The personal site of Tim Schultz. A nerd who loves Batman, The Legend Of Zelda and Post Production.
Random Thoughts:
01.22.12
01.10.12
CES has begun and so far the things I'm most excited about are the thunderbolt peripherals. I've been waiting patiently for an esata adapter and it looks like Lacie will be the first to release one that runs at full speed (sonnet made an express card adapter that doesn't have the bandwidth to take full advantage of the speed). I tweeted them for more info and all they would do is link me to their Press Release so here is the information.
ESATA HUB THUNDERBOLT SERIES
The eSATA Hub Thunderbolt Series gives new life to existing eSATA drives with Thunderbolt innovation and backward compatibility. It connects to a late-model Mac via the Thunderbolt port and features two eSATA ports. This lets the user connect two eSATA external hard drives to the Hub and get full eSATA speeds on their new Mac. The Hub also features a second Thunderbolt port that lets the user connect other Thunderbolt peripherals. This means up to 12 eSATA drives (6x Dock, 2x eSATA links per Hub) can be connected via a single connection to a Mac with full eSATA 3Gb/s speeds.
Very cool that they thought to include the thunderbolt port to allow for daisy chaining. I've seen a few things out already that don't have that and I kinda want to yell at the companies that do that. I hope I can get my hands on one ASAP. My Mac Mini server has been waiting for a way to hook up some of my faster and larger existing storage solutions. Lacie also announced a thudnerbolt drive called the 2Big that you can read more about on that press release.
01.06.12
Here's a tip for all you Avid users out there. I have a method I use to handle how I reference my previous cut's timecode while I'm doing network notes. Get your cut open and make sure to back it up in an old cuts bin and here we go. Start by doing an Audio Mixdown of the VO Track. Do this by setting your in and out on the entire length of your VO track only. If you don't have a VO track just pick the one with the least amount of audio on it to save time. Go to the Special menu and then select Audio Mixdown. Leave it Mono and make sure to select an audio track number BELOW your last track. Then give it a minute, though it should be pretty quick and it will automatically cut it in to the track you told it to. Now turn the volume all the way down on the audio mixdown clip. Make sure all of your tracks have sync locks turned on. Open the Timecode Window from the Tools menu. Add a line and point it to the source timecode of the track the audio mixdown is on. Now as you start to do notes and add and remove time by doing them you'll be able to see the timecode of where that content was in the last cut as well as the current time of your timeline.
01.05.12
This has been on my mind lately. How long should the electronics we buy last? What is a reasonable expectation for your cell phone to be relevant? How long should a game console be current?
I'll start with the game consoles cause that is what actually sparked a lot of these thoughts. E3 is coming up. I'm excited because I may have some stuff I've worked on being shown there this year. Even still I'm sure the good people who run E3 will put me through the wringer before giving me a pass. But it's rumored that a new XBox and PlayStation will be announced and I gotta say if it's true I'm not sure I really NEED a new game console so soon. I realize they've booth been out for about 6-7 years but I haven't seen huge improvements in graphics performance or processor power that would really warrant a new system. Not to mention the lack of a new disc format or some new technology that would affect anything. Regardless I think that consoles are going download mostly soon for new titles and all 3 major systems support that currently. The Nintendo Wii getting the much needed HD upgrade with the Wii U seems right but I always expect them to be one step behind graphically and two steps ahead in innovation which is where they are now. So I'd say that all three have been good investments and will continue to be. If Microsoft and Sony are to release new systems I hope they come with something beyond my comprehension that makes them worth it.
Cell phones are an odd topic. I've always known that they are the most personal of computers. Only seconded by tablets now. The iOS versus Android debate will rage on till one of them stumbles (like the Avid vs FCP debate did). There are people that would cut off their own hand before giving up their Blackberry. This is the device we touch first thing in the morning and last thing before bed so it makes sense that it has to match your lifestyle. Also we keep our most personal of communications on it. So privacy with these devices is a must. But how long should a cell phone last you? The cell companies say 2 years. But now that we have these little computers in our pockets we are bound to the software companies who develop them. Apple has been giving a new operating system out yearly and it seems like after that magical 2 year marker you get the new OS but they hold back newer features that would need newer hardware. Well, I'm sure that there are some things being held back by the marketing department but who knows for sure. Google on the other hand has been a little less regular with their updates and on top of that they haven't been that great for the last few releases. Only one or two devices even get their coveted latest version at that and then as the end user you don't get the updates from Google directly so you have to wait for whatever mod that has been made by your companies dev team to get integrated into said release before you're going to get it. Having said all that, people don't always need the latest and greatest to be happy. But I come back to the question of not how long it should last but more how long it should be relevant. Relevancy matters when it comes to tech because if your platform isn't relevant than you don't get applications made for it or updated for it and so on. Also phones are really expensive. I know we all buy a subsidized model and that makes it a $100-$300 average range but the actual costs of these phones leaves even the iPad to shame. So is 2 years really enough? And of that I'd say only one year is where you fall into the relevant category. I'm pretty sure there is no good answer to which cell phone is the best for the cost since it's too subjective.
