Produxion

Isn’t it weird how sometimes you’re thinking about how you’re missing something in your work life – I’m talking specifically about a tool, a piece of software, maybe even a workflow? You’re sat there thinking about how much easier life would be, trying to imagine how you would go about filling the void to make life easier? And then, moments later, the exact thing you’ve been dreaming of appears before your eyes?

Rands has written a really interesting post all about cadence, and more specifically how the tone of language used on the Web has a direct impact on our trust.

Semiotics. I’d forgotten all about it. I remember it being part of my studies when I was at university, and no doubt I’ve been applying the theory throughout my work over the years, but I hadn’t ever given it a passing thought until recently. The subject had stayed dormant in my mind until it came up during a gathering of friends on Halloween. We’d had a trio of classic thriller movies playing silently in the background – Scream, American Werewolf in London and The Cat & The Canary – the kind of films which lend themselves well to the discussion of semiotics, since they’re loaded with clichés and visual signs.

I’ve had the chance to play with a new filter in FCP called SmoothCam. It’s great, and creates delicious results.

It’s basically a camera stabilisation filter which has been ported from Shake. It processes your footage to create a vector map of all of the objects and movements, then using that data to manipulate the original footage to create smooth camera motion.

Since I recently posted on a great method for encoding for Vimeo using Compressor resets, I’m currently adopting that workflow for all of the work I’ve been doing this past month or so. It may well be that I’m losing a certain amount of quality by using this technique, but I’m happy that it’s good enough for online distribution.

What I’ve done, is created a set of Compressor Droplets, which live on my desktop and allow me to just drag-and-drop files for encoding. The one-click dialog box which appears feels a lot cleaner and more efficient than having to launch compressor and fiddle with settings and sources etc.