So, I was telling my wife the other day that I would love to just be able to record my thoughts and ideas as I’m driving so that I don’t forget them later. She recommended a tape recorder. I asked her “What is that?” and moved on.

Fast forward to the next day, I’m surfing the web and I came across a cool site call Jott at jott.com. The basic concept of Jott is to capture your thoughts via your cell phone through a toll free number. The captured voice message is emailed to your Jott Inbox and to your regular email inbox and also are transcribed by someone so you get both a voice mail and text message of that voice mail.

Well, if that was not enough (which it is for me), you can also create “groups” of people in your Jott account. So for example, you are a marketing department VP and want to quickly communicate some new campaign you are going to run to your entire team. You set up a Jott account. Your team mates set up a Jott account and you add them to your “Marketing” group.

Ok, so at first, I thought what a stupid idea, a site where you just log in and answer one question and one question only, “What are you doing now?”. How lame! Well, 1 week later and 100 entries later, I’m pretty much addicted to it.

And I have friends that follow me and “What I’m doing now.” Oh yeah, I also follow other people. I’m a loser right? Wrong!

Social Networking is the hottest thing on the Web now. Why? Because we are social beings. We need contact, physical, emotional and, yes, virtual!

So why is Twitter so popular? Curiosity perhaps? I want to know what you are doing all day every day. Sure. But there is another take to Social Networking and to Twitter itself that lots of people are overlooking, the ability to use it for business!

Ok, so you run a small media/video studio and you are tired of typing up your script in Microsoft Word in really large font, printing it and taping it to the bottom of your camera lens so your talent can read it?

Come on! Admit it! You know you do that. I did and it was embarrassing as hell! That is until I found Prompt 6!, a shareware application from MovieClip.biz (http://www.movieclip.biz).

What a fantastic program. It’s a must have for anyone creating training videos (we do tons of them), interview style videos, newscasts, or any other kind of video that your talent needs to read material for (or does not want to memorize the script!).

The software costs only $40 if you like it (it’s shareware), and I have to tell you, I think it’s fantastic for that price. (A big thank you to the developer).

It’s really easy to use and comes in 2 flavors. The standard flavor is a regular application that runs on top of any other application you are running. The Prompt 6 on Black flavor, will completely black out your screen and only display the teleprompter in the middle (by default, but you can move it around the screen).

Ok, so I don’t get easily excited about a new website offering a new web service (well, I do, I’m a geek), but this one, I have to admit, is pretty awesome.

GrandCentral.com is a new website (well, new to me at least) that let’s you choose a local phone # as your “main phone” that people can call. You can then forward any of those calls to your cell phone, home phone, work phone, etc. all at the same time, so you can choose where you want to pick up the phone.

So for example, let’s say someone is calling you via the GrandCentral phone # you gave out and you are just about to walk out. Both your home and cell phone will ring (assuming you’ve set up both as your forward phone). You can just pick up the cell phone and keep heading out.

But then you realize that

So you thought you were a complete pro at Premiere Pro and don’t need to learn anything new? Well, think again. Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 is out on public beta for you to check out and play with (go to http://labs.adobe.com to download it).

This new version brings on many new enhancements to the table and along with those enhancements, it brings on new preferences.

In this article, I will cover what the new preferences are and any changes to current preferences.

You can access the preferences in Adobe Premiere Pro by clicking on the “Edit” menu and then clicking on “Preferences” then select “General”.
General Tab

To support the new multiple bin view, you can now choose how you want the bins to open up.

1. Open in new window (Default) – When you double click on a bin, the bin will open up in a new window (pop up) so that you can “drag and drop” items in between bins very easily.
2. Open in place – This is the old Premiere Pro 2.0 way. If you double click on a bin, it will just switch to that bin inside the same window.
3. Open new tab – This is pretty cool. Instead of opening up your bin as a new pop up window, it will open it up as a new tab in your project window.

After walking for hours around the NAB 2007 show floor and then taking lots and lots of classes, I came to the following conclusion:

2007 will be the year of media everywhere and of HD.

It’s funny if you think about it, because these are two extremes. On the “media everywhere” side, you have resolutions that are so small and sometimes low in quality (for example, 176 x 208 px for a Nokia 3250 phone and on the higher end HD resolution side you have 720 up to 1080 height resolution with huge screen sizes.

So, as a media designer, developer and or producer, how do you “shoot once and show everywhere”? That’s our challenge and there are some companies out there trying to help us out.

The challenge is to be able to take your nice footage you shot on your nice HDV, HD or even (heaven forbid) DV camera and be able to create a Standard Def DVD, a High Def DVD, a Flash website and prepare it for mobile phone, PSP and iPod consumption. That’s enough to drive you mad!

