Articles by Creative COW
COW Library : Creative COW
Makin’ Planets! Adobe After Effects Tutorials by Graham Quince
Here's a great new Adobe After Effects tutorial series from Creative COW leader Graham Quince that takes advantage of the free Orb plug-in from our friend Andrew Kramer at Video Copilot. Graham supplies project files, tips and tricks, and good humor on this tour through building every planet in the solar system, with customization options galore!
Creative COW |
Blackmagic Design's Epic Hardware Releases for NAB 2019
Blackmagic once again delivers a jaw-dropping lineup of advanced hardware -- ATEM Constellation 8K with built-in Fairlight mixing in the industry's largest live production audio mixer, plus 16 hardware keyers, 24 8K outputs, and more; the New Teranex Mini SDI to HDMI 8K with dual on screen scope overlays, HDR, 33 point 3D LUTs and monitor calibration; HyperDeck Extreme 8K broadcast deck with advanced H.265 recording, touch screen interface, internal cache, built in scopes, HDR, and traditional deck control; and the URSA Mini Pro G2 camera featuring new electronics, Super 35 4.6K HDR image sensor, 15 stops of dynamic range, 300 fps high frame rate shooting, and Blackmagic RAW -- for prices even lower than how low your jaw just dropped reading them.
Creative COW |
Making The Forest Leaves Dance for Ridley Scott's Hennessy Short, "The Seven Worlds"
"The Seven Worlds" is the latest advertising epic short directed by Ridley Scott, a marvelous odyssey spanning surreal scenes inspired by the seven tasting notes of Hennessy premium X.O. cognacac. Realizing Scott's unparalleled vision required a masterful team and state-of-the-art technology to assist, that's where London's The Mocap Studio team came in. The mobile motion capture specialists lent their expertise to the project, using Xsens MVN inertial technology to help capture a human performer on-location in the heart of a Czech forest.
Creative COW |
Workflow That Plays For Keeps: How Netflix Is Protecting Stories' Futures
If you hope to distribute your work via Netflix, you NEED to know this, but even if you're only interested in the best thinking currently available about how to preserve your own work for an unknown digital future, this is a must-read. Kylee Peña, Coordinator of Creative Technologies & Infrastructure at Netflix, and co-authors Christopher Clark and Mike Whipple share insights on the origin of Netflix archival elements, the importance of color management, and how all this comes together to preserve creative intent -- insights you can start using yourself, today.
Creative COW |
Editor Phyllis Housen on Shaping Sundance Jury Prize Winning Drama 'Clemency'
New York-based editor Phyllis Housen first fell in love with movies at a young age and had that love reinforced by a high school teacher who taught film history instead of English class. Her editing career includes both chapters in Tarantino's Kill Bill saga, and most recently, the drama Clemency, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. She tells Kylee Peña about the connection between her skills as a drummer and storytelling, the evolution she's seen in the craft of editing, editing films shot in a language she doesn't speak, her use of Adobe Premiere Pro, and how she explains all the blood and violence in the films she edits to her parents.
Creative COW |
Light From Light: Editor Courtney Ware on Returning to Sundance
Editor/Director Courtney Ware got her start in the industry as a PA, quickly working her way up to producer before her 21st birthday. After her directorial debut on Sunny in the Dark, she realized a pivot away from producing and into storytelling was in her future, and she got started on being an editor in between directing jobs. The first film to bring her to Sundance was Never Goin’ Back, and she’s back at the festival this year with Light From Light. Creative COW Manager Editor Kylee Peña speaks to Courtney about how her work in each role informs the other, and making her way in the film community from her base in Dallas.
Creative COW |
Cutting Honey Boy: Mónica Salazar on Editing The Sundance Hit
One of the most anticipated films at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, and one of the first features acclaimed as a hit when it premiered, Honey Boy is a semi-autobiographical story penned by actor Shia LaBeouf that spans a decade in the life of a child actor. It’s also the first feature film cut by editor Mónica Salazar, a Mexican immigrant whose story starts with a VCR in Monterrey and a dream to one day land at Pixar. She'd never even heard of USC Film School when friends first encouraged her to transfer in a story of hard work, collaboration, and mentorship.