On a fun note, here is an awesome video going around the internet where someone made floppy drives recreate the song "Derezzed" by Daft Punk.
01.04.12
Apple has really screwed some great post production software. What prompts me to say this (again for the 100th time) is that Bunim/Murray has switched back to Avid Media Composer. I find this really great and also really tragic. Apple is one of my favorite companies. I own nearly every model of computer they make (this is not an invitation to come rob me) and use their software daily. While I celebrate the life and times of Steve Jobs daily at the alter I've built for him in my trunk (so that I can travel with it) the one thing I've felt they NEVER got right was post production. It is a creative market that I can see Apple feeling like they had to be a part of. Of course there was that ugly business of Adobe pulling Premiere from the Apple back in the day and Apple harboring that grudge that made a lot of users switch to the PC but I digress. At some point after The Great Jobs returned to the throne Apple started making it's own software for creative markets to help sell the Macintosh. They made Aperture for professional photographers, bought Logic for music makers and Final Cut for the emerging digital video market. In case you didn't know and I've reminded people of this many times, Apple didn't make Final Cut Pro. Macromedia did. The same company that made Flash before Adobe bought that. I'll go into that more in a second. My point is, Apple has done very little as far as direct development in the post production software arena and what they have acquired they have ruined. Before I go off on these rants I will say that a lot of the WHYs I'm about to say are speculation based on being around for all of this happening and conversations on convention floors with nerds who, if you can believe it, OUT NERD ME! Here are the big three:
Final Cut Pro
As I said Final Cut wasn't made by Apple. They bought it from Macromedia. It was a revolutionary product when it first came out. Using Quicktime as an architecture for inexpensive digital editing it sparked a whole generation of DV Cam carrying college students to make their masterpieces. I haven't actually seen any yet but that's really not the point. Also, it was Apple's push of the Firewire standard that helped make Final Cut so popular. But after Apple got their hands on it FCP didn't really change much. Sure it got more refined and features like HD Video were added to it. They made it the right price so that anyone could put it on their computer, which was good for Apple since you had to have an Apple computer to run it. I argue that the recent Final Cut Pro X is the first full featured (laughs out loud literally) video editing software they've made. Everything up to that point was riding the natural tails of what Macromedia had come up with. Over years of tooling with "new ideas" in iMovie they chose to go with what was a confusing toy and tried to sell it to pros. I was at the FCPX announcement and I did boo and heckle them on stage. I argued with people, including friends I was with that it was the end of Final Cut Pro and that even those staying with FCP7 in hopes Apple would inevitably add all the things they'd need to make it a feature rich software package the new "paradigm shift" they expected to make in editing was nothing but a company making an excuse for wanting to streamline development into one department and they chose the cheaper one. Probably because they didn't actually make that much money off the software in the end. Making and supporting software isn't cheap. In the end FCP7 was a good piece of software (that I wouldn't use professionally but none the less I give it credit for being a viable option) they ruined.
Shake
This is a bitter subject for me. I've always loved visual FX work and Shake at a point in time before Peter Jackson's King Kong (the last major film I remember reading used Shake) was the best in class. Apple had bought it while it was at it's height and was about $3,500 a seat. I'm not really sure what happened here other than I can assume it was too costly for their average user to buy. So when they announced that they were dropping the price of Shake to $500 I got really excited. The only real compositing package that ran on a laptop worth talking about then was Adobe After Effects and though it's still the backbone of most of what I do, After Effects is not a powerful compositor by compositing software standards. So I went out and got Shake, learned it and used it on a lot of projects. Deal or No Deal was a big one since we did a lot of fun flying through 3D environments with 2D elements for the super teases. It also had the best point tracker I had used to that point. What I didn't know at the time was WHY Apple dropped the price. They killed Shake. The only software to come out since Shake that is a worthy successor is Nuke but Nuke is still too expensive for most users going back to the $3,500+ a seat price range. What did Apple do with the technology it acquired from Shake you may ask? Motion. Essentially the most powerful compositing software out became the most annoying tool for any serious graphic creation. Sure you can make a dancing word or some smoke fly around a screen really quickly but they look terrible and every effect in Motion is so over used that you can spot them a mile away. Apple once again tried to simplify for their common user. In any creative environment this is a mistake. The metaphor for post software is "lead a horse to water". Give us tools to make what we come up with so that the end result of the professional is unique and of the quality of the artist. If you give every idiot the ability to make text turn into flowers than every idiot will.
