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PAST MEETINGS 22 September 2002 — By Mary A.C. Fallon Software applications that can enhance your filmmaking was the focus of Mac Filmmakers Sept. 18 meeting with demonstrations of Synthetik's Studio Artist 2.0 and Adobe Photoshop in combination with Final Cut Pro. Synthetik's Studio Artist 2.0 Demo'd Because Synthetik founder John Dalton was unable to join us, Mac Filmmakers' founding member Alutha Jamancar, assisted by Jim Jhao, explained this award-winning software application that combines raster painting with the editability of vector paths to allow filmmakers to create paint and drawing effects on their films. Studio Artist 2.0 examines your source image, say a film or video, and based on its built-in intelligent visual perception abilities automatically or interactively re-renders it to simulate natural art materials. A digital video image of sunflowers in sunlight can easily be re-render to look similar to van Gogh's own. Studio Artist 2.0 offers more than 2,000 painting and drawing pre-sets and lets you enhance your filmmaking with realtime warp effects, 3-D painting lights, and kaleidoscope and symmetry effects. Enhancing your film with Studio Artist 2.0 may sound ambitious but the Macintosh(tm)-only application comes with eight hours of QuickTime (tm) tutorials to get you going. Alutha showed how a digital video image could be processed to look like pastel chalks with black ink lines layered on top. Jim says be prepared for long processing times when you use a lot of effects. But, "you can kick out extraordinary effects with this incredibly powerful tool. It's a must-have," said Alutha. The application is resolution independent and it can generate broadcast quality video from low-resolution QuickTime source movies. Studio Artist 2.0 retails for about $380 and comes with both a Classic and an OS 10 version in the box. A full version of Studio Artist was raffled to an enthusiastic crowd at night's end. (Our thanks to John Dalton!) Check it out a www.synthetik.com or at MacWorld in January. (Ed. Note—A second demo of another powerful app, Artmatic, was postponed until a future showing because of time constraints.) Chris Fenwick Gives Photoshop for Video Tips Some of the secrets of using Photoshop to create titles brought into Final Cut Pro were demonstrated by member Chris Fenwick, whose remarks kept us laughing as he showed off both his wizardry and dry humor. Chris is a director and editor who founded Broadcast Business Graphics. Chris led us through the task of creating an alpha channel (same as a key signal for live TV), which he describes as "a hole in the video that you can see graphics through." Composing titles superimposed on video images by using Photoshop eliminates at lot of rendering processor time. With Photoshop you make a lot of composites and render once, quite the opposite of what you have to go through using Final Cut Pro. He also provided a lot of tips on keyboard shortcuts and organizing your video editing so you can work quickly and be prepared for the inevitible changes from your clients. Chris has posted several tutorials on his Web site that lead you through how to use Photoshop in combination with Final Cut Pro effectively. Read his tutorials and his editorials about technologies at www.chrisfenwick.com or www.bbgroup.com. Demo Reels In addition to two great demonstrations, we watched Dan Drasin's work in progress - a film about patience and balance seen through the eyes of a yoga teacher and artist Bill Dann, who creates stone sculptures by balancing rocks on top of each other without any other support. Miguel Morejohn showed us his work-in-progress, a music video called Orta Vez, which is about the sultry tango dance shot in black and white with interesting flash edits and other motion effects. MacFilmmaker Announcements MacFilmmakers announced the need for volunteers to create a MacWorld booth, the launch of an iCal-based webcalendar carrying events from various bay area user groups, and future meeting plans including a December celebration that brings together many ofthe Bay Area filmmaking groups for a party and discussion with online distributors.
