Jim Tierney is a pioneer in the development of plugins for motion graphics, animation, and video editing. During the 1990s, Jim worked for software companies like MetaTools, Atomic Power, and Cycore. He helped create graphics products like Bryce, Evolution, and Final Effects. After working on After Effects plugins for six years, Jim thought it was finally time to get out there and do some of his own. So he did, and Digital Anarchy was born in 2001.
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In This Episode
- 00:09 – Cirina introduces Jim Tierney, Chief Executive Anarchist and President of Digital Anarchy.
- 7:19 – Jim Tierney talks about the Beauty Box as one of the first plugins of its kind to be released and Digital Anarchy’s most popular plugin.
- 13:48 – Jim explains the changes of Digital Anarchy’s Flicker Free version 2.0 plugin.
- 22:07 – Jim describes the best features of the PowerSearch and Transcriptive plugins to optimize your NLE workflow.
- 29:22 – Jim shares the efficient work setup of Digital Anarchy’s team, where they don’t need to go to an office daily.
- 35:45 – Visit Digital Anarchy’s website at digitalanarchy.com to check out their awesome products and solutions.
Transcript
This is Cirina Catania with OWC Radio. Jim Tierney hasn’t talked with us in, boy, it’s been a year Jim, it was last NAB. Jim is president of Digital Anarchy, and he has a lot of amazing solutions for people who work in the media. So Jim, how have you been? I haven’t talked to you in a year.
Good. My April is much calmer than it’s been in probably 25 years with no NAB.
Does it feel weird not to be going to NAB, or are you kind of happy about it?
It feels pretty weird. I certainly don’t miss setting up the booth and all that nonsense, but I do miss the people. That’s the important part about the show, it’s like who cares about the booth, but it’s the people that you see once a year. There’s just a lot of people that I just love to catch up with and nice to see folks that you know.
Yeah, I do too. I’m missing everybody. It’s the one chance every year, NAB and IBC, I think are the two big ones for me. I always complain about them because there’s so much work in preparation. It takes at least a month in advance, and I’m not setting up a booth, but it’s just crazy. It’s full time for at least a month in advance, and when you get there, and in those days that you’re at the convention, you’re exhausted by the time you get home. But as much as I complain about it, sometimes they say you don’t miss it till it’s gone, and I’m kind of missing it.
Oh, totally.
Yeah, I kind of missed it this year.
Yeah, I complain about every year as well. And as I said, my April was much calmer than I think it’s been in 25 years. Just not having to ship stuff and not having to prepare stuff and all the rigmarole that you do, but yeah, I missed it.
I certainly don't miss setting up the booths, but I do miss the people. The people are always the most important part of the show. Click To TweetWell, there’s no Burning Man this year either. How many years have you been involved in Burning Man?
This would have been the 20th year that had gone.
Wow.
But yeah, they’re not holding it this year.
That’s longer than a lot of relationships.
I’ve been going to NAB longer.
Have you really? Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, my first debut was 1996.
Oh, my goodness. You’re not old enough. So, Burning Man, you were involved in the creative artistic side of it, right? We talked a year ago about this, and I can’t remember exactly what you were doing for Burning Man, but I thought it was really cool.
Yeah, I volunteered for them for a long time in this department called The ARTery, which is the department that helps hardest. The Burning Man, when they’re out there, they have a lot of resources, heavy machinery, cherry pickers, forklifts, sprinters, all these things, and we help manage those resources for the artists. So if they are setting up some big art installation and scheduling when they’re going to get the heavy machinery over to their site, if they need fuel, propane, firewood, and all this stuff, we just help them with the resources. But the thing that I’ve mainly been doing for them for the last 14 years and really has been my role, the last eight or nine is doing this Audio Art Tour. So basically, kind of a Docent-Led Tours of the major art installations on the play. It’s just like a list of 50 mp3s that you can download, and then you can either listen to them on your way to Burning Man or walk around with your iPhone and listen to learn more about the art. So it’s kind of like if you go to a museum and you get one of those audio tour things, it’s the same idea. So it’s always fun to put that together and see what kind of art because we can get access to all this stuff four or five months in advance, so I kind of know what dark installations are coming out. It helps to get you kind of fired up about going, and you can get a little bit jaded after 20 years, but there is always cool new interesting stuff that people are bringing out. That’s just a good way to kind of get past the jadedness and get some excitement about it.
