Today teenagers interested in the world of special effects are a few tutorials and some affordable software away from getting their feet wet. In 1977, the requirements were a bit more elaborate. It involved woodshop, sheets of styrene, and maybe a few surreptitious pictures taken at a screening of Star Wars. That’s how a teenaged Bill George got his start – making models from scratch dedicated to George Lucas’s space opera. Four years later, George was working on the crew of Return of the Jedi. Now in his 33rd year at Industrial Light & Magic, George has been a part […]

Sponsored by PremiumBeat.com Choosing the right music cues for a video project should take place earlier rather than later in your editing process. Working with temp tracks can lead you to get attached to music you can’t afford, and hiring a composer can be untenably expensive, especially for smaller projects. PremiumBeat, a royalty free music library, offers a variety of affordably licensable cues that can be used in your project. Here are seven things to keep in mind when choosing from those cues: 1. Commit to music as early as possible It’s good to make sure that any client you’re working […]

A LEGO Brickumentary, a documentary that looks at the culture and appeal of the LEGO building block, opens July 31. Like many historical documentaries, this project involved working with a wide range of archival footage, but it also made use of footage shot with a wide range of modern cameras — in one case, all shooting the same event. Co-producer and post-production supervisor Chad Herschberger of Milkhaus talked to us about the work they did on this documentary and the ins and out of post-production work, including animating faces on LEGO bricks, moving media between Avid Media Composer and DaVinci […]

Blackmagic first announced DaVinci Resolve 12 back in April at NAB, but now they have released a public beta and say that the final release will be available in late August. DaVinci Resolve began life — and is widely known — as a color correction tool, but the last two updates have seen significant advances in its editing capabilities, making it a possible competitor to programs like Adobe Premiere and Apple Final Cut. For those on a budget, the free version offers a surprisingly complete feature set. With the release of the public beta comes some new features that weren’t […]

Filmmaker‘s Taylor Hess recently attended and reported on the U.S. in Progress series at the Champs-Élysées Film Festival. While there, she spoke to a number of female directors, producers, actresses and, below, an editor. Here is her conversation with Sofia Subercaseaux, who edited Sebastian Silva’s Nasty Baby. Filmmaker: How did you start working in film? Subercaseaux: I went to film school in Chile. It was a random decision because I had no idea what I wanted to do, but the course description just seemed right. Afterwards, I worked in production. It was really fun and I learned a lot, but […]

The Sundance Institute has announced the eight projects that will take part in their Documentary Edit and Story lab at the Sundance Resort in June and July. All participating projects are in the advanced stages of post-production and will work on their rough cuts in the two-part lab. This year’s Creative Advisors include Marshall Curry (Point and Shoot), Geoffrey Richman (Racing Extinction), Kate Amend (The Case Against 8), Richard Hankin (God Loves Uganda), Victor Livingston (The Queen of Versailles) and more. The full list of projects and synopses is below. The Bad Kids Director: Keith Fulton & Lou Pepe Editor: Jacob Bricca At […]

The advances in camera technology over the past few years have somewhat overshadowed application software developments, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been some interesting new updates and new applications. Here are just some of the most interesting application updates announced over the past couple of months. Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 12 At NAB Blackmagic announced Resolve 12. It’s not available yet, but this update continues where 11 started, adding more video editing features and continuing to turn Resolve into a serious editing tool. Blackmagic even claims it’s now the “most powerful editor available.” The new interface is lighter and offers […]

Okay, you’ve spent seven years making your indie opus, another two years playing the festival circuit, and somewhere along the way you even managed to sell your film and get distribution. Hooray, you’re done and the party’s over! Your goal by this point is undoubtedly to move on and start working on the next film. But, wait a second, just because you’ve “sold” your film and you “got” distribution doesn’t mean your job as a filmmaker is “done” (or that you need to stop using “air quotes”). On the contrary, you’re still staring at a 20-to-life sentence for your film. […]

While most of the attention paid to Blackmagic’s releases at NAB went to their slew of new and updated cameras, they also released DaVinci Resolve 12, which they say has made a bigger improvement in the last year than their last five years of updates. When they introduced 11 last year, they announced new editing tools within the app. They’ve further expanded Resolve as a feasible NLE with multicam features, tons of trim mode options, and a brand new audio engine for audio editing. I played around with Resolve at the booth. The timeline definitely felt familiar and the ease of making […]

LaCie announced some updates to their familiar rugged line at NAB. There is now a larger housing with two drives for RAID 1 or 0. It includes both a thunderbolt and USB 3 interface, with 4 TB for $419. Also new to the rugged line is a 1 TB SSD drive, priced at $899. There’s a variety of other options in both SSD and spinning disk ranging from 250 GB to 2 TB. Not rugged but a new mobile addition is a USB-C drive. Expect to see more of these now that Apple has made it clear that’s the new direction of connections. Comes […]