Basic Video Production
October 31st and November 1st, 10am - 4pm
The ever-so-popular class that covers it all from Aperture to Zebra Stripes. It always fills up, so register early. Or don’t. Your choice.

Scene Building and Montage
November 8th & 9th, 10am - 4pm
An exploration into the visual elements that make narrative films so compelling. It’s all about finessing the edit, which should be done before you even start shooting. Confused? Come to class and we’ll sort you out.

Both classes take place at The Northwest Film Forum.

http://www.nwfilmforum.org/live/page/workshops/84#89

Registration: 206-329-2629

My friend John Rodsett (part seasoned executive, part guru, and a university professor besides) brings a new seminar to LA, Miami, and Seattle.  He has a great deal of experience in the industry, and several years teaching at the University of Washington and University of Miami.  For anyone interested in his unique perspective on building success in the entertainment industry, I believe there is still room in his second Seattle seminar scheduled on October 23-24.

More information about John and his seminar can be found at his (aptly titled) website:  mrfilmbiz.com

According to a post on the Google blog this morning, individual videos with high hit counts will now be eligible to participate in the YouTube Partnership Program on a one-off basis.

Participation is still based on traffic and is by invitation only, which makes sense since the ad revenue has to support the incremental cost of administering each additional revenue share in addition to making money for YouTube and the producer. According to Google’s post today, once you’re in with a single video or two it may increase your chances of participation across your whole channel. This is great news and the real key for web producers trying to make a go of this. Channel-wide revenue sharing means that your videos have a chance to cross-promote one another and create a snowball effect.

While this new development is a great turn of events for anyone who happens to capture a popular video by chance (Charlie Bit My Finger, Otters Holding Hands), it remains to be seen how it might work for those who are trying bootstrap webisode production or a whole channel through ad revenue.

Now, it’s pretty cool to be able to pan and tilt to see what is happening on all sides of the camera, but your navigation is still locked in to the axis.  You can’t change your vantage point.  The position or motion of the 360 camera was  set by the operator when the video was shot, and there you have it.

But if this is an age of innovation, it is also an age of integration.  Systems and functionality from disparate products are being combined at an amazing rate. There are some other cool innovations that could stairstep on a technology like Yellowbird’s — or vice-versa.  Microsoft has been developing a product for some time now called Photosynth.  If you have overlapping photos of a location, Photosyth automagically creates a virtual map of the area, allowing you to zoom in and out and change your vantage point from image to image.  If there are enough images, you can almost get a sense of motion by navigating between them.

Can you imagine what it would be like to apply image processing technology like Photosynth to a bunch of high resolution Yellowbird streams?  A user would not only be able to pan and tilt, as in the Yellowbird app, but also change perspective from one stream to the other seamlessly.  With enough streams, the environment would become completely navigable, completely immersive.  To even begin to apply Photosynth-like processing to multiple  video streams would require an inordinate amount of processing power by 2009 standards.  But as long as Moore’s Law holds up, we may have real-time, truly 3D navigable video in the not too distant future.

The potential implications for visualisation, surveillance, and entertainment are almost mind boggling.