Ferrari can afford them. So you got your 100″ LCD-screen. Multitouch is now integrated in the OS, and you bring up the photos from the last month in Aperture 2008. All the pictures are in a pile in the middle. You start dragging them into piles according to themes you see. Change them around. See new combinations. Move again. Zoom in on a picture to see details. Zoom out again. All while standing in front of this gorgeous screen and using the best tool ever existed on earth: The hands of a human.

I think Steve Jobs was absolutely right when he compared multitouch to the mouse and the click-wheel at his keynote in January, 2007:

We have been very lucky to have brought a few revolutionary user interfaces to the market – the mouse, the click wheel, and now Multi-Touch.

And just as with the iPod, we don’t see the huge changes this will make. I think multitouch will change the way we use computers, a revolution.

Try this: If you know kids that use a computer, watch them find their way around on it, play games etc. They are fast. It’s second nature for them.

Now watch the same kids playing; Lego, toys, dolls, puzzles, drawings – whatever their favourite is. If they like to draw, and do it a lot, watch how fast they move their hands, change the angle, move the paper, grab a new pen or crayon, put it back and pick a new one. It’s like they don’t watch their hands at all: It just moves around. Precise and fast. Watch kids who build with Lego – look how fast they find tiny pieces, pick them up, turn them in the right position, position them and make something.

Your hands are 100x superior to your computer mouse. Or tablet, trackpad etc.

Of course, you still will be able to write your name lots nicer with a pen than with your finger. And you still will need special input devices for special tasks: Like a shuttlewheel for video editing, a tablet for illustration.

But for lots of the things we now use a mouse on the computer, using your finger is much better. I move around the screen much faster on the Powerbook, than on the MacPro, because of the trackpad. And the trackpad is only one finger! Or actually two, as two fingers scrolls the screen. The thing I miss the most when I’m working on the MacPro, is the two-finger scrolling on the trackpad. Very intuitive and time-saving.

Which apps?

I want Final Cut Pro with multitouch: Zoom in and out on the timeline. Move clips around on the timeline. Trim or expand with two fingers. Mix the sound with 10 fingers, right on the screen. Manipulate videos in 3D space. Colorcorrect.

Aperture with multitouch: Make stacks of pictures on a virtual table. Sort. Mix. Change. Zoom in and out. Retouch or colorcorrect. Drag pictures into albums. Move them around. A lot. And really fast.

Soundtrack Pro with multitouch: Expand loops. Timestretch and pitch change. Mixing again. Tapping the rhythm to change tempo. Same thing with Logic. Tap different drums. Play a piano right on the screen for easy note entry without your keyboard with you. With real chords.

And Finder with multitouch! Move files around. Stack them and sort them. Zooming and panning on a huge desktop.

Suddenly the worlds most advanced OS, Mac OS X, seem so old-fashioned and restrained…

Update: Multitouch Logic

Infinite Loop at Ars Technica is on to similar thoughts:

Basically the rumor is this: There will be no Logic 8. The successor to Logic 7 will have a new name. The unnamed application will be 10.5 only and will work with a new line of touch sensitive Apple displays. Also, it will be an OMG PROTOOLS KILLER!@!!

I’d love to throw out ProTools. Talk about overrated!

Aperture solves that, and so far I’m very happy about the 1.5 version.

And just the other day I was putting “figure out how to export lots of pictures from Aperture to FCP quick and easy” in my todo-list. Then comes “Aperture to Final Cut Pro” from Connected Flow. Check. Great work, Fraser! There’s a dead-easy manual online and the price is nice (read: Free).

Also check out the excellent Flickrexport for iPhoto and Aperture.

Final Print is a standalone application which prints a list of markers from a Final Cut Pro sequence. This provides a very useful workflow enhancement when handing off a project to someone else for further work.

Excellent little application from Digital Heaven. I also recommend their Final cut Pro plugins, of which I own DH_SubTitle. It does what it says: Make subtitles. (I’m so lucky that I live in an European country where we DO NOT DUB foreign movies, but subtitle them. Going to movies in other European countries (or watching other European channels) is a total nightmare. Dubbing ruins movies…)

Now, back to subject. Digital Heaven is run by talented Martin Baker, who also has made the VideoSpace widget, a widget all video editors should have on their Dashboard.

—

Apple let the iPhone out of the box today… and wow! It’s a revolution, especially on the UI side.

So now we know where the multi-touch technology that Jeff Han demoed at TEDtalk in february 2006 went. In the iPhone.

Just to remind you, here’s the video at Google again:

And for rss readers: Here’s the direct link.

Now, watch how it is used in the iPhone.

Where do you think all the other cool things Jeff demoes will go? Obviously 10.5. All MacBooks and MacBook Pros could use the same technology with the touch pad. Or maybe the rumoured new Apple display will have a similar multi-touch feature as the iPhone? Just think about it. Apple has already done this now, on a small scale in the iPhone. Mind-boggling.

