Ira Glass On Storytelling

Ira Glass, host and executive producer of public radio's This American Life describes the building blocks of storytelling.

In this clip Glass discusses using anecdotes and raising questions within them to keep an audience engaged. He adds that stories also need a moment of reflection or in other words, "Here's why the hell you're listening to this story."

Walter Murch, A Lecture

While I refine a reliable work flow to edit AVCHD footage in Premiere Pro, check out this 2003 lecture by Oscar-winning film editor Walter Murch at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.






Part II of the lecture is here.

I'll share what I've learned editing AVCHD soon.

Mercury Playback Hack Premiere Pro CS5

Adobe's Mercury Playback Engine leverages the GPU of select display cards to deliver real-time editing. Pretty cool.

This video demonstrates the performance gains of the Mercury Playback Engine

Unfortunately the only display cards to be certified by Adobe are pretty pricey.

Here's an article that explains how to tweak Premiere Pro CS5 to work with cheaper NVIDIA cards. The changes look fairly simple although make sure to review cooling requirements as the demands on your display adapter will increase substantially.

Cool Tool

Working with AVCHD video clips can be a hassle, particularly when your computer doesn't have the power to edit that footage in its native format. MPEG Streamclip is a great free tool to transcode footage to more manageable formats:

"MPEG Streamclip lets you play and edit QuickTime, DV, AVI, MPEG-4, MPEG-1; MPEG-2 or VOB files or transport streams with MPEG, PCM, or AC3 audio. MPEG Streamclip can export all these formats to QuickTime, DV, AVI/DivX and MPEG-4 with high quality encoding and even uncompressed or HD video."

Squared 5's MPEG Streamclip
is available at no charge for
Windows and Mac

MPEG Streamclip also supports batch projects and simple editing.

Here are two short clips created using a Koday Playsport. The first [file spec] and the second transcoded to DV. The ratio of transcode time to the duration of the footage was about 1:1.




This first clip is straight from the camera.





Notice that the DV version was mangled by Vimeo. The original file is 720x480 with letter box. Vimeo's transcoding squeezed the image and cropped the letter box. Ugh. Beyond the problems created by the video host, the DV file held up pretty well.

MPEG Streamclip is a great utility to have around. I'll have more on that little Kodak Playsport later, but as you've probably guessed, it's waterproof.