Ohmyjeezus, the box for Final Cut Pro Studio is the single heaviest box of software I've ever seen in my life--by orders of magnitude. This is because, unlike most software purchases these days, there are actual manuals included in the package. Emphasis on the plural here--each component (Final Cut, DVD Studio, SoundTrack and Motion) has its own manual, and some are multivolume (the Final Cut manual runs to more than 1,800 pages over four volumes). There are seven DVDs of software (a two-hour install!), plus two more discs of tutorial.
So naturally, I didn't spend much time with the actual program because it took most of the night just installing. First there was adding memory (maxing out my iMac at two gigs), then installing the software, then downloading updates to the software, then copying project files for the tutorials. All this took so long that when Marc Rosenbush and our great good friend Buffie Groves (visiting from Boston) swung by around 8:30, I was only just getting ready to fire up the program for the very first time.
"Oh good," said we. "We can all partake of the program for the first time, together!" (No, we didn't actually say those specific words. No one really talks like that. Often.) So in my cramped office-that-is-not-an-office-according-to-the-IRS, we stuffed four chairs occupied by we four persons (Jamie was there too, bemused by the whole rigamarole), and I cheerfully double-clicked.
Short pause. We all stared at the screen. "Huh," I said. "Wonder what that means." Mind, we hadn't even reached the workscreens yet--this was just a window asking which video format and scratch disk should be set as defaults. Hijinks ensued, during which my brand-new 400 GB scratch drive seemed to disappear for a while, and we all stared at the spinning beach ball for an amazingly long time till I finally decided that maybe I should force-quit and then reboot the computer.
But at long last! The program opened! And we opened up the iMovie project Marc and I have been working on, and we marveled! (Marc: "Ooooh, now I can do superimpositions!") And then we noticed that the timeline had somehow inserted a great big gap between a couple of clips, which would result in a long stretch of black screen with nothing happening. "Well then," I said, "this will be my first edit on the new system." And I tried to drag the clips back into place, and something weird happened. So I tried to right-click in the gap, and the command for "Close the Gap" was greyed out and unavailable, and the only option available was "Fill with slug," which by that point we thought was extremely funny.
Suffice it to say that Marc and I will be finishing the current Alien project using iMovie. I got me an education to fit in before I can do any of that there fancy stuff.
Now if only the tutorial moved at something less than lightning speed...
Friday, July 29, 2005
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Bad, Bad Little Brother
Having a 21 year old little brother means that sometimes you end up looking at pictures like this one.
Adam lives in Ft. Lauderdale, with the rest of the family; far, far away from me here in L.A. And he was driving home the other night from his gig at a nightclub, trying to merge onto a highway; but in looking left at traffic he over-compensated to the right, just where a car was parked on the shoulder, its blinkers off.
Let me just say how very fond I am of the overall construction of the Audi he was driving. And to say that even if there are dangers to be had with air bags, right now they are my new best friends. Adam walked away from this with scrapes and bruises. Short pause while I take a deep breath of relief.
Okay, good. Everyone's fine, the drama is over. Whew.
The Final Cut Pro Studio package arrives tomorrow, and a whole new education begins.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Miscellanii Aye-Aye-Aye
Work Machine
What busy little bees we were. Marc and I got together Saturday morning to work on the City of Truth script, beginning at page 32; by the time we finished working Sunday afternoon, we were on page 50. Gotta love the second act. We spent ages writing and rewriting the first act, but now things are really starting to jump. And once we were done with that, we immediately headed over to Ezra's to shoot more Alien material, discovering (for about the billionth time) that having an actual shot list really does make your day move faster. When Marc announced we were done everyone just kinda looked around, saying "Really? But how could we--I mean, that was so fast!"
Ah, Politics
I ran across this article the other day, a commencement speech that Theodore Sorensen (special counsel to JFK) gave to the New School last year. It's called "A Time to Weep," and the portrait Sorensen paints of the America we ought to have is so movingly right that, yes, I did want to weep as I read it.
And apropos of nothing, I want to repeat in public a prediction I made in private shortly after the 2004 election: at some point, probably about halfway through Bush's current term, Dick Cheney will announce that his heart problems require him to step down as Vice President. A new VP will be quickly named, and will promptly become the anointed successor to George Bush, the conservative standard-bearer for the next election. Doubt me? Just notice the small news items that have been popping up recently about Cheney getting his pacemaker checked and his health examined. Routine stuff or laying the groundwork?