Used in Pro apps

Imagine having this way of working in the pro apps; Final Cut Pro, Motion, Logic. Zoom in and out of timelines. Zooming on video effects. Controlling faders and graphs directly on the screen. And you could use your fingers to draw vectors for movements, and easier graphics work. It would be so much more organic. Like playing on the computer, using it more like a musical instrument. I would love it.

4 minutes into the video, Jeff moves around lots of pictures with his hands. Imagine using that to organize your content before putting it on the timeline.

The new OS?

What if the new OS X worked like this in the Finder? Zooming into folders, organizing content. Sorting and analyzing. That would certainly be something different than Vista!

So Eirik, it’s Apple-shares you should buy.

The guys behind it are setting up a company and hope to put it into production. Where can I buy shares?

Or rather – bought. Apple shares went up 8.3% today.

Eirik also has a nice video of the screen in action at Siggraph 2006

Update: TED blog

Several blogs write about this, including the TED Blog. Chris Anderson asked Jeff Han about multitouch, and he answered:

The iPhone is absolutely gorgeous, and I’ve always said, if there ever were a company to bring this kind of technology to the consumer market, it’s Apple. I just wish it were a bit bigger so I could really use both of my hands.

Hm. Does it make you any wiser? A bit secretive?

Just to make this a little more fun, seven different computeres at Apple read this post some minutes after it was digged… Read into it what you want. I still think 2007 will be an amazing year for Apple.

Update 2: Exciting updates coming?

Now Jeff Han comments on the project page for multitouch:

Update: Yes, we saw the keynote too! We have some very, very exciting updates coming soon- stay tuned!

(via daringfireball). Still in doubt something big is in the works?

Update 3: Fast company

Fast Company has an article about Jeff Han, which was done before the iPhone launch:

Not everyone is sold on Han’s idea. Ben Shneiderman, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland and a founding director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab, calls Han a “great showman” who has “opened the door to exciting possibilities.” But he doesn’t think Han’s technology would be suitable for a large-scale consumer product, nor as useful as a mouse on a large display. If you are standing in front of the screen, Shneiderman wonders, how would people behind you be able to see what you’re doing?

One way, Han counters, is for the demonstrator to simply move his ass out of the way. Another: Use a drafting-table display, as Han did at TED, and project the image on a wall-size screen.

But criticisms like these are a million light years from Han’s mind. We’re in his cluttered and cramped office at NYU. Books line a shelf, and a skein of wires unfurls across the floor. A computer circuit board is half taken apart (he stopped losing screws long ago), and a nearby whiteboard contains blueprints and sketches of the touch screen, plus a clever trick for hacking programming code.

Han is explaining why he formed Perceptive Pixel. “I want to create an environment where I can create technology, get it into the hands of someone to market it, and move on to other technologies so I can keep innovating,” he says. “I want to be a serial entrepreneur: Incubate an idea, get it to a good state, and make that an enabler to get to the next state. It’s every researcher’s fantasy.”

Update 4: Fingerworks

According to both Engadget and Charles Arthur, it is FingerWorks technology that is inside the iPhone. Apple bought their technology some time ago.

If you head over to FingerWorks.com, you’ll see…

Important note!

FingerWorks has ceased operations as a business.

FingerWorks products are no longer available for resale, and no further updates to software drivers will be developed.

The fun thing is that both Jeff Han and FingerWorks call their technology Multitouch.

Update 5: Revolution!

You may want to know how multitouch will revolutionize your computer/…

I’m finishing a major upgrade (way, way too long in coming) and starting to look for new ways to make the filters bigger, faster and better.

He also want’s you to help with the new filters, so if you have some answers on these questions…

• Which filters do you use most?
• What formats are you working in? (SD, HD, HDV, DVCPRO, Red, etc)
• How did you first learn about Joe’s Filters?
• What other plugins do you use?
• What kinds of new tools would you like to see? (existing things done better, or things that haven’t been done yet)

His e-mail is in the sidebar, bottom right at joesfilters.com.

I use lots of Joe’s Filters in Final Cut Pro, on almost all projects. I can highly recommend them. They are great value for your money, and you can try them out before buying.

