Digital Motion dot net

Here’s the making of:

Really innovative work from Keith Loutit in Signapore

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo.

This is a great little film, wonderful portfolio piece. It does a great job at establishing a look and a mood. I love that Spy Films also put their Making Of on Vimeo as well. It shows exactly how much work went into it.

(via ProVideo Coalition.com)

This site is great for checking out Motion Graphics portfolio pieces. It does what it says:

motionspire screenshot

Motionspire – Motion Graphics Inspiration

sadly (for showing my age), I recognized all the gear he used and owned several pieces of it. In fact, I probably still have my scanjet 4C sitting in a box somewhere…

I also like the way he did the video, looks straight out of ’84

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

[via wired]

What I like about these new web-based media tools isn’t just that they make it easier for normal people to do media editing, but they really show the power of Flash/Flex in a mind-blowing way.

This kind of cut-up editing is old-hat for audio and has shown up in video as well from time-to-time, but this clip is a pretty awesome example to show what some kind of insane attention to detail can produce:

[via Creative Cow Forums]

Also, The Hush Sound – The Lions Roar

My favorite live blogging is always from Engadget.

My summary:

• New Final Cut Digital Asset Management/Transcoding Server: $999/10 users or $1999 for unlimited users (available summer)
• Final Cut Studio 2
  • Final Cut Pro 6
    • ProRes 422: compression for HD (1TB -> 170GB “at same quality”)
    • Support for Sony’s new HDCAM SR 1080p60, Silicon Imaging’s Red Camera
    • Aja-built IO-HD input box for encoding ProRes 422 in real-time on external box ($3495)
    • Open-format timeline: mix formats, resolutions, framerates
    • Smooth-cam camera shake elimination (from Shake)
    • Better Motion integration
  • Motion3
    • Match-moving
    • more 3D
    • Paint
    • Audio-driven animation
  • SoundtrackPro2
    • Better 5.1 support
    • 5.1 and stereo in same project
    • frequency spectrum editing (ripped off from Audition/Soundbooth)
    • Video HUD for better synching
    • “conform” feature (not sure what that is yet)
  • Compressor3
    • Faster
    • More codecs
    • Preview overlays and watermarks with a before and after slider
    • Integrated chapter markers
    • Better multi-threading
  • $499 upgrade, $1299 new, $699 to upgrade from FCP
  • Available May
• Color (new application)
  • Color grading
  • looks like this what at least part of the Shake team is doing now (my guess)
  • Same UI for 3-way color correction with
    • RGB and luma curves
    • lift
    • gamma
    • gain
    • visualization of color in 3D space
  • Mattes from chroma, luma, saturation, custom vignettes, hue and saturation curves
  • Color effects — string them together with a node tree
  • Geometry
  • included in Final Cut Studio 2

Wow, so FCS 2 was expected, but a lot more was also expected in this announcement given that Apple announced the 8-core MacPro a couple weeks ago with crummy video cards and no new iLife for ’07 and lappys and iPod designs getting a little stale. Wonder what else would have been announced today if Apple hadn’t announced the delay of Leopard earlier this week?

I just realized that there was no update to DVD Studio Pro. Hrm, wonder why…

[added links to the apple website and comment about DVD Studio later at 3:51 pm]