I have a confession. I have never been to Burning Man.
Oh my god.
I know, forgive me, please forgive me. Maybe next year. All my friends go, and for some reason, every year, I just seem to be out of the country. I’m filming somewhere that doesn’t allow me to go to Burning Man. Maybe next year, we’ll see.
I can’t tell you how many years I’ve gotten back from Burning Man and then been on a plane to IBC a few days later. That’s always been an interesting transition.
I think I was either coming back from Berlin or going from one country back to Germany, and there were some people on the plane wearing their pink tutus, and I knew it was Burning Man. What was it? TuTu Tuesday or something?
Yeah. We do.
Oh, my goodness. So 70,000 of your best friends, right?
Twenty-five thousand people when I started going. Even then people were complaining about “Oh my god it’s too big. It’s over. Burning Man is done,” and here we are 20 years later.
That’s three times the size, and it’s getting bigger every year. Wow, that’s awesome. Well, maybe next year. So for people listening, you really are a pioneer in the development of plugins for motion graphics and animation and video editing, and what’s also surprising to me is that this is still a privately owned company, right? It’s your company. So with all of this stuff that you have out there, that makes our life easier. It’s all yours. And I just think that’s very admirable, it’s wonderful. Tell us, for those who don’t know, talk to us about the plugins, what I would call your legacy software that’s out there that we can use. I use Beauty Box almost every day when I’m working on a video. I use Beauty Box all the time because everybody wants to look nice.
Everyone’s going, “Well, why would I want you to do makeup?” but video lights don’t make you look normal. I mean, that’s not how we normally walk around with the big bright light on our face. And so it just shows up all the details that you don’t necessarily see every day in real life. So that’s been a really incredible plugin for us. And it’s basically the first one out there for doing this type of work; now there’s a couple of them. But actually, when it came out, do you remember MGLA, the motion graphic user group? So I saw a presentation there about somebody working on music videos, and just what they had to do, to do all the retouching. Like with mass and tracking in and this is like 15 years ago, so it was some work. And it’s just like wow, we could probably make this a lot easier. And eventually, we figured it out, and that’s been a really popular plugin for us.
Well, it’s brilliant. And it’s also very subtle, too. I mean, you can adjust it, and it’s very, very subtle. And if you do it right, it really does enhance images, which is important. You want your clients that you’re photographing, that you’re videoing, you want them to look good. I kind of like it to what I do with perfectly clear on the stills side, right? You don’t let a portrait go out without touching it up a little bit and the same with video. It’s really nice. I love it. So what else? Tell people about your other solutions that you have?
One thing about Beauty Box, that was the key thing about that made Beauty Box different when we released it. I mean, there were some skin retouching plugins out there, but basically, they’re just blurring the skin. And I think we were kind of the first one to actually go, alright, well, we don’t want to make everybody look like Barbie. We really want to keep the skin texture, but we want to just soften things up without. Basically, apply a thin layer of visual makeup without it being a super obvious effect, so I think we did a good job. I’m glad and thank you for using it. I appreciate it.
Subtle changes make a huge difference. If you do it right, it really does enhance images. Click To TweetOh, I love it. It’s funny. I always laugh, I see these Instagram posts with people that are like in their 60s and they’ve taken every single line and wrinkle completely out. They look ridiculous. It’s like oh my gosh, who did this to you? But Beauty Box doesn’t do that. It’s really very realistic and very subtle. You also have a sharpening tool, and you have Transcriptive, do you want to talk about those for a minute? And then we have some new stuff to talk about too.
We do. Yeah, so we’ve got Samurai Sharpen, which is the sharpening plugin that we released four or five years ago, maybe less than that. Suitable plugin for doing sharpening if you’ve got something that’s just slightly out of focus, obviously if it’s totally out of focus, nothing’s gonna help it. But it is a way of kind of just making some adjustments there. So that’s a cool plugin. We have the Light Wrap Fantastic plugin, and if you’re doing a green screen, it just makes the edges blend a little bit better. We have a bunch of free plugins you can download Ugly Box if you want to make somebody look worse.
