Samsung Video: The UK Developer Programme

The Brief - Come up with a teaser introduction video to show at events, with no budget ASAP.

I set about writing some scripted lines for everyone, thinking I'd splice them all together in post production, but when we started filming everyone wanted to freestyle it and say something 'like' what had been carefully written for them. Not wanting to cause any offence I let them get to it and we ended up with some good content.

My 2D to 3D Experiment

Following on from the excellent Premiumbeat.com article "Still Images: 2D to 3D using After Effects or Apple Motion" I thought I'd try my hand, as I often am on the scrounge for content and there is only so far Ken Burns will take you...

Being in possession of Photoshop and Motion I tried out Jonathan Fowler's approach but instead opted for Pixelmator as I've gotta get used to using it on the iMac.

Quick Mask Mode - A comfortable way to extract

Samsung Video: UI Scalability

Just finished my most recent project, which ended up taking twice as long as normal, although I learnt a hell of a lot about keyframing and 3D camera's in Motion while making this video. We shot the DTC footage in one go, but the battery on the wireless mic ran out, so we had to re-shoot. I did a very rough cut in FCPX, before realising the audio needed producing into false stereo, or dual channel mono via MPEG StreamClip, rather than dual channel mono in FCPX. I muted all the non-voice over audio, then exported just the audio from the whole project. Then I converted that whole track into dual mono with MPEG StreamClip and re-imported it into FCPX. As I carried on editing, some parts fell out of synch, but those were quickly trimmed and lined back up again (slightly laborious but quite fun looking for word shapes on a zoomed in pair of lips...<shudder>)

Evaluating Pixelmator as a Photoshop Replacement

As I'm currently between video projects and our IT department has given away my license for Photoshop, I'm trying out Pixelmator as a very cheap alternative. As most of the image processing I end up doing ends up being used in either Motion or FCPX as video assets, so it needs to be able to handle high quality potentially large files and produce vector based graphics for print.

£10 on the App Store! 

Thoughts so far - The UI is nice, icons expand when selected and the look and feel of the menu system is very similar to Photoshop for all you pro's. There seem to be hundres of effects/filters you can apply (no auto draw for crap artists like me!)