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Man, reading this reminds me of those audiophile douchebags that insist that records sound 'warmer' and go into all of these nonsensical explanations about sound texture and other dumb shit when in reality, it's mostly all in their head and they're talking out of their ass.

If it really does remind you of that, then you aren't paying attention. Grain is a characteristic of film that a good cinematographer uses, just as he uses things like exposure, focus, lens-flare and depth of field. Digitally removing grain from a movie where the cinematographer made artistic decisions regarding the grain is the equivalent of amping up the saturation, blowing out the contrast or even chopping off the edges of the picture - it is destructive to the artist's intent. Grain is part of the creation not part of the playback, unlike the "warmth" that vacuum tubes add to music (and which can be simulated with the right digital filters).

Grain is such a basic part of modern cinematography that a fair number of movies shot on digital have had artifical grain added in post.

I don't think film is going anywhere and digital most certainly is not going anywhere.

Film is on life support already. By 2013 all US theaters will be digital. Over 90% of all primetime tv is already shot on digital.

Apple essentially merged FCP and FCE. While leaving the extremely advanced users behind with EOL software. Some numbers say that Apple sold about 2 million copies of the last version of Final Cut Pro, if we assume that Final Cut Express sold less, at perhaps one million copies (this is a bit low, part of me thinks there are actually more FCE users). This is the market for the new Final Cut [any version] that Apple is targeting. However, was their mistake in alienating the top 50 000 - 100 000 or so users in the initial release enough to kill their whole market? No, most users are not affected by the high end limitations in the initial release.

Most importantly though is that almost all of the complaints have already been acknowledged by Apple and the product manager has promised that they will return to the suite in coming updates.

re multimedia pros - I had a multimedia grad say "oh 3db isn't that much" err actualy it is :-)

Actually, it is YOU that fails.

Not to get too far off topic; but, dB, deciBels, is a COMPLETELY USELESS MEASUREMENT by itself, until accompanied by additional nomenclature.

For example: dBm, dbV, dBW, dBSPL ("A" weighted, or "C" weighted) all are different.

What I believe you are referring to is the engineering axiom "A change of 3dB means a doubling (or halving) of power." While that is true, the EFFECT of that power change is not the same to the human observer.

For example, even a trained audio engineer would be hard-pressed to accurately QUANTIFY a 3dBm or 3dBSPL (A or C) change in level. They would be able to DETECT it; but most wouldn't say "Yes, that's a BIG difference." You're at a rock concert: The average level is 110dBSPL ("A" weighted). The next song is 113dBSPL on average (A weighted). People MIGHT notice; but NONE would not go from boogie-ing in the aisles to covering their ears and running. Therefore, perceptively, to the HUMANS, that 3dBSPL change "isn't that much."

But, as I pointed out, your entire argument is mooted by the fact that YOU were too stupid to include the "units", rather than simply a baseless quantity.

you can't just jump into it, there is a learning curve, its short but its brutal
You have to start with a tutorial like Blender Survival Guide by Ciccone Paolo

You might find this article interesting: The Truth About 2K, 4K and The Future of Pixels

TWiT: This Week in Tech (former Tech TV Screensavers)
dl.tv (former Tech TV Screensavers)
diggnation (again, former Tech TV Screensavers)
CreativeCOW.net (Digital Media)
Shields and Brooks (Newshour Political Podcast)
NPR Technology (collected stories about tech from the previous week)
KCRW's The Treatment
Ricky Gervais (BBC's The Office, Extras)

I'm a budding motion graphics artist who's used After Effects for about a year, without a lot of success. After Effects is very powerful, but it's also extremely slow, even on my dual 2ghz G5. The immediate feedback you really need when doing motion graphics design just isn't there, unless you shrink your image to near the point of invisibility.

Motion is an amazing program. To start with, the user interface is almsot entirely intuitive. Whenever I had a question, nine times out of ten I could just look around the screen and find the answer. The overall feel of everything is very smooth and fluid.

Motion creates superior performance by using the computing power of your graphics card. For the first time in my life, the power of my graphics card is actually important. (I don't care for games, so that's never been an issue). It also creates a very odd pheonmenon: A machine where 25% of CPU is being used, but multitasking is sluggish. This, of course, is because the graphics processor is being used at full speed!

With my graphics card, the standard one on the G5, Motion can do simple animations at full speed, and more complex ones half-speed. (After Effects, even with a fairly small image, would do its preview at about quarter speed). I found I could figure out a lot of things successfully at half speed and only occasionally had to render the RAM preview to view them at full speed.

You can build an animation in pieces. Comps in After Effects are like layers in Motion. You can save a layer in motion (which can have nested layers forever) as a Favorite. Then you can pull it out of Favorites to another project. This is one of the few things in Motion that's not fairly obvious, so it's good to note it here. For example, I was able to make my crab's legs move in a short animation. Then I saved that as a layer called "Crab Walk". When I want my crab to walk, I just drag that animation from favorites into the canvas, and start moving the crab around; the legs will keep moving automatically.

Motion has several innovative features, which as far as I know exist in no other program today. For example, instead of keyframing a motion path (which you can also do, if you want), you can use behaviours. For instance, the Throw behaviour simulates pushing something until another force stops it. The gravity behaviour creates simulated gravity, and so the item that you Throw will drift down towards the bottom of the screen. You can adjust the speed of the throw and the amount of gravity you want. You can then use the Edge simulation to cause the object to bounce when it hits the bottom, top or sides of the screen. This is amazingly fun to work with and makes it very easy to do realistic animations which would take hours of tedium in After Effects.

