Matt's Conference Talks And Presentations

Here's a list of talks I've given at conferences.  Where possible, I've linked to slides.

Year	Date	Event	Location	Talk
2012	January 2012	California Charter Schools Confenrence	Sacramento, Ca	Free, Cheap, And Open Source
2012	October 2012	Mac Tech	Studio City, Ca	Editorial Tools At Walt Disney Animation Studios
2013	Spring 2013	SLO International Film Festival	Cal Poly SLO	Editorial Integration At Walt Disney Ainimation Studios
2013	Fall 2013	Mac Tech	Manhattan Beach, Ca	Python For Sysadmins
2014	Summer 2014	PSU Mac Admins	Penn State	Python For Sysadmins
2014	Fall 2014	Mac Tech	Los Angeles	Mobile Communication Tools at WDAS
2014	Fall 2014	Mobile First Summit	San Francisco	How Mobile is Changing Communication at WDAS
2015		PSU Mac Admins	Penn State	The 12 Unix Commands Everyone Should Know
2015		Mac Tech	Los Angeles	The 12 Unix Commands Everyone Should Know
2016		PSU Mac Admins	Penn State	Teaming At Disney Animation
2016		Mac Tech	Los Angeles	Teaming At Disney Animation
2017	05/13/2017	Tech Symposium	Cal Poly Pomona	The 12 Unix Commands Everyone Should Know
2017	7/13/2017	PSU Mac Admins	Penn State	Staying Relevant As A Manager
2017	11/17/2017	Mac Tech	Los Angeles	Finding Your Process
2018	11/04/2018	DisNix	Burbank	Security Is Boring
2019	04/20/2019	Tech Symposium	Cal Poly Pomona	The 12 Unix Commands Everyone Should Know
2019	07/09/2019	PSU Mac Admins	Penn State	To MDM or Not to MDM, Is that a Question?

Mac Tech 2013

Star Trek Bridge!

Folks form http://newstarship.com/ were there to display their Star Trek Bridge.  You could sit in the chairs and get your photo taken.  They were looking for volunteers to help with their effort to make the touch screens interactive.

Notes From Talks

Dave Maclachlan - iOS Development at Google. How we make it work.

• They use Sen Test, OC/Test, SC Test
• He wrote Cover story for code coverage
• Unit tests are the best documentation your code will ever had.
• Things Apple has done with XCode 5 are really nice.
• Having the number of tests without having coverage is not very useful.  XCode can use GCov.
• There is a NSUserDefaults setting that configure observers for code coverage.
• When working in real time at 60FPS, you have 16 msec per slice. Mac dispatching takes 4 of the 16 Ms so he uses C++.
• Good speaker, but the material was pretty deep and specific to unit tests and coverage.

Gwynne Raskind - Intro To Internals

• Talking about the internal hardware design of the Mac from a high level.

Peter Hosey  - Building Great User Interfaces

• Users are broken in that they are afraid of the computer.
  • They have been trained by bad interfaces.
• Respect The User
  • A person is not a machine and should not be forced to think like one.  The machine should conform to the user, not the other way around.
  • heeris.id.au - Jason Heeris Cartoon : http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-a-programmer
• Help The User
  • It is never the user's fault. The app should guide the user. If the user does the wrong thing, it's your fault.
  • Everything you tell the user should be actionable - even if the action is "wait".
  • Gestures are verbs, akin to keyboard shortcuts.
• Problems in your app are your fault, not the users.
  • Kill Gestures: The problem with Gestures is that you need to know that they are there which means you need a tutorial.  This means it's best not to use them.
  • Kill Dialog Boxes : Dialog boxes will yank the user from the think they are trying to do.  Dialog boxes can be a problem.
  • Kill Documentation : If you have to explain your application, there is a problem.  Fix the app instead of explaining the problem.
  • Care about the little things - they all add to become the difference between good and great.
  • An example of little thing - setting the keyboard type to use the "@" symbol on the login screen.
  • Another Example : Dialog box on empty trash.  For one, it's a dialog box. Secondly,  you have to cancel to know what you will do.
  • Test your app on regular, non technical users.
  • Kill Verbs that can be replaced with nouns.
• Not a bad talk. Peter always does well. Would be good to see this from an actual IXD person though.