Creative COW |
Audio Professionals
Face Vocal Band: Giving Rock a Human Voice
Great music transcends genre. The most memorable songs are able to cross over to different styles seamlessly. They’re timeless because the melodies and lyrics reach people no matter what kind of music they favor. That is the root of Face Vocal Band’s success. The Colorado band has been bringing audiences to their feet for seventeen years, using their uncanny ability to identify rock hits and the masterful talent to turn them into something completely new. When they take the stage, there are no guitars, no drums, no Marshall stacks??"just their voices.
Feature, People / Interview
Creative COW |
Blackmagic Design Announces Advanced New Blackmagic RAW Codec
Blackmagic Design has introduced the public beta of Blackmagic RAW, a new and very modern codec that combines the quality and benefits of RAW with the ease of use, speed and file sizes of traditional video formats. Blackmagic RAW is a more intelligent format that gives customers stunning images, incredible performance, cross platform support and a free developer SDK.
Creative COW |
NVIDIA's realtime raytracing premieres at SIGGRAPH 2018
Highlights include: Photorealistic, interactive car rendering. Real-time ray tracing on a single GPU. Advanced rendering for games & film. Cornell Box ??" Turn to this tested graphics teaching tool to see how Turing uses ray tracing to deliver complex effects ??" ranging from diffused reflection to refractions to caustics to global illumination ??" with stunning photorealism. Ray-traced global illumination. New Autodesk Arnold with GPU acceleration, this demo lets you see the benefits of Quadro RTX GPUs for both content creation and final frame rendering for feature film.
Feature, People / Interview, Business
Creative COW |
Autodesk Maya
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Unveils Turing, Reinventing Computer Graphics
Ray-traced graphics offer incredible realism. Interactive graphics driven by GPUs offer speed and responsiveness. The two now come together in the greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced Monday. Speaking at the SIGGRAPH professional graphics conference in Vancouver, Huang unveiled Turing, NVIDIA’s eighth-generation GPU architecture, bringing ray tracing to real-time graphics. He also introduced the first Turing-based GPUs ??" the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 8000, Quadro RTX 6000 and Quadro RTX 5000. And he detailed the Quadro RTX Server, a reference architecture for the $250 billion visual effects industry.
Feature, People / Interview, Business
Creative COW |
AJA Video Systems
AJA Video Systems Celebrates 25 Years of Professional Video Systems
John Abt started AJA Video Systems with his wife Darlene in 1993 to develop simple digital parallel to serial and serial to parallel converters. Many of AJA’s products at their core continue to bridge connectivity and simplify pro video workflows through video up, down, cross format conversion. A great read that you will find at Film and Digital Times.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview, Business
Film and Digital Times |
Broadcasting
Westdoc Online interview with National Geographic Channel's VP of Development, Charlie Parsons
Charlie Parsons is Vice President of Development for the National Geographic Channel, responsible for developing new projects, discovering new talent and serving as one of the network’s main points of contact for the global production community. Since joining the Channel in 2010, Parsons has developed popular series “Doomsday Preppers”, “Inside Combat Rescue”, “Mars” and “One Strange Rock”, as well as the global natural history event “Earth Live”. He developed the Emmy Award winning Special “Space Dive”,as well as the Emmy Award winning feature doc “LA 92”. He also served as an Executive Producer on the network’s most watched program in history, the Emmy nominated three-hour movie event “Killing Jesus”, as well as the second and third most watched programs, “Killing Kennedy”??"also Emmy nominated for Outstanding Television Movie??"and “Killing Lincoln”, respectively.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
Chuck Braverman |
Audio Professionals
2018 MPSE Award Winner John Fasal on His Passion for Sound
On February 18th, the Motion Picture Sound Editors will present John Paul Fasal with its annual Career Achievement award at the 65th MPSE Golden Reel Awards. Fasal has worked in sound for more than 30 years as a sound designer and field recordist. His many credits span features, television and games, including such titles as Top Gun, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Interstellar, The Dark Knight, American Sniper and this year’s box office hits Dunkirk and Coco. Fasal recently spoke with the MPSE about his career and the art of sound.