Seriously? I didn’t know about that.
You didn’t know about Ugly Box?
No. Oh my gosh, that’s mean.
We released it for Halloween one year. So like if you want to make people look like a zombie or whatever, it’s a great tool for that. Instead of softening the imperfection that just brings them out. You can turn the skin green and stuff like that.
Oh, I have to remember that for Halloween. Make them ugly.
So that’s Ugly Box, and that’s a free download, just go to our website and download it. And there are a few other free plugins on there.
You get those at digitalanarchy.com. Go get your free plugins.
Yeah, when we release a regular product, we try and do something fun for a free plugin. So we have Flicker Freak, which adds a flicker to your video, which is also a free plugin, which is the opposite of Flicker Free, which is our plugin for removing flicker from the video. So there’s a lot of free plugins out there on digitalanarchy.com, so go check it out.
That’s awesome. So that is a great segue to Flicker Free 2.0. So it actually was 1.5 recently, and now it’s 2.0, you are busy, you’re just keeping this stuff really updated. So tell people what Flicker Free is.
Flicker Free is a plugin for removing various types of flicker from a video. It originally came out of the fact that I do a lot of time-lapse photography, and if you’re trying to capture sunsets or sunrises, you’d have to let the camera kind of automatically adjust. And if you do that, you end up a little bit of Flicker. And there wasn’t really a great tool out there for dealing with it. And so we came up with Flicker Free for that, and then as it turns out, it solves a whole bunch of other problems. So if you’re shooting slow motion, you can also see the lights flicker because of the electricity. And then the most common thing that we’ve discovered that works for us is that the camera and lights are out of sync, you get this rolling bands problem.
Yeah, that’s terrible.
Which is just super common if you are shooting in Europe, and you forgot to switch the camera to 50 frames a second or 25 frames a second.
Fluorescence will do it, too, right?
Fluorescence, and then one of the more common things, LED lights, which really became a thing right around the time we released Flicker Free. Especially if you’ve been using LED lights, it causes crazy rolling bands. And so it was kind of good timing to come out with a tool that fixes that type of problem. And the big change with 2.0 is that we now do better motion detection. So if you’ve got a handheld shot and say you’re shooting a wedding and you’re in a hotel, ballroom, and the hotel has dimmed the LED lights in the ballroom, and you just didn’t notice you have this camera lighting problem, we can now do a much better job of fixing that. Before Flicker Free really had a problem with light handheld footage, it did a great job if the camera is locked down, if it was just kind of an interview shot or something like that. But if you’re moving all over the place filming the bride and father dancing or whatever, you really struggle with that. So the new version really does a great job with that particular instance, and of course, it’s all the stuff that’s in Flicker Free 1.
Wow, this is great stuff. So you’re making our incompetencies competent?
Well, often it’s not visible on the back of the camera.
Yeah, it’s true.
On a tiny screen and you just don’t notice it. And then you get back into post and you’re like, “Oh my god, where did this come from?” And so, we’ve saved a lot of people from it, which is always an awesome feeling.
Yeah, when you’re in the middle of it, and you’re shooting, and you’ve got eyes on the back of your head. Especially for me if I’m doing reality type of things, and I’m concentrating on the action and what’s happening and trying to get the master shot and the cutaways and the storyline. And if something changes, I’m at that moment may or may not be aware of it. You’re right, sometimes no matter how good you are, things happen. And you’re concentrating on another aspect of what you’re doing telling the story with your camera, for example, and yeah, you don’t notice it.
When you’re moving around, and suddenly something that was not in the background is suddenly in the background. And it’s across the room, but it’s flickering like crazy. We’ve got a great example up on the digitalanarchy.com, a sight of The Amazing Race, like an indoor shop where we can test them, they go into this store, whatever, and of course, they have the fluorescent lights or just not a set up for filming. There are cheap fluorescent lights, which tend to flicker and a nice job on fixing that for them. There’re so many situations where you just don’t have control over all the lights, and especially lights that might be in the background that you just don’t quite think of, and it’s just been a great tool for solving all that stuff.
What about if you’re shooting something on TV? Does it work on that too?