Jim Rea; Constructing Lexers With Ragel and Objective C

• Gave a talk in 2010 about maintaining a code base. This year he's rewriting Panorama in Objective C.
• He writes tool used by Spreadsheets, Databases, Programming Languages.
• Allow the user to create formulas that will operate on values. Take a string and convert it to tokens.
• Parsing -> Tokenizing : Tokenizing can be done by char, NSScanner, NSRegularExpression.
• Also can use lex, yacc, bison, etc.  He's using Ragel which targets Objective C and supports Unicode.
• Ragel recommends that you install Mac Ports and use that to install their application.
• Showed examples of writing grammars and then handshaking with Objective C methods to parse formulas and numbers.

Vendor Forum : Adobe

• With creative cloud being in the cloud, how is it deployed?
• Creative Cloud Packager
• They have tools AAMEE, AUSST. They come together.  Home base update server.
• RUM - Remote data manager. Remotely invokes the Adobe updater.
• XDA - Exceptions deployer.
• Adobe CS4 would have taken 400 floppy disks.
• AAMEE 3.0 caused some problems for educational users.
• With creative cloud, the apps still live on the user's system. They are still installed locally. Users are not required to sign in to each machine. You do not need to be on line to use the software.
• Services such as shared storage and sync settings are in the cloud.
• Creative cloud licensing for the enterprise is serial number based.  The serial number based solution does not count your launches. Adobe does not monitor what is launched when.
• Talk of using serial numbers for installs. - They are "serialized". You can be serialized with a small number of users. They are going to trust you to manage your users on your own and not exceed concurrent users.
• This was a good talk if you are someone who has to deploy Adobe products to a large enterprise. I had no idea they had so many tools to help manage deployments.
• There was some mention of using Sassafras to manage license usage.
• Currently they expect that you need at least 100 users to be an Enterprise account. Though, they know there are people that are smaller and want to work off line.

Consuming Web API's the TDD Way : Luis Solano @luisobo

• Going to talk about good practices for networking code and real life testing scenarios
• Also going to talk about underlaying principals of TDD
• It's unfortunate that TDD has test in the name since it's really a design tool.
• He is using a testing framework called "QE" which has an "it" block. Uses Objective C.
• Tests must be isolated form undeterministic and slow dependencies such as the network, changing data, or databases.
• Tests should not be coupled with implementation details.
• You don't want to have failing tests while modifing both the tests and the implementation.  If you do, "git reset --hard"
• He released an open source tool called Nocilla that allows you to "stub the internet".
• Mentioned "Charles Proxy"

Joe Workman : Automating Business

• He started as developer working at companies, and doing projects on the side.
• He started charging and folks bought things. He then wrote a book.
• If doing something more than one time, figure out how to automate.
• Suggests using a Ticketing system instead of keeping things in E-mail.  He uses ZenDesk.
• Suggests against using PDF for documentation. Use live web pages.
• He suggests using Video Tutorials as much as possible.
• The video should talk you through the work flow.
• When hiring support staff, it's good to recruit customers. They are already your advocates.
• There is a package maker for Terminal commands (similar to mac ports).  http://brew.sh
• XCode ships with xcode-select, xcrun, xcodebuild
• He went through and automated everything in his life with Ruby.  Before Ruby, he used Perl.
• There were some automation talks at WWDC this year.  Changes in Apple script eleminated need for the TELL statements.
• XCode Bots are a new thing in XCode5. They are new.  Allows some build automation like Jenkins.
• Test Flight and Hockey App can be used to deploy tests.
• He's never met the support folks that meets for him. One in Vegas one in Minnesota.  He pays his guys $15 per hour. 1099 contractors.
• Cocoapods.org - Cocoapods allows you to use other folks open source tools in your project. "Ruby Gems for Cocoa".
• It's worthwhile to hire contractors to build more stuff. What about hiring junior people cheaply, like High School folks.
• Fresh Books is a good program for running your business.
• They use BitBucket for tracking bugs.
• Some talk of Tcsh, "Fish Shell", Csh, "Oh My CSh", Zsh.
• joeworkman.net
• 
  

