I just wanted to announce my latest venture, Nilo Post: affordable, high-quality video post-production services such as video editing, mastering, color-correcting, creative color grading and audio post for broadcast TV, short and feature films, corporate media, and web content.

I’ve been building up a client list and have completed some great projects recently. Additionally I’ll be writing articles for the blog there about the art and the experience of being a professional colorist. Drop by and say hi! And editors & production companies come see why your next project needs a colorist.

Thanks for indulging me on my shameless plug; more articles to come soon.

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Thanks for everyone’s messages and patience pointing out the Google Malware Warning one would see when visiting this site in Safari, Firefox or Google Chrome. The problem vexed me for a long time, but finally I figured it out.

I was hacked!

There was some code pointing to a known malware site in one of my posts. It has since been removed and we are free & clear!

If you find you ever have the same problem with a site of yours (especially a blog), go to validator.w3.org and validate your site. Bad code will be revealed!

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We finished the construction of my edit suite / office this week. As you can see from the pictures, it’s just waiting for my edit desk and some furniture. I’ll post pics of the custom edit desk that Wayne is making for me.

The desk will ultimately be up on the platform on the left, facing the wall, with a producer’s couch or table (haven’t decided yet) behind against the right wall.

Down towards the French doors I’m going to add a small music area (to set up my drum kit, upright bass, and various other stringed instruments) and another desk that will be for my laptop. I’m going to try to make a more physical (and psychological) divide between creative work and paper work in this office.

The floors are the most bargain basement laminate wood floors I could find and they turned out great. Wayne reworked my ductwork (which actually improved my heating / cooling efficiency upstairs), added vents and painted the ducts black for aesthetics.

More soon! Moving in over the weekend!

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Ceiling and walls are painted! The ceiling has a nice texture called “knock down” and it’s painted white.

I decided to go with a 10% gray for my walls. I choice the highest quality paint (Valspar from Lowe’s, but I would guess any premium paint would do) and had them create a gray with no color tint whatsoever. Colorists swear by gray walls, as any color on the walls will seep into (or be pulled out of) any critical color correction being done. I initially thought I’d have the paint guy at Lowe’s color match an 18% gray on a proper color correction card, but that proved to be too dark for my taste.

Additionally, my lights are daylight-balanced, as is my color grading monitor setting, and, of course, the wonderful daylight-balanced sunshine coming in through my French Doors.

Next up . . . flooring!

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Moving right along

This is my first blog post about the construction / refinishing of a video edit suite in my home. I’ve been a freelance video editor for a few years now, and my current edit space is, essentially, a corner of my basement and an attached voiceover booth. Not very conducive to having clientele in my space.

I’ve been planning on changing over an unused garage in my home into a proper edit suite for some time. Last year we removed the old garage door and added french doors, but the project stayed that way a while due to budget. Now we’re up and running again!

I’ll describe the process in depth as we progress. What you see in the picture above is a drywalled room and the frame for a platform that will be my desk area and producer’s table. This platform addresses a 3-inch tilt / grade in the room over the 20 feet of its length (it was a garage!).

The drywall on the walls was chosen for its moisture / mold resistance and sound dampening qualities. The ceiling is 5/8″ drywall (big, heavy stuff!) that will also aid in soundproofing.

Lighting are recessed cans with daylight-balanced compact fluorescent bulbs. CF for the sake of being green and daylight balanced for the sake of my color-correcting. I’ll write more on my preparation for color as this project progresses. Additionally there is a nice amount of natural light coming in through the french doors (behind me in the picture), which I will control with blinds.

I’ll post with more details as the project moves along, complete with more info about: equipment choices, monitoring, paint choices (geared toward accurate coloring), soundproofing, etc.

The work is being done by my friend Wayne at Complete Carpentry. If you live in Western North Carolina and need any sort of similiar carpentry or home remodeling, I recommend him highly.

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I wanted to share a little tip I decided to try today, and I’m quite pleased with the outcome. Searching for work as a video editor can be tiresome. After updating websites, demo reels, Facebook pages, blogs, Twitter status, etc., then sometime you have to pound the payment and find video editing gigs in classified ads.

Enter Craigslist. Many jobs are posted in the Jobs / TV Film Video and Gigs / Creative. It can be tedious surfing through these, especially since I have no aspirations in becoming a Low Budget Adult Film Star or Dancer for TV Show Pilot. Additionally, I live in a city that is within a couple of hours of a few major markets in the southeast, so I have to search my city, then the next city, then the next . . .