Yeah, sure. That’s another example. LED lights basically function as a computer monitor because they have a refresh rate, just like a computer monitor or a TV, and so that’s where you get the rolling bands. Rolling bands is the same exact problem for shooting a computer monitor or something, where the just the refresh rate of the monitor is out of sync with your shutter speed of the camera. And you just end up with the rolling bands. So yeah, it’ll totally fix that type of stuff.
I’m just wondering about those scenes where you’re shooting somebody in the studio, now that’s a computer in the background, but I’m thinking that sometimes they’re syncing problems with the picture if they’ve got somebody on the television behind them. So this would help with that, right?
Yes.
Awesome.
The other big feature with 2.0 is it’s much faster; it’s now GPU accelerated. Especially if you’ve got a CUDA or an Nvidia card, it does a great job, but it also supports open CL, so AMD works very well. We don’t support Metal yet, so that’s coming, that’ll be a free upgrade, and that should be in the next month or two. We’re not seeing quite the same speed improvement on Mac as we are on Windows machines right now, but we’ll fix that shortly.
What were you thinking when you were watching dub dub the other day?
Oh, God. That’s what I said.
You went, “Oh, my goodness, here comes a lot more work.” Yeah, all my developer friends, whenever there are announcements like that, I always sympathize with what their next six months are going to be like. Although they do claim that a lot of the applications are going to be universally compatible, that remains to be seen.
It’s a big question. I mean, how compatible, how fast are they gonna run, which matters for anybody doing computer graphics, it’s not just the word processor. I guess Transcriptive kind of is, but all of our other plugins are pushing pixels around, and if you’re running that in emulation, what kind of speed head are you going to take because of that? We’re not too freaked out about it. I have a hard time seeing a lot of video professionals just jumping on the first round of the new machines just because of all those speed issues. A lot of software is not gonna be updated by September, October, whenever they really see things.
I wonder which computer they’re going to bring in that will still have the Intel chip because they did say that they would have new models of their computers out and I think maybe it’s the Air. I don’t know. Did you think about that? Do you have any feelings about that? This totally off the subject, I’m just curious.
They said that the first arm machines are going to be iMac and MacBook Pros. So I’m assuming the desktop they just released is this ridiculously expensive Mac Pro.
I know I got one and it’s sitting here, and I think now you’ve got this Silicon chip, I just bought the Mac Pro and everything that goes with it. I was hoping to use it for more than two years.
Yeah, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem. But those kinda shorten the life of those things, unfortunately.
Well, I have a lot of friends who use Flicker Free, and they just swear by it. They love it. And I am excited about PowerSearch, which you’re about to announce if you haven’t already. If it’s not out when this interview comes out, it will be out by the time the interview does come out, which is in a couple of weeks from when we’re recording it. And I’m very excited about PowerSearch, can you tell people what that does and what platforms it runs on?
Yeah. So it’s basically kind of an addition to Transcriptive, which is our tool for getting AI-based transcripts into Premiere. Right now, we’re pretty Premiere based on all that stuff. We may eventually get over to Final Cut. But we got a lot of other stuff to do, especially now that Apple announces crazy CPU change. But anyway, so PowerSearch is just a way of taking advantage of the fact that now all of your videos have transcripts attached to them. And it’s really designed to work with transcripts too, but it can work, it doesn’t matter where you get the transcripts from. Now a lot of other applications are either putting them into the metadata or putting them into markers or whatever. And PowerSearch can search all that stuff. And the cool thing about the new version is we now have a pretty robust SQL database behind it. And we’re just indexing every bit of text that we can find in your premier project, and then allowing you to search for that. And much like any other search engine, you just type in what you got, what you want, you get search results back, you can click on that, and it’ll jump to that point in the clip or the sequence where that was said. So it’s just a really cool way of taking advantage of the fact that so many people are now getting transcripts for all their videos. And just be able to dig through all of that fun stuff.
Some skin retouching plugins basically blur the skin but we don't want to make everybody look like Barbie. Click To TweetIt’s funny, and we just had a conversation yesterday on OWC Radio, we’re starting to get AI-based transcripts that are going to integrate with our show notes and add in the chapter markers. And I think that what you have here with PowerSearch is really valuable, and we need that for SEO, and we need it for an organization. And the first thought that came to my mind when Kevin was telling you about PowerSearch is that, what about your legacy media that you may not necessarily be using now, but you are going to be using, for example, on a project where you have a lot of clips that you’re bringing in from old media? I guess if you bring that into Premiere Pro, that would also get transcribed, or how does it work? Does it come off of the timeline?