Jeanette Lee : WiFi Design 

• #rukusgirl  jlee@ruckuswireless.com
• Channels 1, 6, and 11 suck
• Lots of AP's are on these channels and they collide.
• Power drops as an inverse square of distance.
• With the 802.11 protocol, if someone else is on their channel, they have to stop transmitting.
• Each channel is 20 Mhz.  There is now a 5Ghz Spectrum.  There is a lot more spectrum and more capacity.
• The individual channels are 20Mhz wide and do not overlap.
• These frequencies are also used for RADAR. If you hear something on that channel that sounds like RADAR, you are required to vacate for 30 minutes. These are called DFS events.
• You can have more access points not using the same channel.
• They use multiple antennas - called beam flex or beam forming. They try to make it directional.  Another trick is to try and transmit slightly out of phase and get a node where the person is sitting.  You can get 3db gain this way.
• The client has to support beam forming and give feedback to tailor the signal.  Though, there are no clients that do this so they have to do implicit beam forming where the AP Guesses.
• 802.11 MCS Rates - Your throughput will change depending on spacial streams.
• MIMO Technology - You need multiple antennas. Inputs/Outputs/Spacial Streams i.e. 2x2x1
• Option Key + WiFi on the Mac shows you what your Mac is doing. RSSI is not very usful.  MCS Index is important.!  SNR and MCS will tell the real story.  Data rate will always be changing.
• Example Slide RSSI: -31, Transmit Rate: 27, MCS Index: 1
• Mine Currently: -50, Transmit Rate: 216 , MCS Index: 15
• "inSSIDer" is a good tool.
• 802.11ac : 5Ghz only. GIgabit Wifi. Must be done in hardware.
• 802.11n was supposed to support 4x4, but stopped at 3x3.  Best to wait till Wave 2 of 802.11ac.
• 5Ghz goes about half the distance with the same data rate. 2.4Ghz
• Indoor AP's can run up to 1W, outdoor can run 4W.
• "Sticky Client Problem" - A client that connects to an AP, then moves.  The client has to decide to let go of the AP and use a new one.
• With Apple, around and RSSI of 80 is where the client goes to a new AP.
• With sparse AP's, lowering the power may help to make sure only clients that can actually talk to the AP's are connecting. Though, if you have sticky clients, it does not help.
• A Wireless controller will not help with the "Sticky Client" problem becuase the AP can not force them to go somewhere else.  They end up writing a lot of code to deal with bad clients.  They then kick the client off the AP when the signal gets too low.
• For the conference, they have 16 2x2x2 access points. They are all using 2.4 and 5Ghz.  Their pipe is 90 Megabits Per Sec.
• In this hotel, they had bad jacks.
• Hotel turned off their AP's where the conference is happening. Though, there is a ton of 2.4ghz traffic which made it un-usable.
• On channel1, there are 30 overlapping AP's.
• She had a client in Portland that had interference problem. They were in the middle of the woods. She went there with a spectrum analyzer. 2.4ghz went red for 10-15 minutes. Turns out they had 11 microwaves all going off at 3PM every day.

Jamie Newberry : Designing Engagement

• I really liked this talk.  I asked Jaimee to come give it for our team.
• @jaimeejaimee  bests.com jaimeejaimee.com
• Worked for Black Pixel after using them when she worked at Zappos.
• She's been doing all mobile stuff since 2010.  She has a UX background.
• You have to find out both who you are, and who your customers are.
• Been doing design work for the last 17 years.
• Ask the question, "If my product were a celebrity".
• When looking at a web form, think about the personality with the colors and symbols. For example, the login on Oprah's site vs a more playful one on Carbonmade.
• Personality informs everything!
• The OnBoarding process is really important.  Introduce the concept.
• Empathy Rules.  It's way more important than disruption.
• Simplicity is very hard. Editing, taking things away, is difficult.
• Define Your Objectives
• Games define their objectives. They don't cram everything up front.
• The personality of the product should be everywhere. i.e. Release notes, button text, etc.
• Bug reports should be fun as well.
• Example of Photomojo making a connection emotionally.
• Honesty is Important.
• Talked about Twitter moving from "What are you doing" to "What's happening"  A simply change in copy changed the possibilities with the product.
• Flickr has a downtime message that is a coloring contest.
• Review Your Product - Do a sweep. Think about.  There are Cheap, Delightful, and Engaging things you can do you to your product.

Angel M. Stone (TSE At Walt Disney Studios) - Documentation Can be a beautiful thing.