Color
Silicon Color made a product called FinalTouch. A very cool Color Correction software that ran on Macs. Apple bought it up and married it to it's ProRes codec. Even if you hated Final Cut Pro at the time it was worth buying just to get Color. Like Black Magic Design's DaVinci Resolve is now, it was a great desktop tool that took what used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to do and put it in the hands of anyone who kept FCP up-to-date. It was the first time a lot of people were exposed to powerful secondary corrections and power windows. But after only doing a couple of updates to what was a kinda buggy piece of software they scrapped it and have built it's most basic of functionalities into FCPX. Color had node based corrections and advanced features that allowed colorists to help tell story through the tone of a shot. Things like that subtlety tell the story. Now, FCPX auto-balances your shot and you can pretty much do to video what you can to a picture in iPhoto. This goes back to the repetitive philosophy Apple has of taking the power out of a good tool to give the average user some resemblance of professionalism but really just making everything cookie cutter and ruining it.
So to sum up, despite the fact that I love Apple I'm really glad that companies like Bunim/Murray are going back to Avid. Apple did this to themselves. They deserve the wake up call. If Apple is going in the direction I think they are it's really better this way. The fact that the Mac Pro hasn't been updated for almost 2 years is very telling. I hear rumors that a new Mac Pro is around the corner but also that the iMac will become the new default professional Macintosh. I'm not sure I want that to be honest, I still like the lasting power and expandability of towers. But I'm also not so stuck in my ways that I wont buy an iMac at the drop of a hat if that's how it goes. I'll tell you this much, I certainly wont be buying a crappy Windows machine if I can help it.
01.03.12
So I've been pontificating a lot on this site and social media. I want conversation. Without an open conversation there is really little point in posting anything online. Yes so far I've been using the site as a journal but all the more reason I'd like it to be tied into Facebook, Twitter and Google+. I'd love to be able to write any post at any length and have it posted to all three of those and some how synchronize comments between all three. Any @ reply on twitter would manifest as a comment, and some how Google+ and Facebook comments could interact with each other. Now I realize this is a pipe dream. The best I could do is probably just use the Facebook Comments plug-in for my site. But that poses another issue. I don't want a CMS (for those that don't know, that stands for Content Management System. Think Wordpress, Tumblr, Blogger or Moveable Type). So none of these posts are in a database. Just a simple HTML file. Easy to update and the lightest weight content any browser can handle. So the Facebook Comments plug-in from what I can tell is a per page plugin. Since all of the posts are on the one page that isn't going to work. A friend mentioned Disqus but it seems like similar issues plus I like the idea that if you want to comment on something Facebook has at least made you go through the hassle of signing up for a fake account first. I'd love it if I could actually get feedback from any of the 5 people that will probably see this post but therein lies the issue.
Ok I am trying the Facebook Plugin with some minor mods to see if it works. So I'm going to test comment and look like a tool.
Also. If you never went on the ride JAWS at Universal Orlando sadly you wont be able to now as today it closed. But this video gives you a great feel for how awesome this ride was.
01.02.12
Being lactose intolerant sucks. But it does remind me to show people these. I'm proud of what Drew and I made here.
01.01.12
Ok maybe I do have fun playing with my site. It's been a while since I've hand coded anything and I miss the trial and error of it. Today I'm going to be playing with a head bar. I chose to move the "ABOUT" section into the side bar since this site is a basic table with 2 columns if I write something too long here it will stretch out the rightbar beyond the bottom of this content but I'm starting to think that may be ok design wise. I could make it a layer but then the right bar would be the same width anyways. Now I'm going to try to make a head bar. Nothing to fancy. My goal is to keep this a single page site. No need for RSS.
12.31.11
Happy New Year! I wanted to get whatever it was I was going to do with my website done by today but I'm still not sure what I want from a website. I'm not going back to iWeb, Wordpress takes too much management to stay secure and tumblr was great but I want my site to be hosted on my server. I hand coded this one since I can't find a package I like to manage my site. Rapidweaver seems like it's it's cool if you are willing to buy a handful of $30 plug-ins. SandVox seemed too template driven like iWeb was. Basic HTML is easily updateable from anywhere. I don't really like any of the iOS apps for blog updating either. Also, I don't really want to "blog" about things. In fact I'm starting to see the whole social interaction of the web to be a bit of a life distraction. I really don't care about other peoples lives as much as I'm just bored and can't help but constantly check twitter and facebook. I just need to be less bored in my personal time. Hobbies are good. I play a lot of video games. Batman Arkham City is the best game of 2011 hands down for the record. Anyways, goodbye 2011. Maybe I'll get excited about the interwebs again in 2012.
About:
Tim Schultz began editing at age 19, when he started cutting together animatics for Sony and Warner Bros. At that point he knew editing was for him. He has worked steadily ever since, editing on projects such as "House of Purgatory" "Deal or No Deal" and "Big Brother" Tim credits his passion and success to the Universal Studios backlot tour, which he frequented as a child. "Not only did the backlot tour give me a love for the process of making television, but it also taught me French! Facade: a French word meaning false front." Tim now works at Chainsaw, a post house in Hollywood, CA.
Credits: