Friday, October 28, 2011

The Editors' Panel: Why Do We Make That Edit?

Moderated Discussion About the Creative Storytelling Side of Editing

The Editors' Lounge was thrilled to present another installment of the Editors' Panel, a series of moderated discussions with industry-leading editors on a variety of topics affecting the editing community!

This panel's discussion engaged in a fascinating free-ranging discussion centered on the creative side of editing—why we make specific editing choices rather than how. This month's panel included:
Debra Kaufman (moderator) • Founder / Editor, MobilizedTV
Mark GoldblattFeature Film Editor
Andrew SeklirEpisodic TV Editor
Derek McCantsReality TV Editor
Bee OttingerPhotographer/Music Video Editor

The Editors' Lounge and AlphaDogs would like to thank the fine folks at the American Legion Post 150 in Burbank for providing a great space for our huge crowd.

Visit the Editors' Lounge Vimeo Channel and watch the discussion yourself. It's even in HD! (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4)

Friday, September 30, 2011

Editing Options: Exploring the Alternatives

Demonstrations from Adobe and Blackmagic Design

The Editors' Lounge was excited to welcome everyone back from our little summer hiatus! We all know that a certain recent product announcement has rocked the editing world to its core, and many people are now looking around for an alternative. A knockout crowd joined us on September 30 for an evening of demos by Adobe and Blackmagic Design, to see if they offered the solution.

Adobe presented Premiere Pro Creative Suite 5.5, a fully-featured professional editing workflow offering breakthrough performance with Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop Extended, and more...
• Timesaving integration between Premiere Pro and After Effects and Photoshop
• Real-time effects and color correction, accelerated rendering, and superior multilayer performance
• Broad native format support (import and export virtually any format—even FCP 7 projects), skip time-consuming transcoding for file-based and DSLR footage
• Advanced audio editing in Adobe Audition and timesaving integration with Premiere Pro

Rich Montez showed off Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve and discussed what's new in the recently released version 8
• Node-based image processing with sequential and parallel connections
• 3D tracking for locking Power Windows™ to on-screen objects
• Real-time stereoscopic and Raw RED workflows

Blackmagic Design also showed several of their new products including the UltraStudio 3D Thunderbolt-based capture/playback, Decklink 4K capture/playback card and several new Mini Converters.

As a special treat, Don McDonell of Ciphertex Data Security displayed some of their portable, hardware-encrypted, key-based hard drives and arrays designed to securely store digital assets when unattended or during transit between locations. Products shown included the CX-RANGER-E RAID array and CX-5000NAS NAS Server, featuring:
• AES 256-bit hardware encryption and password protection
• hot-swappable drives, with automatic hot rebuild

It's an important time right now to have a look at all the options available to the editing and color correcting communities, and the Editors' Lounge is here to help!

Friday, June 24, 2011

Integrated Post Workflows… Supercharged!

Product Demonstrations to Start Your Summer Right!

The Editors' Lounge on June 24 showcased the best-of-breed post production workflow enabling technologies. From ingest, to asset management and manipulation, to media management, backup and synchronization, all feeding and pulling from a single collaborative shared storage network. It’s the framework behind the creative process, the foundation of modern post production.

Presentation and demonstration highlights included:

Facilis Technology's TerraBlock 5.0 with Facilis Shared File System
• Virtual Volume storage with Multi-user Write access across platforms

Square Box Systems' CatDV 9.0
• network-based ingest and playout for HD SDI, cross-platform workflows

StorageDNA's DNA Evolution
• data management for file-based workflows, backup and archiving
and much, much more...

As an added bonus, Philip Hodgetts was on hand to talk about Final Cut Pro X and discuss his brand-new book, Conquering the Metadata Foundations of Final Cut Pro X.

All in all, it was a fantastically successful evening with a record turnout. Many thanks to all who participated!

Friday, May 13, 2011

Lucky 13: Avid's 2011 NAB Product Announcements

An Evening with Greenfield and the Avid Products Team

The Editors’ Lounge pulled out all the stops at AlphaDogs on Friday May 13 with an exciting event: Avid was back this year to show off their 2011 NAB product lineup! A massive crowd joined us for a packed evening of demonstrations, presentations and discussions.


