Transcoding with MPEG-Streamclip

The easiest way to get that wack-o footage you recorded using your mothers underwater camera into Final Cut is to first run it through MPEG-Streamclip and convert it into a format that Final Cut likes.

The final answer to what that format is may depend on what style of work you’re making. If you’re doing a lot of compositing then I’d stick with a format that works well with colors. That usually means ProRes, but as with most HD formats ProRes comes in a lot of flavors. Most of the time good old vanilla is fine. Or for those of us on a file storage diet ProRes LT might even be a good choice.

Almost never will you want to bump up the quality to anything higher than this. The concept of using an uncompressed file format (or ProRes 4:4:4:4) to increase the quality of your movie is, well, it’s just plain wrong. You movie will NEVER look better that it does right now, our goal is just to make Final Cut more happy by using Intra-Frame formats instead of the GOP formats that a lot of DSLR or Flips or other H.264 cameras shoot in. We’re just trying to convert our unruly files into a personality that will play well with others, no more than that.

And always remember: your mom’s shooting HD and you’re downloading movies off of the internet from YouTube. Who’s the filmmaker now? Seriously.

Campus Tour Groups

Wow, I've been overwhelmed recently by the frequency of campus tours and the number of people in them. When holidays happen parents and prospective students must hit the road fast to furiously drive up and down the east coast shopping for colleges. It must seem like getting up early to hit a string of great tag sales on a Saturday morning – grab that brochure, look over there, talk to those people, keep moving, where do we go next.

I'm always struck by how differently each tour group behaves. It's similar to a production class dividing up into smaller sections when I give a workshop. The first group is sullen and unresponsive, then the next is effusive and insightful, but they're all in the same class. Odd. Similarly, some of the tour groups I'd like to talk to all day. They're all fun and engaging. With others, the conversation dwindles, no one asks questions or makes comments, and I wonder where in the world their silent student will end up.

On Friday, Good Friday, three large groups right in a row, only six or seven minutes apart bumped into each other like ocean rafts. The second group arrived pushing the first out of the way and then the third group appeared just around the corner ready to do the same. I'm a shy, quiet guy to start with so it's a stretch for me to do any of this in the first place, then the forced repetition on top of that adds more stress. Oh my, did I talk about Anna Elliot and Chris Applebaum just a few minutes ago or did I say that to the previous group?

The groups do have the usual common concerns, misunderstandings and questions, but each family is different in interests and their ability to articulate useful questions. As I always say to Division III students it takes about an hour of back and forth questioning to finally get to the heart of their project and truly understand what they're trying to do. That three sentence description from their Div III contract really isn't deep enough, nor revealing enough to elicit the informed discussion that's so necessary in letting others understand and finally give back a useful response. No one believes that initially, but later they're astonished that we've uncovered new problems with their project or that they could take a new direction in method, outcome or presentation. It really does take that long and you have to stay with it and not give up just because the conversation seems too difficult or makes you uncomfortable.

So tour groups with their enforced brevity will also leave with an equally abbreviated understanding of what we do and how we do it. That's too bad, but I understand the reality of the situation. For me the easy way of interacting in that short time frame is telling stories either of alumns that I knew personally or the Div III and Div II students that I'm currently working with. While most of those stories seem well received, after so much repetition I feel them unsatisfying – at least for me. I wish we could talk more about theories of education and what have been parents and students personal experiences with learning and understanding, but no, that doesn't happen. It's a simple show and tell, not a deeper prolonged experience.

This frequency of interaction is happening because I now have an additional office in the new Jerome Liebling building of the film/photo program. The building is a show case and an obvious part of a general tour of the campus whether people are actually interested in media as a concentration or not. I'll happily continue to talk with prospective students and their parents and try and fill in their understanding of what Hampshire offers and allow them to decide if it's a good fit for them. However I'm only in the building on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I wonder who they talk with on Tuesday and Thursday?

gunther

Technology Fair

We just participated with the IT department in a Technology Fair last Friday. Using the basement as the location was the real draw for us since we're always looking for more exposure down here in the invisible recesses of the college. We feel over-looked by tours of new students and faculty so we relish visibility in any form. The IT side of it was to help people with laptop problems either real or imagined.