Apple today released a point update to Aperture. Version 1.5.3 fixes issues with the following:

1) Generation of thumbnails for adjusted images.
2) Entering and exiting Full Screen mode.
3) Working with large sets of keywords in the Keywords HUD.
4) Restoring from a vault.

Other issues that were fixed:

Ok. So I have a big ego. My title at my work is “Interactive Media Manager”, so when I saw Microsoft at NAB 2007 introducing their new “Interactive Media Manager” software, I wanted to sue them. But then I realized…oh, it’s just a title. I can’t copyright that. Oh well.

Which makes me think…Will Microsoft now require that I pay royalties to them because my title is their software title? You never know with Microsoft!

Anyhow. Based on SharePoint 2007, Microsoft introduced an extension to SharePoint specifically targeting people in the multimedia industry including film makers, game designers and web site developers.

Interactive Media Manager comes with the following:

Ok, so I have to admit it, I’m lazy. I could get on the Internet and search for a phone # when I want the number to my local Pizza Hut…or I could go “old school” and use the yellow pages…But no. I dial 411 (”phone information” for those reading this article that are from another country).

The problem with 411 is that they charge you. I think it’s up to like $1.25 now, especially if you are dialing 411 from your cell phone.

If only I could harness the power of Google Local on my phone by dialing a phone number, say 1-800-GOOG-411 and just telling Google what phone number I’m looking for. Ah, wouldn’t that be nice. And I would not want to talk to a person. I’d want this entire process to be automated.

Microsoft announced at NAB 2007 that they will be releasing a competitor to Adobe Flash called Silverlight. From Microsoft’s website, here is what they say it offers:

1) Deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIA…hey the Allaire Brothers….makers of ColdFusion…now Macromedia…err…Adobe coined that term) for the Web.

2) Seamless, fast installation for users (2MB download)

3) Consistent experiences between Macintosh computers and Windows-based personal computers (Yeah right! Microsoft always says that…but has anyone ever tried IE on Mac compared to IE on Windows?)

4) Create richer, more compelling Web experiences (You mean like Adobe is doing today in Flash)?

5) Stunning vector-based graphics, media, text, animation and overlays (Wow! That’s a great new invention…I mean, not like Flash had it for over 6 years already!!!!)

Ok, so it’s my last day here at NAB 2007. Now back to reality (aka work). Damn. I wish it could last forever. Anyhow, my last day consisted of walking the floor some more and of taking the following classes:

• Creative Lighting with Shadows
• Green Screen Lighting

Walking the Floor
I got to see the NewTek booth and played around with the Tricaster Pro (see my blog entry on this). Basically, it’s a portable studio in a box. A must see if you are webcasting.

I also visited other smaller booths and did another walk around the Apple and Adobe booths (what can I say, I’m a fan). Now on to my classes.

Creative Lighting With Shadows
This was a really neat class that inspired me again to be more creative and not just strive to finish the video and deliver it immediately. Taught by Victor Milt, legendary cameraman and director (he shot the famous Irish Spring commercials, plus lots more), the class covered how to “paint your scene with shadows”.

Do you need to webcast a meeting, event or anything else live to the internet? Have you tried seeing how much people charge to do this? From production to distribution, it can cost your company well over $15K to webcast a meeting or event to an internet audience.

Most of your cost will come in at the production level. Getting your equipment (camera’s, lights, switchers, etc). I found this really great product at NAB 2007 from NewTek called TriCaster that may bring your costs way down if you purchase and reuse for many events. Basically, Tricaster is a production studio in a box.

TriCaster & Pro allows you to connect up to 3 cameras, a VCR, a laptop and edit all of those live as the event is happening. It then allows you to switch between sources, watch the program monitor, add lower 3rd text so that your program looks “network quality”.

Obviously, this is not an extensive list of what’s in NAB 2007, but it’s my list of things I’m interested in, and since this is my blog, I can post what I like! Just kidding. Sorry for the attitude. I’m only here for 1 more day and I’m kind of bummed to have to go back to reality (a.k.a. work)!

Anyhow, below is a list of products that I think will greatly improve and/or help you in your corporate media making abilities (I know they will help me).

Adobe Photoshop CS3
The coolest thing that I saw about Photoshop CS3 (Extended version) is the ability to import video into it. That’s right. You can now open a video file directly into Photoshop and there is even a brand new timeline to allow you to move through it frame by frame. Why would you want to bring in a video into photoshop? Rotoscoping baby! That’s right. You can remove whatever you want from the video on a frame by frame basis using all the tools you already know in Photohsop. So you can now be a rotoscoping artist with Photoshop! One more thing to add to your resume! Yeah!

