Premiere Pro 2.0: Clip Notes

Here's a tutorial by Digital Media Net's Charlie White on a helpful feature introduced in Premiere Pro 2.0. Clip Notes enables you to export your sequence as a PDF document which can be emailed for comments by the viewer. It's very handy when working with a client or collaborator.

Here's Adobe's word on Clip Notes:

Getting fast, to-the-point feedback from clients is a crucial part of successful production, but it can also be a time-consuming chore. Adobe Clip Notes streamlines the process with an elegant solution based on two easy, accessible technologies: e-mail and Adobe PDF.

Export a video sequence as an Adobe PDF file with embedded or streamed video, and then e-mail the file to your reviewer. The reviewer plays the video with Adobe® Reader® and enters timecode-specific remarks into the comment box. After the reviewer e-mails back the comments and you open the file in Adobe Premiere® Pro CS4 software, the comments appear as clip markers at the appropriate timecode locations in the timeline.

Great Online Font Utility

I've never been delighted with Premiere Pro's font browser. It works well enough but is a bit clumsy to use.

Here's a very useful website when you need to know how your text will look in any font installed on your computer. The name of the site is Flipping Typical.



Make sure to check out the keyboard shortcuts on the wtf? page.

Thanks to Scott Kelby for sharing this link. Check out his blog here.

Somebody Shoot Me

John Huston was a talented actor and Oscar-winning filmmaker who directed 47 films. While well-remembered for Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Prizzi's Honor, Huston also served in the U.S. Army during WWII and made three war documentaries for the Photographic Division of the Army Signal Corps.

Typically Hollywood personnel were enlisted to produce propaganda for the U.S. government. However Huston chose to show the horrors of war and its long-term consequences. It's not surprising that Huston's war films were not appreciated by U.S. military leaders. Recounting a screening for the brass, Huston said: ''I remember the ranking officer rising around a third of the way through and leaving the theater. And when he was gone, the next-ranking officer rose and he left. And so they went, one after the other, until I was alone in the room.''

Midge Mackenzie wrote for the NY Times, "two of the three films Huston was to make were never shown, suppressed by the military because the images of broken bodies and stumbling, shell-shocked soldiers told a different story: that in war, everybody loses."

These films were finally declassified in the 1970's and are now freely available via Archive.org.

Let There Be Light, 1946

The Battle of San Pietro, 1945

Huston said that "If I ever do a movie that glorifies war, somebody shoot me".