It was DVD Night and we concentrated on all things DVD plus awesome show and tells, and of course world famous raffle. Long meeting tonight but a good one.

Stump the Gurus was up first as usual with Ken Stone, Andrew Balis and special guest Guru, Tom Wolsky. Some questions asked and answered were"
Q.) I have an G4 iMac and a G4 Tower and when I capture Media it works great in my iMac but crashes at about 37 minutes in my G4. What's up?
A.) Well something is different in your systems. Check your settings to be sure they are identical. Check your Hard Drives with a disk check. Go through the usual troubleshooting list of problem solving solutions.
Q.) When I import a PS file with a set duration of say 3 seconds and I want to lengthen that still in FCP, I can't.
A.) Simply drag the still image from the timeline back into the browser and do it there then bring back into the timeline or control click on still clip and select duration.
Q.) When I try to import iMovie clips into FCP they need to be rendered. Why?
A.) iMovie is DV Stream and FCP is QuickTime. Thats why.
Q. Is there anyway I can make the Log and Capture Window smaller when using Capture Now?
A.) Try setting your Canvas window to 25 % and that might have an effect but no, there is no way.
Q.) Is there anyway I can put a bug over my entire sequence without rendering?
A.) No.
Q.) I get this flicker on my imported PhotoShop text. How come?
A.) Most common cause is the type of font you use. Using a serif type font is a very bad idea. Try using Arial. Bring down you whites as far as you can where they are still White on your NTSC monitor. Apply a one pixel blur.

Josh Mellicker from DVCreators was up next with this months Tip/Trick of the Month and Josh showed us a very cool way to create loopable content in FCP then export
to create DVD motion menus. it is very detailed and quite frankly way to complicated for me to write here in any coherent way. Or any way I could make you understand. Suffice it to say it involves many layers of text and graphics to loop every 17 seconds with a one minute audio track.
Josh had a very good tip for those of you making loopable content. Change the audio track every five minutes or so. Its not the video that drives people nuts all day, it's the audio. Same audio is torture. To see how and what Josh did here, well you are just going to have to buy the DVD or write Josh and say howdy do.

Apple Distinguished Educator Marco Torres from San Fernando High School here in LA was up next for our first Show and Tell of the evening and it was quite remarkable as it is a remarkable story.
San Fernando High had at one time one of the lowest student to computer ratios in the nation with a 52% transiency rate among it's students and a 62$ transiency rate among its faculty.. From a budget of zero he has raised over 4 million dollars and has built a multimedia center called the Community Inspiration Studio that is now one of the best and most advanced in the nation. They were also recently awarded a $300,00 grant to create a digital TV studio to help the Spanish speaking community w/ technical/ creative shows and programing.
Marco and his students have been singled out by Steve Jobs on more than 5 occasions. One of his students was recently mentioned in a Newsweek article on Video and Education. And she (Connie) along with Sal and Jose joined Marco up on the stage to present a little of what they have accomplished in this remarkable studio and with FCP.
They put together several clips for us one of which showed the media center which was quite impressive. And a wonderfully crafted "commercial" for digital moviemaking. Click HERE for a glimpse.
Students go from QuickTime Movies to iMovie and then on to FCP. And by that time they are accomplished filmmakers. Marco doesn't let them touch a camera until the script is done and story boarded. It shows and they showed us. Wow is all you can say.
Many from the Studio were in the audience that night and it was a pleasure to have them. These kids are doing remarkable work along side a remarkable and dedicated man.
You can read more about Marco and his students and take a look at what they are doing at these numerous web sites. Take a look at them all.
http://www.sfett.net/ican.html
http://homepage.mac.com/ican2/
http://www.convergemag.com/magazine/story.phtml?id=2530000000001963
http://www.apple.com/education/k12/imagine/0203/sanfernando/profile/immigration/
http://www.apple.com/education/dv/
http://campus.mediaschool.com/news/feature/InspirationStudio/Inspire.html

DVD Guru and author of the DVD Companion, Bruce Nazarian was up next with a nifty how 2 on using your DVD to interact with the web.using the handy tool provided in DVD Studio Pro called DVD@cess. What's cool about this tool is not only can it interact with the web but it can access files on your local disk. So Bruce showed us how to do that
So he opened up DVD Studio Pro and opened up and took a piece of one of his video stories and and opened that and selected the option to connect that piece to the web.
What is cool is that with DVDSP you can author your video AND link pieces of that video to the web AND it is cross platform
Bruce is doing this today for major educational institutions and just watching it is very easy to configure.
Very cool stuff.

Tom Wolsky was up next to talk about his excellent book "Final Cut Pro 2 Editing Workshop". It's Tom's first book and he said he wrote it because, well...everyone told him to write a book, AND he felt, while the FCP 2.0 manual was quite good, it did nothing to teach the user about editing. And thats what this book addresses. And address quite well.
The book comes with a CD filled with P-jpeg video files and using this media, the book guides you from start to finish, including everything in between. Log and capture, transitions, tools, compositing, different edits. You name it, it's there.
Tom says this book is geared towards the beginner and those coming from another editing application. The advanced user in my opinion will find helpful tricks in here as well.
Tom figures it takes about 3-4 days to diligently go through the entire book. Just depends on your experience level.
Tom also says that those who are using 1.2 will benefit from this book.