It can come off the timeline, or it can come out of the metadata of the clip. Obviously, you have to have one of the AIs transcribe it for it to get stored. So if you’re just putting in something from 10 years ago that hasn’t been transcribed, you’re going to need to transcribe it. Or if you already have a transcript for it, one of the cool features with Transcriptive is you can import that text doc, and then we’ll analyze the audio of that clip, and sync up the texts that you imported where that happens, where that matches the audio. And that’s actually a free function, at least for English, it’s a free function within Transcriptive if you don’t want to pay for it. So that’s one way of dealing with legacy assets, and being able to search them. You can import old transcripts or old caption files or whatever. So that’s one way, but regardless, PowerSearch only really works well if you’ve got stuff transcribed. And then, of course, for us, that means Transcriptive, but there’s plenty of other solutions out there as well. But once you have those transcripts amongst those that are attached to the media, then everything becomes searchable. You just bring it in, if it’s in a sequence that’s great and PowerSearch will locate it within the sequence and then jump to that point in the timeline. But then also, if it’s just attached to the clip itself, it’ll open up the clip on the source monitor, and then jump to move the Playhead to where the words are spoken.
What I like about it, too, that I was told, is that you can also use symbols so I can search for Jim + Tierney.
Yes, totally. We really want to make it like a regular search engine. So if you use quotes, then that’s gonna find the exact match, you can do an “&,” you can do a “-.” If you’re searching for digital something, and you don’t want all the digital anarchy to show up all over the place, you can just do digital minus anarchy, and it will just show results with digital. So it just makes it a lot easier to do complex searches. Because what we’re finding with very large projects is, it’s pretty easy to come back with 1500 search results, and you don’t really want to dig through 1500 search results. So having ways to kind of narrow that down is a pretty important thing.
Absolutely. One of my projects is a series, and there are 200 hours of interviews. And organizing that and searching through all of that and figuring out which act goes in which episode, this is going to really be very helpful. So talk to me about speed, because this is apparently very fast too, right?
Yeah, that was one the problem with 1.0 is it just took a really long time to index stuff. So if you have 200 hours, it could take all night to index stuff. So by moving to a regular, real database, we’ve been able to speed that up pretty dramatically. So even with 200 hours, it should probably only take about an hour or so to index everything, and then everything is just easily searchable. So the speed just makes it much more usable in terms of running the indexing and just finding everything in the project.
I love talking to smart people. Where’s your development team? What part of the world are they from?
We’re all San Francisco.
Really? I love that. Made in the USA, I love it.
Absolutely.
Oh, that’s awesome.
Four of our engineers live in Oakland.
Wow.
We’re a small team. But you know, we’ve tried outsourcing stuff, and it works well if you’re a bigger company, and you can actually have a whole team over there wherever you’re outsourcing to, but if you’re just working with one developer or something, it becomes more challenging. And so we’ve just made a decision to hire people around here, which certainly makes it a bit more expensive, but we find that communication is much easier and development is faster than it would be if we were trying to outsource everything.
Well, I always worry about outsourcing to someone that I’ll never meet in person, and I worry about security. Particularly in the business that we’re all in, you’re on the developer side, but boy, you’ve got code there that’s proprietary. And I think I would be worried about farming that out to somebody that’s living in a foreign country that you’ve never met. I don’t know. I worry about it just with what I’m doing, and I’m not even writing code.
What we’ve kind of learned if we do any outsourcing is I tend to handoff stuff that’s non-critical. So some of the work that doesn’t necessarily involve the really proprietary type of code. Security is an issue no matter where you have people working unless you’re just a facility that’s like locking everything down. Most of our engineers work remotely, I mean, now everybody’s working remotely, but even before the whole COVID thing. Our engineers only came in two days a week, so the rest of the time, they were working from home. One of them got really upset with us and decided to post all our code on the internet, and that’s possible.
Well, I hope it never happens.