• Documentation is important, but it can also be fun and interesting.
• She likes doing documentation because it allows her to come to conferences, lowers the bus quotient, and helps her remember things.
• Documentation is changing.  No more simple text documents or even word documents.
• She's a fan of video documentation.
• She worked at a Catholic university and made videos for the Nuns.
• Think about the audience of the documentation.  What is the scope of their expected knowledge?  How often will it be updated. ?
• Know your clients - Know what your clients can and can't do.
• Know your team
• Pretend you are doing this task for the first time. (She didn't say it, but this is akin to putting yourself in the users shoes)
• Don't be boring. - No one wants to see your documentation if it is boring.
• She does not like Wiki's.
• Their help desk system comes back with "Have you tried doing this"... As they add more knowledge, they have more people clicking on the "have you tried" links.
• Separate documentation from what the product is, and how you use it.
• Folks went around and talked about documentation that was problematic.  i.e. Stick notes on the client's monitor, text translated from Russian, Old documentation for an old operating system.
• Error messages often need translation.
• She started talking a tiny bit about cognitive research.
• She still uses pages for documentation and builds her templates in pages.
• Zen Desk - Useful for integrating help. A lot of effort can go into making the site useful.
• One of the teams is publishing all their documentation as Google Docs in Read Only mode.
• Someone mentioned folks printing documentation and putting it on the wall and then it goes out of date.  To me, it seems this is done because 1) Docs are hard to find. 2) Fear they go away.  Angel said she fixes this by visiting users.
• She's been using Camtasia because it has editing built in such as Title cards.
• She walked through using Camtasia to record some documentation.
• She has "Stems" and the stems need to be named accordingly.
• Someone mentioned iFixIt and that they have a tech writing handbook.

Some Random Notes From Talks:

• There is a desire from folks to "Learn Terminal" - A new talk for next year?
• Listening to some folks, I wondered if a talk on Learning Spaces would be useful.

Python For The Sysadmin By Matt Schnittker And Greg Neagle

Greg and and I gave a presentation about python programming for the Mac sysadm.  The talk was well received.  Here is some Twitter feedback.

Some folks suggested that it would be good for us to give our python talk at UofPenn. Greg and I applied and will be presenting as a pre-conference workshop!!

Evening Events.

Mac Tech keeps you busy all day.  They feed you breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and plan evening activities well into the evening.  They want to make sure that everyone has a chance to talk with peers and share ideas well beyond the formal learning presented in sessions. One of the trips was to the Endevour Shuttle at the California Science Center.

Some Books I've Enjoyed

I really enjoy Audio Books.Here's a few that I think are exceptionally good that others might enjoy as well.   

• Drive : The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us  by Daniel H. Pink - His companion TED talk is amazing and is my all time favorite TED talk.  
  
  
• Quiet by Susan Cain -  This is a very good companion to Daniel Pink's book and covers similar topics.  Understanding how different people communicate is an excellent tool to understanding and collaborating with others. 
• Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek - Simon Sinek is one of the most insightful folks you can learn from for building relationships and growing as a leader.  You can pick up a lot of the content from this video. 
  
  
• Resolving Conflicts At Work by Kenneth Cloke - I picked up this book while working on my Masters in Management.  If you've ever had to help resolve workplace conflict, this book has great methods to approach solutions. 
• Leading Change by John Kotter -  Also one I read while working on my Masters in Management.  Are you looking to implement change at work?  This book has a time tested recipe that can be used in almost any environment. 
• Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull - Ed is the founder of Pixar Animation Studios. Although this book focuses on Animation, it's a great book for leaders everywhere. Much of the content is covered in his Stanford talk.   
  
