[Tim Wilson]

The .veg and images all look good to me! All downloading as expected.

I confess to not having upgraded Vegas in a while so I can’t test the file, but everything about it looks like I’d expect.

Look good to you too?

Hey, and thanks again for working with me on this!

[Tim Wilson]

When I hear “Tehachapi”, I also hear Lowell George and Linda Ronstadt singing “Willin'”. (And I wouldn’t want to live in a world that lacked either of their renditions.)

But I do know that area! We lived in the mountains above the Coachella Valley for a few years. Up Hwy 17 from Palm Desert, or down 17 from Idyllwild, depending on which direction you drive. We weren’t in the part of the mountains with forests, like Idylwild or Big Bear farther up the valley, still very much high desert (4500 ft at our porch), so we had Joshua Trees AND we got snowed in pretty regularly.

Because we were in the desert part of the mountains, our wildlife was mostly just coyotes and snakes, the occassional bobcat, and the very occassional mountain sheep (although those tended to be lower than us, more like 3000-3500 ft). I never got tired of any of those, but I think I’d lose my mind if we saw elk like yours on the regular. Man, those are gorgeous animals!

So I’ll say to you the same thing I would say to a student or someone just beginning their career, not sure if they have answers to contribute — we want to hear from EVERYONE who has their own unique experience to offer. You were of course posting more regularly when you were on the job (your account goes back to 2004! Thanks! And a former Media 100 guy, like me to boot!), but don’t be a stranger, Peter.

Thanks again for that video! Showing it my wife now, and her jaw is dropping too!

[Tim Wilson]

I think trend-wise, the ship has already sailed. Apple poo-pooed HD and 4K resolutions when they didn’t have them, but are now flying past that. Right now, it seems that they’re putting their focus on exactly where they should, make all this resolution usable with proper stabilization.

This is the likely camera to capture history in the making, just because it will be so ubiquitous.

Except that I’m not sure it will be. Apple’s highest-end phones aren’t its best-selling ones, and nobody thinks that Apple has anything resembling the biggest marketshare. Even within the iEcosystem, Apple’s biggest competition for This Year’s Model is always Last Year’s Model, which is probably still banging, and has another year or two of useful life.

If not more. I used to be a once-a-year guy with computers and phones, but with both, I’m now no less than two, and often three years between upgrades. Not because of money or even inertia as lack of urgency. I don’t have anything currently on my radar that would make me move to a newer model of my current phone or any other phone.

(Certainly not 5G. I think The Verge is WAY off base thinking that customers care much about this. Am I wrong? I get that the egg does in fact come before the chicken, and that the presence of usable networks is a prerequisite for demand, even before the phones.)

But I think you’re very much on the right track for phones in general. I’d hate to be in the pocket-sized camera divisions in companies like Sony and Canon. Today’s equivalent of DV cameras aren’t cameras. They’re phones.

And I think that for both better and worse, you’re on the right track about Zacuto-izing iPhones through MagSafe. At its most basic, MagSafe speaks to Apple’s late-breaking understanding of how badly people want to customize their phones. That was a small but compelling reason for my own departure from Apple in general and iDevices in particular, but ironically, a huge part of why I’d never go back. Apple hasn’t gone a quarter as far as they need to to catch up to what I’ve been expecting from customizability for my phones for a full decade now.

But I do see filmmaking add-ons being an interesting sideline for the MagSafe “platform”, if you will. Heck, why would Zacuto not get in on the fun themselves? Even the image in my post at the top of this thread is starting to push the bounds of what any of us would call handheld. Yes, it’s in a hand, and the hand is holding it, and without diminishing for a second how cool I think it is as tech….but c’mon.

[Tim Wilson]

@craigseeman sez

I’m certainly curious to see if Magsafe or LIDAR will have utility for video as well but no one, including Apple, is hinting at those possibilities. Maybe next year’s phone will offer the equivalent of “portrait” mode for a video giving you a bit more flexibility in post.

Well now it happens that on another thread, @mathieughekiere raised a very interesting possibility based on the existing 3D compositing in Motion that exists today. Somebody actually did a tutorial where they took a Lidar’d scene, composited himself into it, and had the camera tracking around him, in that space. As Mathieu wrote:

I didn’t think so much about it until I saw this tutorial on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDZtrR475_E) where they put someone from Green Screen in a USDZ model in Motion. So does that mean I for instance, could go to a special location, scan it in 3D, later film myself in front of a green screen, and put myself in a 3D set I all made myself with an iPhone?

LIDAR is a bigger and bigger deal in general. I spoke to the VFX supervisor for the Netflix hit, The Old Guard, Sara Bennett. As an aside, Sara happens to also be the only woman to win an Oscar for VFX supervision, and only the second woman to win an Oscar for any contribution to VFX, but she told me that they LIDAR’d every inch of every scene, even ones that weren’t on the call sheet as VFX shots.

The team’s feeling is, hey, it’s easy enough to capture the scene while nothing else is happening, so let’s get it while we can. The fact is that you don’t know for sure that some shot might not actually become a VFX shot in post. “We just noticed something we need to remove”, or “there’s something we need to add”, etc. With LIDAR scans already in hand, nothing is a crisis. You’re ready to get to work immediately.

Now being able to do LIDAR scans with an iPhone, why would you not? Even if you don’t use it for a phone, right?

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[Tim Wilson]

Amazing video, Peter! Where are you?

BTW I’m retired and an amateur, with aspirations to become an “accomplished amateur.”

