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Recently, I have begun to think about the world we live in and the technology that we use. Everything is moving at such an incredibly fast pace that it’s a challenge even to keep up. Between computers and consumer electronics and TVs, it’s impossible to be on the cutting edge for long. With the advent of the Internet, people all around the world are connected in ways they never could have before. I just want to take a moment to set back and look at where we are. I want to look at the State of Technology.

When I look upon our world, the first thing I see is the “tech-spec generation”. We are the generation that looks at all the technical aspects of a piece of hardware or software. We have begun to devalue elegant, simple, and beautiful products. We are too consumed with the numbers, that we are missing the true value of the technology. Risking sounding like an Apple fanboy, I’m going to bring up the MacBook Air. Look at this device – thinner than my iPod, and perfectly thought-out. It is a marvel of design. From the backlit keyboard, to the magnetic latch, to the specially designed Magsafe adapter. But people complain. “It’s underpowered.” “It doesn’t have an optical drive.” “It doesn’t have an Ethernet port.”

Underpowered? Apple fit a dual-core processor in something as thin as a pencil! The majority of the people I know only use their computers for email, web browsing, IM, and maybe video chats. They want to organize their pictures, and they want to be able to type documents. And the MacBook Air does just that. The problem is, most people think they need a super-computer. I understand that many people with specialized careers do need the power, but the average consumer doesn’t. The MacBook Air is as powerful as the PowerMac G5’s of old – the same machines that they edited movies such as “King Kong” on. Technology has moved to the place where the tech specs don’t matter anymore. Sure, the geeks will compare and analyze and talk about the minuscule 50Mhz differences, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. We have moved past the numbers to a place where it is not a matter of what machine you have, but what you do with it.
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I woke up this morning to a surprise in my inbox. Jon-Michael Deldin had written me a rather lengthy response to a blog post I had written last week on learning to code. I love getting feedback from readers, especially 1000+ word emails written at 2:00 in the morning. Jon-Michael went into extreme detail on how to begin coding, and where to learn the languages. Take a minute out of your day, and read it through. You won’t regret it.

Hi Michael,

If I were starting from scratch today, I’d learn Python. It’s clean, and it’s easy to run (open Terminal.app: Type “python”). Once you’ve learned HTML, you can get started with building a Python site using Django, TurboGears, Plone, etc. With Python, you can do incredibly useful stuff like creating the world’s longest palindrome . Python and other high level languages are just gateways to other languages.

For Python books, check out Dive into Python (free download) and Thinking in Python (also free) while you’re waiting for your copy of either Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional or Learning Python to arrive. For book selection, avoid any quick start guides or teach yourself something in x days. They’re terrible and often leave you with a poor introduction to a language. O’Reilly books are good; most Apress books suck, with Beginning Python being an exception; Sam’s and Peachpit books are terrible.

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The other day I was sitting in my bed just surfing the web. You know when you get to that place where you’ve done all that you’ve had to do, and you just surf? You just go wherever the tide takes you? I love that feeling. Because it is in those moments that I see things.

When I began this year, I started fresh. New blog. New Camera. New Flickr account. Everything was new. And I didn’t want to fall into the trap that so many people fall into. I didn’t want to get to a place where I dreaded blogging and taking photos. I didn’t want to forget my blog, and leave it, like countless other abandoned blogs in the blogosphere. I wanted to have a presence on the Internet. An online home.

So what did I do? I made a commitment to blog and upload a photo each day. I thought that taking part in Blog365, and writing something each day would do just that. At first it worked. But slowly, I started to become a slave to it. I felt that a blog post every day was my duty, and it quickly began to lose its appeal.

While I was sitting in my bed that one morning, I pointed my browser to ShawnBlanc.net. I’d been there before, and I’d subscribed, but I saw it differently this time. This was not just a blog. This was a window into Shawn’s life. And then it hit me. That was what I wanted. That is what I was trying to achieve. I looked at my own blog, and saw the pointless, passionless words I was writing. I realized that I would not even want to read content like this. I knew I needed a change.
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If you are using a Mac for serious video editing, you’ve most likely moved past iMovie to Final Cut. After Apple announced iMovie ‘08, which was geared towards the first-time video editor, the most viable option for any amateur editor was to upgrade to Final Cut Express for only $200. I got FCE for my birthday this year, and it is miles ahead of iMovie. Of course it has a steeper learning curve, but at the same time it has power that iMovie can’t even come close to matching.

Final Cut Express is technically the stripped-down version of it’s big brother, Final Cut Studio. Final Cut Studio at $1300 is designed for the pro editor, and includes Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro, Motion, DVD Studio Pro, Color, and Compressor. It is the one-stop suite of video editing applications that are meant for professionals. For the amateur however, all of that is overkill. Final Cut Express has almost all the features of Final Cut Pro, but comes without the rest of the applications in the suite.

