This is the first edition of a weekly post discussing opinions on any subject loosely related to design between Mike and the new designer at Konspiracy Studios, Christine Doore. (Link to come..)
With the conventions closing up, it feels like a good time to compare the campaigns from a advertising and design standpoint. The idea has been on my mind, along with many other designers, after seeing the Obama website. Coincidentally, this month’s edition of Print Magazine ran an article praising the design and usability of the site.
  CD: Each candidate has an image to uphold, but do each of their campaign websites reflect them and their efforts well? Putting all politics aside, and solely based on design, I’d have to say that that Barack Obama would win my vote. Although patriotism is an essential theme to each website, Obama’s website is more vivid, colorful, and eye catching, without going overboard and looking cheesy or too flamboyant.
MG: The Obama site sports a good mix of gradients, icons and photography. McCain’s site is still good but lacks a certain element of coherence. When it comes to layou
t all the modules are strongly defined with borders. The gradient flow of Obama’s really serves as a focal point directing you eye where to go.
 CD: Both candidates have the same website layout for the most part,.McCain’s website definitely is well designed as well, but the color choices are a tad dull whereas Obama’s choice of colors are more refreshing.
MG: I think that odd teal color is a direct result of the “Make Mccain Exciting Challange” from the Colbert Report.
 CD: McCain’s website is clear and simple to read or find information easily. Obama’s downfall
here is mostly because of his lack of simplicity to an extent.
MG: Speaking of simplicity, “BarackTV” always KILLS my flash player and forces me to abort the script or quit firefox. I’m surprised that hasn’t been fixed yet. I’d say both sites are about equally navigatable. I thought the choice of typfaces was very telling. The use of Gotham on Obama’s site was refreshing, I don’t think the font has been in existence for more than 10 years. I read that Optima (McCain’s logo font) was used on the Vietnam Memorial coincidence? One final note about fonts, why would you ever choose Trebuchet MS in anything related to an election?!?! It’s ALMOST as bad a Papyrus…
 CD: Both websites are clearly democratic versus republican IF your aware of each candidate and their stance on each issue.
 MG: True, I’d say that both are good for their target. Although, the Obama site is a design masterpiece. We’ll see next election if it raised the bar for everyone.
Check out the websites and decide for yourself!
Art Adams section on PVC has a good post detailing set etiquette and the do’s and don’ts on set. While most of it is related to working in the camera department it is useful for everyone starting out. There were even a few points in there that I was clueless about. Take a look,
OpenCut WhitePaper - Curious about what OpenCut is? Click for PDF.
Well– despite the fact that I could really use a week with a RED, I didn’t have the winning cut on OpenCut 1. The winner, Carsten Karpanek, had a very good cut- which deserved to win. Susannah was actually the first narrative I’ve ever cut. It was a success for me in the sense that a 19yr old with no formal film education was able to hold his own.
OpenCut 2’s Registration is open now featuring 120fps material from Alpine Meadows and some time-lapses. I caught a glimpse of the material in the new Silverado reel posted on Tyler Berry’s blog. As a snowboarder, I look forward to getting my hands on the footage. There’s definitely some things I’m going to change in my workflow this time around:
- Do a once-over in RedAlert before touching the footage in FCP.
- Hire (Read As: Barter or Beg) a friend to do a mix.
- Troubleshoot why Color Crashes whenever I send a project to it. (All CC was done in FCP last time)
This time around the registration changed up a little bit. I was excited at the proposition of a student entry, but the system passes people like me over. To run my company, I take classes online, therefore I don’t have a physical body to receive footage from. The costs went up- a little high for my tastes– but I can classify it as a business expense. I can’t state the previous statement without mentioning that the stakes for prizes also rose. 
On a cool note, OC1 was submitted to the Guinness Word Records under the category of ‘greatest number of cinematic film edits from a single set of source media’ with that number being 51. OC2 aims to set the record for “greatest number of commercial spots from a single set of source media.”
Pro Video Coalition posted a video tutorial on creating a 2.5D scene from a layered photoshop file.
In it is the solution I have been looking for to one of Motion’s most vexing problems. How to quickly change the depth of a layer whilst scaling it so it doesn’t appear to move!
The answer is with the canvas “in focus” Command Click the Z-Depth Button on the HUD and drag it forward or back. It won’t appear to make a difference but if you pull up the “perspective” view you’ll notice that it is working.
