Archive for category News

YouTube Documentary “Life in a Day”: An Unfunny Version of America’s Funniest Home Videos

Jul 26

Posted by Doug in General DiY, News | 1 Comment

Many of you have likely heard of YouTube, Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald’s experimental, user-generated documentary, Life In A Day. In fact, many of you may have contributed to the project. This film, which according to YouTube is going to be the “largest crowd-sourced film ever made”, has a simple concept, capture July 24, 2010 on a camera.

According to the guidelines, the idea is to “create a time capsule to show future generations what it was like to be alive on 24 July 2010”. All the content of the film will be submitted through YouTube, and if the footage you submit is chosen for the film (by director Kevin Macdonald), “you will be credited as a ‘co-director’ in the credits that appear at the end of the film. You will also be eligible for consideration to attend the film’s premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival”.

The DiY-Filmmaking Super Hotline New Marketing Plan

Jun 10

Posted by DiY Filmmaking in News, Site News | 1 Comment

Remember a few months ago when we introduced you to the DiY-Filmmaking Super Hotline? And then for four consecutive weeks on the podcast we reminded you about the hotline’s existence and offered you gifts in exchange for your call? And do you also remember that [unless your name is Shaun] you decided for whatever reason that you didn’t want to call us? Good… because we remember that, too.

This made us sad but it also made us realize that the problem starts with us… and so will the solution. This is serious.

In an attempt to boost the number of incoming calls to our Super Hotline, we hired an extremely expensive and famous internet marketing corporation to come up with a more comprehensive marketing plan for the hotline. They determined that the best way to get more incoming calls would be to shoot a commercial for the hotline. A commercial that they were unwilling to let us be a part of. While this move seemed to go against everything we stand for with a DiY-Filmmaking website, they had a really nice powerpoint presentation with techno music that we just couldn’t say no to.

Visual Storyboarding with iMovie for iPhone

Jun 7

Posted by Adam in News | No Comments

As anyone with a Twitter account knows, Apple’s WWDC kicked off this morning with the usual keynote announcing new products. This one was all about the iPhone 4 and its new tech specs and glittery glam.

One thing that struck me was the announcement of iMovie for the iPhone. Bam!

iMovie for iPhone

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We Have a Facebook Page

May 27

Posted by Adam in Site News | No Comments

I know, we’re very imaginative. We hired a social media consultant at $400/hour and that’s what he said to do.

Anyways, it’s a good place to have some conversations and interact a little bit more. LIKE IT or else we look stupid.

You can find it right here.

Facebook Page

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Final Cut Pro going “Prosumer”?

May 19

Posted by Adam in News | 5 Comments

iCut

UPDATE: FCP Daily has pointed out that this has been denied by Apple.

Apple Insider had an interesting article yesterday about Final Cut Pro. Basically, Randy Ubillos, the man behind FCP and also the man behind the much-maligned iMovie ’09 is back at the helm of the Final Cut Studio team. Apparently, there is a makeover in the works that will bring Final Cut Pro to a more prosumer level, since Apple mainly sells Final Cut Express. There’s been some job postings for Senior UI positions, which are pretty interesting.

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Facebook Changes “Become a Fan” to “Like”

Apr 21

Posted by Adam in News | 1 Comment

The pages feature has become a central way that DiY filmmakers promote their films. You can gather a lot of information and interactive media and material all together in one place, and bring everyone to it on a platform they are familiar with.

Yesterday, Facebook changed the way people traditionally interact with these pages by dropping the “Become a Fan” button and adding the “Like” terminology. Users should already be familiar with this, since you can “like” anything you find in your news feed.

Like Button

The number one change as I see it though, is the connections feature that Facebook is rolling out. Essentially, what you “like” shows up in your profile, categorized by the type of thing you like. As Facebook puts it:

connecting to Pages will now be the main way to express yourself on your profile

(from the Facebook FAQ)

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Check Out Our New Podcast Comment Phone Number!

Apr 20

Posted by Adam in Site News | 3 Comments

We want to involve people more in the podcast, so we set up a Google Voice voicemail box where you can call and leave anything you’d like – questions, comments, or verbal abuse! We’ll play it on the podcast and discuss, as long as we can play it (meaning keep swearing to a minimum).

The number is 954-324-7349, or 954-324-7DIY.

Google Voice has a problem with custom greetings, so if you want the cool custom greeting featuring yours truly, you just have to use this handy little Google Voice call widget.

Hope you give us a buzz soon!

NAB: Where Editing Is Heading

Apr 13

Posted by Adam in News | 1 Comment

Two of the underdogs of editing (compared to Final Cut Pro and Avid) wasted no time in unveiling new versions of their video offerings Monday at NAB. First of all, let’s just take a basic overhead view two of the announcements:

Sony Vegas Pro 9

Sony Vegas announced Vegas Pro 9.0d at NAB with a few new features. Multi-layer PSD support (with support for manipulating individual layers within Vegas, which is pretty cool), closed captioning support, more device support, and a burn to DVD from timeline feature.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5

I have to admit that I am not a Premiere fan. It was my first serious NLE that I used, but I floated over to FCP and never looked back. However, Monday Adobe showed off the CS5 versions of its video lineup (which includes Premiere, After Effects, and all the little tagalong Adobe apps like Media Encoder, blah blah) and turned some heads, including mine.

First of all, Premiere Pro uses Adobe’s much-touted Mercury technology, which boasts “amazingly fluid” realtime editing of clips snagged right off of your Canon 5D or 7D (to name a few). It’s also only 64 bit – no 32 bit machines allowed. And if you have the right graphics processor, you can gain some significant speed advantages in rendering and playback by using your GPU over your CPU. This, when FCP is still dancing around Open-CL is a little distressing to FCP users. At least, of course, until Apple decides to let us know the next steps for Final Cut Pro (fingers crossed).

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NAB 2010 – All the Hits

Apr 12

Posted by Adam in News | No Comments

Vegas

We aren’t at NAB 2010 in Las Vegas, but we are hooked in and seeing what sweet new technology will be coming out of the expo for DiY Filmmakers to use and adopt.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter where we’ll be tweeting some awesome NAB stuff, and following NAB’s official twitter account might not be a bad idea either.

As is to be expected the NAB official list of talks and things like that reads very much like the things we write about here on the site, so we’ll see how things go down. It feels like filmmakers of all budgets as well as broadcasters are on the same page here. Very excited to see what goes down!

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March is DiY Filmmaking Month!

Mar 4

Posted by Adam in Site News | 1 Comment

No, really – it’s a thing. The good people over at Poetzero have declared it.

This is pretty cool because both Poetzero and MAKE magazine are doing some even more DiY filmmaking articles than they usually do, which we will be sure to link to.

But how will we commemorate DiY Filmmaking Month? We’re coming up with something, so hold tight.

DiY Filmmaking Month
Can we use this graphic? I don't even know, but I'm going with it.

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The internet is chock full of how to guides for doing pretty much anything you can think of to make films on a budget. DiY Filmmaking is a blog that brings you the best and the worst of all that, plus great tips, tutorials, and guides of our own.

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