  
• Outliers: The Story of Success  by Malcolm Gladwell - Ever wondered how Steve Jobs and Bill Gates ended up where they are? This book explains a lot. The author has done some TED talks. both on The Norden Bombsight and Spaghetti Sauce.
• The Tipping Point : How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference  by Malcolm Gladwell - Another Gladwell Classic. If you liked Outliers, you'll like this one.  You can see his Crazy hair on his TED Talks.
• Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking  by Malcolm Gladwel - Talks about instant instinctive decisions we all make day to day.  Check out his TED talks on the Norden Bomb Sight and Spaghetti Sauce. 
• Click : The forces behind how we fully engage with people, work, and everything we do  by Ori Brafman - Talks about people that naturally get along and how effective they can be when this happens.  The author discussed the book in a talk at Stanford which you can watch to get the basic ideas.
• Made to Stick : Why Some Ideas survive and Others Die  by Chip Heath and Dan Heath - Ever wondered why fake e-mail and urban legends spread so easily? Ever wonder how to make your ideas propagate better? 
• Switch : How to change things when change is hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
  Here is a video presentation on Vimeo about the talk.
• Rework by Jason Fried - Written by the creator of Ruby on Rails. They founded the company 37 signal. If you are curious about the author and his work, you can watch his TED Talk.
• Misquoting Jesus - The story behind who changed the bible and why by Bart D. Ehrman- The bible has had a profound impact on our culture. Yet, few take an academic or historical approach like Bart Ehrman.  More information can be seen by watching Bart Ehrman's Stanford Lecture.   
  
   
• The Bible Says So by Dan McClellan  - In today's politically challenging and divisive times, the Bible is often use as a bludgeon in the political arena.  Dan takes an Academic and Historical approach to firebrand topics such as homosexuality, abortion, slavery, and monotheism to show that the bible does not say what you probably think it says.  
• The Victorian Internet  by Tom Standage - Yes, the Internet existed in the 1800s.  It was called the Telegraph.   This book is amazing and a great history lesson!!!

NAB 2012

I attended NAB 2012 in Las Vegas. It's a massive conference with lots to see. This was a chance to talk face to face with vendors and technical support staff as well as a great opportunity to meet with other folks that work in the entertainment industry. I spent a total of two days at the conference. The first day was spent in meetings with vendors  The second day I spent walking the show floor asking questions and learning about new products.  

Day 1: Meetings

As an entertainment industry professional, I was able to make time to attend updates from multiple vendors on their latest products.  These were curated meetings with presentations from the vendors for folks who work in entertainment.  Attendees were from across multiple media and entertainment backgrounds. 

Avid Overview -  Tuesday 4/17 

• There was an initial overview of many of the new features in Media Composer 6.  Specifically called out was the move to 64 bit and the increased stability that came with it.
• JPEG 2000 is now supported natively in Avid.
• The avid can create Pro Res media on Mac, or in Window Server.  Can not be created on Windows desktop.
• Pro Tools and Avid are being brought closer together.  Avid uses the same audio engine as Pro Tools.
• They have more Open API's.  They need to make them available and then make sure they are used internally for development.
• Interplay is expected to become more effective in post workflows.
• There are many new cameras coming out.  Vendors have the ability to add AVID support through AMA plugins. They supply the AMA toolkit to the camera vendors.
• Future:
  • Interplay Sphere is coming in Q3.
  • MC 6.5 is coming in the second half of the year. 
  • Not willing to discuss MC7 right now
  • They are supporting AS02 workflows.
  • Avid sees future media experiences to be an integrated media experience. TV's have Internet. People want their hand held device to talk to the TV as more than just a remote.  There is a tend towards Multi-Screen.
  • Viewers on hand held devices want to see high quality content.
  • They are working on Frame Rate independence, color management, and  LUT support.

Telestream Overview  Tuesday 4/17 

This meeting focused on telestream's media conversion and transcoding products such as Vantage, and Flip Factory.

• General philosophy behind Vantage is to take the linear workflow that flip factory had and open it up to better process design tools, non linear decision making witout loosing focus on transcoding.  - Take all the knowledge they have form flip factory and use it for media processing.
• They want all their transcoding products and  workflow products to "feel and quack" the same way.
• They have analysis tools,  decision making frameworks,. etc. It's good for when you have a mixed bag of media and need to convert it.  All the decisions that need to be made can be worked in.
• Flip factory is still selling like crazy, but folks are starting to move to Vantage.
• They have introduced x264 as a commercial license in vantage.
• With vantage you drop 100 files in a hot folder and it figures out what to do with them
• They are different code bases than flip factory so here are a few features that doen't exist in Vantage. If you are doing long form episodics, Vantage is still a good choice.
• Lots of discussion on audio compliance and SMPTE 2052 files.
• They are releasing a lightspeed which can do H.264 conversion quickly.  If doing 720P or 1080p you get much faster acceleration.  You put Vantage on a windows server and it has the license for the lightspeed server.  This can replace a Flip Factory Server.  I can be a 5X speed increase. You can make an array of transcoding farms that is CPU aware (better than round robin)
• Talked a little about Rosette which is now called "Pro Media Carbon".  It does delivery and media processing work flows. They've gotten a lot of requests for an API to drive it.