Hooray! - This will literally save me an hour a project. Why I never thought to try command-clicking is strange, generally I’m on top of this type of trick…
A society that remains successful in appealing to the lowest common denominator (lcd), breeds ignorance and detachment. [lcd break] Freedom of speech i
s a right (obligation?) to offend, with the hopes that audiences might ponder subject matter longer than their stunted minds generally permit. [lcd break] In a modern nation, where people have the opportunity and resources to really think, we’re plagued in the efforts of determining if an action is politically correct or socially acceptable.
In another useless “quality media coverage” several stations babbled about this New Yorker Mag Cover:
Summed up, the cartoon gathers and magnifies all the ludacris rumors floating on the internet into one image. Yet we’re expected to dilute our media to the plebeian level- The fear being readership may not understand that it is a satire (as it features victim’s not accusers). - Let me phrase that in blunt terminology.
The average American, as deemed by other Americans, is not intelligent classify something so outrageous as satire, despite the fact that it originates on the cover of a very creditable source. [lcd - brain overload]
My guess is that these same people would pick up a copy of The Onion and TXT all the current events their friends.
Truly Sad, I blame our reporters. Real news hasn’t been broadcast since I was a baby, as the Cold War fizzled away.
Today marks the first day in which my old blog is finally dead. When I began using wordpress I had no idea you could host it on your site, I viewed it much like a facebook profile, or myspace page. Now several months after moving everything to my own domain I’ve deleted the old site.Generally SOP would include domain forwarding, or a redirect– but I didn’t have access to any of those features from the other site (as it was hosted by Wordpress). I didn’t want it to plain disappear either as I was geting over 3,000 hits a month. The solution ended up being a BIG link saying “Article Moved” and over 85% of people click the link and found my own site.
While this site still doesn’t command the same respect from Google as the other did, It’s position on Alexa is up 4,000,000 in 3 months. No complaints!
You Send It, a replacement for FTP, allows you to send files up to two gig files over the internet. Cool.
Yet a little while back they released a plug-in for FCP which allows you to export your project out and send it for approval, or to another editor. This is a very cool initiative on their part, but since it is in Beta it comes with several drawbacks. The Plugin resides in you export options, but really isn’t “exporting” by definition. What it attempts to do it round up all your media and the project file and send them along. I hope your beginning to catch on.
- The 2GB limitation isn’t a lot of video time.
- If you have media in folders, it doesn’t see it.
- I’m having trouble using the plug-in with any project containing RED footage
In the next round I’d like to see the plug-in access QT Conversion and export a compressed version to send. Additionally, if their developers are feeling up to it, run it as a background process. That would be ideal. Overall a very cool concept which I applaud YSI for.
Several months ago a new site launched providing templates for FCP and Motion, the site is finalcutprotemplates.com, and there are several key differences between this site and other template providers;
–The templates focus on animated drop zones, without forcing you into a color scheme or background. This is critical because most templates are not time efficient to modify for an out of context use.
–The price tag is extremely reasonable and the sets come in large bundle’s.
–As often as practical they utilize behaviors to animate as opposed to keyframes, making it easy to understand and modify
I recently purchased Drop Zones Vol1 for use on some motion graphics projects (& perhaps a fall reel..) and have been extremely pleased with the results. There are a few extremely useful and unique templates (roladex and wallet photos) which really blow people away.
That said, no first generation product is complete without some requests.
- Full 1920×1080 Templates (easier to scale down than up..)
- Templates that involve serious use of the replicator (How cool would that be..)
- A static “cloud template” with 10 drop zones at various Z-depths for last minute 2.5D moves
The templates are HD720 (SD & DV too…) So before I replaced the drop zones I changed everything to 1080 and resized for my project (1080i60). I didn’t see any pixelation so I *believe* you can scale up in a non-destructive manor if you apply images after the scale.
Overall, a great product, highly recommended.
6/28 I’ll be filming at the ‘HipHop is not Dead’ event at Breakers…
 Sorry for the lapse of posts, I’ve been very busy working but with intermittent access to the internet over the past 2 weeks as Comcast fumbles around providing me with 16kbps things have been hectic.
Also, the county has closed shop for the past 3 days due to contaminated from a water main break nearly 20 miles away. Enjoy the clip expressing my frustration.
The city renamed cigarettes jacks or how,
Even the mayor had a run in with Crack,
But we all kept it real and we voted him back. -Mambo Sauce
Meeting Details on the DCFCPUG site, where you should RSVP. Oh, it’s free too.