What busy little bees we were. Marc and I got together Saturday morning to work on the City of Truth script, beginning at page 32; by the time we finished working Sunday afternoon, we were on page 50. Gotta love the second act. We spent ages writing and rewriting the first act, but now things are really starting to jump. And once we were done with that, we immediately headed over to Ezra's to shoot more Alien material, discovering (for about the billionth time) that having an actual shot list really does make your day move faster. When Marc announced we were done everyone just kinda looked around, saying "Really? But how could we--I mean, that was so fast!"
Ah, Politics
I ran across this article the other day, a commencement speech that Theodore Sorensen (special counsel to JFK) gave to the New School last year. It's called "A Time to Weep," and the portrait Sorensen paints of the America we ought to have is so movingly right that, yes, I did want to weep as I read it.
And apropos of nothing, I want to repeat in public a prediction I made in private shortly after the 2004 election: at some point, probably about halfway through Bush's current term, Dick Cheney will announce that his heart problems require him to step down as Vice President. A new VP will be quickly named, and will promptly become the anointed successor to George Bush, the conservative standard-bearer for the next election. Doubt me? Just notice the small news items that have been popping up recently about Cheney getting his pacemaker checked and his health examined. Routine stuff or laying the groundwork?
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Collaborating
The aforementioned Mr. Rosenbush is a sterling gentleman of considerable gifts. We have known each other for just over twenty years now, and we've been collaborating on writing projects for almost half that time. Video editing of the Alien project is the most recent of these projects, and yesterday we met up to work on one of the short pieces. The project, I should mention, is aimed at creating very, very short video and/or film pieces to be downloaded to cellphones or viewed on the web, or for similar uses. The ones we really like we might submit to short-film festivals, and there are a couple other ideas we've come up with that I can't really talk about just yet.
The trouble with our latest project was, when we shot we didn't really have a story laid out, we just kinda figured we'd start with a few shots that Marc already had in mind and then wing it from there. This had the inevitable result: I put together a rough cut, we hacked it into some kind of sense several days ago, and soon realized that there were things missing. This means reshoots, which in this case isn't such a big deal because shooting on video against a backdrop in Ezra's apartment isn't very expensive at all.
And yet we still did a couple hours' work on the footage, which came as a bit of a surprise. But Marc has done this more than I have, and he was quite right: even with missing footage, there are still things to be done. Moving this here, that over there, inserting a placeholder like "insert: victory dance" to mark where the new footage will go, etc. The value of a placeholder is that, with a decent guess as to how long the new footage should be, you can still get a here-and-now idea of how the music and sound effects are timing out.
The fun bit is that iMovie isn't very complicated, so Marc has been learning how to use it by watching me, so now his natural I'm-in-charge directorial instincts are starting to take over, leading to comical fights over who is in command of the trackball and keyboard. When he edited Zen Noir he rarely tried to take over the cutter's chair from the editor, Camden Toy, because they were using Avid and it's fiendishly complicated and, really, he just didn't want to know. But we're planning to get Final Cut Pro in a week or two, and that should cure his trackball obsession.
Well, actually, no it won't, 'cause I'll be learning it almost in real time as we work, which means he'll be learning it too, and--ah, heck. So much for that idea.
The trouble with our latest project was, when we shot we didn't really have a story laid out, we just kinda figured we'd start with a few shots that Marc already had in mind and then wing it from there. This had the inevitable result: I put together a rough cut, we hacked it into some kind of sense several days ago, and soon realized that there were things missing. This means reshoots, which in this case isn't such a big deal because shooting on video against a backdrop in Ezra's apartment isn't very expensive at all.
And yet we still did a couple hours' work on the footage, which came as a bit of a surprise. But Marc has done this more than I have, and he was quite right: even with missing footage, there are still things to be done. Moving this here, that over there, inserting a placeholder like "insert: victory dance" to mark where the new footage will go, etc. The value of a placeholder is that, with a decent guess as to how long the new footage should be, you can still get a here-and-now idea of how the music and sound effects are timing out.
The fun bit is that iMovie isn't very complicated, so Marc has been learning how to use it by watching me, so now his natural I'm-in-charge directorial instincts are starting to take over, leading to comical fights over who is in command of the trackball and keyboard. When he edited Zen Noir he rarely tried to take over the cutter's chair from the editor, Camden Toy, because they were using Avid and it's fiendishly complicated and, really, he just didn't want to know. But we're planning to get Final Cut Pro in a week or two, and that should cure his trackball obsession.
Well, actually, no it won't, 'cause I'll be learning it almost in real time as we work, which means he'll be learning it too, and--ah, heck. So much for that idea.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Books and Things
Because the world will be oh so very interested, and because I don't particularly have anything else to talk about just now (but this blogging thing is still new and I feel like writing just for the newness of it), here are some lists of things, in various media, that I've been messing around with lately.
