I was just playing around with Vimeo’s widgets and albums today - and I wanted to share them with you all in case you weren’t aware that they existed. This is a pretty neat ways to share your video work on your blog or your site pretty quickly and elegantly. There’s also a cool OS X Dashboard app.  Check the features out here.

or another style you can use for your videos  or in the case below some of the channels I subscribe to on Vimeo:

The funny thing is:  I was planning on writing about my video and photography workflow within the next few weeks (ok well months - it’s been BUSY).   I can now cross that off my calendar because my buddy Chase Jarvis just did a pretty extensive video that describes his workflow - and he did it WELL.

And you know what?   Our workflow is SCARILY SIMILAR - if not close to identical.

The only main difference?   I back everything up to LTO Tape at the end of the process and keep two copies of those tapes - one in Los Angeles, and one in New York  (kind of like Chase’s theory of making sure floods/meteors etc don’t strike the ONE location where your data is backed up.  I call it Armageddon myself and joke that if CA falls into the ocean - I’ll have some data in NY…)  I do also send my still masters to PhotoShelter for online storage as well.

One of my favorite sayings of all time is one by Bert Lance: “If it ain’t broke - don’t fix it!”

That comes into play here.   Chase - thanks for saving me the time  To everyone here - check out Chase’s video and his workflow - and understand that my workflow is nearly identical.   I’ll detail some of the minor differences below after the video in case you want to get into the nitty gritty / nuances between our similar workflows.

What we use here at LAFORET | VISUALS: (more…)

I’m going to punt today’s Tech Tip Friday post over to my friend (and co-director on Nocturne) Stu Maschwitz’s blog - Prolost.com.

I’m becoming more and more involved in the screenwriting process as a director myself (mostly revisions - I let the pros write the scripts!) and I own Final Draft. It’s such an industry standard piece of software that it’s fair to say that it’s pretty much a “must own” for anyone involved in the development process of a script.

I also found Stu’s suggestion of Scrivener and it’s use of note cards to be pretty fantastic.  Basically it digitally mimics the way most screenwriters / directors / producers I know work.  When you walk into their offices it’s not uncommon to find walls full of dozens if not hundreds notecards, photographs, reference material setup in some sort of hierarchy - so that they can visualize and analyze the building blocks of their screenplays and the progression of the characters, etc.   I guess this is the digital version of that and I’m going to purchase Scrivener in a few seconds after I hit post… for now - why don’t you all go over to to the Prolost blog to here the skinny from the man himself.

We’ve had a few similar requests from people over the past few days regarding this weekend’s upcoming Canon 5DMKII workshop and have agreed to allow more students into the workshop this weekend. This will allow us to offer them at a significantly lower price. For more information see below.

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I just got back from the EOL APA event that took place in Los Angeles last night - and it was pretty fantastic.  It was well worth the cross country round-trip.  

There seemed to be great interest out there on behalf of photographers who were contemplating making the jump into video/film.   While there is a lot to learn in terms of the nuances between shooting a still vs. moving image - I think that one of the biggest hurdles for most will be post production.

Therefore  I wanted to let you in on my little secret:  Ripple Training.    I met Steve Martin (the person behind Ripple Training) two years ago at NAB - we were both there as guest speakers for Apple - at the time he was helping to announce Final Cut Studio 2, and I was there to talk about Aperture and my experience with it.   Steve and a few of the other experts out there (many of them the actual product managers for many of the Apple apps) gave me one on one training during the lengthy breaks back stage - and you’d figure that with that kind of tutelage that I’d be an expert at these apps by now… but I can tell you that there’s ALWAYS more to learn.

As I find myself jumping into video/film now - I felt that I needed a refresher course and a more in depth understanding of workflow etc.  I’m not a big fan of books - they’re often too bulky to travel with - and I just love video tutorials.   I found myself asking quite a few friends who work at/with Apple where the best source for such information could be found - and quite a few of them kept sending me back to Steve’s Ripple Training series.    (Note: I use Apple’s Final’s Cut Studio 2 to cut/grade/export my video - and the Ripple Training series focuses on that product.) (more…)

One of the most common questions that have been posed by people on this blog is:  Do you delete your images in camera and do you delete images on your server or in your Aperture Library?

I think it’s a very important question, and my answer for the most part is: No - I don’t.

Why?  Well here it is:  I’ll point to the following events in specific:  My coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and my coverage of (actually pretty much any) Olympics.  In all of these events - I was often rushing to make a deadline and under severe pressure.  I had a clear idea of what the “news of the day” was and what images I needed to get out first, and I was all too often sleep deprived - in that state, I become pretty close to being my own worst editor.  

And here’s a big lesson: once you make that initial edit - you almost NEVER MAKE a second edit of that work - EVER.   All too often you move on to the next event or day - and never get the luxury of looking back.

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