Tutorial - Color Correction Masks in FCPX

yea yea yea, its not the 3 way color corrector from FCP7 but there are some really cool features in the FCPX color board and color corrector. Color Masks, Shape Masks, Inside and Outside controls. Check out this simple fix on a shot that just needed a little bit of love.

Umbrellas are happy.

This is a unique example of “Tilt Shift Photography” with a twist of “Flash Mob” added in for spice. My friend @planetMitch found this one. You can read all about how it was put together on his site.

2012 was a good year for Charley Voorhis.

Retrospective - 2012 Reel from Voortex Productions on Vimeo.

One of the great things about working on the Digital Convergence Podcast (DCP) is we have really talented artists sharing with us all the time… Charley Voorhis is one such guy. Charley shared with us his “2012 Retrospective” thsi week and I wanted to share with you too.

I told Charley one of the things I REALLY dug about this cut was his use of nat sound, or the sound from the shot… the horse hoofs, the motorcycles, the skateboarders grinding. It trasnports you to another place, and in this case, MANY different places.

Thunderbolt CF Card Reader Results.

Well… if you are a regular listener to the Digital Convergence Podcast that I co-host with Carl Olson, or if you just happened to catch Episode 82 last week, you may have heard me mention a solution that I found for a Thunderbolt CF Card Reader. Well, the little bugger came in the mail this weekend and I have the test results. 

First off, let me tell you that I don’t recommend this solution so if your time is valuable you can move on, but if you want to know why, you can read the details. 

The “reader” is really an after market CF to SATA adapter that comes in a cute little shell, the item can then be slide into a Seagate Go-Flex Thunderbolt cradle and you effectively have built an ad-hoc CF to thunderbolt card reader. (NOTE… i don’t know if I’m using the word “ad-hoc” properly there but I’m nearly 50 years old and eventually I had to use that word in a sentence and today seemed like a good day to give it a go).

There are a few problems with this configuration. 1. its hard to align the adpater into the cradle. 2. the cradle mount is too high so effectively the thing ‘floats’ in mid air, its very light so this isn’t that big of a deal but still… 3. once you put a card into the adapter, there is no release mechanism so, if you don’t have finger nails, good luck getting that little bugger out of there. But the number one reason why I don’t recommend this ‘solution’ is this… SPEED.

This gizmo actually was SLOWER then one of my older SanDisk Firewire 800 card readers. By much, no but it was slower

8GB of data transfer went like this:

Thunderbolt 3:30

Firewire 3:06

I’m not sure why this is the case, but there you have it. I appologize to the listeners that got excited about this “find” but if it makes any difference I was really excited too so now we ALL know how it feels to be disappointed. (PS, there’s no easter bunny either).

Tutorial - Time Lapse in After Effects

Here is the method with RAW images.

This is the original Tutorial I did with JPG images.

On the BMW MINI Takes the States 2012 trip we shot a lot of time-lapse shots. I told Nicole Salmeri, my assistant editor that I would show her how I process time-lapse shots in AE… this is a REAL fast run thru of how I process the shots.