SmartShoot Producer's Blogg

Fun adventure park video

This excellent video by filmmaker Doug R. really shows off why video is so effective at getting across what certain businesses do.

Excellent photo studio video

Here's a fantastic video for our partner CareerBuilder by filmmaker Jonathan A. for a photo studio company

Beautifully done chiropractor video

David G. shows his quality especially with some nice moving shots in this video:

Green and clean video

Nicely produced video by filmmaker Larry C. on a carpet cleaning company:

 

Great pub video for Yelp

Nice video by Nick B.:

NovoCut - Free + OpenSource NLE editing

 

A cool project that we stumbled across on Kickstarter recently. NovoCut is a free open-source NLE system being produced by some very passionate and talented folks.

They are taking a very interesting approach to the design of editing tools, namely looking at some key metrics and how they impact editors/artists and their storytelling ability - a quip here from their site:

This UX design focuses on three profitability metrics:

1. Person hours - if artists can produce the same end result with equal quality but in fewer total person hours, they are more profitable

2. Risk - if we can eliminate avenues where likely user error will cause loss of work or simply waste time, artists are more profitable

3. Cost of collaboration - if great artists can collaborate with lower overhead, or collaborate when they couldn't otherwise, they are more profitable

If you have a chance check out the NovoCut team's Ubuntu Wiki or if you want to get involved kick them some dough throught the NovoCut Kickstarter project

 

This may wind up being a great solution for those with the sour taste of FCPX in their mouth or anyone else who's looking for an alternative to Avid or Premiere.

NovoCut looks like a very interesting project aimed at solving the right problems for editors.

Hot pressed sandwiches in Park Slope

Matt C. does a nice job bringing this cafe to live through video -- wish there was a place like this in our neighborhood!

Transitioning to Collaboration

Limited Release: for Intercontinental, Williams Sonoma, and CareerBuilder jobs and ALL California jobs.

(If you are not in this group, collaboration has not been released for your jobs yet.)

The first wave of collaboration started June 23rd for all of our filmmakers doing Intercontinental, Williams Sonoma, and CareerBuilder projects as well as all filmmakers in our lovely state of California (where we had unbelievable weather this past weekend, right!).

June 23rd marks the date when all new orders placed include collaboration. Any project ordered prior to June 23 is not a collaboration project.

If your job includes collaboration (we realize it may be a little unclear during this transitioning period), it will be listed as "shoot & edit + client revisions" in your jobs list.

 

For collaboration projects, you do not need to upload the music, b-roll and soundbites files.

***For those of you who do not have collaboration jobs yet, please be sure to continue uploading all files as you have in the past. We've had a few bugs along the way, so be sure to upload the raw, music and production outline, even if the Upload page doesn't put a red dot next to those items.

 

For more details, check out the page in our Resource Center: Collaboration Platform

Happy July 4th weekend! A Boston video for you...

Here's a video that we produced for InterContinental Hotels in one of the key cities of the American Revolution -- Boston. FIlmmaker Dave J. did an awesome on this.

Click here to watch video.

Check out Lytro's Light Field Camera

 

 

This is a really cool new gadget from startup Lytro. They are calling it the light-field camera and it may wind being the end of having to focus your camera. How does it do it? In a nutshell the Lytro camera captures all light info in the scene, not just the light hitting the image sensor. More deftly put:

"a light field camera first separates rays of light in order to individually record their color, intensity and direction. This extra information opens up a world of possibilities, including the ability to focus on any depth of field within a taken photo, observe a 3D-type effect even without specs, and boost images taken in extremely low light."

The technology itself has been around a while but Lytro has figured out a way to commoditize it. They have said that this will technology will eventually make it into the video world as well as the still world.

Thoughts? Questions? Let us know below.

Hooray for Science