Enter Google Reader. My tool of choice for reading RSS feeds from different websites. I noticed that each search query on Craigslist generates a unique RSS feed that one can subscribe to. Search Jobs for the term Video, and you get this little nugget:

http://YOURTOWN.craigslist.org/search/jjj?query=video&format=rss

So my wheels started turning. I added a folder in my Google Reader called “Craigslist Jobs”, clicked “Add a Subscription”, and then posted my link in there. Voila, an RSS feed of the video jobs in my city. Then I added it to the aforementioned folder for organizational purposes.

Look at this link:

http://YOURTOWN.craigslist.org/search/ggg?query=video&format=rss

What’s the difference?

Now we’re searching “Gigs” for the term video.

It gets better.

With a little bit of effort, I now copy and paste the links but change the cities to search my surrounding major markets . . . in my case Charlotte, Atlanta, Knoxville, etc.

That’s a lot of links! Now just close the folder view in Google Reader and all day long this folder will update with potential video editing work in my surrounding area! Skim through quickly and easily via RSS.

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Another great tip from the Tips for Final Cut Pro Editors blog regarding the conform function in Soundtrack Pro:

So I made the changes in FCP, exported the sequence to STP again, but this time with a different file name. Then, once in STP, I clicked the conform button, and in the dialog box that appeared, I navigated to the old STP project in the original column, made sure the new project was selected in the new column, and clicked conform.

About 20 seconds later, my updated timeline appeared in STP, complete with all the music, SFX, Compressors, EQs and Limiters from the original project. I double checked it, to make sure everything was in the right place, and it was. Flawless. I fixed the EQ on the new soundbyte and exported a new mix to my FCP timeline, and sent it off to Compressor.

via Conforming Changes in Soundtrack Pro Mixes « Tips for Final Cut ProEditors.

I agree that the conform function, added in the most recent version of Soundtrack Pro, was a powerful addition. Before this function, audio mastering had to be performed as the very last step, and if you made a change, you had to do it all over again.

As a long-time audio engineer, I have to also point out that my audio suite of choice, Mark of the Unicorn’s Digital Performer, has added a similar function in its most recent version 6. Digital Performer is a more mature multitrack audio & MIDI suite used by pro audio engineers, audio post engineers & composers. Both of these audio programs utilize the fact that a Final Cut Pro project file is simply an extensive XML text document, and track changes and edits in this project file.

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While reading a great article all about the ProRes 422 format, I found the following nugget of info:

While comparing the software-converted files I noticed a couple of interesting issues. My testing found that when the camera native codecs DVCPROHD, HDV or SxS were converted to ProRes in software they universally ran better when using the Standard version of ProRes rather than choosing the HQ version. This was most noticeable on HDV and DVCProHD originals that seem to consistently stutter or choke when playing back software-converted HQ content from compressed camera originals. The best explanation I have is ProRes HQ wants to fill in 10bits of information from the 8bit native compressed files. Due to the massive amount of processing needed to handle this conversion, it overwhelmed most systems on playback, whereas the standard version of ProRes is not trying to over-sample the 8bit data but rather it allows that data to move freely within the larger 10bit color space, easing the load on the CPU when processing the video for output.

via ProVideo Coalition.com: ProRes: A Closer Look.

The author goes on to point out that the worst-quality conversion from DVCPro HD to ProRes 422 was done from Final Cut Pro 6′s media manager. Imagine that! But Compressor did the best file conversion.

I fully recommend this article for all Final Cut Pro editors about the ProRes 422 codec.

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Quite a “bloggy” title to this post, I know, but I’ve been thinking about these techniques that I do over and over in Final Cut Pro that I think add to better video editing.
Read more »

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New in ScreenFlow 1.5.1

* Powerful titling and text support

* Produce screen recordings in Windows Media video format (direct export requires a Flip4Mac WMV Studio license (prices starting at $49) see how-to video

* Create custom cursors for your demos

via Telestream ScreenFlow – Overview.

Screenflow seems the go-to screencasting software of choice for Mac OSX. I create a lot of screencast material for this blog & podcast, and for clients through my company HiLo Media. I had tried 1.0 and it crashed a lot for me, but now that we’re up to 1.5 (and everyone seems to swear by it), I’ll have to learn how to use Screenflow and give it a try.

My tool of choice lately has been iShowUHD. If you’d like to learn more about some of my screencasting techniques and how to make a great, professional screencast, check out this recent tutorial video: Screencasting Secrets

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