In a repeat of one of last year's biggest highlights, CEO Gary Greenfield joined Director of Product Management, David Colantuoni, to discuss Avid's plans for today's changing post-production landscape and their vision of where Avid is headed. This was a rare opportunity to meet senior management face-to-face and share questions and concerns.


Editors also looking to get their start working on 3D projects heard from Director of Architecture and Design VD&O, Steve McNeill, on how to simplify and manage 3D stereoscopic editing workflows. He discussed how to avoid pitfalls that are common to the world of 3D post and how Avid is working to make dealing with them easier.


Consulting Product Designer, Frank Capria, demonstrated the new Phrase Find feature in Media Composer 5.5, a revolutionary way of finding the right clips quickly along with numerous other innovative timesavers.


Principal Product Designer, Doug Hasel, showed off the Artist Series of control surfaces for Pro Tools, Media Composer and more, acquired by Avid through last year's purchase of Euphonix.


All in all, it was an exciting and memorable evening. Thanks Avid!

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

8th Annual Pre-NAB Discussion Panel

Our Famous Prognosticators Prognosticate...

Our friends at Key Code Media once again helped the Editors' Lounge put on the famous (infamous?!) Pre-NAB Discussion Panel. This 8th rendition of our annual look ahead at NAB, enlightened us all with heated discussion about trends and predictions for post-production and the film/TV business for the rest of 2011 and beyond. Topics included Final Cut Pro update rumors, radical changes coming to current post production business models, the impact of the disaster in Japan on video tape, and the ever-present 300-pound-gorilla in the room: 3-D. This year's panel featured:


Debra Kaufman (moderator) • Founder / Editor, MobilizedTV

Lucas Wilson • Director Business Development, 3ality Digital

Steve Cohen • Film+TV Editor / Blogger / Author Avid Agility

Mark Raudonis • VP Post Production, Bunim/Murray Prods

Michael BravinTechnical Consultant

Terence Curren • Editor+Colorist / Founder, AlphaDogs


As a special treat, the Sony BVME250 OLED master monitor that was discussed at last month's Editors' Lounge was actually be on hand for guests to oooh and aaah over.


You can watch the panel discussion right now on our Vimeo channel (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). Be sure to check out other past video presentations there.


A great big thanks to our fiends at Key Code Media for hosting us!

Friday, February 25, 2011

The Great Big Sony Event

A record crowd braved heavy rains to attend the February Editors' Lounge at Key Code Media featuring a full evening of Sony presentations. Sony Sales Support Engineer, Mike DesRoches, guided attendees through the many features of Sony's PMW-F3 camera, as well as SR 2.0 memory and file-based tape-to-Avid import. He was followed by Avid Application Specialist, Casey Richards, who wrapped up the evening showing XDCAM proxy video with hi-res audio, and many other new features in Media Composer 5.5.

You can watch presentation highlights right now on our Vimeo channel (
Part 1 and Part 2). Be sure to check out other past video presentations there.

A great big thanks to our fiends at
Key Code Media for hosting us!

Friday, January 28, 2011

Triple Demo Action!

Boris Continuum Complete 7, mocha Pro, and FCP plug-ins from Intelligent Assistance

The Editors' Lounge got off to a great start for 2011 with a jam-packed event in January.

James
Rankin was on hand to demonstrate the power and flexibility of Boris FX's Continuum Complete 7 plugins package. BCC is one of the most popular NLE visual effects plugins packages out there, and it was amazing to see what can be achieved with version 7. James was kind enough to do some follow-up research regarding the plugin package; for those who's questions couldn't be answered during the presentation, you find his notes online here.

M
ary Poplin from Imagineer Systems dropped by to show off their latest mocha offering. The all-new mocha Pro combines their amazing tracking and roto tools from mocha with the matchmoving and correction/stabilization tools from mokey and monet for an all-in-one compositing solution.

P
hilip Hodgetts demonstrated the amazing things that can be accomplished with the various Intelligent Assistance plugins for Final Cut. From automated syncing and matchbacks to sequencing and log note tools and much more, there are plugins to solve every problem and speed editing workflows.

T
hanks to all the presenters and everyone who showed up!