Ask a CS Pro was fun.

I never thought to post a link to this talk that I did for Adobe, mainly because its not a pretty “embed” procedure but if you missed my talk last Monday you can watch a rerun of it here. 

A bit about viewing it. It is what is called an “Adobe Connect” session. You will be watching a bit flash movie that fills your browser and it will look like you are a part of a live broadcast and you’ll be able to view the chat window on the left side of the screen.

I had never heard of Adobe Connect before a couple months ago. Its pretty damn cool. 

The talk was MY views on the History of Final Cut Pro and there is a bit in there about Randy Ubillos, the man I call the “Godfather of Digital Video”.

Feel free to comment back here if you like it. (or I guess if you don’t like it)

Also, you may want to follow Randy Ubillos on Twitter. Although it doesn’t appear that he is very active on his account. I guess it may be a “Steve Job’s imposed embargo on social media”. Its a shame too. I remember back when Randy worked for Adobe he answered a digitizing question I had about Premiere 4.2 on an old school AOL chat forum. Made me feel really good that the main dude behind the app was answering MY post. Ah the good ol’ days.

Switching IS hard.

Spent a lazy Sunday afternoon having a great lunch and dropping by a buddies house to drop of a long term piece of loaner kit. Invited us in and we sat around chatting and catching up. Dave is a manager at Cisco and an audio engineer who dabbles in video stuff. He asked me about spreading a single video across a tripple screen playback device so we went into his den where he has a 27” iMac and a slightly older copy of FCP6 so I could show him a few tricks.

I didn’t bother getting into the whole “Switch to Premiere” thing with him because frankly, he doesn’t edit that much anyway. I did, however, miss having COMMAND - E for “Export Sequence”. (Sadly, perhaps one of the BEST features of FCP7 over FCP 6. If you don’t know what I’m saying thats ok.)

This experience got me to thinking. You know, it IS hard to switch. When I think about all the experience, all the ‘muscle memory’ and all the problems that I’ve solved over the years of dealing with FCP, it IS hard to walk away from that. However, I’m also pretty well convinced it is time to look over the fence and see what is growing in the next yard. 

Swithcing is not easy but there does come a time when it is necessary. In the late 80’s we gave up on tube cameras for CCDs. Think about all the time we spent (ok us OLD guys spent) learning how to properly register the tubes of those old broadcast cameras. In the early 90’s we gave up on offline editing on VHS  systems and toward the end of the 90’s we even began to see non-linear systems as finishing tools. But those changes eventually brought improvements. Eventually we get to the point when thinking back to the way things were before seems like the dark ages. 

So, if you are looking at your FCP Bins and Viewer and Canvas and Sequence windows and thinking, “but how can I say goodbye to these old friends?” just remember. Change is good but sometimes it IS hard.

If you want to see some of the things I thought Premiere couldn’t do but I figured out it CAN do, check this video out.                                                                               

The Kevin and Karl Show - Ep 1 "Overview"

I got asked to participate during the taping of these videos. Its good content if you are interested in making the switch from Final Cut Pro to Premiere Pro. If you don’t know Kevin, you should. Kevin founded the worlds very first Final Cut Users Groups back in the Little House on the Prairie days.

AutoCAD is on the Mac.

I love the dudes smile at 25 seconds in… it tells the WHOLE story.

Sony makes balls bounce.

I remember when this was released a few years ago being totally mesmerized by it. I even have a copy on my hard drive somewhere, but it so much easier to share it here.  Apparently its all practical, no effects… (I find it hard to believe its not enhanced in someway.