Notice how I say “almost”. I’ve been searching all over the Internet for some kind of comparison of what Apple took out of Final Cut Express that is still in Pro. All I’ve found is the lack of support for some high-end video cameras, and lack of batch capturing from tape. However, that doesn’t seem like enough to differentiate the two product lines. Could FCE be Final Cut Pro without the rest of the Studio? If anyone could clear up the differences between FCE and FCP let me know. I’d be interested to see how they stack up feature-wise.

Update: Dave sends his remarks:

I realize this is coming a little late to the party, but perhaps someone will find the following observations useful:

List of Stuff Final Cut Express Can’t Do:

1) No Cinema Tools. This means no EDLs, no Reverse-Telecine, no advanced 30 fps to 24 fps pulldown. If you don’t know what those things mean, and you never intend to create a print of your project on actual film for a theater projector, you won’t miss these features.

2) No Multicam editing. This means if you shoot with multiple cameras simultaneously, you’ll need to sync the footage manually in the timeline. This would be a drag if your entire project was one big multicam event, like a concert or play. This would kinda be a drag if you were shooting a narrative project that was exclusively multicam, like a sitcom, soap opera, or second unit on an action movie. This would be a little bit of a drag if you used multicam on a few shots in a mostly one-camera movie. This will make absolutely no difference at all if you only have one camera, regardless of how many takes and camera settups you shoot.

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/multicam_editing_martin.html

3) No Batch Capture. If you have one long tape, and you know you only need 5 small chunks of it, and you know the exact timecode in and out of those 5 small chunks, batch capture would let you import only those chunks. In Express, you can import an entire tape, and then delete the parts you don’t need, or manually surf through your tape, and only import what you need manually, or type in one timecode to import from, but you cant put in all 5 in and out timecodes and then hit ‘go’ and make yourself a sandwich.

http://www.squarebox.co.uk/users/rolf/dv/bcfaq.html

4) Timecode. In Express, you can see your live-updating timecode in the timeline window, but you can’t (to my knowledge) burn in the timecode so it shows up in an exported video file.

5) Undo. In Express, you can hit undo up to 32 times; in Pro, you can hit undo up to 99 times.

6) Compatibility with iMovie. Express can import iMovie projects. This feature is not avalable in pro (presumably, apple thinks people using pro would rarely start a project in iMove).

7) No Soundtrack program. FCE 4 does not include Soundtrack like it used to : (

Color. Final cut Express has a color correction module that works pretty well. Final Cut Studio comes with the program Color, which is extremely powerful, allowing real-time previews in any resolution, and an 8 stage workflow that allows you to affect the entire image first, then multiple areas of a single shot independently, along with many other high-end features. If you occasionally want to correct an over- or under-exposed shot, or your shots sometimes look too blue, green or pink, Express should do the job. Also, learning how to use Color is very time-consuming and complicated – it is not a program like Photoshop or Final Cut itself, where you can just teach yourself by fiddling around a bit.

Hope this is helpful to someone out there!

-Dave

Update #2: Dave responds with more useful information:

Robin,

You asked, “what’s DVD pro like compared to iDVD? ” In my experience, DVD Studio Pro and iDVD are pretty different programs. iDVD is great for the casual user who wants to make a great-looking dvd simply and quickly, and doesn’t care about customized menus. The templates in iDVD look great, and making a professional-looking menu can be done in minutes, if not seconds. Professional users will find some secondary uses for it as well; when I was in school, we used iDVD all the time to quickly burn copies of unfinished projects for screening.

DVD Stuido Pro is a much more robust program, designed for someone who needs or wants the DVD itself (menus, buttons, etc.) to be custom-made. While iDVD offers almost no options for customization, DVD Studio Pro gives you a blank canvas, allowing you to import images and motion content to create menus to your exact specifications. There is some learning curve, and some of the interface decisions really leave you scratching your head sometimes, but if you are willing to roll with that, you can learn to love it, and get some great-looking original results.

(One last thing to note: DVD Studio Pro is not designed for you to create the backgrounds, buttons, motion menus, etc.; it’s function is to assemble those pieces into a finished DVD. To get the most out of it — to get anything at all out of it — you need to have access to Photoshop, or at least GIMP or similar. If you want motion menus, you need to use another program to make them — luckily, motion and FCP work great for this!)

You asked, “are the other applications really something to consider in the bundle FCS? are they even that good?”

Okay, so the other applications are: Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Color, Compressor 3 along with the 3 supplementary apps LiveType 2, Cinema Tools 3, amd Qmaster 2. What do all those things do? Here is what wikipedia has to say:

* Motion 3 – “real-time motion graphics design”
* Soundtrack Pro 2 – “advanced audio editing and sound design”
* Color – a new color grading application adapted from Silicon Color’s FinalTouch.
* Compressor 3 – a video encoding tool for outputting projects in different formats.
* LiveType 2 – a text animation program.
* Cinema Tools 3 – tools specific to film processing.
* Qmaster 2 – a distributed processing tool.