I've only had the program for a few days, so obviously I've only scratched the surface. But this program is one of the few I've seen that's truly worth the hype. After Effects is in grave danger of becoming a deposed king; this program is easier to learn and use, faster and saves hours of effort. For everything it can do, it blows away AE.

Hope that helps.

D

(For a more detailed discussion of Motion, see Creative Cow's Motion Forum, and the Peter Wiggins' Review of Motion.

I'm a budding motion graphics artist who's used After Effects for about a year, without a lot of success. After Effects is very powerful, but it's also extremely slow, even on my dual 2ghz G5. The immediate feedback you really need when doing motion graphics design just isn't there, unless you shrink your image to near the point of invisibility.

Motion is an amazing program. To start with, the user interface is almsot entirely intuitive. Whenever I had a question, nine times out of ten I could just look around the screen and find the answer. The overall feel of everything is very smooth and fluid.

Motion creates superior performance by using the computing power of your graphics card. For the first time in my life, the power of my graphics card is actually important. (I don't care for games, so that's never been an issue). It also creates a very odd pheonmenon: A machine where 25% of CPU is being used, but multitasking is sluggish. This, of course, is because the graphics processor is being used at full speed!

With my graphics card, the standard one on the G5, Motion can do simple animations at full speed, and more complex ones half-speed. (After Effects, even with a fairly small image, would do its preview at about quarter speed). I found I could figure out a lot of things successfully at half speed and only occasionally had to render the RAM preview to view them at full speed.

You can build an animation in pieces. Comps in After Effects are like layers in Motion. You can save a layer in motion (which can have nested layers forever) as a Favorite. Then you can pull it out of Favorites to another project. This is one of the few things in Motion that's not fairly obvious, so it's good to note it here. For example, I was able to make my crab's legs move in a short animation. Then I saved that as a layer called "Crab Walk". When I want my crab to walk, I just drag that animation from favorites into the canvas, and start moving the crab around; the legs will keep moving automatically.

Motion has several innovative features, which as far as I know exist in no other program today. For example, instead of keyframing a motion path (which you can also do, if you want), you can use behaviours. For instance, the Throw behaviour simulates pushing something until another force stops it. The gravity behaviour creates simulated gravity, and so the item that you Throw will drift down towards the bottom of the screen. You can adjust the speed of the throw and the amount of gravity you want. You can then use the Edge simulation to cause the object to bounce when it hits the bottom, top or sides of the screen. This is amazingly fun to work with and makes it very easy to do realistic animations which would take hours of tedium in After Effects.

I've only had the program for a few days, so obviously I've only scratched the surface. But this program is one of the few I've seen that's truly worth the hype. After Effects is in grave danger of becoming a deposed king; this program is easier to learn and use, faster and saves hours of effort. For everything it can do, it blows away AE.

Hope that helps.

D

(For a more detailed discussion of Motion, see Creative Cow's Motion Forum, and the Peter Wiggins' Review of Motion.

We've considered archiving our video in some kind of compressed streaming format like AVI, Quicktime, or MPEG-2, but none of these offer lossless codecs that are appropriate for us, and we're unwilling to accept using a lossy compressor.

It doesn't sound as though "compressed streaming format[s]" are what you're really looking for, and AVI isn't a streaming format in any case. However, there are archival-type video codecs that may suit your needs:

• BitJazz SheerVideo is an excellent, relatively quick, lossless, 4:4:4 video codec. The encoder is fairly inexpensive, the decoder is free, and they're working on a 10-bit version.
• Digital Anarchy Microcosm is a lossless, 64-bit, RGBA codec. It's excellent if you're not working in YUV. The encoder is even less expensive than SheerVideo, and the decoder is free.
• Apple Pixlet is quite nice, though not completely lossless.
• Motion JPEG might be considered if you need pretty-much-visually-lossless but not mathematically lossless.

In a perfect world, you'd have one of these working behind the scenes in some sort of network storage device in a manner similar to the dpsVelocity VTFS. If you haven't worked with an editing system that uses VTFS, I recommend getting a demo.

Wireless USB comes from the same group that spec'ed out USB 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0, and that managed to out-sell the arguably-superior firewire spec.

I know you're not implying that Firewire is therefore useless and doomed to extinction, but just to clarify:

USB 2.0 and Firewire both have their pros and cons and different uses. USB 2.0 is more prominent because it's cheaper and more of a "consumer" protocol because it puts more work on the system's processor (instead of the controller) and doesn't sustain its data rate as well as Firewire. So yeah, more devices have USB 2.0 because most people don't care if their USB 2.0 scanner is 15% slower on a 600dpi scan.

However, video editors and more "pro" types will pay a premium for Firewire because of its higher sustained data rate. It also has devices that *gasp* support daisy-chaining which is really useful. Not to mention Firewire 800 which is hella faster than USB 2.0.

So, yeah, USB 2.0 definitely has out-sold Firewire, but that doesn't mean Firewire is going away. Just like IDE drives have outsold SCSI, but you don't see that going anywhere, do you?

Anyway, sorta OT, but the examples apply to the BT/WUSB debate. Since I don't know the specs of WUSB I can't compare them, but I'm sure one will have a power/performance/distance trade off somewhere which will make each protocol have their uses.

Now if only someone will make a Bluetooth CDMA phone so I can switch to Sprint because my overpriced cell provider was just bought by the evil Cingular overlords.

Actually you can do an amateur rotating bullet time in After Effects as well, just takes a bit of prep work when you are shooting:

http://www.nccinema.ch/esfx11.html

http://www.creativecow.net/articles/kumar_satish/b ullet_time/index.htm