We try to treat people pretty well. It has not been a problem so far.
Most engineers like being alone anyway, because they need to concentrate, especially if I’m in the room. I talk too much.
Yeah, it’s very inefficient if I have to commute. I mean, everybody can see the value of having some time face to face, that is actually important. But you don’t need to do it every day. The thing we had going where they came in a couple of days a week was a pretty good solution.
I miss people, though, I have to tell you. I was telling my friends, I’m Sleepless in San Diego, I mean, I do have my daughter and her daughter here, but they’re in another location. I just miss picking up the phone and saying, “Hey, let’s go see this movie” or, “Hey, let’s go have a drink” or “hey, let’s have some dinner” or “let’s go for a hike” or “do you want to go camping?” now you can’t do any of that. Well, you can, but it’s just not the same, and I hate wearing those masks, that’s another subject. That’s another subject we won’t get into it.
I hear you. I’m kind of an introvert, but there’s nothing like turning me into an instant extrovert than to tell me that I can’t see people.
Don’t tell me I can’t.
Like telling me, “You can’t do this,” I’m like, “I want to.”
You go, “Don’t tell me, I can’t do something.” I think I might be similar. I don’t know. I hate to admit it. But you know what, if somebody tells me I can’t do something or they say no to an idea that I have that I just know is gonna work, I don’t want to hear it. I just move forward anyway. And you know what, honestly, it’s been a gift. It’s been a wonderful blessing in my life that I don’t listen to anybody else. I’m very stubborn. Oh, my goodness. Well, this all sounds really wonderful. Talk to us about pricing and availability, and so on PowerSearch, and Transcriptive, tell us how that all is gonna work.
Yeah, so PowerSearch, if you buy Transcriptive, it’s basically included free. And we just did our big NAB announcement, which, of course, didn’t happen at NAB, but happened in April, was that we dropped the price of Transcriptive from $299 to $149. So that’s been pretty cool. And then that includes PowerSearch, and obviously, with Transcriptive, you still have to pay for the transcripts, either eight cents a minute, or if you prepay it, you can get it down for four cents a minute for the transcripts, it’s a pretty inexpensive way of just being able to transcribe all of that media. And then the PowerSearch, you can now search all of it. So overall, we feel it’s a pretty reasonably priced solution for doing that type of work. And if you want to buy PowerSearch by itself, it’s $99. So if you’re using one of the other transcription solutions, then you can just purchase PowerSearch on its own. If you buy Transcriptive for $149, you get PowerSearch for free. And with Flicker Free, that’s going to be the same price as 1.0, and that’s $149 for a license, and then the upgrade will probably be $89, I think that’s probably what the price is going to be for the upgrade if you already own 1.0.
And you do have the ability to demo the software before you buy it, right? Or not?
Oh yeah, totally. With all this stuff, with the plugin, you can download the demo versions, and it will just watermark it. With Transcriptive and PowerSearch, you can download it. With Transcriptive, you’re limited to two-minute transcriptions, but If you just shoot us an email and say, “Hey, I want to kind of unrestricted two-week license,” we’re happy to do that for you. Just reach out to sales@digitalanarchy.com, and we’ll hook you up with a two-week license that you can play around with.
So somebody has it on their desktop in their editing suite, can they also put it on their laptop? Or how does that work?
Yeah, so we allow it two installs per license. So it’s really set up for that exact situation so that the person with a laptop and a desktop or work machine, you can totally set it up that way. Obviously, if it’s a studio, we would prefer that you bought a license for every machine.
Well, a lot of people, especially right now, I used to be a big road warrior, but now I’m Sleepless in San Diego. Oh my gosh, Jim, is there anything I didn’t ask you that you want to tell people about?
I think we covered most of it. This will be 20 years for us as a company, pretty stoked about that.
Congratulations. So if you work with media and you want these awesome plugins and solutions, you need to go to digitalanarchy.com and check them all out. Check out the new version of Flicker Free, check out PowerSearch, check out my favorite, which is Beauty Box, and all the other solutions. This is awesome. Jim Tierney, you are the president of Digital Anarchy, and I suspect on the side a bit of an anarchist which is kind of fun. Thank you.
Well, my official title is Chief Executive Anarchist.
