Tech Talk
A Swift Kick to the Head
Why Big Stars on Raising Money on Kickstarter isn’t Hurting Smaller Projects Allow me to start by saying that I’m not a Zach Braff fanboy. I’m sure he’s a nice guy, and he seems to have things he wants to say through filmmaking. But judging based on his debut feature nine years ago as well […]
NAB Roundup 2013 – Forget 3D, Let’s Talk 4K!
Emerging Patterns Every year, if I’m able to do so, I make the 4-hour trek by car from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to attend the National Association of Broadcasters Convention (NAB). For the uninitiated, it’s a trade show where all the manufacturers of every piece of gear involving broadcast, filmmaking, production, postproduction, you-name-it fill […]
Post-Mortem: Two Years After the Fall of FCP
What A Difference Two Years Hasn’t Made It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost two years since the stalwart Final Cut Pro shat the bed and drove countless editors into the hinterlands. At NAB 2010 2011 (thanks to Dave Camp for pointing out my error) when Apple took over a Final Cut Pro Users Supermeet […]
10 Apps That Will Make You a Better (or more effective) Director
Here I Go Again… Recently I blogged about Hollywood Shot Designer app, a product I’ve come to know and love. And use – on every shoot. I went the next step, geekdom-wise, and even joined their beta team so now I’m one of the people testing new versions before the public gets them. It’s an […]
Restoration Software II: Software Harder!
So I Re-Transferred “The Meeting,” a Short I Directed in 1998 I sometimes talk to filmmakers who came up in the all-digital world who say something like, “I’d like to shoot film someday.” My pat, dickish answer is always, “no you wouldn’t. You want to HAVE SHOT film. It’s not the same. As someone who’s […]
Restoration Software
Piecing Together Fragments of Our Creative Pasts – PART 1 If Malcolm Gladwell was to write a filmmaker-specific edition of his great book Outliers, I am relatively sure my generation of filmmakers would be shown to have gotten the shaft by history. In Outliers, Gladwell posits that when one is born can be a huge determining factor […]
Finally, a Practical App for Directors
Is There an App for Disappointment? It’s sad to say, but I thought I’d love my iPad more than I do. The promise of a different kind of user experience – like the iPhone but bigger – seemed like a great thing to have in my information-shuffling arsenal. Don’t get me wrong, I use my […]
NAB 2012 – Filling The Vacuum
It’s been two years since I last attended the National Association of Broadcasters Convention (NAB) – a two-year period in which much of production has undergone some serious seismic shifts. NAB is the giant trade convention in Las Vegas where just about anyone who sells a good or service tied to the film, TV, Radio, […]
Priced to Rent
Masters of our Domains I’m happy to admit it – Filmmakers today should all feel like a bunch of spoiled carping jerks. Some three and a half years ago, Canon (not a company previously renowned for their professional-level HD cameras) blew the lid off the world of filmmaking with the Canon 5D Mark II and […]