Adobe Overview  Tuesday 4/17 

• Announcements for NAB:
  • CS 6 - Incremented every product in the suite and added two products to the suite.
  • Story - Script writing application is a good source of metadata and cloud based.  Over 100K folks are now using story.
• Front end of production pipeline is an area they wanted to focus.  - Prelude. You can transcode, tag metadata,..
• They have an app for folks who work on metadata systems. it coms out of the box and just works. It's working with CNN's and BBS's metadata system.
• They developed an API that can be used to make logging more interesting.  Demo of ipad app where he is clicking on the screen and using that to do logging.
• They have the biggest release of technology that they had in a decade.
• Adobe has a "Creative Cloud" and a "Marketing Cloud".  The vision they set down 5 years ago is now there. They are proud of the vision. Creative Cloud - $50 a month gives you all products and cloud storage.
• Things are moving back towards remote architecture. You may have an on site server or one in the cloud but premiere is running remotely.  Adaptive media streaming allows scaling of media based on bandwidth.
• Premiere  - They have been focusing on making it technical grade.  They have a completely revamped UI and work flow. Because of Apple FC issues a lot fo people have tried their product.
• Premiere looks gorgeous -they believe they have the fastest editor in the world right now.
• After FX - They broke up the team. One team is on 3D environment the other handled the rest. They spent a lot of work focusing on Performance.  They now have a powerful 3D tracker in After FX.
• After FX has always been, at best, 2.5D. They now fully embrace the Z axis. They have a true hierarchal radiosity engine casting photons.
• No one is talking about resolution on cameras any more because they gotten big enough but folks are looking at high dynamic range.
• Adobe Media Encoder - Software architecture for encoding to any device. you don't have to worry about file size or cadence.  Compositionally aware encoder, it knows by the kind of data what it has to do.
• Audition - Their audio solution.  It is the fastest audio editor and can sit next to pro tools. They have a fast ADR tool.  They are doing ADR so they can handle dual system sound - i.e two cameras.
• Audition is fast and launches works in 4 seconds. You can run it on a 5 year old macbook pro.  It does a great job with Audio cleanup.
• They are working on making all their products open platforms and using open standards.
• Adobe is very focused on standards and using XMP which is based on XML.
• They acquired Automatic Duck. There will be integration in CS7. Support for XMP and AAF.
• Broadcast Engineering - A group internally of 13 engineers. They pick up projects that customers need and integrate them into the products. These guys work on getting these features into the product. They don't do it as a service, they do it to win business.  The work flows into the main product.
• Lots of Premiere users.. half million folks run after EFX.
• Adobe Premiere was used to edit  on Social network and girl with the dragon tattoo.
• They now support 3D lookup tables. They are then going to standardize Rec709 for all of their tools.  They will use .look for the LUTs.