Motion 3 is, in my opinion, a good program for doing exactly what it aims to do; it is not the end-all be-all of graphics effects, and doesn’t try to be, but it is pretty useful for the filmmaker who is doing basic stuff in-house. By ‘basic stuff’, I mean: taking existing images or objects, and moving them around a screen — either by traditional keyframing (you tell it to start here on this frame, end there on that frame, and the computer fills in the middle frames), or by their so-called ‘behaviors’ (pre-programed movements which, when stacked together, look pretty good with almost no effort). For making animated text and objects, I find Motion pretty powerful and efficient, though not nearly as versatile as, say, Adobe After Effects.

Soundtrack Pro is also really solid, and getting better every day. I like it a lot, and though it isn’t yet as powerful or widely accepted as, say, Pro Tools, I think it is definitely robust enough to mix a big feature film without trouble. My favorate thing about it is how well it integrates with Final Cut.

Traditionally, when you edit a movie, you edit the picture and ignore the sound, then when the picture is as good as you can make it, you ‘lock picture’ and go to work on the audio. Often, while spending days and days tweaking the audio without much thought of the picture, you start to notice little things you wished you had done, but didn’t notice before; often it’s just little things – a frame or two here and there – but they start to drive you crazy. But you know that to un-lock’ the picture and fix those things will cause everything after that point in Pro Tools or Nuendo or whatever to be out-of-sync, which could potentially be a big hassle to fix.

Soundtrack has a special interface to correct this, so if you unlock picture and make 35 small edits in Final Cut, it can read the .fcp files, see where you’ve made changes, and (this is brilliant) ask you how you want it to fix each one. For some people, this is a little thing, but for me and some of my friends, it fundamentally alters our post workflow in such a positive and organic way, it is worth it if there are some little features missing relative to Pro Tools. (Bring this up with an audio engineer, though, and you might get a totally different answer!)

I’ve already mentioned Color above, but let me just say: it is amazing. The learning curve on the program is very steep, but figuring this program out rewards you in a huge way. Back before Color was Color, it was this buggy crazy weird program called Final Touch HD. It took forever to save, crashed *all* the time, and and all of my friends were in awe of it. Finally, we could do real color correction without spending $350/hr (student rate) for DI processing! Color is basically that same program, but much, much more stable, and with a few useful new features. It isn’t the best color correction software out there — Da Vinci Resolve is definately more powerful — but it is the only package I’ve seen for under $500,000. (That’s not a typo. Half a million dollars.) So, at roughly, what, 1/000 the price of the competition, you are doing pretty good with Color.

The other four programs: Compressor is great at what it does – put things or batches of things in other formats. If you need that, it works perfectly. One neat thing, if I remember right, is how it can output audio files in multiple formats (2.0, 2.1, 5.1, 7.1 etc.) and integrate them with DVD Studio Pro.

LiveType is a piece of crap, endlessly frustrating, mostly because every time you change anything in a project, the entire thing needs to re-render. Luckilly, it is just a very wattered-down version of Motion (which is so much faster and nicer), so you’ll never have to use it.

For the home user, Cinema Tools and Qmaster are probably never going to be opened. The only time I’ve ever used Cinema Tools was once, when I got some processed dailies sent to me incorrectly, and I need to do a 24:30fps conversion in-house. It worked great! I feel like nowadays, if you are shooting in film, and you are going to go out to film with an EDL, you are probably going to have some kind of Digital Intermediate, so the post house can handle the film stuff for you. But maybe that’s just me. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, and you are never going to shoot film on a film camera (ie not digital), and you probably wont make a film print of your movie (but even if you do…) you will never ever use this program, ever.

Similarly Qmaster, made for distributing processes over a network, is probably outside the scope of most users here; in my experience, anyone who is making movies outside the studio system would rather spend $10,000 on lights, costumes, equipment rentals, or lunch and craft services for your crew, than buying extra machines so you can cut down your render time. Anyone who is thinking of distributing processes over a network is definately not reading this trying to decide weather or not they should buy FC Express — they are way past that — so it is kind of a non-issue.

Hopefully that answers your questions, or someone finds this useful.

Best,
Dave

After writing about some photography tools yesterday, I decided to go out and buy a Wacom Bamboo tablet from my local camera store. While I have not used it extensively yet, I can already see that it is an amazing product. Currently, I am using it as a complete replacement for my mouse. My MX Revolution has been put aside for now, so I can test the Wacom Bamboo exclusively for a couple days. So far, I’m loving it

It is very easy to see the strengths of this over a mouse. Just opening Photoshop or ArtRage will allow you to select items and paint with such precision that would never have been possible with a mouse. At first I thought it would be difficult and clunky to navigate, however, I have found the opposite. For drawing, sketching, and handwriting this tablet shines. It has a small, portable form factor, and looks and feels great as well.

