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LAFF 2012: Cinedigm's Chris McGurk Predicts a Digital-Driven Indie Film Renaissance | Gregg Kilday | Hollywood Reporter
Thoughts on the positives of digital distribution:
McGurk, whose Cinedigm offers alternative programming to theater owners, argued that “narrowcasting” is part of the solution. And instead of holding out for a 500-theater wide release, he suggested, filmmakers should follow the example of a film like Margin Call, which combined a VOD release with a more limited theatrical roll-out.


Into the fire with FCP X | Oliver Peters | digitalfilms
Oliver documents his experience using Final Cut Pro X on a real-world project:
If you work with a lot of different FCP X jobs, you quickly learn that there is no internal way to manage different clients’ work. You either have to move these files manually from the Final Cut Events and Final Cut Projects folders to an “inactive” folder(s) – or you have to use a utility like Event Manager X.


Gareth Evans – Fighting Spirit | novieScope
Director Gareth Evans explains how he developed his indie movie The Raid, and some of the low-budget techniques used:
Working with a $1.2m budget, we knew we had to be creative with the action scenes and find ways to achieve high energy by using every DIY indie trick we had. This extended across all departments. Using a FigRig stabilisation device, we were able to pass the camera from one DoP to another, giving us the illusion of the camera defying gravity while also travelling through extremely tight spaces.


Seamless Video Editing – A Look Toward the Future | Danny Greer | Premium Beat
Computers will soon put us all out of a job:
What if a computer editing application could tell you where to make your video cuts? A new application being developed by researchers at UC Berkely and Adobe Systems aims to do just that…helping editors identify the best spot to make a cut based off of audio and visual features of raw footage. The program can auto generate seamless transitions to make the cuts visually smooth and undetectable.


Software Review: Adobe Master Collection – Premiere Pro, Prelude, and Speedgrade CS6 From Adobe Systems | T. Michael Testi | Blogcritics
This article on the video applications in Adobe Master Collection highlights the new features added to each application, including SpeedGrade:
Professionally designed looks,– filters, and effects that come with SpeedGrade that will provide visual impact to your productions in the form of .look file presets. They include a 3D LUT, along with the SpeedGrade grading parameters, making them a rich and powerful interchange format with other Adobe tools — both After Effects and Photoshop CS6 support application of SpeedGrade .Look files. The 3D LUT component of .Look files can also be exported for use with other products.


Lip Sync in After Effects | Rich Young | Pro Video Coalition
A second collection of tips on creating Lip Synch:
Here’s a few more lip sync video tutorials for After Effects. They’re very similar in using time remapping, basic expressions or converting audio to keyframes, etc. instead of CC Split, Reshape, or other effects


Woody Allen's Cinematographer Has 6 Life-Saving Tips for Low-Budget DPs
| Jay A. Fernandez | Indiewire
Lighting can highlight character. And headaches, if you’re not careful.
“Of course, your work has to first correspond to who the character is and what the story is about,” he said. “The most important thing to bring out when you shoot a movie is to figure out how you’re going to light the location in order to bring it into this area of the character.


Bravely going where Pixar animation tech has never gone | Daniel Terdiman
| C|Net
Pixar's next movie, Brave, comes out at the end of the week. This article explains some of the new techniques they came up with to render the movie:
The new software took a significant amount of work, May said, and allowed Pixar to make both hair and fur that wasn't considered likely to pull audiences away from the story. But doing so itself took more than a year, Chung said. And before they were able to fine-tune the software to solve the problem, there were endless days of watching Merida's curly hair explode, or of watching the fur on Angus, Merida's horse, fly off as he ran around.



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