This months meeting was so packed with information and sensory overload that I 'm still wondering what the heck it was all about. Thank you Dan Brockett for taking notes.

OK, I'll be the first to admit that this was one long meeting. It was so long Lowell Kay let the night security guard at Dr Rawstock go home cause he didn't need him anymore. My apologies to all for the length of this months meeting and I promise to keep it under 3 hours from now on. Promise.

This months meeting was held in the brand new, made for lafcpug, "Great Room" upstairs at

. This room was set up to hold 100 people and there were 100 people in attendance. Next month we get microphones and a PA system. Promise.

Meeting was called to order at 7:30PM after a half an hour listening to Ralph Fairweather answer troubleshooting questions from the audience. Did you know that by holding down the option key and dragging you can flip flop clips on the timeline? Well, now you do.

First order of business was to announce that we finally have a web host and will soon be moving the lafcpug web site to new digs as soon as the ink is dried. Joseph Karr O'Connor of the LA Digital Media Center located at Pasadena City College has kindly offered us this most generous gift. Thanks Joe, and thanks LA Digital Media Center. This is a real fine fit.

Member

. While I presented my carefully worded and killer introduction, Scott proceeded to fiddle with his PowerBook for about 10 minutes trying to get it hooked up to the spanking brand new maze of wires and projection hardware. If this wasn't embarrassing enough for us, we finally had to abandon the PB and go with the back up G4. Ahh, demos. Gotta love em, and gotta love Scott for not complaining.

Commotion is the first program to be able to play full screen, full color in real time. Paint away on those pixels and behold the wonders of what you do while you do it. Scott says SCSI raids are the way to go with Commotion. Gotta have em and gotta get those 30-40 mgb per second out put rate to get real time. Scott demoed the RT paint functions, and compared Commotion to Photoshop. Those Commotion tools do look awful familiar, so for us PS folks, commotion is not unfamiliar territory. He showed us some of the really cool special effect paint brushes, including my favorite, the Police Tape. Scott said Commotion will take advantage of the Cinewave system and then immediately got into the complicated world of Rotoscoping with Splines and layering. He showed us motion blurred splines and showed us all how to do the trick with Commotion much easier than with AE.

Next Scott gave us a 'how to' on the Motion Tracker using footage of a car going through an intersection. He then demoed compositing and showed off the Primatte keyer as well as some other Plug ins that come with Commotion 3.0. Rotomattes can be done with Commotion. Did ya know that? Well, now you do.

Scott showed off some footage that he put together just for this demo. Dang if we didn't get to see the famous light saber from Star Wars. How cool is that, I heard someone mutter. He also showed us blasts of lighting he created shooting from ray guns, and to top it off put in some string puppets floating by. Said that it took him about 2 hours to put this all together. Real impressive stuff.

We only had time for a few questions as Scott did the impossible and covered most of what Commotion can do in just one hour. That's kinda like going to the Louvre and seeing it all in an afternoon.

Thanks Scott for flying down and participating in our General meeting. It was an honor to host you and Commotion, and we are forever grateful to you for giving us the opportunity.

Oh... yes, Scott's' a nice guy too.

After an hour of splines and rotomattes it is customary to take a break, and so we did.

When we came back we brought up one of the

Promax head honchos, Charles M. McConathy and Cawan Starks brought some cool toys for all of us to see and hear about. First up was the much talked about and misunderstood Dual Processor Mac. While poor Cawan held the DP Mac, Charles talked about how now might not be the time to invest in one of these things if your looking to grab a big speed boost out of FCP. Seems rendering time is almost the same except for the Gaussian Blur filter. For FCP to take advantage of the speed capability of the DP MAC you are going to need a new FCP, (FCP 2.0?) OSX, (shipping in Jan 2001?) and a new QuickTime, (5.0?) Get all those elements working well together and you got speed. He also says that by the time all of this is stable, a new faster single processor will be available Because of the way DPs work, a single 800mghz processor will be faster than a Dual 500mghz. Finally Cawan, sweat pouring from his brow, gave Charles a look of "are we done yet" and set the DP MAC down.

