Agile Creator

In an elaborate round-up of features, IT Enquirer discusses the new and improved functionality that is part of Apple’s newest version of Final Cut Studio.

Except for creative novelties and workflow efficiency improvements, Apple has also once again added new functionality to integrate Final Cut Studio with third party solutions.

In their series of presentations, screen casts and articles, IT Enquirer covers all new functionality, including workflow, integration and creativity.

The story includes a 20 minute walkthrough videocast.

Wirecast is Telestream’s live production tool that allows online publishers to broadcast live events and create professional webcasts from any location.

To work with Wirecast, you need one or two cameras –any camera, including webcams, will do– one or more good quality microphones, and a Mac or a Windows machine. The test that I ran revealed some webcams that are capable of HD video are not well supported, resulting in crashes and bad looking video results.

Your camera online is a shot, an image that serves as logo is a shot, and so is the title of your show, and basically anything else that is used as content.

The program does lack a teleprompter, but if you also buy Telestream’s Videocue, you can have that application running side by side with Wirecast and read from Videocue’s excellent teleprompter.

When it’s showtime, Wirecast allows you to run the presentation in two modes: the first is where you handle everything yourself, the second where you have an engineer taking care of Wirecast and you handling the presentation by itself.

If you want to do it all by yourself, Wirecast does enable you to automatically create the transitions, effects –everything that is visual appeal but not content– which reduces your workload to clicking on shots you want to show.   However, in Autolive mode, the creative possibilities are limited because the program can’t guess which visual effects you want to activate when transitions occur between shots, etc.

This time, the problem wasn’t due to the Mac’s underwhelming performance compared to today’s standards, but simply the fact that Wirecast isn’t supported on the PowerPC platform.

The basic Idea upon which JDF is based is “to develop an open, extensible, XML-based job ticket standard, as well as mechanism that provides new business opportunities for all individuals and companies involved in the process of creating, managing and producing published documents in the new economy”. …  The purpose of the association is to encourage computer based integration of all processes that have to be considered in the graphic arts industry, in particular the specification of standards, such as JDF.

The Graphic Enterprise is the culmination of the evolution of print – where technology takes its rightful place to create a continuous, uninterrupted flow of data that begins with project creation and ends with its delivery.

Clients need to get their projects to market faster, they want shorter runs more frequently, and they want to work with printing companies who can handle the entire project, which may include repurposing, personalisation and fulfillment.

DVD Studio Pro 3 is Apple’s software for creating DVD titles from videos you created in any video post-production software. It inherited the interface as its predecessor, but a number of new features have been added that make the product more aimed at the high(est) end than it was before.

To me personally, that is not a major disadvantage—proud G5 owner that I am for three weeks now—but I can imagine video- and DVD-pros working with Intel-machines, and not willing to give up on their choice of platform just because some journalist tells them DVD Studio Pro is so good.

I tried the transition feature with menu buttons and of course it works like a charm—better still: I didn’t read the manual before I tried the feature, and I could work out how to do it by myself.

The new version supports additional MPEG-2 video resolutions like full D1 and cropped D1, half D1, and Standard Interface Format, and an asset’s embedded colour profile is supported so that it is easier to control how an asset will look on the final disc. …For very large projects with many components, the Graphical view offers a Macro-view option that displays a small-thumbnail overview of the entire project that can be manipulated to offer you zoomed views of parts of the project.

This is also the reason why even experienced professional DVD publishers sometimes resort to using iDVD: a simple project with one menu or a simple structure does not require DVD Studio Pro.

Roberto Bigano’s web site shows a lot of example images that have been treated with the ALCE plug-in and your first reaction will probably be the same as mine: it’s incredible that you can get so much drama out of even ordinary photos without having to use 90% of Photoshop’s toolchest.

…After having tried ALCE on a number of images I shot myself, I found the plug-in to add drama to originals that looked flat by comparison, but I also found higher numbers don’t always mean more drama.

…On the other hand, portraits of elderly people, for example, can be made quite interesting with ALCE, because one way of using it is to dramatically increase the physical tokens of their age.

…It knocked me off my socks when I used it on one of the photos I took of a Rubens painting inside my birth town’s Cathedral, it moved me when I saw the results on a portrait of a 79 years old lady.

Reviewed here: http://www.it-enquirer.com

As most photographers know, every lens, no matter how expensive, deals with it: light falloff at the edges and in corners. This is true, even for Zeiss lenses on medium-format digital cameras.

Light falloff is the worst when the focal length is set to infinity. It’s a lens aberration and therefore in need of correction, but since most good lenses’ falloff will occur in the corners only, some of the light falloff can be kept as a sort of natural vignetting.

You can compensate for light falloff in every application, be it Lightroom, Aperture, Capture One or Photoshop even. There’s a great video tutorial over at IT Enquirer which explains exactly what you need to do to correct Light Falloff from start to finish – in the first three applications.