For $95 you get…

Joe’s Levels
Joe’s Sampled Color Levels
Joe’s Saturation & Colorize
Joe’s Simple Saturation
Joe’s Threshold & Posterize
Joe’s Bevel & Emboss
Joe’s Drop Shadow
Joe’s Inner Shadow
Joe’s Channel Blur
Joe’s Diffuser
Joe’s Motion Blur
Joe’s Generators
Joe’s Ellipse
Joe’s Shapes
Joe’s Color Noise
Joe’s Levels Noise
Joe’s Noise Reducer
Joe’s Saturation Noise
Joe’s Soft Stuff
Joe’s Soft Ellipse
Joe’s Soft Gradients
Joe’s Soft Shapes
Joe’s Soft Spot
Joe’s Color Glow
Joe’s Flexi-Smear
Joe’s Gradients
Joe’s Maximizer
Joe’s Pixelizer
Joe’s Frame Rate Adjuster
Joe’s Time Bender
Joe’s Broadcast Legalizer
Joe’s De-Interlacer
Joe’s Field Blender
Joe’s Field Fixer
Joe’s Multi-Frame Blender
Joe’s Y/C Corrector

Screenshot: The latest creations in the Flickr Amazing Circles group

But now there are 1 002 members in the Amazing Circles Flickr group, and member number 1 000 is JJjunki from Tsukuba, Japan. Welcome! Here’s a circle JJjunki made.

The group now approcahes 10 000 Amazing Circles, with the most active members close to 200 circles each.

Also, a big applause for Nadano Kamome, who started this with the picture “How to edit Reversing world” in October 2005. I almost met Kamome in April 2006, when I visited Japan with my family. Almost, because we couldn’t find a spot and time where we both could be at the same time. I think we even passed each other on different trains between Kyoto and Kobe at some point! Next time, Kamome, I promise! I’m definitely going back to Japan, which was just brilliant. Remind me finishing my Japan series that I started (brilliantdays.com – tag “Japan”), but never finished.

If you do a Google search for “Amazing Circles”, you’ll get over 37 000 hits. That’s a quite a bit for a name I “invented” only 15 months ago. According to Trendmapper (Amazing Circles chart), it has been as high as about 95 000 hits back in May 2006. And when Digg caused a stampede in February 2006, the site went down. Heh.

Some people have gone bananas with pictures of themselves. So if you want to make some really scary new year’s cards…

The Power Of Video Editing Video – video powered by Metacafe

Related on brilliantdays: How to make special effects in movies

With Xsan cataloging using Proximity artbox and project level integration between artbox and Final Cut Pro, users are able to acheive streamlined collaborative workflow.

Artbox has partnered with all the big names in the video production industry: Apple, ENPS, Avid, Chyron, Discreet, Grass Valley, Omneon, Quantel and Sony.

This is a perfect match for Apple, and I’m sure they’ll develop Artbox into an ever better product. Apple don’t even need to change the name – “Apple Artbox” sounds just as good as the other names in their pro video portfolio.

(Screenshot: Artbox asset management)

Have a look at the screen shots or the tutorial video.

I’ve been testing Aperture for some time, and it’s an amazing program. But I like iPhoto a lot too. There are many features in iPhoto that Aperture doesn’t have, and the other way. So I find it difficult to decide which one to use. If I could have one wish for Aperture and iPhoto: Use the same database and folder structure. I don’t care which one, where or how. Just use the same database.

So that everything I do in iPhoto (tagging, easy picture manipulation like removing red eyes, putting together some calenders and books), also shows up in Aperture.

And when I do advanced editing/correction/tagging in Aperture, it should immediately show up in iPhoto. And be available in all apps that tap into the media from the iApps, like Pages, iWeb, Keynote, Comic Life, Disc Cover etc.

I guess you could send large files to a client with some of the many services that lets you do that: Upload huge files. But Xprove focuses on viewing and commenting on clips. Clips can have different states; “active”, “approved”, “archived”, “offline”. This is typically what a client might see at her end:

It’s a free 30-day test period. After that prices are from $15 to $40 a month for the different plans, depending on bandwidth and storage. If you’re not sure which plan covers your needs, try the nifty calculator to find out.

If you’re using Xprove and have any comments, I’d love to hear what you think!

Now, let’s add things up here:

• Apple has said that Shake is not to be updated.
• Apple has bought Silicon Color and the Final Touch color correction app
• Motion never became the killer app Apple wanted it to be

Motion is way cool, but I’m not sure that most Final Cut Users have discovered it yet. As I written before; I think the new version of Motion will be Motion on steroids. Apple will put lots of the stuff Shake can do inside Motion, and now also include the great color tools from Final Touch. I’m not even sure they will continue FinalTouch as separate product. It depends whether they manage to get a work flow for colorists inside Motion.

So getting better color correction in Final Cut Pro and Motion is reason number one for buying Silicon Color. Number two isn’t that obvious but I’m sure it’s a just as big reason for Apple: Aperture. Put the color tools of FinalTouch inside Aperture, add the realtime engines of Motion and finally the Core Image and (the new) Core Animation.html of OS X 10.5. What do you get? A app for processing photos that can compete with Photoshop. And lots more.

Steve Jobs loves photos. I don’t know whether he’s a photographer himself, but search for “Steve Jobs keynotes” on Google Video or YouTube, and watch when he demonstrates iPhoto. Always great photos, always quality. I’m sure Aperture – already an amazing application – will take giant steps forward with the color tools from FinalTouch added in the 2.0 version.