Books I Am Currently Reading:
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Everyone is reading, or has read this, it seems, and now there's the PBS miniseries. A brewing cottage industry about one theory of ultimate answers. I love the concept, but think that Prof. Diamond pushes way too hard sometimes, like for example the development of technology section--I just don't buy the idea that geography alone determined who invented such a crucial technology as writing. Maybe he's right that any civilization might have eventually invented it, given enough time, but the plain truth is that such an invention was a very, very difficult thing indeed, and that only two civilizations did invent it (the rest absorbed it through diffusion). They got there first; and while it's impossible to guess how many more thousands of years might have passed before some other civilization came up with it, I have a hunch it would have been a very long time indeed. Somewhere in this whole equation we simply have to leave room for the idea that someone (with, yes, the right set of environmental circumstances, etc.) was simply very clever indeed.
United States by Gore Vidal. Yeah, that's right, I'm a liberal, and right proud of it. And Vidal is one of those essential gadflies every culture needs--particularly when the culture looks and sounds like ours. And while I certainly don't march in lockstep with Vidal (his argument for Timothy McVeigh still baffles me, even after reading the article thoroughly), on the whole his arguments against America's misabuses of power through every presidential administration make for essential reading no matter what your political viewpoint. He also has some valuable things to say about the "bookchat" crowd, literary academics who create nothing but instead talk endlessly about books and how clever they are for being able to read and understand them. Much as I am doing here, come to think of it...
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. I'm the first to admit that poetry is not my forte, which is why I've been reading this book since before I left Chicago, almost three years ago. A poem or two at a time, in drips and drabs, every now and then; and currently it's at the bottom of the pile and hasn't been touched in a while. But when I do open it up, and make the effort to get into the poems, there's no dispute: pure brilliance. Whitman had a one-of-a-kind vision of a beautifully interconnected everything, and every time I read his work I feel a part of the world in ways the world usually discourages.
London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd. Yeah, that's right, I'm an Anglophile. So this book should be right up my alley: an extensive look at the history of a city I love, by a very good writer. Trouble is, I don't know the city well enough, I don't have its geography down nearly well enough, so that everything Ackroyd writes about seems to be out of context. Thus I've never really been drawn in, and this is another book that I only dip into irregularly. It might be great to take this along on a long trip to London, but as it stands I just find it frustrating.
My Life by Bill Clinton. Yeah, that's right, I'm a lib--oh wait, I covered that already. Gore Vidal is right, and there were abuses of power under Clinton that leave me unsettled--the policy of "extraordinary rendition" began under his watch, it must be noted. Still, I've always loved the man, practically from the first moment. He shares my birthday, he's a deep-rooted Southerner who was never comfortable with the South's racism and intolerance while still loving the South's generosity and good humor. I've always believed that Clinton's heart was in the right place even when petty human crap got in the way of the better angels of his nature, and his mistakes were usually the human kind that I find easy to forgive. (Put it this way: when the current administration lies, thousands of people die. This I cannot forgive.) Clinton is no prose stylist, but the tone of the book is comfortably conversational, and while I'm only a hundred pages in, I've been enjoying the book a lot.
Five books at once. Can you say "short attention span"? There are also magazines, online magazines, newspapers, comic books, etc. I read a lot. And this is already long enough, so any discussion of other media will just have to wait. I'm sure you're heartbroken.
Books I Am Currently Reading:
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Everyone is reading, or has read this, it seems, and now there's the PBS miniseries. A brewing cottage industry about one theory of ultimate answers. I love the concept, but think that Prof. Diamond pushes way too hard sometimes, like for example the development of technology section--I just don't buy the idea that geography alone determined who invented such a crucial technology as writing. Maybe he's right that any civilization might have eventually invented it, given enough time, but the plain truth is that such an invention was a very, very difficult thing indeed, and that only two civilizations did invent it (the rest absorbed it through diffusion). They got there first; and while it's impossible to guess how many more thousands of years might have passed before some other civilization came up with it, I have a hunch it would have been a very long time indeed. Somewhere in this whole equation we simply have to leave room for the idea that someone (with, yes, the right set of environmental circumstances, etc.) was simply very clever indeed.
United States by Gore Vidal. Yeah, that's right, I'm a liberal, and right proud of it. And Vidal is one of those essential gadflies every culture needs--particularly when the culture looks and sounds like ours. And while I certainly don't march in lockstep with Vidal (his argument for Timothy McVeigh still baffles me, even after reading the article thoroughly), on the whole his arguments against America's misabuses of power through every presidential administration make for essential reading no matter what your political viewpoint. He also has some valuable things to say about the "bookchat" crowd, literary academics who create nothing but instead talk endlessly about books and how clever they are for being able to read and understand them. Much as I am doing here, come to think of it...