This is one million percent legit. When I ran beta testing programs at Boris FX and Avid, I made sure to have as many aspirational retirees on my beta teams as I could arrange. Many of them came from technical and engineering backgrounds, and rather than focus the bulk of their energy trying to make the software work, they took pleasure in trying to break it. I feel like I can always tell software that doesn’t have enough retirees in the beta pool. It may be polished, but it’s not durable.

Anyway, I agree with you that, even more than the zoom, the image stabilization intrigues me, because that’s what makes the zoom useful. If you can’t keep the subject in the frame because the shot isn’t steady, who cares if it’s in focus?

We do have an interesting angle on this conversation, because I feel like for the first time, a phone may be throwing down on “real” cameras. Before, when looking at specs side by side, even identical specs favored the “real” cameras in actual shooting conditions. But this stabilzation? I dunno. All of a sudden OIS is seeming borderline passe.

[Tim Wilson]

Thanks for testing with us! Sorry we didn’t get it right the first time, but that’s why it’s a test.

And for sure .jpg files are allowed. They’re included in the list you showed. I think they were stopped because they were part of the same upload as the .veg.

Not sure what to test. Zip or just the veg + media

No need to test zip — that one has also been allowed too. It’s the .veg that’s new.

When you say “media”, I don’t know if that will work or not. The only video extension we’re currently supporting natively is .mp4, but we can try others. I’ll need a couple of frames to test, so maybe start by uploading those as a .zip, then I’ll download to work with it.

If you mean the .jpg files, like I said, they’re enabled.

That said, I didn’t see .veg in the list you posted, so I just reset it. I’ve highlighted that, .jpg and .mp4

Try it again, see if it works this time?

Thanks again!

[Tim Wilson]

Hey Chris,

Whoa, now. I apologize for your troubles posting, but to clarify, our spam system mistakenly stopped your post, because yes, it sensed a link to text ratio that looked suspicious. I replied to you within minutes.

And the fact that you are posting here shows that your account was NOT suspended. If it had been, you wouldn’t even have been able to log in. Suspended means just that. No access to anything.

So I certainly apologize for any emails not going through, but there was nothing resembling suspending your account, which remains in good standing.

If you have anything else to add, by all means do, but in general, we’re looking less for piles of links than your actual insights. Why did you choose what you chose? How did the build go? What has been the effect on your work vs. what you’d been using previously? THAT, we want to hear about!

In the meantime, the Letters To The COW Team forum is always open, and you can write me directly about anything else I can help you with, tim@ this here domain.

Regards,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Back in the day, we had a gigantic Edius community. The parent company was Canopus, pronounced “Can O’ Pus” by its customers after some particularly egregious behavior whose specifics I can’t recall.

It was a ridiculously powerful system, packed with all kinds of cool features, including maybe the first implementation of real-time HD that I remember seeing, but it was swamped by cool features coming out of a rising FCP, the introduction of Premiere Pro, an ascendent Media Composer whose business more than doubled between 2003-2005, and doubled again from 2005-2007 (including a thriving Pinnacle Liquid that gut sucked into Avid’s maw), all while Vegas was continuing its stampede as it moved from Sonic Foundry to Sony.

Grass Valley was a hardcore, old-line hardware company with no software to speak of, so they saw the floundering Edius, and in 2005, picked it up to be the software front end for Grass Valley systems, not just switchers, but all the other stuff in a newsroom or truck that needed software to drive it (broadcast graphics as another example).

And hey, it’s not like Canopus and Edius were the only companies to crash into the rocks in the early aughts. Media 100 was still going as a ghost of its former greatness when Boris scooped it up to take care of folks who had outstanding service contracts. Boris keeps developing it, it’s still packed with state of the art features, but really, most Media 100 folks were early adopters of FCP. Plenty of reasons for some diehards to keep using it, but I’m not sure why anybody would have started using M100 by the time the century turned.

Matrox is another company that used to thrive in these parts — Matrox Digisuite (basically Premiere on steroids on crank, in a good way) was one of the most compelling systems in the world with a huge following at the beginning of the century, but right about this same mid-aughts era, Matrox decamped for the world whose tradeshow summit is INFOCOMM, and is barely around the mainstream broadcast world anymore.

So if you’re not using Grass Valley hardware, I’m not sure you even CAN use Edius anymore. Maybe? But hey, I’m sure that there’s someone still using it. It’s just that COWs have never fed much in the grassy valley so I’d be shocked if there were any former Canopus folks in these parts.

But no kidding, in the early days of the COW, Edius was easily the equal of FCP, Vegas, and a good handful of others. BACK THEN. Sometimes 20 years ago feels like forever, and other times, not so long ago at all…..but even for somebody as old as me, it more often feels like a long time ago.

And yes, if you’re doing the math, that means that Creative COW is coming up on its 20th anniversary next April, with roots going back to 1995. Edius is hardly the craziest story we’ve got to tell.

[Tim Wilson]

Glad to hear it, Blaise! This is the kind of feature that I can’t develop without help from people actually using the software. I mean, I can read the specs on Google like anyone else, and I can make a fake project file to test, but that’s not how you’re supposed to do feature development. In fact, you can always tell when developers do that, every time. So using REAL project files, from actual projects, makes all the difference in the world.

That’s also what makes it fast for ME. Faking projects is actually pretty time consuming. Using files that you, the person requesting this feature, have already verified in your work, actually makes my job much, much easier.

This is fun! Who’s next?

[Tim Wilson]

I should also mention that I added a couple of file types over the weekend, most notably in this context, for .c4d files, which we’d had several requests for.

Keep ’em coming!

Thanks again,
Tim