Kate Winslet about to get her left foot removed.

Notice the cool sound effects…

Fireflies,
originally uploaded by BURИBLUE.

…and this is what you get. Amzingly cool photo by Toby Keller (“Burnblue”). Put your camera on a tripod, and open the shutter for 323 seconds. Yes. 323. It must have been very dark when shot. But look at the great colors. And the fireflies seem to have been flying on command.

See my other favourites at Flickr here.

Update: 92 seconds ain’t bad either…

…trash, backup and refresh your Final Cut Pro preferences with the click of a button. Can be used with all Mac OS X compatible versions of Final Cut Pro (version 3.x thru 5.1).

(via The TV Weasel)

28 chapters is – or rather will be – a movie with 28 parts (“chapters”) that will be made by 28 different people or groups from around the world. The story is developed along the way, but will progress more or less in the same way as a regular short movie will, even though the actors and setting will change every 30-45 second. That is: Even though the actors and setting change every chapter, the story of the movie continues like nothing had changed.

28 chapters is one continious movie with 28 actors playing the same main caracter in 28 different locations around the world made by 28 different moviemakers.

As of today, six chapters are finished. So you can still have your 45 seconds of fame.

So here’s a small mindmap on how to rule the world, a project quite a lot of people seem to be having on their list.

Make the mindmap, and save it. When you make a document in OS X, you get a small icon right in front of the name of the document, in the title bar at the top. Before saving it’s greyed out, and everytime you make changes it also greys out.

But hit Apple-S and the icon gets colors. And – you can drag it.

Exposé is an amazing productivity tool

For dragging to be useful, I have set up Exposé like this:

In English: If you drag the cursor to the lower left corner of your screen, Exposé will show all your open windows, in all apps. That’s the one we’re going to use.

Now, in OmniOutliner Pro, make a new project (“Rule the world”) in your Kinkless file, and hit Apple and Esc to make a comment on it. This opens up a field just below the projects name, where you can put notes and stuff that are not sub-tasks. Like this:

In my example I’ve just typed a reference to my mindmap: “My mindmap for ruling the world”. Just leave the cursor where it is after typing that, and switch to OmniOutliner Pro. Click the little icon in the title bar and start dragging. The icon now becomes a little bigger.

Drag the icon down to the lower left corner of your screen, the one we set up in Exposé. Now all your open windows pop up on the screen. Look for the window with your Kinkless projects in OmniOutliner Pro. Move the cursor up again and “park” on top of that window. Wait half a second or so. Finder will now zoom in on that window. Drop the icon right after the text you wrote previously.

Now you have a link to the mindmap directly from your Kinkless projects. Double-click the icon, and NovaMind opens with your mindmap.

Other ways to do this

As always in OS X, there are many ways to do things. You can drag from a window to another, if both are visible. Here I’m dragging a file saved in TextEdit directly into OmniOutliner Pro.

You can also start dragging the icon from the mindmap, use Alt-Tab to switch between apps and then drop the icon.

Forget import or open commands

With this method, you almost never have to import or link to files with a dialog window. You make the document you need, save it to the right place, and drag it into the app you want to use it. I use it for Livetype files in Final Cut Pro, Photoshop files in Final Cut Pro and InDesign, and in general all kinds of graphics, sound, video and text files into apps that use them. No more Apple-I. A huge timesaver. At it looks cool.

The promos will be judged on “…originality (30% of score), creativity (30% of score), and ability to generate interest in watching “The Office.” (40% of score)”. The winners will appear at the end of selected episodes of “The Office” and on NBC.com.

…It has been an absolute pleasure to serve the visual effects community for the past 9 years. We are looking forward to continuing to support you and are especially looking forward to working with you again. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy this new version of Shake.

Frank thinks – and so do I – that there will be a new version of Motion with all the goodies from Shake inside. Why?

Motion never became the product Apple hoped it to be. After Effects users kept using After Effects, as Motion didn’t have all the features After Effects have. As Frank says: “Motion was no match for After Effects.”

But with all the power of Shake inside, and the new power of Intel-based Macs, Motion would be a amazing tool for high-end graphics and compositing. It would also mean that the stuff that is inside of Shake today, in the future will be inside the Final Cut Pro Studio package. So you get software previously priced at $2500 included with the Final Cut Pro Studio, at the moment priced at $1100 at Amazon.com.

All this is of course speculation from my side, and Apple is known to surprise us.

They already have by annoucing “the death” of Shake, a magnificent piece of software, used for compositing on blockbusters as King Kong and the Lord of the rings series. And when Apple ditches great stuff, it’s almost always because there’s something even cooler coming.

For now, there’s Shake to be bought for $499, and I would think that all the trained Shake users, will have a huge head start when and if the new “Shaked Motion” comes out.

Here’s something fun made in Shake, by my good friend Norby.