I was given two time slots for a talk titled "media for the masses", whatever that is. But as I prepared a Keynote presentation it felt awkward and forced. Technology isn't what we really do, though it may seem like that to outsiders. What the media basement is for is storytelling – in a lot of different forms using a lot of different methods. That's what we do.

Media is just storytelling from one person to another without the teller actually being there. That surrogate "other" is media. It's the autonomous teller, an automatic presenter of the story thoughtfully packaged and tuned for an effective unfolding of a particular story. Some stories need to be told in a specific way for reasons of content, effect, or cost. Others can be related in many ways and often it's the audience that selects the form to which they are most attuned.

So I stopped the presentation in the middle and launched into what I think is one of the fundamental elements of media in form, method and philosophy and that's making posters. They're simple, powerful and work best when you finally understand the essence of what you're trying to say. The form forces you to edit down to what's possible to display on a single page and that usually improves your thinking and writing. It's a refined combination of design and concept. If done well you get a lot of bang for the buck.

So I talked about my personal progression of poster making – the first and its results, the following ones, the most successful ones, the most contentious ones, the art ones, the business ones, and the personal ones. At least it was colorful and fresh. The poster of Ken and Jerry is really popular with donors to the college. The one on lighting technique is the most popular with students (it gets stolen the most, which is one of the best metrics for gauging success or at least desirability).

I use the software application Pages for doing the work. It's Apple's version of InDesign, but a little lighter and much easier to use. It's true for some images I do a lot of the work in Photoshop first, but for the text and layout I work in Pages. It's part of the iWork collection of software: Pages, Keynote and Numbers. Pages can do both word processing and layout. Keynote is Apple's version of Powerpoint, only it's fun and easy. Numbers is the equivalent of Excell, only better with images and layout. I do confess that I don't actually use Numbers that much and Excell, for what I do, is fine after all.

So in the end the presentation went better than I expected since I didn't really know who would show up or how many people there would be. I confirmed in my own mind that we're really storytellers first and tech people second. Everything we do is at the service of the story. We learn what we need to know in order to help the story unfold and find its own voice and form and we always try and push that form into new shapes using as broad a range of methods as possible. Often out of that re-directing or re-presenting of the story we get a new story or at least one with a different flavor - a variant, but in the end the final vote of success is always made by the story itself. Did we serve the story well? That's what the world of media is all about and anyone can learn to do that. It just takes attention, practice and the desire to tell an effective story.

gunther

The New Alumni Reel for 2009

Here's the talk I gave on Saturday to about 50 parents and students in the Main Lecture Hall to introduce this years Alumni Reel showing.

Every year the Hampshire Alumni Relations people ask graduates to submit a clip of recent film or video work from which I build a compilation reel that gets shown first at Hampshire, then in New York, then in LA, and also at other locations across the country as needed. Each year the collection of submissions from alumni is slightly different and has a unique flavor. Some years it’s thin and cold, some years it hot and spicy. This year the vintage is good, but with a still yet different taste. Like any collection of submissions what we see is only what’s submitted. It’s not a true reflection of what’s being done – good or bad.

The odd part is both the list of usual suspects and the ever broadening list of just-past-recent graduates, not yet settled into that perfect job, but not too far away from it. They pop up in strange places and also have very strong ties to each other.

Even with the crowd that’s off in the distance, their friendships are personal, professional and re-occurring. Their names and titles are links that weave back and forth from project to project. They work for themselves, corporations and each other.

The near-recent travel in groups and maybe if they've grown apart they also eagerly come back to the center for fun films that might or might not even be real paying commercial work.

This year there are a few people that pop up more than once doing different jobs and working with different people. What’s instructive about this multiple submission is it’s a reflection of the reality of the new world of work. People don’t do just one thing any more, not even in the same year, certainly not for their entire career.

I met Ann Harrison at an alumni event back in May. She had graduated in media theory, went to grad school and got a masters in journalism, worked for newspapers, produced videos, wrote for magazines (Wired). I asked her what she was doing now and she said, “reconciliation”. Immediately I thought of divorce cases and winced. “Who was your last client”, I jokingly asked. “Liberia”, she replied, “I had a very good year.”

Even closer to home, outside the Liebling building in the stone entrance area are bricks with names on them (a fund raising device). One is from Donna Rockwell. She too went to grad school and got a masters in journalism, did on-air reporting, and now, I find, she has a PhD in psychology and teaches.