Apple Final Cut Pro Overview -  Tuesday 4/17 

• One of the strengths of FC Pro 7 was third party integration. They've kept that.  Final Cut Pro 10 XML has greatly increased integration.
• Autodesk announced a new smoke for Mac. Both this version and current version support FC import.
• Marquis has a tool that imports from FCut into Pro Tools.
• The new smoke has gone from 10K to 3.5K and has a much more Mac look
• There is no private API, all the XML is on the web site.
• FC 10 - 10.0
  • First version was ground up new app.
  • 64 bit,. Magnetic time line, Content auto analysis
• 10.1
  • XML, XSAN, Audio Stems.
  • Audio Stems - files can be marked with metdata.
• 10..3 Multi Cam
  • Chroma Keying - Advanced chroma keying controls.
  • Broadcast Monitoring.
• 10.4
  • Performance optimization
• They used to release every 18 mos, now they can release much more rapidly.
• They are committed to building FC Pro as a video editing system for professionals.
• Advanced Chroma Keying controls.
  • When you apply the chroma key, it does an automatic evaluation of the image.
  • You can manually adjust the range of chroma that is being keyed out.
• Multi-Cam
  • Folks in the room are doing between 2 and 6 cameras.
  • You can have 16 angles in one view and up to 4 banks of 16 angles.
  • With QT7 you had to make sure they were all the same frame rate, codec, and resolution before you synchronize the media, now you no longer need to conform.
  • There is an angle editor
  • If using Arri Alexa or Canon C300 you can sync with time code, but Go Camera and 5D don't.
  • You can also sync using audio in FC pro. It analyzes the waveforms.
  • Also can sync using time/date.
• New Broadcast and post NLE purchase ; Adobe 19%, Avid 19%, Apple 52%, Other 10%.
• Later This Year - Coming
  • Multi Channel Editing Tools
  • Dual Viewers - Folks liked the FC7 Source/Record windows
  • MXF Plugin Support for Import/Export
  • Direct Support for Red Cameras.
• They've been working with Sony to update their full plugin range.
• They are also talking to ARRI.
• Cannon already has a plugin to import their C300 MXF.
• They are looking closely at what they do with the XML and developer API's
• There is no built in 3D support. There are dashwood fliters through MX factory which applies a Left and right filter and edit them side by side.  In the near term it's likely 3rd party support.
• Hobbit and avatar are 48 frames.  They are not talking about 48 frames right now.  FC does not particular bother about that, but the codecs would be the issue.
• Is there support for Ases - IDT, ODT, This is the Academy standard format.
• There is a lot of effort going into developer API's.  They could then have a $300 editing project and some of these things might be in 3rd party.
• Question about Motion being moved into the application.  He won't answer.

Day 2: Notable Show Floor Exhibits

Blackmagic Design

The Blackmagic Design booth was large and prominently placed at the entrance to the lower South Hall.  It constantly drew a large crowd.

 

They had their new Cinema Camera on display.  It was constantly surrounded by folks taking pictures of it and talking about it.  I heard several folks say they planned to purchase one.

The camera was getting a lot of attention.  The had a great area to try it out. Cameras were set up in front of a fake movie set.

They set up a stage with actors for the attendees to try out the cameras. 

Adobe

Adobe had a large booth with large video screen. Their focus was on their movie editing and post production tools such as Adobe Premiere.  They had a technical person posted there to answer questions. I asked some questions about Adobe Photoshop but he said he was only there to talk about video products. I then was able to talk to him for a while about work flows in Adobe After Effects.

AVID

I have spent a lot of time building software wrapped around the Avid for media encoding, especially with AAF Toolkit.  My focus on Avid media pipelines made the Avid booth was particularly interesting to me.  Avid had a very nice booth situated right at the opening of the upper south hall.  You could not miss it.  The booth had a large video screen giving demos of most of their products.

 The booth was consistently this busy.  I wanted to stop and talk with a few folks but the booth was so busy, I gave up. Fortunately, I got a great overview of what Avid is doing in the meetings I had on Tuesday so all was well.

Planar Systems

I was drawn to the Planar booth by these interesting mosaic tiles.  At SCVi, we've been talking about putting together a "Donor Wall" to recognize folks who have donated to the organization. It would be very neat to incorporate this product.

I found a few links describing them in more detail.

• Interesting example with some pictures on Ubergizmodo
• You Tube Link showing a demo at DSE 2012
• Planar Web Site Explanation

They also had some interesting large display screens.

Sennheiser

Sennheiser had a nice booth with lots of microphones on display.

 

You could speak into the Mic and hear how it sounded on the headphones.  Very cool way to demo them. 

 These would look very nice in my Ham Shack!

Sony

Sony's booth was amazing and absolutely enormous.  They had a hub with lit stages surrounded by all kinds of equipment. You could go up to a piece of equipment and try it out in a real studio setting.

Cool And Interesting Booths

I thought these were interesting booths to look at so I snapped some photos.

 

Dazzling displays from InfiniLED

The Canon booth was also quite enormous.

The Foundry, makers of Nuke, a popular compositing software used heavily in the entertainment industry.

In the back of one hall, they had a 200 inch stereo display that could be watched without glasses. I was impressed with it.  Though, I had no easy way to capture a 3D Picture.

These folks were selling "Whisper Rooms" meant for audio recording.  They are sealed rooms you can use to either contain noisy things or to go when you need silence.  I bet there's a few preschool teachers that wouldn't mind having one of these. Hehehe.