Adrian Ramsier from ALL4DVD was up next to show us cool hardware for the DVD author and what cool hardware there is coming out, and is already out. Adrian also took the time to explain the differences between media formats and they are considerable. Shopping for a DVD drive or player requires a lot of reading before you buy or chances are you will be bit hard.
There are 6 DVD formats with DVD-R seemingly the most compatible according to Adrian
Adrian also showed us the very cool FireWire DVD Recorder which DVDSP supports.
VERY cool was the as of yet, not shipping Panasonic DVD-Ram player which will replace your VCR and record from your TV. Yikes he says. Although the price is a bit more than a VCR.
The Pioneer DVR -9000 is a jaw dropper. It's an industrial DVD Recorder which records in Real Time, supports DVD-R/RW, has Firewire IN which will allow you to plug your digital camera in and record in Real Time. No software needed. Costs about 2 Grand. It's supposed to ship soon.
Ernie Schaeffer, head of their DVD training school joined Adrian to talk a little about their program down in Newport Beach.

Filmmaker Mitchell Rose was up next and as usual gave us another fine show and tell, this time of his latest movie, "Learn to Speak Body - Tape 5."
It is a parody on those "educational" tapes one might buy to learn a particular skill, and this particular skill was learning how to decipher ones body language.
Now you would think this couldn't possibly be compelling material for a short.. Wrong, my faux critic. Mitchell has again, in his own strange way, fashioned a dead on and hilarious satire.
Using actor/dancers from the Portland dance company, BodyVox (the same ones he used in his excellent "Modern Daydreams") we are shown a series of familiar body movements with explanation from a narrator. Graphics highlighted each pose and the film was just flat out funny and a dead on impersonation of educational tapes.
Shot on a TRV-900 and edited in FCP, this short is also noted for the use of the Barn Door transition, the first show and tell at lafcpug that had the courage to incorporate it.

Cameraman and DVD guru Barry Braverman was up next after the break and he gave us a comparison of "transcoders," those all important encoding tools that convert your Quicktime movies into MPEG2.
Now, I got to tell you I know nothing about transcoders or DVD authoring for that matter. After tonight and certainly after Barry's informative and very entertaining presentation ,I know a little more. But, like editing, there is so much more to this stuff.
Barry began by talking about the Apple transcoder that is included with DVDS which he feels is a bit lacking. Although he feels the Apple transcoder is quite fast it is not capable of evaluating information very well. So using this as a bench mark we saw a comparison of the Apple transcoder using different bit rates against Cleaner 5 SuperCharger, Heuris, and iFinish also using different bit rates.
And Bit rates are key here. The higher the bit rate the better the encoding and the better the image. The problem is the higher the bit rate the less media you can put on a DVD, so you want the best transcoder working at the lowest bit rate if you want to put that 2 hour video on a DVD and produce a quality image.
Cleaner 5 at high bit rate was VERY impressive as was the high end Heuris at high bit rate WITHOUT running it through an analysis pass. It just smoked Apple's transcoder to my eye.
Heuris according to Barry seems to handle color fidelity very well.
Very informative presentation of a very complicated process.

Next show and tell brought us the honor of bringing back award winning Director Chuck Braverman who just happened to be the second show and tell presented at the lafcpug back in July 2000.
That particular show and tell Chuck showed that night was "High School Boot Camp" and it went on to win Chuck a DGA award for best Feature Documentary. His next doc, "Curtain Call" was nominated for an academy award for best Feature Documentary that same year.
Tonight Chuck showed us a clip from his latest film "Rocky and Rolanda" which is slated to appear on the Discovery Channel soon.
It is the heartbreaking story of 2 teenagers caught in the Los Angeles Dependency system. It was the first time cameras were allowed in the Dependency court room.
Rocky was an abandoned child found near a donut shop when he was 10 1/2 years old. Rolanda, a beautiful and courageous teenage girl was recently diagnosed with Cancer. Although both have very different stories they are tied together by the broader story of the LA Dependency system of which they are just 2 of over 50,000.
Chuck was a very successful TV director for several years, but jumped back into documentaries when he was given the chance. He has not looked back and those that see his finished movies can only be grateful that he made this decision.

Recently transplanted from San Francisco, filmmaker Mehran Saky gave us a look at his first DV feature "Road Kill" which Mehran describes as a cross between "The Usual Suspects" and "Bound." And I am not going to argue.
It's a very "Nourish" style film shot on DV with an expert cast and shows expert story telling skills. While Mehran showed us only a few clips of the movie it is evident that that Mehran shows great promise.
Road Kill was recently picked up for DVD distribution by "Sub Rosa Studios and he is currently working on his next movie, Underwire, which he describes as a social satire.

World famous raffle was up next and there were a boat load of prizes to give away. Thanks to everyone who donated.

2 day FCP Training Class, beginner or advanced - Promax-Hollywood
2 VIP Passes to the NY DV Conference and Expo - Mindshare Ventures
2 Black Diffusion Filters - Tiffen Filters
2 Pioneer DVD ROM Drives - ALL4DVD
GO LIVE Bible Book - Deborah Shadovitz
DVD 101 - Bruce Sturgill
3 CD tutorial "Inside editing with FCP 2" - Magnet Media
100 blank CDs - Meritline
"Final Cut Pro 2 Editing Workshop". - Tom Wolsky
kenstone.net T-shirt - Kenstone.net
CD and DVD labels - Meritline
2 Final Draft or Final Draft AV - Final Draft
DVD Companion - Bruce Nazarian
2 Blank DVD-R DVDs - Meritline
2 FCP T-shirts - Apple Computer
1 3 day FCP Training Class - Andrew Balis and Moviola Education
2 $25 gift Certificates to Good Guys - Deeder McDaniel of Glendale Store

Special thanks must go to the lovely Chriss Horgan, Chris Rogers, and Doug Lindeman for taking tickets. Ken Stone for taking stills. Ross Jones for being the AV guy. Jose Colomer for running lights. Robert Schuster of Hollywood Studio Rental for bringing stuff to show in the lobby, and of course, Promax for footing the bill.

See you Dec 3 for a very special meeting.

Michael Horton

"HeadCutter"