Now, before we get too deep into gun battles, I would like to warn you that shooting a realistic-looking gun in public is not something you want to do. We don't want anyone getting arrested or worse (God forbid), so please use common sense and caution when shooting your gun scenes. This techniq

Not your Daddy’s Copier When it comes to disc duplicators, it’s a topic that we could dismiss easily enough. “Ah, it’s all been done.” Sure, they all pretty much do the same thing – make copies of DVDs (or CDs, or Blu-ray Discs, if so equipped… whatever). Ho

Interactive Tutorial Content To view the tutorial video for Transitioning Naturally, click here. Every blockbuster movie has hundreds or even thousands of edits, yet the viewer often is unaware of the cut. Why? In many cases, the change is very subtle, using a technique which is often known as a Na

2 Drives in One So, you’ve been sitting on the sidelines next to everyone else, waiting for one of the competing high-definition disc formats to die. But you’ve got clients clamoring for high definition. What to do? Lucky for you, LG just made this decision a little easier with its GGW-

Polishing Up The Rough Cut Your goal with your rough cut is to lay down your shots in the order in which you wish to tell your story. Chances are, if you’re producing a narrative, you decided the order of your scenes in pre-production, and you now just need to follow your storyboard as if it

We dropped by the Maxell booth at NAB 2008, to talk with them about their new line of field storage devices iVDR. Available starting quarter 2 of 2008, these rugged 2.5″ hard drives are designed to take a beating in the field while recording video directly from your camcorder. The iVDR media i

Some simpler DVD authoring programs have auto-everything, and all you have to do is “click…click…click” to make a finished project. But there’s a real beauty in DVD motion menu making, and this month’s tutorial is all about how you can take control of your program

Copy Shop Odds are fairly good that within a couple of miles of your home, there’s a copy shop that will also pack, mail and ship anything that you want to send out to anyone. That store probably also offers a notary public service and may even offer private mailbox services. Corel (and recen

When Three Just Isn’t Enough The newest incarnation of Apple’s mid-level editing tool, Final Cut Express 4, brings with it more features and likeness of Final Cut Pro than ever before. AVCHD support, multi-resolution timelines, advanced keyframing and color correction round out a long li

SimpleTech’s Duo Pro Drive With two terabytes of storage, the SimpleTech Duo Pro Drive by Fabrik fills a key need of multimedia professionals, and video pros in particular. If you’ve spent any amount of time dealing with multimedia, you know you’re talking about big files. Even as

It’s a bird… it’s a plane… it’s … the motivated edit? It’s a powerful editing technique, but to execute it well, you must consider the final edit when you plan the first shot. One of our favorite words when we talk about editing is ‘conventions.’

Interactive Tutorial Content To view the tutorial video for 2.5d Animation, the prize winning video Polar Classic, and download project files to work along with the tutorial, click here. Producing The Polar Classic Animated Music Video The Polar Classic, by Mark Wickman, was the 1st Place winner in

While you plan the scene and dialog details for your videos, you need to remember to plan for cutaways as you take that journey down the path to good composition. Shooting seamless and well-planned cutaways can add depth and dimension to your story… and they can save your bacon in editing! Wh

Apple Releases Final Cut Express 4 Apple has released the latest version of Final Cut Express 4. The last major update came in May of 2006 with the added support for Intel-based Macs. This latest update adds support for AVCHD camcorders and also supports the open format timeline, allowing editors t

Videomaker’s Best Video Editing Software of 2007. It’s Vegas Baby! Sony’s newest version of its pro-line editing suite offers professional quality, in-depth controls and an intuitive design. Plus, it comes packed with a high-quality DVD authoring program, as well as an AC-3 surrou

Quick Silver Over the course of the past year or so, we’ve been telling you the benefits of the eSATA (er, external serial AT attachment) interface for external hard drives and why we think that interface is probably going to take over the world. And now we have held in our very hands the dri

A New Side of HP Workstations are funny things, really. Defined as a step above a run-of-the-mill desktop PC and a step below a server, the workstation niche has seen prices creep down ever so slightly over the past few years. As with everything in computer-land, prices just keep on falling as the

Changing the speed of a shot is easy… but, unless you’re looking for a Keystone Cops effect, to control that shot takes more than just accelerating or slowing it down. Time remapping, or the not-as-sexy textbook name, variable speed, was all the rage in music videos, commercials and ed

As promised, we dove a little deeper into a very interesting development at the joint PMA/WEVA event. ImageSpan's LicenseStream has not yet finalized their pricing, but it looks like it will be lower than the $99 stated in the intial press release. This annual fee will allow you to upload 2 GBs

Pinnacle Systems Pinnacle VideoSpin is a free video editing application for Windows XP and Windows Vista that includes basic editing tools and also offers an easy way to upload completed videos to the Internet. An advanced codec pack that includes MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 codecs is available for $15. www.