After I play around with it this week, I plan to write up a review on it’s strengths, it’s weaknesses, and what features I find myself using the most. For now, you can check out my Flickr set with some of the unboxing photos.

Photography can quickly grow from a small task, to a profession or a hobby that can require a lot of equipment, time, education, and money. I have already talked about the importance of having a tripod with you whenever you go out shooting. As I spent more time taking photos, and developed a post-processing workflow, I found three essential tools for anyone who takes photography seriously.

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I want to learn to code.

That’s right. I want to learn how to code things. Websites. Applications. Scripts. There are many different languages that I would like to code. I want to learn PHP, Ruby on Rails, AppleScript, and Objective-C. At the moment, I only know a limited amount of HTML. That is the extent of my coding knowledge. The problem is, I don’t know where to start. That is why I am asking your help. Where does one go to begin to learn coding?

Are there books or tutorials or walkthroughs that can take a beginner through the paces? Is there a certain method that you recommend? What language is the best to begin with? I really am clueless. I look at people all around me that are able to do so much through coding, and I want to learn. Where do I start?

Undoubtedly, the most debatable announcement at Macworld yesterday was the iPod Touch upgrade. Apple released free major updates to the iPhone and the AppleTV, but when it came to updating the iPod Touch, users were asked to pay $20. The upgrade for the iPod Touch would make it more like the iPhone. It would add the Maps, Mail, Weather, Stocks, and Notes applications to the iPod Touch, which originally didn’t ship with the device. However, all new iPod Touches come with the new apps pre-installed. The question is, why didn’t Apple include these apps in the iPod Touch from the beginning?

I don’t think that Apple is perfect, and I believe they made a mistake about the vision of this device from the beginning. They first envisioned the iPhone as a “phone” and the iPod Touch as an “iPod”. The iPhone was meant to include and iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator, while the iPod Touch was meant to focus music, photos, and videos like most traditional iPods had. However, when the iPhone and the iPod Touch were hacked, there was a clear message sent to Apple saying, “We want third-party apps”. I think Apple woke up and realized that these devices were not just a phone and an iPod. They were the beginnings of an entirely new computing platform.

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Today, Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld, and unveiled four new products. Some were disappointed. Others were in awe. But instead of going through each product individually, I want to look at the big picture – the overall theme of Macworld this year. Clearly, the theme this year was wireless. It was portability. It was moving away from the desktop computer as we know it.

At the beginning of this year, I predicted that we would see technology becoming more portable, as well as moving towards the living room. Desktops were to become machines only going to be used by content-creators and scientists doing high-end work. And indeed, in just the first two weeks of the year, we have seen the 8-core Mac Pros get brushed aside, for the announcement of the AppleTV 2.0 and the MacBook Air – the products that target portability and the home theater. What many considered a mediocre keynote, could possibly be the beginning of the next 5 years of technology. I want to talk about the three main themes that I observed from this keynote.

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Macworld 2008. The one day of the year that Apple fans know that they will see some new Apple-ly goodness out of Cupertino. Steve Jobs and Apple attempt to keep the upmost secrecy. But there are many rumors floating around the dark corners of the internet. Here are some of my Macworld 2008 predictions.
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Imagination. When I was a child, that used to be the catch phrase. “You can accomplish anything you put your mind to”. “Your dreams can come true”. But that was when I was a kid. Not anymore. Now things have changed.

I live in a world of people who think small. People who dream small. I live in a world of average people doing average things living average lives. No more talk about dreaming. About imagining. About thinking big. I’m living in the world of adults. The world of hopelessness. The world of averages. Reality. And I’m already sick of it.

I don’t want to be just another person in the world. I don’t want to go along with the status quo. I don’t want to become just like them. The world thinks small. They think locally – not globally. They think in thousands – not in billions. Only a few, truly understand what it’s like to think big. To think beyond themselves and their houses and their neighbourhoods. To think outside their countries and their continents. To view the world from different eyes. To think different.
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Back in beginning of 2007, a couple of my friends and I started an Internet TV station called Cunning.tv. The idea was to have a technology channel where we could cover live tech events. One event that we covered that garnered a lot of attention was the September 5th, The Beat Goes On Apple Event. We had over 13,000 viewers, and got a lot of support from the Mac community from sites like Macrumors.

We’re excited to announce that we are going to be covering the Macworld Keynote live this year. Starting at 11AM EST on January 15th, we will be doing a rumor roundup, and going into the live coverage of the keynote at 12 EST. We will also be updating live with our twitter account. If you have a phone, you can receive SMS updates of all the new releases live.

I’m pretty excited about doing the coverage, and we’d be happy to have you join in the chat over at Cunning.tv.