Date: Monday, June 2nd
Time: 7:00pm - 10:00pm
Place: GW University Campus (Downtown DC)
Jack Morton Auditorium
805 21st St, NW
Washington, D.C. 20052
(Metro Accessible off Foggy Bottom)
It’s official DC has a revitalized Final Cut Pro User Group (DCFCPUG)!
That’s right LA we taking this to the web. *chuckles*
My friend Matt messages me on facebook:
“I am used to the “export to disk” function is Adobe….. I will use DVD Studio Pro to build the senior video, but how should I export and import into DVD Studio? … the full length [video name] that [jerk “boss”] wants on Monday. It is nearly 2 hours and when I export to Quicktime, it is 21GB!!! (how the hell do I always end up with the biggest files? lol) I really just need something that will autoplay in his DVD player, no fancy menus and sh*t.”
I’m glad he made the switch to Mac, now I won’t have to answer so many gosh darn PC Video problems. but for the time being its “pwnage” season on his mac rookie-ness.
Easiest Question- Why is my QT 21GB?! (Get Bitrate Pro) 1 Hour of DV video is roughly 10-12GB so two hours would be ~20Gb.
Now here’s the useful information:
There’s two methods to make a DVD. One is to encode the files and author it or the other is to use a DVD recorder to burn a screener. For Matt I hope he has the available option of #2, because encoding a 2 hour video is not really fun. (Note he’s on EXTREMELY tight deadline on his first FCP project.)
- In FCP go File>Export> Using Compressor
- Then in the settings window (lower left) Select the DVD option which makes th
e most sense. There’s two flavors of each bitrate. Fastest encode vs. Best Quality… All it is 1 pass VBR vs. 2 pass VBR. Use one pass for anything that’s urgent of a screener. Use 2 pass if quality is worth you losing a lot of time. (You can use inspector to modify any settings, like aspect ratio, bitrate, cropping, and all sorts of things but this is a beginner’s guide) - Then set your destination and Compress Away!
As far as Authoring is concerned here’s a good YouTube tutorial, although ignore the beginning steps I would not advise bringing your QT directly into Studio Pro its nice to have the M2v and AC3 first.
Option 2, and the more time effective method is buy a DVD recorder hook it up to some out (breakout-box, kona card or even firewire converter) and play it out of the computer whilst recording it to DVD in real time.
When Adobe bought Macromedia, many workflow problems were resolved. Others were not, you cannot copy artwork in flash and paste it into illustrator and achieve desirable results. The vector data behaves in strange manners and becomes jagged. Furthermore if you select export to .Ai in flash and open in illustrator the colors shift when opened (even when going RGB to RGB).
The work-around goes like this:
- In Flash, go File -> Export ->Image…. Select .Ai. Open the file.
- Copy and Paste the same artwork from Flash to Illustrator.
- Select all the elements which are one color (For example the teal leaves/tree trunk) and then use the Eyedropper Tool (I) and click the copy that has the correct color.
- Repeat Step 3 for all other colors (For example the lettering)
It took a lot of work to get my eyes well-trained to catch mistakes, so my clients, um you know; come back. Yet I don’t think there’s any good excuse on this. It’s from a commercial on ESPN promoting their ESPN U channel.
Our subject leaps out of a SUV on a flat road onto an upward sloping, grassy hill. Yet he lands on a downward sloping mulch pad out of a SUV traveling downhill!
Once this caught my eye I began to look a little closer. The mask on the car was pretty soft and the stunt double had considerable more hair than our middle aged balding Buckeye fan had just seconds before. My guess is this was a rush project and the producer was grillin’ the artist…
Whenever I go to work on a client’s system the one realistic fear I have is that I’m going to be hindered by equipment issues. I know the quirks of my setup, and have the latest and greatest…
This week I was working with a new client and wasn’t sure exactly what they had. As this was a deadline driven project I prepared by loading my 30GB iPod with software/freeware I can’t live without.
This is a MAJOR time saver if:
- They have a Password on the computer!
- They do not trust freeware
- Restart would be required
Here’s How:
Get the Discs or .dmg(s) and mount them, then launch the install function.
Select your iPod as the target drive (Enable Disk use first)
Load any Extras (Stock/ Codecs/ Plugins)
In the end it really didn’t matter the system was nearly identical to mine loaded with FCP 6.0.2 and CS3 and all the freeware (Streamclip, Hijack, Bitrate Pro). I encountered one glitch that caused the system to crash and the media to unlink itself but since I altered the preferences before working and set the Autosave to every 2 min I lost nothing.
