Back from NAB 2015

Whew! This year was my first at NAB and I'm pretty overwhelmed right now. For my first visit I decided to start off slow and will be creating a set of short videos over the next few days highlighting some of the more interesting things I saw and learned while on the show floor. For now, there are a couple of special deals going that are pretty nice if you're in the market for these particular items:

Nikon D750 Camera Body for under $2000. That's an amazing deal for anyone looking for a nice full frame camera. I own this and can vouch that it is an amazing stills camera and surprisingly good at video despite is relatively low bitrate. I record to an Atomos recorder and it produces fantastic footage that way and works around the limited bitrate.

I also dropped by a session hosted by FCPWorks which is a consulting group for Final Cut Pro X users - especially larger productions. But they're obviously big on FCPX and brought in Denver Riddle from Color Grading Central to demo his new professional color grading plugin for FCPX called Color Finale. Right now there's a 30% off special (bringing the price to right around $70 with coupon code "NAB2015"). I've been super impressed playing around with it today and it is a huge time saver. I may not have to round trip to Resolve nearly as often now because this has an impressive feature set including color wheels, curves, LUT support, vector secondaries, and layer opacity. Definitely worth a look if you use FCPX for editing and want to save some time round tripping to color correct or aren't a fan of FCPX's color boards (I'm not a huge fan).

I have lots more to tell you about, especially on the audio and lighting fronts, and will get started posting over the next few days.

Oh, and my RØDE NTG4+ should arrive tomorrow so I'll begin tests with that as well for the upcoming review!

Audio Hiss Noise Reduction

https://youtu.be/1lIjFBG6w58 Sometimes I find that my audio has audible hiss in the background. This is often what is described as a noise floor and is the hiss produced by your microphone, preamplifier, cable, or possibly other things. In any case, it isn’t an awesome sound.

In this episode we look at one way to reduce that hiss in your dialogue audio without affecting the dialogue and we’ll use Adobe Audition CC (2014) to show you how.

The clip with the hiss was recorded with a RØDE NTG-2 shotgun microphone, compressed and loudness normalized to -19 LUFS (since it was a mono file, this is the perceptual equivalent of -16 LUFS for stereo files). I hadn't really noticed this much noise in this mic in the past. And this was all recored as I'm starting to evaluate the new RØDE NTG4+ which I received a few days ago. So far, I'm wondering if maybe there's something wrong with my copy of the NTG4+. RØDE is arranging for an engineer to contact me so we can figure out what's going on with this new mic so it may be a few more weeks before we can publish that review.

Export From Premiere Pro for YouTube: CS5 - CC 2014

When I first started making videos, one of the biggest hurdles was to figure out which settings to use when exporting my video for YouTube. So hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and this will help you export your videos for YouTube with a minimum of frustration. Happy YouTubing! Since we posted the video, several people have already made suggestions--thanks for that! Check out the comment over on YouTube.

http://youtu.be/6OrVo3z_OlM

Learning Final Cut Pro X

I've been listening to this podcast called FCPX Grill hosted by @ChrisFenwick over the last several weeks. Chris bills it as, "An open, honest, and level-headed discussion with users of Final Cut Pro X to discover how they are using the application." And I must say, it is interesting.

He concedes that he is overly opinionated, but makes many good points. He used to edit in Premiere, switched to Final Cut Pro 7, was outraged when Final Cut Pro x was announced, but now has become a huge proponent of FCPX.

When I first switched to a Mac almost 2 years ago, I tried the trial version of Final Cut. It must have been version 10.0.something. It was pretty cool but one thing scared me away quickly: It crashed. Way too often.

Since I'm a photographer, I had to have Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom so Creative Cloud became my solution. And by default, Premiere became my non-linear editor app. And over time, I've become reasonably comfortable with Premiere Pro. I was skeptical about whether or not Adobe would really deliver new functionality and bug fixes more quickly with their Creative Cloud offering but I must say, they've been doing a pretty nice job on that front. Seems like we're getting a solid 2 functional enhancement releases per year and several bug fix updates in between. That's way better than the previous 18 to 36 month upgrade cycle.

I also found myself relying on After Effects more and more for my corporate video gigs. I still haven't fallen in love with SpeedGrade and much prefer Davinci Resolve despite SG's round-trip capabilities with Premiere. Also not a huge fan of audition, though it is hard to beat it in terms of the roundtrip workflow as well.

But Fenwick had me convinced that I at least need to give FCPX another look. So I downloaded the trial again a few days ago and have been watching a few tutorials online to get familiar with it.

Wow. It is very much an Apple approach encapsulated in an app. I mean they really questioned some of the fundamentals regarding NLEs. So far I'm still getting my bearings. I'm starting to wonder if I'll really be able to make a good decision with only 30 days of trial time, but we'll give it a go and force myself to use it for my projects in the next few weeks.

Evidently, the quality of the H.264 exported files from FCPX are better than from Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder. I have to say, it looks good on that front so far but is it something my audiences/clients will notice? More tests ongoing.

I also haven't tackled my round-trip workflow with Resolve yet. Or with audio apps. To be honest, for short pieces, I just color correct, grade, and edit audio before even taking it into Premiere. That's fine when you just have 10 or 20 short clips. Not reasonable for most indie filmmakers when you're doing a longer piece, even a short film.

One thing that alarmed me last night was that FCPX crashed. That's the first time this round so far, but not a good sign. Are any of you experiencing that on 10.1.3? Some of the reviews/comments in the app store express pretty serious frustration along these lines for this version.

For Pro apps, crashing needs to be very rare and Premiere has delivered well on that front, at least for me.

More to come.