I've waited a long, long time to announce this: I have a
FREE BOOK for you this week! (Along with some really
solid tutorials - this is a great issue!)
Here's the backstory: Forty years ago, July, 1978, I was one of eight video directors awarded a month-long fellowship to the annual
American Dance Festival. Not to dance, goodness knows, but to learn how to produce and direct dance for television. This Workshop was taught by the people who were inventing a new way to bring dance to video:
Merrill Brockway,
Emile Ardolino,
Judy Kinberg, to name a few of the workshop leaders. It was an amazing month!
I took copious notes and photos, then, when the Workshop was over, I put what I learned into my first book: "
Dance For Television: A Production Handbook." Produced in cooperation with
Maryland Public Television, the book was distributed to every
PBS station in America. Then, the manuscript vanished. Until this summer, when I found the original masters we used for printing. As I read the book again, after all these years, I realized that it holds up very well. (Yes, budgets and technology have changed, but the craft is the same.) It deserved to be reissued. So, I scanned and converted the original text into searchable PDFs, added a Table of Contents, photographs and cleaned up a typos and other errors.
Producing and directing dance for video is
totally different from drama. Our dramatic instincts will ruin a dance. I see this every day in dance videos and programs that are unwatchable; "Feet of Flames," anyone? So, for everyone who wants to learn from the masters - the team who taught the original workshop - I'm offering my first book for free as a
PDF. There is so much here to learn and think about - I'm delighted to offer it again.
Click here to download your copy. Please, share this link with your friends! From music videos to classical ballet, all of us will benefit when we can better present dance on the small screen. Enjoy!
(By the way, this isn't click bait. You don't need to give me your email address, or credit card. Free means free. There is solid information here - I want to share it.)
In other news,
IBC opens this week with a ton of new product announcements. So many, in fact, that I'm delaying my
webinars for one more week so I can cover whatever new gets announced. More next week.
HDR is becoming increasingly popular, but it's not easy to figure out.
James Duke has struggled with shooting and editing HDR in Final Cut Pro X for the last two years. After a lengthy email correspondence, I asked him to write up his experiences and workflow. You'll find his
report in our Articles section below.
Also, unless you've been living under a rock, you know that
Apple is announcing ... something... this Wednesday. Which means that the release of new operating systems is just around the corner; again. So, I have suggestions on when to upgrade to
Mojave. You'll find the write-up below, as well.
Finally, this last week, I've had several requests to explain how to
move projects between
Final Cut Pro X and
Premiere Pro CC. So, this week, I have two articles that explain how to transfer in each direction. Cool, step-by-step stuff.
Finally, the
Digital Production Buzz had a great show last week: we previewed key trends to expect at IBC later this week. Then, this week, while the world focuses on new tech at IBC, we go back to the basics and look at the essence of any video:
story-telling. We talk with several experts, including
Norman Hollyn, on how to improve the story-telling in our projects. Listen to the
show here.
It's an exciting week: Apple, IBC, news and new products. Summer's finally over and we have a great new season coming. I'm looking forward to sharing it with you. Until next week,
edit well
.