Still closer, my daughter is a recent Hampshire grad and is currently in graduate school in psychology. She did photography for her Div II and writing for her Div III. That’s what we call the “Hampshire straight line” of study.

But back to the Reel. People come and go each year for good and maybe not so good reasons: way too busy; on a shoot in Australia; we’re still in pre-production and I can’t talk about it and that last one, well, that’s so over now; Teresa can you take this call; oops, gotta go Paris Hilton just came in.

Yes, then there’s the range of work. Some, well, I don’t know. Others give me a hard time finding only a two minute clip instead of the ten minutes I really want to show.

So, as I always tell tour groups. You’ve all seen Hampshire work. Some times it’s obvious as with Ken, some times it’s invisible as with Dan Epstein. Some times you never thought about it - MTV and Chris Applebaum. Some times you’d be surprised - Lord of the RIngs, Spiderman III, Up, 60 Minutes.

On the technical side, this year all of the submission were on DVDs. About 60% were QuickTime files and 40% were video DVDs. The QuickTime files look better and proves to me that we’re moving into a new world of distribution with a new way of watching work.

Most people selected their own two minute clip, but some didn’t and those are the hardest. My selections are sometimes just for expediency and don’t really reflect the full tone or importance of the work. That’s my failing. This year I finished the reel the latest ever, just two days ago and any misspellings or typos are my fault because no one else has seen it yet. You’re the first.

On with the show.

gunther

Key? I Thought You Had the Key

I don't usually use an e-mail I've sent as a blog posting, but this one is slightly different. We've all had different experiences lately with the new method of distributing keys to students. For some of us it's worked out OK, for others not quite so satisfactory. While I'm on the positive side of the equation I do see problems in the structural situation this represents and implications for future re-arrangements of methods and procedures. This change over seems to be having more problems that it should and that itself is the real problem. Here's my response back to an e-mail Glen Armitage had written last night.

Thanks Glenn.

I’m reluctant to speak out, but it’s turning into more of a philosophical and operational issue than just keys. We will, no doubt, be experiencing more of this kind of fall-out due to re-organizations in the future and all for a similar reason: that of cost cutting. It has turned, oddly, into a staff only issue with all of us uncertain who is in charge and who to even talk with at a college level.

The ad hoc solutions that some of us have come up with are varied and uncertain. One-card is only a solution if it’s installed. If you don’t have it, you don’t have it and a real solution is still needed now and right now. I’m lucky that I’m part of the library and fit into the “academic” list of users that are allowed. We’ve re-thought our keys, coalesced into using just one key for all of our doors and it is, so far, working, though the real burden has shifted from me onto the library people to enter our information into their data-base – and often. That turns out to be not as easy as in the past. More time of more people are involved now. How’s that for cost cutting.

It is also, I think, a reflection of the separation between the “class oriented day” and the “outside of class day” that both students and staff experience. People who are not involved seem to think it’s a small issue, but those of us who look students in the eye each day and have to say we don’t know what the answer is have a harder time understanding why no one seems to be helping. It’s sort of like the problem of getting water to the people trapped in the sports stadium in New Orleans – please help us.  

John Bruner has solved his problem at the Yurt Radio with a biometric device (well it’s been working for a couple of days so far), but all of us have variants of who and how students need to get keys and the information trail that gets generated in its wake. What seems to be the real unifying theme here is variations.

In the past the switchboard operators were sophisticated enough and thoughtful enough to handle the oddities, subtleties and emergencies that surround the keys and through a narrative exchange tell us when there were problems. (there’s that word narrative again) Now, there is no one answer, no one experience.

So my real worry is that in the name of cost cutting we alter the usual landscape of student life and the flow of the day. We have, indeed, saved money with regard to Public Safety but we have incurred a real cost on the other end of the spectrum in daily student life. The social ecology of the day is often hidden or at least occluded to most administrators and faculty and it has fallen to staff, singularly, to solve, ad hoc, a complex and surprisingly far-reaching problem.

We all need to get better at doing this and I think we could use some help. It’s not just about the keys. If we can’t solve this what happens when we run into a real problem?

gunther

So, that's my e-mail to Glenn.