Oh my! So many new toys, so little time to play. Let’s get to it. Here is a recap of my day in NAB 2007.

I started out by visiting the Avid booth (since that the main one when you enter the show floor). Anyhow, besides the cool looking booths they had, nothing from them really interested me (though they did have a booth dedicated to both event and corporate videographers, which is a sign of the times….that is, everyone is videotaping these days and Avid wants to get a piece of that pie…funny, Adobe and Apple are going the other way…that is towards film).

Anyhow…After I passed the Avid booth I went straight to the Apple booth (by-passing momentarily the Adobe booth). I was really excited and interested in seeing the new Final Cut Studio (especially Color) and also Final Cut Server. So let me start with Apple.

Final Cut Studio 2.0 now consists of the following applications:

Final Cut Pro 6.0 – Video Editing
SoundTrack Pro 2.0 – Audio Editing
Motion 3 – Graphics / Compositing
DVD Studio Pro 4.0 – DVD Authoring
Color – Color Grading
Compressor 3 – Compression (Duh!)

Not too much information about it yet, however, Adobe announced in NAB that they will release an “offline” Flash video player (e.g. like Windows Media or Quicktime) that will allow you to watch Flash videos (.flv’s) offline, just like you do today with Windows Media and Quicktime players.

The video will support live streaming, progressive downloads and protected (read “DRM”) videos. It will also support full screen mode.

OK, so I must have walked 10,000 miles yesterday in NAB. I don’t understand how women with high heels in the show get to do that all day long? I was wearing really comfortable shoes and I still was dead by 6pm. But anyhow, that’s not why you are reading this article.

I’ll make this one short. I’ll be posting another blog soon.

Red, I see Red everywhere!

No, it’s not a song by UB40, it’s the new 4K camera that will sell for under $20K. Yes. Film is officially dead (well, almost, not yet but soon, very soon my child). I didn’t get to “touch it” because the line was extremely long and had to wait over 1 hour just to put my hands on it, and that was cutting into my Final Cut Studio 2.0 presentation schedule, but I did get some great video footage (check out my videos for more videos)

I’m still in my room (the NAB 2007 show floor does not open until 10:15am after the keynote). Regardless, you can start checking out some of the cool stuff companies like Adobe and Apple are going to introduce now on the web. Here is a quick rundown:

Apple:
Final Cut Studio 2 (http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/)
Final Cut Server (http://www.apple.com/finalcutserver/)

Adobe Labs:
After Effects CS3 (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/aftereffectscs3/)
Premiere Pro CS3 (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/premierecs3/)
SoundBooth CS3 (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/soundbooth/)

Yet another great learning day. My main focus today was Podcasting, since we are starting to do a lot of podcasting at work and I’m about to launch The Digital Media Dude Podcast (yes…I know you can hardly believe it…)

So here is the list of classes I took with a short description of each. For the full day’s notes, please get them here.

• 9:00am to 10:15am – Finding Your Voice; Finding Your Podcast Topic
• 10:30am to 11:30am – Keynote – James Thomas, Editor of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
• 10:45am to 1:00pm – Marketing Your Podcast
• 2:00pm to 3:15pm – Final Cut Pro – Effective Titles For Video Editors
• 3:30pm to 4:45pm – Building Buzz & Traffic For Your Podcast Through Social Media
• 5:00pm to 6:15pm – Automating Your Podcasting Workflow

It’s out! Apple did it. They announced the new Final Cut Studio 2.0 which includes the following products:

1) Final Cut Pro 6.0 (Editing)
2) Motion 3.0 (Graphics, Compositing)
3) SoundTrack Pro 2.0 (Sound Editing)
4) Color (For Color Grading - Correcting)
5) Compressor 3 (For compressing files to different formats)
6) DVD Studio 4 (For DVD Authoring).

I can’t write much about it now since I’m in NAB 2007 and I’m on my lunch break, however, I will write about it tonight when I get back to my room.

What a fantastic day today. It started with me waking up at 6:30am (after going to sleep at 2:00am due to watching the TV show 24 with my wife on DVD (Season 4 Episode 2….great episode by the way). Anyhow, I left Excalibur and got on the monorail in MGM to head on to the Las Vegas convention center. It was a very long walk, but I need it anyhow. So it’s all good.

Ok, So it’s about 12:20am and the kids are finally asleep. Yup, I brought my wife and kids to NAB 2007. We had a nice dinner (actually, it was ok, it was the buffet at Excalibur, not bad for the money, but not great cuisine either). My wife and kids will be hanging out by the pool tomorrow all day while I take all my classes at NAB 2007.