Oh, there you go. Jim Tierney, Chief Executive Anarchist at Digital Anarchy. I love it. This is great. Thank you for enlightening us. You have a wonderful day. And everybody remembers what I always tell you, get up off your chair and go do something wonderful today. This is Cirina Catania I’m signing off.
Important Links
- Jim Tierney
- Digital Anarchy
- AMD
- Apple Silicon
- Audio Art Tour
- Barbie
- Beauty Box
- Burning Man
- CUDA
- Docent-Led Tours
- Final Cut
- Flicker Freak
- Flicker Free
- IBC
- Intel
- Light Wrap Fantastic
- Macintosh
- MGLA
- NAB
- Nvidia
- PowerSearch
- Premiere Pro
- Samurai Sharpen
- The Amazing Race
- The ARTery
- Transcriptive
- Ugly Box
- Windows
Checklist
- Plan out your shoot process thoroughly to help you get close-to-perfect shots during post-production.
- Touch up photos and videos before showing them to the public. Raw videos and images tend to have poor lighting, rendering, etc. most of the time. Shots are mostly required to undergo post-processing.
- Create subtle adjustments so a clip or an image doesn’t end up looking unnatural unless it’s intended to be that way. Things like making skin look like plastic or lighting too fake may not sit well with an audience.
- Make use of plugins to make the job more efficient. Thanks to technology, a lot can be done without starting from scratch.
- Use the sharpen tool/plugin when subjects are out of focus. This feature will enable a crisper visual output that looks more sleek and pleasing to the eyes.
- Watch out for light flickers in your video clips. Sometimes they’re difficult to notice while shooting because the camera screen is too small.
- Transcribe videos. This is very beneficial not just for the deaf community, but transcriptions are also great for SEO online.
- Research more about outsourcing and try it out to help with operations. If it’s the first time you’re outsourcing, start with non-critical tasks first and build trust from there.
- Check out Digital Anarchy’s website to learn more about their cool video plugins and filters.
- Try the plugins PowerSearch, Flicker Free, Beauty Box, and more on your next video project.
ABOUT OWC
If you work in tech and haven’t heard about Other World Computing (OWC), you may have had your head in the sand. OWC, under the leadership of Larry O’Connor since he was 15 years old, has expanded to all corners of the world and works every day to create hardware that makes the lives of creatives and business-oriented companies faster, more efficient and more stable. Go to OWCDigital.com for more information.
Here’s the company’s official mission statement:
At OWC, we’re committed to constant innovation, exemplary customer service, and American design.
For more than 25 Years, OWC has had a simple goal. To create innovative DIY solutions to give you the most from your technology.
Beginning with 100% compatible memory upgrades, reliably exceeding Apple’s maximum RAM specs, OWC’s product offering has grown to encompass the entire spectrum of upgrade and expansion possibilities, all with a focus on easy, DIY setup and installation.
Our dedication to excellence and sustainable innovation extends beyond our day-to-day business and into the community. We strive for zero waste, both environmentally and strategically. Our outlook is to the long term, and in everything we do, we look for simplicity in action and sustainability in practice.
For us, it’s as much about building exceptional relationships, as it is about building exceptional products.
About Cirina Catania, Host of OWC RADiO and Founder and Lead Creative, The Catania Group
Filmmaker Cirina Catania, the Founder and Lead Creative at The Catania Group, has been involved as a writer, director, producer, cinematographer or marketing exec on over 130 film, television and new media projects for the big screen as well as for networks such as National Geographic, Discovery, etc. She is one of the co-founders and former director of the Sundance Film Festival and former senior executive at MGM-UA and United Artists. Cirina lives in San Diego, D.C. and Berlin when she is not on the road filming for her projects or for clients, or speaking as a tech evangelist for companies such as Blackmagic Design and Lumberjack System. For nine years, she was the original “BuZZ Babe” showrunner on the weekly tech podcast, Digital Production BuZZ heard in 195 countries. Cirina is a member of Local 600 (IATSE), the PGA and the WGA. Best way to know more about her is to type her name into your favorite search engine! There you will find all the good stuff.
Digital Anarchy is a privately owned company in San Francisco, CA that creates smart image enhancement software for video editors, broadcast designers, and photographers.
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