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. I'm the first to admit that poetry is not my forte, which is why I've been reading this book since before I left Chicago, almost three years ago. A poem or two at a time, in drips and drabs, every now and then; and currently it's at the bottom of the pile and hasn't been touched in a while. But when I do open it up, and make the effort to get into the poems, there's no dispute: pure brilliance. Whitman had a one-of-a-kind vision of a beautifully interconnected everything, and every time I read his work I feel a part of the world in ways the world usually discourages.
London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd. Yeah, that's right, I'm an Anglophile. So this book should be right up my alley: an extensive look at the history of a city I love, by a very good writer. Trouble is, I don't know the city well enough, I don't have its geography down nearly well enough, so that everything Ackroyd writes about seems to be out of context. Thus I've never really been drawn in, and this is another book that I only dip into irregularly. It might be great to take this along on a long trip to London, but as it stands I just find it frustrating.
My Life by Bill Clinton. Yeah, that's right, I'm a lib--oh wait, I covered that already. Gore Vidal is right, and there were abuses of power under Clinton that leave me unsettled--the policy of "extraordinary rendition" began under his watch, it must be noted. Still, I've always loved the man, practically from the first moment. He shares my birthday, he's a deep-rooted Southerner who was never comfortable with the South's racism and intolerance while still loving the South's generosity and good humor. I've always believed that Clinton's heart was in the right place even when petty human crap got in the way of the better angels of his nature, and his mistakes were usually the human kind that I find easy to forgive. (Put it this way: when the current administration lies, thousands of people die. This I cannot forgive.) Clinton is no prose stylist, but the tone of the book is comfortably conversational, and while I'm only a hundred pages in, I've been enjoying the book a lot.
Five books at once. Can you say "short attention span"? There are also magazines, online magazines, newspapers, comic books, etc. I read a lot. And this is already long enough, so any discussion of other media will just have to wait. I'm sure you're heartbroken.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Taking a Stab at This Whole Blogging Thing
Eventually, if a technology lingers there in front of your nose long enough, it crosses through the mind to actually, you know, give it a try. What with me being a writer and all, and blogs being so much about flinging words around, you'd think such a thought would occur to me a little sooner than it did--and in fact, yes, it did occur to me much sooner than this. But then there's the whole inertia problem, namely the massive amount of time required for me to actually say Okay, yes, I will now not-later-now actually try this.
So. Words, being flung around. Except in this case, by me.
Things That Are Going On Lately, In Case You Were Wondering: the film I helped produce, Zen Noir, is pretty much done with its festival-going life, and won several lovely awards, as can be seen on the site. There are still some interesting theatrical and/or DVD release scenarios being considered, but I can't really talk about them. The director of that film, Marc Rosenbush, is working with me on another script, an adaptation of James Morrow's City of Truth. Then there is my original script Beaudry, which is almost ready, and Marathon (about the Battle of Marathon in 480 BC and the famous Marathon runner, Phedippides), which is done--both these will soon be going out into the world as I start the hunt for an agent.
There is also The Alien, a character created by the actor Ezra Buzzington. I had never done any video or film editing before, but sat in for several of the Zen Noir sessions; and since I had iMovie just sitting there on my computer, I volunteered to take a stab at doing the editing for these very short Alien pieces. The results (with Marc Rosenbush directing, and sitting next to me while I edit) have been pretty good so far, and Ezra certainly likes them.
There. A start. Some words flung around, and sites where you can go and look at interesting things. As good a beginning as any other, I hope. Ciao.
So. Words, being flung around. Except in this case, by me.
Things That Are Going On Lately, In Case You Were Wondering: the film I helped produce, Zen Noir, is pretty much done with its festival-going life, and won several lovely awards, as can be seen on the site. There are still some interesting theatrical and/or DVD release scenarios being considered, but I can't really talk about them. The director of that film, Marc Rosenbush, is working with me on another script, an adaptation of James Morrow's City of Truth. Then there is my original script Beaudry, which is almost ready, and Marathon (about the Battle of Marathon in 480 BC and the famous Marathon runner, Phedippides), which is done--both these will soon be going out into the world as I start the hunt for an agent.
There is also The Alien, a character created by the actor Ezra Buzzington. I had never done any video or film editing before, but sat in for several of the Zen Noir sessions; and since I had iMovie just sitting there on my computer, I volunteered to take a stab at doing the editing for these very short Alien pieces. The results (with Marc Rosenbush directing, and sitting next to me while I edit) have been pretty good so far, and Ezra certainly likes them.
There. A start. Some words flung around, and sites where you can go and look at interesting things. As good a beginning as any other, I hope. Ciao.
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