Editorial, Feature, People / Interview
Creative COW |
An Open Letter to Incoming Women Freshmen in Media Programs, by Kylee Peña
A lot of so-called “open letters” on the internet address the outgoing graduates of programs. And while they should bask in the glow of congratulations and good luck because they worked hard, they earned it, and they have some serious challenges on the horizon, this letter isn’t for them. It’s for you: the young woman who is leaving high school behind and beginning your first year of college in the next few weeks. Read on as Hollywood workflow supervisor and president of the Blue Collar Post Collective Kylee Peña reminds you: You have so much ahead of you!
Creative COW |
My Illegal Internships: An Oral History, by Kylee Peña
Sure, unpaid internships aren’t exclusive to post production; however, for some reason we’ve collectively decided that the single biggest way to prove one’s merit is by working in some capacity for free. It’s almost as if everyone believes that because they suffered the difficulty of doing often humiliating or degrading work for free, everyone else should too. There are certainly times that personal enrichment worth the sacrifice to work for free, but employers, do you know if what you're asking interns to do for you is even legal? Follow along as Kylee gives examples from her own past internships to highlight current requirements, and lays out some suggestions to a fairer, more productive future for everyone.
Kylee Peña |
An Editor's Epic Journey, by Katie Toomey
What do you do when your company folds and there's no local work? Whatever you have to. For Katie Toomey, that meant emptying her savings and heading 2000 miles west to Los Angeles, with no job in hand. The only options were make it or break it. The journey itself was difficult, but the hardest part may have been the only thing that made it all possible: asking for help. This is a truly inspiring story with tons of real-world examples of how to accomplish what feels impossible at the time.
Katie Toomey |
Panasonic at NAB Show 2017
Panasonic’s booth at NAB is going to packed with the range of goodness that showgoers have come to expect, including the Cinema VariCam Experience, a look at the control room of the future, cloud-based news production, transparent and AR displays, and much more that we’ll be reporting throughout the week. Just before the show officially opened, Panasonic offered a preview of some of what’s in store for their customers, at the show and beyond, starting with a new camera system for live broadcast of 360-degree uncompressed 4K/30.
Creative COW |
Blackmagic Design Announces DaVinci Resolve 14
Blackmagic Design today announced DaVinci Resolve 14, the biggest release in the history of the product, and an update. New features include up to 10 times performance improvement, a whole new audio post production suite with Fairlight audio built into DaVinci Resolve, and multi user collaboration tools that let multiple people edit, color and mix audio from multiple systems, all in the same project at the same time. What this means is that DaVinci Resolve 14 is like 3 high end applications in one. Customers get professional editing, color correction and the new Fairlight audio tools, with a new reduced price of $299.
Creative COW |
Netflix to move production back to California
While many productions chase tax credits and use them to help underwrite production costs, Netflix has decided that in some cases the savings do not outweigh the costs and so it will be moving as much of its production as possible, back to California.
Creative COW |
PLOTAGRAPH PRO: A Powerful Tool For Animating Still Images
The COW was just introduced to one of the coolest new creative tools we've seen in a long time, PLOTAGRAPH PRO, which powerfully animates still images. Imagine animating your still images to become full high resolution video, all the way up to 4K. In this video tutorial, Blake Rudis is your guide.
Review, Tutorial
Blake Rudis |
Cinematography
Beautiful 8K Timelapse of Norway's Four Seasons
One year of planning, one year of shooting, and four months of post-production is a lot of time to spend on a single timelapse, but photographer Morten Rustad‘s creation SEASONS of NORWAY captured this 8K masterpiece by travelling a total of 20,000
Morten Rustad |
Videoguys Top 10 Products of 2016
As we look back at 2016, we reflect on a year that involved media consumption -- and more specifically LIVE media consumption. Increased bandwidth, improved cameras on mobile phones, and easy access to YouTube LIVE...
Editorial, Feature
Creative COW |
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COW Library : Creative COW
