Quintessential Studios' Weblog

I attended two events last night: Mocha training by Imagineer at New Media Hollywood and the Los Angeles Post Production Group meeting.

I happened to be only one of two that attended that particular session of Mocha training.  I guess people don’t like to go outside in the rain!

New Media Hollywood seems like a chill place.  They have a foosball table in the front waiting area, if that is any indication.  They are your basic post production provider/reseller.  You can get systems, software, editing bay rentals, etc.  After an decent hands-on Mocha class, I decided to tell others about their discounts and took some flyers to LAPPG.

I’ve been impressed with Mocha and Shape ever since they demoed at LAFCPUG a while back.  Mocha is a planar tracker, so it’s very accurate.  It is more accurate if you define more areas to track.  Then you can adjust the “surface” for a clean export of tracker layer data.  It seriously has a lot of “smarts”.

I also learned about another Imagineer product, Mokey.  This one actually tracks and replaces the hole with what should be there.  Pretty cool.  We went through removing a sign from a yard, as a car drives by.

Props to Ross Shain for an excellent training session.

LAPPG

Later, at LAPPG, I met some nice “new” people including a photographer who proclaimed “Stills are dead… Be prepared for millions of new video people.”  I posted that claim on Twitter and it inspired this post: http://blog.jayfriesen.com/2009/10/millions-of-new-video-people-my-take/

Being early to the meeting I was one of the lucky ones who got a $5 gift card to Showbiz Store & Cafe.  I also partook in some coffee, cookies, a piece of pizza and some brownies.

Woody who founded LAPPG said he’s on a panel for “http://backpackfilmschool.com/” which sounds cool.  Check that out.

Jeffrey Way from AJA went on to talk about the AJA KiPro.  I’ve already been aquainted with the KiPro but I did learn some new things.  One, is that the Sony V1U is a small camera, small like JVC GY-HM100 small.  I learned this because one of the LAPPG members brought one and they used it to hook up to the AJA KiPro.

I also learned that Apple’s Pro Res (HD) is 220Mbits/sec.  Random fact, I know, but here’s some more: The AJA Xena card is the same as the Kona card but it’s for a PC and it just uses different drivers.  So I guess that means if you want to use your Kona card on a PC, all you have to do is download the Xena PC drivers.  There are also some ports on the AJA KiPro that aren’t usable yet.  They are for future upgrades.  You can also use your KiPro like an IO HD.  It’s basically the next gen of that product.  Cross, up and down convert to your heart’s content with this little unit.  It also works as a monitoring unit.  By that I mean a hook-up-your-monitor-to-see-your-footage, type of monitoring unit.  (I’m really not hip to that whole side of things yet but those of you that are should appreciate that.)

Then, the best for last, I learned that Philip Hodgetts wrote a book called The New Now.  And in this book, there are lots of pieces of information on how to grow your video business.  His talk was very inspirational, at least I know it was to two people for sure, myself and one friend, Chris, who sends out a newsletter-type email every month or so.  We talked about how we are going to use information from Philip’s talk in our own businesses, after the meeting.

Chris’ website is here: www.chrishartedits.com Hey! He’s done a comedy short that’s winning lots of awards that has that kid from Glee in it!

Philip talked about some things: the clue train manifesto, H.A.R.O. (Help a Reporter Out), caring about the customer and to install Google Analytics on to your site.  I know I’m being random with this post and my facts, I think I’ve been on Twitter too much lately!

If you get a chance to see Philip Hodgetts, do it.  And if you like what he has to say, maybe you’d want to buy his book. It’s available here: http://proappstips.com/TheNewNow/ and I’ll be reviewing it here later.