It’s going to be an interesting day. Here is what I have scheduled for tomorrow:

8:00am to 8:45am: Sessions Orientation

One day left and I’m off to NAB 2007. I’ll be leaving for Las Vegas tomorrow around 2pm PST ready to arrive for a nice dinner, relaxation and then start the full day of post-production classes.

I’ve signed up (thanks to the generosity of the company I work for) for the Post-Production world seminars, and I will be taking a variety of classes, from production (shooting, lighting) to post (editing, dvd authoring) to web (Flash and AJAX).

I can’t wait to see what the announcements will be. I know Adobe will be showing their CS3 suite, though I saw most of it already at the MGLA (check out my last post on Adobe & MGLA). What about Apple? Will they introduce Final Cut Pro 6? Will they introduce FCP 6 Extreme (the competitor to Avid)?

Adobe CS3 and transparency? What am I talking about? Ok, so you might think I’m sitting here, just typing away and drinking way too much wine (well, in my case it would be a nice beer, like Oregon Honey or something similar), but no, I’m not since I’m at work on my lunch break just writing this blog (instead of going out too lunch…I’m way too dedicated).

What I’m talking about is the announcement that Adobe made (last night at the MGLA meeting I attended in Hollywood) that they will be releasing a “preview release” of After Effects CS3, Encore CS3 and Premiere Pro CS3 for everyone that owns any version of any of those applications to download, start playing with and provide feedback.

Add to these apps the other applications in the CS3 series which are already available in the Adobe Labs (http://labs.adobe.com) like Photoshop CS3 and Soundbooth CS3 and they are letting us “geeks” play with all their software before it’s out.

Ok, so I’m still on a “high” from last night’s meeting at the MGLA (Motion Graphics Los Angeles Group). This is the first time since I started going to the MGLA that it was so packed, I could not find a parking space.

Anyhow, let’s talk about what’s important, which is the introduction and demo of the new Adobe CS3 Production Premium Edition.

Adobe took over the entire meeting last night and gave, what I thought was, a fantastic meeting.

Three people from Adobe where there presenting. Steve Kilisky, Senior Product Manager for After Effects, Giles Baker, Senior Product Manager for Premiere Pro and original After Effects team member Dave Simons.

Wow! It’s amazing. I was given a new project. The VP of Operations came up to me and told me he wants to webcast a presentation live to over 1000 of our Trade Partners where I work. I’m said “Sure. We can do that.” Then I hung up the phone and started my research.

Boy, I had no clue what I got myself into. It’s a pretty complicated thing to do (with less then 5 weeks to do it in with NAB in the middle of it!).

Anyhow. I started my research on Google, of course! I love Google…Anyhow…Keep your focus Marcelo. So I started with Akamai to see what they have to offer.

They in turn put me in charge with 2 of their partner companies. Multicast and OnStream Media. I spoke with Multicast and the guy there (Chuck I think was his name) really helped me get educated on this process. Here is a short breakdown of what it takes to webcast:

Ok, so I just ordered (about 4 days ago) my new lense for my Canon 30D. It’s the Tamron 28-300MM lense. Since I can’t afford for now a really fast lense, I had to settle for a slower (this one is F3.5 at the wide angle and F6.3 at the telephoto side.).

However, after attending a few Tamron seminars and looking at the images on their website I decided that for the money ($378 out the door since I’m a student at a local photography school) it is a bargain and offers great quality.

There are a couple of reasons I decided to go for the Tamron lense:

#1 - The focul length it offers (from 28 to 300MM). This is a pretty wide range which will allows me to shoot both wide angle shots and really nice close ups when I’m shooting either a concert and/or air show.

Ok, so I have tons of videos, photographs, sound files, Flash files, photoshop files and God knows what other type of files.

I need to organize all of them for easy lookup, so I started researching and found that what I need is a DAM (no kidding) solution. DAM stands for Digital Asset Management system and they range from the simple and cheap (iView Media Pro) to the real expensive ones like Alienware (which are multi-user systems).

After careful research and analysis I came to the conclusion that a one user system was the way to go (ok, so actually my boss made me come to that conclusion by saying that we can’t afford a full multi-user system now).

After exensive research (a.k.a. Google searching) I narrowed my testing to 2 solutions.

Adobe wants to take over desktop application development, not just web development. Their forey into this arena is called Apollo. What is Apollo? Apollo is a runtime you have to install on your computer that is cross platform.

Think of Apollo just like .Net, except it runs on multiple platforms (Mac, Windows and Linux) and instead of you using VB.Net or C# to write applications, you would use what you already know and love (that is if you are a web developer), web technologies such as Flash, AJAX, HTML, Javascript, Flex, etc.

What’s very cool about this is that you can code applications for the web that can go offline and be used offline in a desktop setting across platforms.