Had a great time at the Farm Bureau Convention/DigiComm!
Spoke on two subjects:
It was great meeting you and being in Kentucky.
Feel free to ask any questions by emailing me!
Three email tips/Do you really have to send that email?
0I love the flowchart from here : OnlineITDegree.net
TL;DR? Basically, we’re drowning in email. 20+ hrs a week worth. That halves your efficiency, and it’s brutal as a ‘creative.’
Most of the people I know (including you if you read this) already are aware that email is killing us all.
There were three good things that I want to mention from it (one that I already do.)
- NNTR – No Need to Respond. In the Subject line.
- EOM – End of Message. Again, write your subject with EOM
- 3 sentence rule (which I’m going to amend as the 5 sentence rule , which is how I encountered it first.) Mostly, just see if See if you can keep your email under 5 sentences.
Imagine if everyone adopted these rules!
Just the flowchart alone saved one company 20% of the time.
11 months ago
I’ve just come across a friend who is dealing with a workflow problem.
The problem is that he switched from one NLE to another…and things don’t work the same.
I’m not calling out the person; I’m not calling out the editorial tools….I understand that he has an investment in hardware and software (including cameras.)
But why, why not first, contact the NLE manufacturer or resller and say “How to best do this?”
Get the download demo, walk thorugh head to tales what your workflow plans to be.
Realistically, that’s what whiteppapers are for, right? But the day of one format (like one NLE) is pretty much a myth. It’s always a mixture of formats (and frame rates, and compression types.)
More on the Retina display…
0From the Engadget review
“The primary Apple apps — Safari, Mail, the address book, etc. — have all been tweaked to make use of all these wonderful pixels. Sadly, little else has. While we got assurances that third-party apps like Adobe Photoshop and AutoCAD are in the process of being refined, right now, seemingly every third-party app on the Mac looks terrible.”
MacBook Pro Retina Display – interesting choices
0If you are an Apple Fan, you saw the announcements yesterday.
For me personally, the big question was about the new MacBook Pro. I’m overdue by about a year (last time was 2009, and I swore, I’d buy and dump after a year…and forgot…and forgot.) Also, my wife is overdue for a system as well.
The new Retina display has to be my new machine. I need a system that has a great (read HD) display, I need an SSD (less moving parts) and it has to have thunderbolt.
On the great side, the new MBP is thinner (yay!) and has USB 3.0 (a sore spot from Apple, especiaily on the MacPro line.)
I was wondering in this blog post exactly how they’d handle the problem of a denser display without the ability to increase the font size. Since 10.7 doesn’t have an independent resolution and doesn’t permit customizations, all I would see is small fonts. Or, should I say, wouldn’t see, because it’d be too dense.
It looks like Apple is taking a page out of the iPad – they’re doubling the resolution from 1440×900 to 2880 x 1800.
From what I’ve read, Apple is rendering the screen twice. It’s got some scaled resolutions, such as 1440×900 and 1680×1050.
This will be a nightmare at the ‘Retina’ resolution, for Applications that are mired in old code. I’m dying to work at actually 1920×1080 or above, since I work with video, and my struggle is going to be the problem of seeing text in those apps.
Apple’s perspective, is likely, if they don’t follow our rules, screw them. Or work at a smaller resolution. I’m terrifically curious – for years (5 or so), There’s been the claim that Apple is going to have resolution independence – fonts/menus/etc could be the same regardess of the resolution. Each iteration of the OS, it’s mentioned as a beta feature and then disappears.
I have a couple of apps that I’m really worried of how OSX will render them. Avid Media Composer is my #1 worry – but I’ll be curious how fixed font sizes look in some of the other apps.
Adobe Roadshow hits DC
On Monday, I was speaking at the Adobe CS6 Roadshow in DC.
This is a great event; when it does come to your city, it’s worth attending (there are loads of upcoming cities!)
In NYC, DC and LA, there are also special training seminars.
These are perfect for an editor who sees the Adobe Production Suite (Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Speedgrade) in their near future.
Here are the presentations I gave, as promised.
Broadcast centered editing.pdf- this is about adopting Premiere Pro and understanding some of it’s feature set that apply to a broadcast environment.
Editing faster.pdf- a crash course in editorial in Premiere Pro.
Trimming.pdf- Trimming, the adjustment of clip length in the timeline – something that I feel makes and breaks and editorial system (and editor) demystified.
If you’re going to join us in LA – drop me a line – I might be able to arrange a special present.
The problem with a Retina Screen
0How am I going to be able to read anything?
Like everyone else, I’ve been holding off (too long) on getting a new mac. I ‘needed’ one in October – and for the first time I paid attention to the rumor mills in my life – new MacBookPros would be out any day.
No great prognostication here: At WWDC that Apple will announce a bunch of updates, including to the MacBook Pro. Will it be a MacBook Pro Air? I have no idea. That’s too many words for a product name.I hope they get rid of the whole ‘air’ idea and just have two models of super skinny laptops.
One big rumor right now- a retina screen
Great. I need more pixels and sharper ones. Make it so I can’t see the dots.
But the Mac OS is broken in a simple way.
The Font/UI cannot be scaled.
There’s been rumors for years, for more than one iteration of OSX, that the Menus will be adjustable. That’d also mean window title size, contextual menus, etc.
Take a quick look at this article from Macintouch – just skip right to the part on Resolution independence.
Bunches of software I use have some custom or tiny UI/text elements. One piece of software has a palette with text that was designed when the mac had 640×480 screens. That palette? Not so readable now. And it’ll be nearly impossible to read under a retina display.
I have a feeling that if retina displays come out, Apple will have a 10.7.5 release that will double UI widgets, until Mountain Lion comes along and (hopefully) we’ll have a litlte more scalability.
Adobe RoadShow hits NYC
On Tues, I was speaking at the Adobe CS6 Roadshow.
This is a great event when it does come to your city; but in NYC, DC and LA, there are special training seminars. These are perfect for an editor who sees the Adobe Production Suite (Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Speedgrade) in their near future.
I’ll need to update these for the next city, but here were the presentations, as promised.
Broadcast centered editing.pdf - this is about adopting Premiere Pro and understanding some of it’s feature set that apply to a broadcast environment.
Editing faster.pdf - a crash course in editorial in Premiere Pro.
Trimming.pdf - Trimming, the adjustment of clip length in the timeline – something that I feel makes and breaks and editorial system (and editor) demystified.
I’m not a master of wordpress
But I am trying to figure out all the pieces of how it works.
It is the defacto blogging platform at this point.
I did (once upon a time):
- Manual HTML
- Claris Homepage
- Aldus Pagemill
- Dreamweaver
- Movable Type- 03
- TypePad – 05
I’m done with code, y’know?