(If you’re reading this in a newsreader, you may have to click through to the site to see it)

Here’s a how-to on how to create quite realistic looking bubbles on your pictures, using Photoshop or GIMP. It’s based on the Amazing circles technique I have written about before. Join the Amazing circles group at Flickr if you make any, bubbles or not.

Google buying Sketchup is good news, and I hope the first thing they do is to lower the price (at least I can hope). I guess some people, like architects and designers would worry that Google turns Sketchup into an app only for 3D for web. @Last Software explains:

I can’t stress this enough: the 3D world just got a huge boost, so please don’t worry about SketchUp or our mission. Think about it this way: we haven’t traded in the Honda for a Porsche; we’ve strapped a rocket to the Honda. SketchUp is still SketchUp, but now it will go places it couldn’t possibly have gone before.

Somehow that image is a bit disturbing. Strapping a rocket to a Honda? Reminds of the 1995 Darwin Awards winner (lately confirmed as a bogus), about the guy who strapped a JATO unit to his Chevy. Must be one of the funniest bogus stories ever.

Update

TUAW thinks Google is working on it’s own operating system:

I wonder if this is another move for Google into releasing their own operating system, as has been rumored for some time now. They’re actively acquiring desktop applications, resources, and programmers to make such a move. A free Google Linux, or even a suite of Google Web 2.0 applications that run on the platform independent Internet, would be an interesting competitor to Microsoft’s stranglehold on the desktop marketplace.

3D ads?

Hmmm. Maybe they are, but I think Sketchup was bought to give people a great tool to build 3D content for Google Earth. My guess: In some time it will be possible to make a 3D model in Sketchup, but an ad from Google Adsense, get a code from the Adsense page, put that code into your 3D model, and as people fly over your business, they’ll see your sign/ad/whatever.

See this picture from Google Earth. It’s downtown Chicago with buildings mapped on it from Sketchup.

3D Navigation system?

Or maybe they will use Sketchup to make better 3D maps for cars? Google and VW is making a GPS car navigation system together. Imagine if all buldings you drive by were mapped already in the car navigation system? That would be a whole lot more precise than just flat maps. Add Google’s database of businesses, shops etc, and you have a system where you could park anywhere, type any product into the nav system, and Google will take you there with 3D maps showiing the way: You: “Toyota tires”. Nav system: “Go forward on E14 700m, turn left…” (and shows buildings leading up to that left turn).

Lower the price

Like I said, the price need to go down. Fraser Speirs has some thoughts on this.

I hope this is an acquisition in the style of Picasa (which was released more-or-less as-is but for free) and not in the style of Urchin (which completely screwed over TextDrive in a big way).

And finally: Official Googleblog post about this.

Does anyone know if there is something similar for the Mac, or if it is possible to port it to OS X? See more pictures made with Chaoscope here and here.

PS. Click the “FCP” tag under this post to see other posts about Final Cut Pro and the other apps in the Final Cut Pro Suite.

I’m sure people will switch to much bigger displays in the years to come. A 17″ display is just way too small to work effeciently on. Of course, it depends, if you just are going to write and do nothing with the text but write from a to z, 17″ is ok. But as soon as you need to start editing and making structural changes, you need a bigger display.

When editing in Final Cut Pro, I use both a 17″ Powerbook, and G5s with 22″ and “23″ displays. The 17″ Powerbook is much better than the 15″, but if you are working a lot with keyframing of effects and motions, it’s way too small. The 22″ is wide enough, but not tall enough. 23″ is better, but after working on a 30″ at a demo… (I want!)

Bigger = faster

With a bigger display you look at your work more the way you look at your desk. It took me some time to get used to it, but then something happens. You start you use tools faster and better, you can put things you need to have around open next to what you’re doing. You don’t have to scroll as much, and can use your eyes and your amazing brain to find information fast by scanning over text and visual information.

If you want some more background and research, first head over to the display pages at Apple.com, and mouse over the the 20″, 23″ and 30″ displays (the numbers) at the page. You get a very clear visual on how much bigger the 30″ is. What I especially liked was that it’s so much higher. The 23″ is wide enough for most things, but not tall enough. When I edit in Final Cut Pro, I need a tall monitor, because I need to see as many tracks as possible. This would be the same all software working with tracks and timelines: Flash, After Effects, DVD Studio Pro, Logic, ProTools etc.

At the same page, Apple has put up a pdf report on how much more productive you become with a 30″ display. They want to sell bigger displays, but I totally agree with the results.

Significantly improve productivity

37signals had an interesting article about bigger screens in October 2005.

One veteran researcher claimed he has “never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user’s productivity.” On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly – and some as much as 44 percent more quickly.

Microsoft has an article on the same subject, also talking about how much better it is to have two displays instead of one:

Give someone a second monitor, let them use it for while, and then try to take it away. It just isn’t going to happen. They’ll never go back to a mono display. Researchers in the Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment group (VIBE), found that increasing a computer user’s display space made it easier for them to complete their tasks.

