Archive for February 2010

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Avid Receives ACE’s First-Ever Tech Award

February 15, 2010

The American Cinema Editors held its 60th annual Eddie awards ceremony last night with Bob Murawski & Chris Innis taking home the prize for “The Hurt Locker,” Debra Neil-Fisher winning for “The Hangover” and Kevin Nolting winning for “Up.” Alan Heim and Lee Percy won for “Grey Gardens.”

The ACE awards just seem to keep getting better, and this year the presentation was consistently entertaining, with a lot of humor and, at times, some rather edgy patter. I offer all the winners my humble congratulations.

From a tech-centric point of view, the highlight of the evening was ACE’s first-ever Technical Excellence Award, which went to the Media Composer. Avid CEO Gary Greenfield was there to receive it, and many Avid folk were on hand to share in the festivities.

The technical Eddie couldn’t have been awarded at a more appropriate time. Avid has made a remarkable turnaround in the last couple of years, and the Media Composer has come a long way very quickly. Congratulations to all those at Avid who helped make it possible.

The Winners Were:

Feature (Dramatic)
The Hurt Locker – Bob Murawski & Chris Innis

Feature (Comedy or Musical)
The Hangover – Debra Neil-Fisher, A.C.E.

Animated Feature
UP – Kevin Nolting

Half-Hour Series
30 Rock: “Apollo Apollo” – Ken Eluto, A.C.E.

One-Hour Series for Commercial TV
Breaking Bad: “ABQ” – Lynne Willingham, A.C.E.

One-Hour Series For Non-Commercial TV
Dexter: “Remains to be Seen” – Louis Cioffi

Miniseries or Motion Picture for TV
Grey Gardens – Alan Heim, A.C.E. & Lee Percy, A.C.E.

Documentary
The Cove – Geoffrey Richman

Reality Series
The Deadliest Catch: Stay Focused Or Die – Kelly Coskran & Josh Earl

Student Editing
Andrew Hellesen – Chapman University

Career Achievement
Neil Travis
Paul LaMastra

Golden Eddie
Rob Reiner

Technical Excellence
Avid Media Composer

Categories: Avid

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Gigabit to the Home

February 12, 2010

On Wednesday, Google announced plans to build a pilot project that will install high speed fiber-to-the-home in select locations. They’re projecting gigabit speeds for this network and are planning to open it up, meaning that they’ll lease it to many service providers. I once participated in a workshop that demonstrated the use of cable TV wiring to bring digital information to the home. This was several years before I’d ever seen a browser, let alone a cable modem. The inventors thought they could provide a gigabit of speed, and to them, a gigabit was the holy grail, the speed at which everything changed. Today at 5 megabits, we’re getting less than 1% of that.

Google has only proposed a pilot project and it may be a while before anybody actually uses it. Still, the idea is tantalyzing, and, given enough time, inevitable. The major fiber-to-the-home scheme available now is Verizon’s FIOS. It offers 15-50 megabits.

Imagine that your connectivity is 100 times faster than it is now. And that you could buy it from multiple providers. That’s going to change digital editing in fundamental ways, making real-time remote collaboration possible and forcing editors to compete with each other worldwide. What would you do with speeds like that?

For more, see the Google Fiber for Communities page, or this article at Ars Technica. Use this link to nominate your community for the test.

Categories: Avid, Media and Society, Workflow

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Using the GPU

February 11, 2010

As some of you may know, Adobe has been working on a new player engine for Premiere that aims at full utilization of all your CPU cores and tight integration with your graphics card. Shown at IBC last year,  information about the technology, code-named “Mercury,” seems limited to a few breathless blog posts and a recently-posted video. But the demo, available here (Sneak Peek: Adobe Mercury Playback Engine) is very impressive. They’re able to show multi-stream native editing of 4K Red footage — with just a high-end Nvidia card on a 64-bit PC. Yes, you read that right — 4K on a stock PC. According to this post, the technology will initially be limited to Nvidia’s “Cuda” architecture.

When Mercury might appear in a product you could buy isn’t clear (Adobe CS5 is slated for delivery in April). What is clear is that the price of high-end video performance is being driven relentlessly downward by the video game market, which in turn is driving the capabilities of modern GPUs (the chip in your graphics card).

A lot of editors are just getting used to the idea of working in HD. That may seem pretty tame a lot sooner than you think.

Categories: Adobe Premiere, Workflow

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Why Hospital Visits Cost So Much

February 10, 2010

Two articles on opposite sides of the NY Times’ business page yesterday neatly frame the crisis in medical costs. In the first, we learn that HCA, the largest hospital corporation in America, was taken private in 2006. The investors in the deal put up $5 billion and borrowed about $28 billion more. It’s not clear what added value that move brought to patients, but now, instead of paying back all that money, the new owners are paying themselves a fat multi-billion dollar dividend. Who pays for that? Patients, that’s who, in the form of higher prices. (Details are here: Shareholders Deciding a Dividend.)

On the other side of the page we learn that hospitals now spend $35 billion a year on patients who don’t have insurance. Who pays for that? The patients who do. That’s probably one reason why hospital bills are designed to be incomprehensible, with obscene prices like a $75 charge for a 35 cent disposable scalpel (true story). (Details are here: Bills Stalled, Hospitals Fear Rising Unpaid Care.)

I assume that people reading this blog fall into one of three groups: members of a union (whose medical costs go up every year and threaten to detonate every new contract), people who buy their own health insurance (at exorbitant prices because they’re not part of a risk pool) and people who get along without insurance (and end up using the emergency room the rest of us pay for). Is this system working for any of us?

Categories: Editors Guild, Labor, Uncategorized

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Addicted to Novelty

February 9, 2010

For those of you who might have missed it, last week PBS’ Frontline aired a really interesting look at how the wired world is affecting us. I was skeptical — shows like this are usually full of platitudes or stuff that’s so obvious there’s no point in talking about it — but this one was different. It starts with internet addiction and the fact that a lot of teachers think that the multi-tasking students of today can’t concentrate, and it ends with a very sobering look at videogame-powered warfare. It’s a serious, thoughtful look at where we’re heading and it’s enlivened by a documentary style that doesn’t try to exclude the filmmakers from the film itself.

You can see the whole thing at decent full-screen quality here: Digital Nation. The web site also offers longer interviews and other video materials that didn’t make it into the air version.

Categories: Media and Society

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