Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

By Dannie Delvos, BAVC Outreach Coordinator

Last Tuesday, 7/31/07, SF Cutters celebrated their 7 year anniversary with a hot and heavy topic: Everything You Want to Know about Final Cut Studio 2. Unfortunately guru Kevin Monahan, one of the co-founders of the group and former BAVC instructor, couldn’t attend, but he was with us in spirit.

From OUT OF THE POISON TREE

Mitchell Rose started the evening with a presentation of his short film “Modern Daydreams 1: Deere John” – a 3 minute excursion into the relationship of man and machine; a 22 ton John Deere excavator to be exact. Charles Meyer, Senior System Engineer Pro Film/Video Sales at Apple, followed this act and dove right into the workings of ProRes 422, which is part of the Final Cut Studio 2 (FCS 2) suite. Paul Saccone, Apple’s Senior Product Manager for FCS, couldn’t make it, but Charles handled the presentation well by himself. Naturally he covered the advantages of ProRes 422 over uncompressed HD – an obvious one being the file size, and we also explored the details of YUV; however, the content was too chunky to digest, and wikipedia’s explanation of YUV was recommended as a great resource (we were warned that we might have to read it five times though). Anyway, ProRes 422 works with 10 bit as well as 8, has a much more precise color space, more bandwidth efficiency, next gen device support, it looks uncompressed and is visually lossless, and it can be used with both HD and SD footage. Sounds perfect so far – just make sure you have the right hardware depending on the project you’re working on (you might have to invest in the latest power mac), and if you want to share your work in progress, make sure they have FCS2, otherwise they won’t be able to see it.

After Apple’s presentation Alex Lindsay of dvGarage, who generously hosts the SF Cutters meetings every month, shared some of his Motion 3D projects with the group. Motion 3 has some great, easy-to-use 3D tools that might be easier to handle for editors who don’t use After Effects on a regular basis. He was also very excited to use the application PF Hoe Pro (no – I am not making this up) for motion tracking. And the cherry on the cake was his demo of Conduit Live, which will go into BETA testing next week. Conduit Live is a basic real time compositing tool that’s being developed by dvGarage; definitely keep your eyes open for that one. Last but not least, long time BAVC certified Apple instructor and fiscal sponsoree Beth Pielert presented her documentary “Out of the Poison Tree,” a hard-hitting look at the Khmer Rouge and their survivors 30 years later, which was recently onlined at BAVC.

This latest SF Cutters event was again a great success; informative and a good networking opportunity. I ran into former BAVC student Nanette Rosen, who was taking care of the technical aspects of the night, new BAVC student Eric Predoehl, whom I had only met via email before, and International filmmaker Marinell Haegelin, who chatted with me in German about her latest piece. Claudia Crask, SF Cutters Business Manager, was making sure that everybody got their pizza, raffle ticket, and exchanged a bunch of business cards with fellow media professionals. SF Cutters membership is free by the way, and the monthly events are $5 to attend. I can’t wait to find out who’s presenting next month…