Women think wider

The Microsoft article also says that woman need bigger displays to be able to work better, because of the way their brains work differently than men:

So we need to support females with big displays, with wider fields of views when they’re doing intense navigation tasks. They’ve been at a disadvantage in any 3D system, but just give them a wider field of vision and smooth graphics, and they’re good to go.”

Bigger TVs -> bigger computer displays

People now are buying 42″ and 52″ LCD and plasma TVs for their living room. And most of these TVs can be used with your computer too. So what does happen when you go back to the 17″ in the office after using your Media Center with a 42″ all weekend? You feel like someone put on blinds. Not a good feeling.

If I were to buy a new display for my computer, I would buy nothing less than 23″. And not a portable with less than 17″ (unless you need to hide it away in a tiny bag, or just need it to dump your pictures when traveling).

Update 1: Eric Mack

Eric Mack points back to this post. Thanks, Eric!

Update 2: Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble has a long post about how to improve Microsoft. One of his points is to buy every employee of Microsoft a new fast computer and dual monitors:

I’ve seen the productivity benefits that dual monitors can bring. Every employee who has them says having two monitors is transformational. Especially coders who can have one screen for typing code and another for designing UIs. Or, even if they are just an algorithm kind of person, the second one keeps their email showing so they don’t need to switch over when a new email shows up.

Heck, I’d go further. If we want to reach the Second Life generation we need three screens. One to run Second Life (and other kinds of social apps), one to run Visual Studio, and one to run Outlook. Or something like this. Go and watch the researchers at Microsoft Research who are working on multiple screen interfaces. They told me that industry researchers are seeing somewhere between a five to 15% productivity gain when someone goes from one monitor to two.

This make sense to me. Even if I totally understand Merlin Mann in his articles about attention, mindfullnes and always on, I often need to pay attention to several things at once. And having a third display just for IM and social apps is a good idea!

Question: What is the difference between Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Avid’s Media Composer?

Answer: None.

Not at least when it comes to creating first-class, professional results in a timely manner. They both get the job done on-budget and on-time.

But when it comes to how we approach our projects or how we interact with the software itself, there are some meaningful differences. I generally classify these differences into two types: Big picture and Smaller stuff.

In the newsletter Pamela Robinson continues her series on successful interviewing, and also answers questions from readers of the newsletters. Like this answers from a woman thinking about how having a baby could influence her career.

If you are in the creative arena, there is more of a tolerance and acceptance of kids… in fact many of the creative execs, writers, & directors bring their children to work at times, and have the flexibility to take time off when needed – for a doctor’s appointment or a soccer game. However, the more corporate positions (on the business side) tend to be less tolerant of catering to the children’s needs, and of course this varies from company to company.

I think she is right. In the creative arena, where I work, there IS a bigger tolerance of kids. And their parents! And exactly that is why many of us are so creative. Yes. It’s as simple as this: People who spend a significant amount of time with kids get a new way to look at things. And also learn that there is no need to take themselves so seriously all the time. Not to mention perspective: After washing poo or nursing a fever sick child, you do think differently the next time you sit down with your Wacom tablet. Taking your small kids to work also helps you see things that you didn’t think about at all before: Why did you put that thing over there? Why do you have to do it like that?

I even let the kids make promos with me. They loved it, the result was excellent, and my boss was happy. And the show got lots of viewers.

How to make amazing circles

You make your own amazing circles, the full instructions are here. And do post them on the Amazing circles group at Flickr.

Promax members – upload your pictures!

Promax BDA has conferences all over the world, in cities like Vienna, Dubai, Jakarta, Mumbai and New York this year. If you’re attending on of these conferences, take pictures and upload them to the Promax group at Flickr. So far there are only pictures from Promax Athens 2005, so find those pictures and upload them! See my post about sharing your Promax BDA pictures.

The picture is from a presentation by Carlos Ferreyros, Creative Director of ca square, USA. The slide reads “Vision without action is daydreaming. Action without vision is a nightmare.” I think it is a Japanese proverb. Do you know?

Update: The picture used in the article is also at Flickr, here.

It also has a list with the colors on the iPods. That is, the colors they used to have. Now, with the iPod mini gone, they are only black and white.

I guess one of them is David April, who has made some circles at Flickr. I checked out his site and found a good idea for the christmas cards. If you don’t think my cow card was good enough, how about a Harry Potter Card with your own kids and your dog?

You need a camera, kids, a dog and Photoshop. Check it out.

The Photoshopped transparent photos group takes it one step further. Use some Photoshop magic and obects appear transparent even if they’re not. Here’s one example:

(Picture by simplethingsuask)

Now, I won’t write anything about this until member number 1 000…

A very short summary:
- Public broadcasters should use open standards
- People in general agree on this
- Microsoft Windows Media is not an open standard
- The public broadcasters should choose something else
- People question the knowledge of the broadcasters

Is there an open streaming platform that can meet the demands of broadcasters that wants an alternative to Windows Media. Eirik at Eirikso.com wants to know.

