Philip Hodgetts, long a Final Cut authority, asks if the rumors about a new 64 bit Final Cut Pro might be true and speculates on what that would mean. It’s only speculation, and the comments include lots of wishful thinking, but it’s informed speculation. After the unveiling of the new iMovie for iPad and the praise it’s had, there’s apparent reason for anticipation.

Creative COW is the odd acronym for “Creative Communities of the World,” an online community where established pros in filma and video come to learn, teach, and share information about the ever-changing world of moving image production, post-production, and exhibition. The author of the article linked below, for example, created the trailers for James Cameron’s Avatar. At the proper forum on the same site, you can find basic help regarding iMovie or Windows Movie Maker.

The particular article I’m linking here, called Relax, and Quit Bluffing: Aspect Ratios and Workflows, offers a history of the different frame sizes for feature film production and exhibition from the invention of film through the contemporary use of digital SLR still cameras for capturing high-definition video. You don’t have to be deeply into the history of technology to appreciate this; knowing how current standards evolved will only help you better grasp where they may be going.

Crossposted at TimMerritt.net

That’s where I’ll be all day tomorrow! Much more to come, including much more regular stuff here on this very blog. No, really.

Before I get to the mechanics of everything in this post, I want to say a bit about why to do all this, and it’s much more than “branding” yourself. I had not long before found a post on 3 Quarks Daily, a group blog on current affairs, about thinking and working in this new economy and this new century. It was a link to an interview and podcast with Seth Godin, an unconventional marketing consultant and author. In this service economy, most of us have to provide something unique—there are videographers and editors all over. To be successful, Godin asserts that we have do our work as an artist would, to add ourselves in essential ways to what we do. After listening to this podcast a few times, and starting to read his blog, I’ve tried to consciously bring more of that attitude to what I do, and I encourage you to do that as well, and tell the story of it through social media. Now, to the links:

We talked of course about Facebook, and we also looked at this Mashable page about its privacy issues. There is of course Twitter, and I briefly pointed to this article about ways to use Twitter for business. Our own Carl Marxer provided a link on the spot to his own advice on using Twitter and other social media.

We focused mainly on LinkedIn, the networking site for professionals. Mashable, linked above, also had a page about searching for jobs on LinkedIn.

MCA-I member Jose Acosta explained how he’s found clients through Facebook as well as his LinkedIn page, and showed his SmugMug portfolio site. Looks nice!

I showed how easy it is to get a good, free blog for creating a website at WordPress.com. There are other options, of course, but I’m familiar with WordPress and it has a huge user base. I showed this article for using WordPress to set up a professional site and weblog.

Posterous is another site offering free blogs, and is easy to update via email. Educational Technologist Tony Vincent explains some features of Posterous here

An example with real relevance for media professionals is Steve Bransford’s blog, Downhome Traces. Steve regularly posts video of historians and long-time Atlanta residents sharing the history and their memories of Atlanta. It’s an absorbing site, offering interesting insight into our local scene, and a great showcase for his skills.

Other example sites: The DV Show, with regular informative posts and sometime video interviews with filmmakers, videographers, and equipment manufacturers.

Finally, that day I showed how relevant blogs and social networks can be, showcaseing Mac-watcher John Gruber’s Daring Fireball site, and his pointers to that day’s announcement of Google’s open-sourcing the VP8 video codec, and the new cloud storage service from Google. Both of these could have big impacts on how video professionals post and store video for online use.

This is hugely exciting—video professionals using digital SLR cameras to shoot very high quality hi-def video on a surprisingly affordable budget. Not cheap, but still startling quality for the price. Please read this article and consider the possibilities. Make sure to watch the first linked video, and remember that was recorded with available light. Very very impressive.

HDSLRs for Video: Beyond the Hype – Creative COW.

I just love how much free hype Apple’s gotten on this. Business majors and MBA candidates, rev up your graduate theses to analyze how they generate so much press mania (which most of you poor mutts will have to write in MSWord on a Windows machine). In the meantime, here’s a nicely done (and fairly plausible) wish-list for today’s announcement from Alchemist Muffin (because all the other good blog names were taken). Via Slashdot, via popurls.

Which news feed will you follow? I’m going to try several, but Fake Steve writes that he will live-blog the keynote Going to be a fun day.

I just discovered Rands In Repose, a fascinating blog about/by/for tech engineers/managers. Entertaining, yes, but full as well of valuable insights about people, management, software, working on a computer, and living with all of them. The author, Michael Lopp, just published a book, Managing Humans, which intrigues me as well. (That link goes to a slide show about the book and the author; I haven’t read it yet.)

The ideas I’ve found here connect with instructional technology and teaching in the attitude he takes toward managers and projects and on the ways the programmers/employees relate. Lopp digs under the many assumptions, acknowledged and implicit, that govern the relationships, and good teachers can learn from reading his examples and reflecting on them.

Via Daring Fireball.

I still shoot Standard Definition: MiniDV, 720×480, 29.97 fps, 4:2:2 compression, etc. etc. But HDV is coming to education. It will be a while before schools and colleges have the funds to upgrade their TVs and display systems to show HDV, but those of us who produce and teach video in education need to know about this format. From Consumer Electronics.net.

A Beginners Guide to High Definition Video.

Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing notoriety points to this great-looking book at Amazon, The DV Rebel’s Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap. He says it sounds great, and I think so too.