• Jim Tierney from Digital Anarchy
Jim Tierney from BAMG, in conjunction with Mac Filmmakers and SFCutters, decided to have a design contest. It's a chance to do some cool stuff and show it off to the world, win some cool prizes, and basically have a bit of fun. Thanks to the sponsors (ArtBeats, Adobe, Digital Anarchy, and Total Training), there will be some great prizes to giveaway. BAMG'll be giving away copies of After Effects, about $5000 in ArtBeats stock footage, lots of Digital Anarchy software, and sets of training tapes from Total Training. Details can be found on the Digital Anarchy website contest page. (Submission deadline is July 30!!) Jim is also the leader of BAMG, a great San Francisco group that deals with effects and video. • "Lighting for Indie Filmmakers," coordinated
by Mac Filmmakers' Kevin
Johnson. This presentation was geared towards helping the beginning and intermediate indie filmmaker develop appropriate lighting design. Areas he explored included: * why natural light is NOT natural light BONUS UPDATE: For those filmmakers who are REALLY new to lighting concepts, a brief companion glossary has been posted to our website. This companion glossary will introduce the most basic of lighting terms essential to understanding the June 19th presentation. If you are new to lighting, be sure to download the (36kb) PDF file. 6 June 2002 — Our third meeting was held on May 15th, 2002, on the Apple campus in their spacious Town Hall. We had another nice turnout — and more great speakers! (Please note: we are not affiliated with Apple. They were gracious enough to let us use their auditorium to hold our meeting. And they make great computers. :-) To lead off we showed six demo reels. (We are currently working on the May demo reels page.) We have already put up a page for the April demo reels and the March demo reels. Next, Apple Product Manager Tony Knight walked us through the features of Apple's DVD Studio Pro 1.5. DVD Studio Pro recently was rev'ed to 1.5. He discussed the tweaks in the now-released FCP 3.02 and how they tied in to DVD Studio Pro. Tony covered how it is now OS X-ready and more integrated with Final Cut Pro. He was kind enough to do an extended Q&A, following his presentation, which was well-received.(Update — our own Fred Balin has a write-up on Tony's presentation up for those of you who missed it. Thanks, Fred!) After the pizza break, we had an extended program called, "Acquiring Local Talent: How to Find Skilled Screen Actors." Our panelists included:
This incredibly knowledgeable series of speakers walked
us through the many avenues and benefits of finding and hiring local
talent (aka, actors). Next, Hester Schell tapped into her 20+ year's professional
acting experience to make a full presentation about how to find
and audition actors, along with some very important tips on what
NOT to do. Bay Area Casting News maintains a comprehensive website. Finally, rounding out the program, students from Foothill College's prestigious Theatre Conservatory described their intensive acting curriculum, bringing with them a full contingency of aspiring actors complete with résumés and head shots! To send audition notices or obtain more information, contact:
Although we went pretty late with this comprehensive presentation, the information presented was compelling — as attested to by the fact that the majority of the audience stayed to the end. MANY, MANY thanks to each and every speaker who participated in this fantastic presentation. Your participation and information was truly invaluable! 14 May 2002 — Our second meeting was held on April 17th, 2002, on the Apple campus in their spacious Town Hall. We were fortunate to have another strong turnout — and more great speakers! (Please note: we are not affiliated with Apple. They were gracious enough to let us use their auditorium to hold our meeting. And they make great computers. :-) Please note that we have photos by Bill Vorbau and Mark Calice up in our gallery! To lead off we had five demo reels shown. Check our April demo reels page! We have also put up a page for our March demo reels. Next, our very own Jerry Monti gave a spirited presentation on digital distribution. He asked the basic question, "How do you make money with digital distribution?" He also discussed the implications of new compression schemas on digital video delivery. Particularly exciting was the likely ramifications of the new MPEG-4 on potential online audience sizes. The sites he mentioned are listed below (56k modems beware!):
Last, we had BIAS reps Jason
Davies and Zac Wheatcroft on hand to go into the great sound
resource that ships with Final Cut Pro 3 — Peak DV 3. This
resource has fantastic sound editing options and is widely underutilized
by FCP-users (many of whom fail to even install it!). Jason covered
why to install this gem and how to integrate it with your FCP-workflow.
The audience served up a wide range of questions which were ably
fielded. He then touched on the capabilities of the full version
of Peak and explained some upgrade options that were available —
including paths to BIAS Deck. (Our own Mark
Calice provided a link to the Cubase
site VST Plug-in reference page.)
28 March 2002 — Our first meeting was held on March 20th, 2002, on the Apple campus. We were very fortunate to have a standing room only crowd (150+) at our inaugural event — and great speakers! (Please note: we are not affiliated with Apple. They were gracious enough to let us use their auditorium to hold our meeting. And they make great computers. :-) NEW — the first member photos are up! [700 k+]) To lead off we had three demo reels shown. Check our new March demo reels page for the 411! Mac Filmmakers was also fortunate to have at our very first meeting R/COM Networks onsite to tape Apple's very own Joseph Linaschke going over features of FCP 3 and Garrett Rice going over the benefits of using Apple's new acquisition, Film Logic. Check out our Channel DV section for information on how to access their FCP demos, interviews with filmmakers, and even a news feature on Mac Filmmakers' first meeting! Our scheduled roster of three speakers had several last-minute modifications, as Tom McDonald, the scheduled speaker from Apple, couldn’t make it. Joseph Linaschke and Garrett Rice from Apple stepped in at the last minute and gave great presentations! To accommodate the late speaker changes, our own Jerry Monti graciously offered to move his presentation on Digital Distribution to next meeting (April 17th). Our apologies for those of you who hoped to catch him speak on the 20th. Last, we had the amazing Stuart Maschwitz on The
Orphanage's 'Magic Bullet' process. Rebel Mac stories, cool
tools, and that ‘film stuff’ — we had it all! |
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© 2002 Mac Filmmakers. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Final Cut Pro, Macintosh and Power Mac are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Mac Filmmakers is a volunteer-run User Group and is not not sponsored by Apple.
Comments or
questions can be directed to the webmaster at webstaff@macfilmmakers.com. |
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