Still, I fail to find one single blog, comment or article that actually suggest a complete, working alternative.

Post suggestions to the article, or use Del.icio.us with tag “opencast”.

If you need to do calculations from timecode to lenghts on film…

…there is the new TC Studio from Spherico. It’s very under testing, so use at own risk. And don’t be surprised if the download link dies.

Update: Another timecode calculator .

Make a square selection

1. Open an image in Photoshop (screenshots are from Photoshop CS2 on Mac). Higher resolution and size will give better results. I have used a picture I took myself some time ago. If you want to use the same picture for this How to, you can find it here.

2. You need to make a selection that is squared. Use the selection tool, and set the aspect ratio to fixed:

3. Enter the same number in both fields. 1 and 1 works.

4. Make a selection.

Apply the filter

5. Apply the filter Polar Coordinates:

6. In this step, use the bottom radio button, marked “Polar to Rectangular”:

7. Now your image will turn into something that may look interesting at best, but we're not yet there:

Rotate and apply filter again

8. Rotate the selection 180 degrees. There are a few different ways to do this. One of them is to use the Edit menu, then Transform and Rotate 180 degrees.

9. Now apply the same filter we did in point 5. But do NOT just choose it from the top of the Filter menu. We are going to change one of the parameters so you have to choose it from Filters > Distort > Polar Coordinates… again.

This time, choose the upper radio button, labeled “Rectangular to Polar”:

Crop and save

10. Crop your picture to get rid of the stuff surrounding your new Amazing circle:

11. Voila!

Save and upload to Flickr.

12. I have created a group for Amazing circles. Please join!

You might want to have a look at all the other posts I have about Flickr!

Update 1: 100 members

Now 100 members on the Flickr group. Read about it here.

Update 2: 400 members

As of December 25, 2005, the Flickr group has over 400 members, and appproaching 3 500 amazing circles. Wow!

Update 3: Digged

Digged!

Update 4: Amazing circles with GIMP

Flatfield at Flickr has posted instructions how to make Amazing Circles with GIMP.

Update 5: Dumpr.net

If you’re lazy just use the new automatic Amazing circles tool at Dumpr.net.

Sponsored links

Total training: New Advanced Adobe Photoshop CS Training.

Amazon.com: The Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers

Amazon.com: Adobe Photoshop CS2 for Photographers: A Professional Image Editor’s Guide to the Creative Use of Photoshop for the Macintosh and PC

The whole set is here.

UPDATE: See how to do this yourself!

It’s still in beta, and is free. It will also be free when it’s final. LinoType does this beacuse the program has access to the LinoType font store, just as iTunes has the iTunes music store.

One cool feature is that FontExplorer X can activate fonts missing from documents for Quark and Adobe apps. You can find them in your collection or buy them online.

When the model is finished, you can upload it to Lego.com, and buy a kit with your model.

But it never made it to the official arrangements at the festival, due to criticism in the Gay and Lesbian community. On the net it’s a different story: A huge success, with over 80 000 downloads and over 500 GB in downloads during this weekend.

Idea

The idea comes from advertising agency Kitchen in Oslo, which also have clients like McDonalds in Norway.

Technical details

The movie itself is made by Toxic design studio in Oslo. It is animated by talented 3D manager Rune Spaans, who made an animatic in 3ds Max first. 20-25 pics were put together with “temp” music, and discussed with Kitchen to see if the story and cut was right.

Version 1 of the animatic is here, and version 2 here.

Rune then had to download way too many pictures of sperm and Colonoscopy for research. At work! LOL.

He then made an advanced test in 3ds Max, which didn’t work out the way he wanted it too. Switching to Maya didn’t work out either. Back to 3ds Max again, this time with a simpler setup, which worked.

The passes were done with RPManager in 3ds Max, 16 bit greyscale.It was rendered in Brazil and composited in Digital Fusion. An almost finished version of the animation is here.

With several thousand sperms in some pictures, some of the frames took over five hours to render. The sperms have a glasslike surface that mimics jellyfish. The whole thing took over a week to render on Toxic’s render farm.

Music

The music is made by Verdens sterkeste mann (The World’s strongest man). Brilliant name for a company.

Rune has even made a director’s cut of the movie. I won’t tell you what the yellow thing is…

There’s also a technical explanation about the production here – in Norwegian.

Controversy

The movie got lots of criticism in the Gay and Lesbian community in Oslo. Many people thinks it encourages people to have sex without a condom. And thereby undermining the work with HIV and AIDS information. Other critics don’t like the fact the the Lesbians are forgotten in the ad. Which in turn made Europride turn down the movie, and not include it in the festival.

Read more about the controversy in Gay and Lesbian paper Blikk

(Siemens press picture).

Second: Complete Digital Photography has made lots of Photoshop Automator Actions. With these, you can automate lots of boring tasks in Photoshop CS and CS2.

Then head over to “Getting things done with Automator and Spotlight” and see how to use these in a brilliant way!

If you’re looking at a volume graph in ProTools, you can’t see the pan graph at the same time. Or if you are keyframing parameters in an eq, you can’t see the graphs for all the parameters at the same time. It’s so lame. Work one hour in After Effects or Motion or almost any program that deals with keyframes on a timeline, and you’ll see how lame ProTools is on this thing.

Try this: Grab a DV-camera and have someone run in front of you, starting on the lawn outside the house, into the front door, trough a long narrow hall, into a big livingroom, then a kitchen, and out on the lawn again, screaming all the way, all in one take. Then replace the original sound (which includes your own feet tramping) with a new scream from the studio. Then add the right eq and reverb etc. on the whole take, to make it realistic.

It’s a total mess in ProTools.

You have to change between the different graphs about 8 000 times. I once discussed this with a DigiDesign representative, and aske why they don’t adobt the multiple graph approach that graphics and video applications have. All I got was a answer like “people are used to doing it this way”. Oh, then leave it the way it is.

I will eat this post if Final Cut Pro is the “latest version announced” the day after NAB, 22nd of April.

Here’s what I would like to see in FCP 5.0:

Move before import
I would like to see a checkbox somewhere when I’m importing something. When this is checked, files are moved to the current Capture scratch folder before importing. I’ve blogged about this before.

One click CD import
In the File menu I would like to see: Import drom audio CD. Then a iTunes-ish window pops up, where I check which tunes to import. Or listen to them. When clicking import, all files go to your projects folder in Capture scratch, inside a folder marked by CD name, artist etc (just like iTunes does).

One click Backup project
Put “Backup project” in a menu somewhere. Pick a sequence or several, and choose “Backup project”. It saves all files that can’t be batched. That is imported soundfiles from CDs, graphic files etc. But not things that came from tapes, those can be batched (batch digitize). FCP then collects all the files, reports if any are missing, and asks for a destination. And tell you to insert an empty DVD if you want to backup to DVD. The folder (or DVD) it then creates is called “(name of project) backup 040205″ by default but yoy can change it. It also puts a PDF-file with the names of the tapes needed to batch the sequence. That way, you can give the DVD to an assistant without FCP on his Mac, and he/she still will be able to find the tapes and put them at your desk.

iTunes and iPhoto tabs in Browser
I would like an iTunes tab in the Final Cut Pro browser. Just like we have “Effects”. When clicking this tab I see all my iTunes tracks, and also my playlists. This would be a HUGE timesaver, as we have all our audio effects in iTunes. With a iTunes Tab I could get to all the sound effects without using other software.

Same goes with iPhoto, even though it’s much more seldom I need photos in FCP.

Multiuser iTunes enviroment
This is not a Final Cut Pro wish, but adresses an important issue for FCP users working at bigger post houses or schhols where several stattions are connected through a fast network or a SAN. Let’s say you have 200 sound effects CDs that you want 10 FCP Macs to share. You insert every single one into iTunes on one Mac and import every track (in 48 KHz of course). Thanks to CDDB you don’t have to type all the names!

When all the sound effects are imported, and stored in a single folder on the SAN or network, go to every FCP Mac and import the whole folder again. Remember to check off that option that moves songs you import. The whole point is that the sounds should stay at the server/SAN.

OK, so now we have 10 FCP Macs with access to all our sound effects. The licence for this is of course ok. No stealing here.

Then, next week, you get 15 more CDs. You import them on the first Mac, then what? Then you have to do the same import again for all 10 Macs. No good.

iTunes is a great program for music and sound effects. Apple should make a version that lets an administrator update the library on several Macs from one central location. Not to steal or copy music illegally, but to make things easier for the companies that uses their other software, like Logic and Final Cut Pro.

It could be connected in some way to Apple Remote Desktop 2, or maybe XSAN. And only work on the same subnet. This would prevent it from being misused by people who just want to copy music between Macs.

What are your top wishes?

So the next time I want to import a file from a server somewhere, i don’t have to…

1. Switch to Finder
2. Locate the file on the server
3. Locate my projects Capture scratch folder in another window
4. Copy the file from the server to Capture scratch
5. Switch to Final Cut
6. Choose import file
7. Locate file and press OK

The checkbox would read “Move to Capture scratch before importing”. With it checked, Final Cut would move the file you are about to import, from wherever it is located, to the current Capture scratch folder of your project.

See also Final Cut Pro – the Larry way.

I will post about my top wishes for FCP 5 later.

Larry has published a book on FCP too; Final Cut Pro HD Hands-on Training (Hands on Training (H.O.T)). I highly recommend it and will post a review about it soon!