Charles showed and explained the difference between the RT Mac card from Matrox and the RT MAX card from Promax and there are significant differences.The Matrox card will have analog out ONLY and not feature color correction which the card from Promax will. The cards will not speed up more than 2-3 layers and the RT MAX will do RT MPEG compression. RT-FCP is due out sometime in the fall. Seems, if memory and Dan's notes are correct, the cards will NOT work with G3 PCI slots. An adapter is on the drawing boards if demand is there.

Next up was the nifty JVC HRDV10 DV-VHS dubbing deck, which according to Charles makes "killer dubs" and plays mini DV AND small DVCam. Cawan had to hold this deck up too. Charles also said that SONY will be introducing 3 or 4 new decks soon. The DSR-1500,1600, and 1800 will play DVC Pro but only output analog.

Then Charles brought out the Sony PD150 and said the audio problems were fixed, but if you were one of the unfortunate buyers of the ones WITH audio problems, you still got to fork over $150.00 to Sony to fix the problem they created. Hmmm.

Asked about the 1.2.5 version of the DV Toolkit, Charles said Brad Pillow is working as hard and as fast as he can and hopes that DVTK will be out by the end of August. It is in Beta now.

Charles showed us the much talked about DA MAX box. A chip problem has kept them from shipping but they expect to have new chips and ship by November. The DA-MAX will eventually work with uncompressed through Firewire.

Alot of cool stuff and a lot of questions answered. Thanks Charles, and thanks Cawan for holding all that stuff up. For more info go to the Promax web site.

We had some really big time special guests break down the door at Rawstock and force their way into our hearts and minds. Zed Saeed, from Oxygen Media, Darryl Hock, head honcho at Aurora Video Systems, Loran Kary, architect of Film Logic, John Taylor of Cyber 3, and Walter Shires, Interim Product Manager for FCP, all came up on stage to announce a FCP Film workstation which, using the brand new upgrade for the Aurora Ignitor card along with Film Logic will do 24fps with 3:2 pulldown support and will pull down the audio. Cyber3 will be selling a complete turnkey FCP Film System which will feature among other things, E-MU Paris 8/8 Digital Recording System, and Medea VideoRack 4/240 RTX. Film is not dead.

Alessandro Mercuri came up and wowed us with an extremely creative and very "Dadaist" clip from a short he wrote and directed inspired by an interview with a woman and her experience on the I-405. Real impressive stuff and it was Alessandro's first effort using FCP. Yikes, says we all.

World famous raffle was up next and while some in the back row were sleeping, Cawan Starks took on the role of ticket puller and and we handed out the following to the lucky winners: Congrats to all and let us hope we have something to raffle next meeting as we gave out a LOT of stuff this time.

Ben Dents, Dan Brockett, and Michael Butler all won Dr Rawstock hats donated by our host Lowell Kay.

Joe O'Connor, Dan Brockett, J. Perpich, and Steve Martin won Creative Planet T-shirts donated by Ralph Fairweather and CP.

Steve Martin again won a CP hat donated by Ralph and Creative Planet.

Doug Seelig, Joe O'Connor, Steve Ray and Rachel Wilcox all won Visual Quickpro Guide by Lisa Brenneis, donated by Promax.

Donna Kuyper, and Dave Poncia won FCP T-shirts donated by Ralph Fairweather.

Ned Soltz won the amazing and useful Movie Magic Budgeting donated by Creative Planet.

Pat Cates won the equally amazing Movie Magic Scheduling also donated by CP.

Damon Abacherli won a DV guys T-shirt donated by Ron Margolis and Steve Martin from the DV Guys.

And Jeff Reese and Chriss Coe won "Extreme Editing" donated by our friends at Promax.

Whew! Next month we look forward to a shorter evening with much more time to network and get to know one another. Thanks to all for hanging in there and we all look forward to seeing many new faces in September. In the mean time, keep making movies.

See ya next month and bring us your clips for Show and Tell.

Michael Horton
HeadCutter
LAFCPUG