My key problems, thankfully, are small and we're still thinking of ways to re-work what we do to make more adjustments and allowances, but it's start and stop as we go along discovering both the good and bad of slightly changed and still changing  circumstances. 

My point really is that as we come upon more changes in the future, and we will for good and reasonable reasons, we need to more quickly grasp the subtleties and newly induced problems and then quickly and commonly agree on implementations. The ad hoc problem solving ends up fractionating the daily student experience. No two offices now have the same methods. It's all a grab bag of reasoning and implementations. That's never a good user experience and that's my point.

gunther

Why We Are Here

The semester starts so fast and with it classes and workshops entered into quickly. Later reflecting I think, wait a minute I should have had some kind of welcoming or motivational speech to give – first thing. It's always a failing of not having time to fully thinking things through. So belatedly here it is.

Some time from now you will be asked a question. It may be eight years or fourteen months or two decades, but it will come. It will be the most important question you will ever answer. You may not have studied it in school. You may never have thought about it at all. You'll think, why are they asking me, but they are and you'll need to answer, because there'll be no one else.

Your response will save the life of your friend, your lover, your next door neighbor, the person at work you hate. Your answer will save the company you work for, the neighborhood you live in, your daughters school, the little park just down the street, New England.

The person who asks you the question will be your younger sister, the guy in the elevator, your best friend, the woman in the car across the street. They'll be crying, depressed, fearful, in pain, desperate, stoic, angry, or simply have a blank look on their face. You won't have time to look it up, ask someone else, talk it over, think it through or read about it. Suddenly everything will stop. People will turn to hear your answer. Faces will lift. It will get a little quiet.

The question you will be asked is, "what should we do?" Your answer will change the course of your life and the lives of others for better or for worse. Will you be able to give an answer?

Is this likely to happen? Maybe. But here's the "really scary" version – perhaps more likely is that no one will ask at all; that people will stand there frozen, uncertain, bewildered and wait for something to happen. That's when, unasked, you have to step forward and say what you think we should do. That's when you need to lead. Answering the unasked question is the hardest thing in the world to do and the most important, but to be able to do it you have to practice – starting now.

So that's why we're really here, to get you to a point, much later in life, where you could answer that question or more importantly the unasked question. If you want to save the world you need to get ready. You may not think you're up to it, but everyone here is. However, if you're just here to only have a good time, later you're not going to be much help to anyone because you won't be able to answer the question – you didn't practice. You'll have no idea and the unasked question will just hang there, unanswered.

gunther

The Beginning, Again

Well the month of August disappeared into the past amazingly fast and we're already into the cool weather of September. This weekend is move-in day for new students and their parents.

In the past parents had been whisked away quickly and without much regard. Now we offer them seminars, counseling, dinner, and frequent tours of the campus. I had the obligation and, I discovered, the pleasure of giving tours of the new Liebling wing of the film/photo building, but I was astonished to find fifty parents in the first group and the same number in still yet another group. In retrospect I see how that many people changes what you can talk about and it's a compelling validation for small classes. However, I did have a good time and a few parents told me afterwards they were grateful for the information I gave them.

With that many people, most of whom were not really interested in media education, but more general information about Hampshire, I simply talked about what I think it takes to get through Hampshire. Engagement. Positive engagement. That, like most of life, means something different to different people, but without it you'll flounder and drop away. It means interacting with the day, with your classes, with your professors, with administrators, with other students – not just showing up. Just showing up only gets you in the door. The rest is up to you and it's not enough just to go to class. You can take all the classes we offer and not be able to graduate! Work here is project oriented and helped along by friends and associates. Friends are personal and might be content free. Associates are content oriented, but could also be friends. You need both and you need to know how to get them.

One of the most interesting byproducts of the lingering of parents is the feeling that they, too, bond with the school and become interested in not just their own sons and daughters, but the campus as a place and as an idea. I also found, surprisingly, that it worked the other way too. I felt an obligation to pay attention to their specific family member and take a responsibility to help them through Hampshire. The families did their job and I think they'll get more out of Hampshire for being here.

So I always feel the glow of optimism each September. So much is possible, so many good things will happen, it could all work out for everyone. We can hope so, but we all have to work at it and make it happen. There's no free ride here, but everyone wants the students to succeed.

gunther