Charleston morning - iPhone

There have been a lot of incredible speakers at the 2010 NPPA Convergence in Charleston South Carolina. But the lessons continue after hours. I shot a quick video of Edit Foundry‘s Shawn Montano as he dove into a quick lesson on how to shoot Tony Overman (in a bikini) for a sequence while eating dinner at a restaurant in downtown Charleston. Great stuff so far and amazing people.

Most newspapers cannot afford having Final Cut Pro on every workstation, let alone one, so FCE has been the affordable answer.  That was, until the HD video DSLR’s started coming out then editing became quite the process dealing with raw video that needed to be rendered.

I don’t want to get into my frustrations and of those I know dealing with the raw HD video.  Instead, I’m posting my Streamclip export setting and how-to videos below.  I hope this helps anyone with problems getting their video into Final Cut Express, or is dealing with the “size vs quality” setting for online video export.

These are by no means authoritative, but based on using the tools to get work done at my paper.  Anyone with comments, questions or suggestions please post it below, thanks!

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Getting 7D video into Final Cut Express

Anyone with Final Cut Express and the new Canon DSLR cameras know the frustration of getting their video ready to edit.  Here are my settings, that I have set up as “preset” in Streamclip to export it out for FCE use.

Streamclip, export to Final Cut Express from 7D

I  know the 1440 is not 1920 but is, by my guess is, that FCE was designed to play nice with the many 1400×1080 HDV tape camcorders on the market.  The menu says it’s a 4:3 aspect ratio but when you put the converted clip into FCE it adjusts the workspace to a widescreen format.  Also, I have not ran into a noticeable quality problem using the 1440 size.

Watch the How-to: (if you cannot read the menus click here to go to the youtube file and enlarge it to full screen)

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H264 mov export for Web use:

There are so many recommendations on saving for Web that it can be very, very confusing.  I found no distinct output that gave me a small enough size for the quality so I fiddled around, and around, and around until I hit on this.  For short or long videos (that would be uploaded to Blip.tv, youtube or vimeo) I used this set of settings in Streamclip.  I hope it works for some of you.

Streamclip settings for HD for Web

Watch the How-to:  (if you cannot read the menus in the video click here to play it in a new windown and hit full-screen)

Listening in on baby #3.

Yup, baby #3 is still cooking, past due by 1 day. Since this site was set up more as a mobile blog focused on journalism topics and new media stuff I have re-launched (long-overdue) our family Web site; Kim and TJ — http://kimandtj.com.  It should look similar but it will contain family content and updates.

As for why you should care in the next few days especially?!?  Because the refreshed kimandtj.com site will contain baby #3 updates, photos, videos, etc.  Maybe even a live video feed (not of the birth mind you) or two before and after baby is born.

I also plan on posting a bit more to facebook since work has slowed down a bit for me, so you may see some of these cross posted there.  Talk to you later!
-TJ

I’ve been catching up a bit on strobist.blogspot.com and the more I read the more I wish I could duplicate the great techniques for fun around family and maybe non-editorial work.

What I like about the strobist talk is use of light, not just the gear head stuff but how to use light well, and the occasional tweaking of it.  Getting down to this post; I took the boys to the Playdate expo at the convention center then over to Dairy Queen for a treat, giving mom a break.

I took an open seat near a window and played with the natural light and lucky for me the lights in the place were not on, dropping the background light off nice and dark.  Also closed the depth of field to nil…

I brought the photos into photoshop and they were beautiful but I wanted to try out a couple post-processing experiments… how should I say… to magazine contrast it up.  I think it worked out OK but I wish the depth wasn’t soooo tight now…

The photo is of Andy Bronson. We had a ton of fun following state basketball.

Andy Bronson shooting it up at Yakima Sports Center. March 2010

(more photos on the jump)
Well it’s been state basketball craziness around Yakima for two weeks and we have one left.  I suppose I should get around to posting some of these random shots of non-game stuff and of game stuff sooner than later right?!?

Here’s a couple photos of photographers working the games, then I will try harder this week to get more up, along with the videos I post… -TJ

It’s been a while since I made a post, but my furlough time is up and I’m back at work.

It’s been nice doing family things, taking iPhone pics and also getting sick. You can find some of the photos in the mobile gallery on the left.

I hope to write a post about a meetup of NPPA regional folks by the weekend.

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