In spite of starting our third week of "lock-down" here in LA, there is a ton of news - plus, I have eight articles for you as well. To start, the "Big Three" are all making news this week. Let's start with Apple.

Apple announced that it is extending the free-trial period for Final Cut Pro X to 90 days. It is also, for the first time, offering a 90-day free-trial to Logic Pro X. While these trials directly benefit students and educators who are now learning from home, this also comes in response to offers from both Adobe and Avid.

Last week, Adobe published a guide to working from home and collaborating with colleagues remotely. Since these features are part of a Creative Cloud subscription, these collaboration features don't cost any additional money.

I'm sure you, like me, are getting flooded with offers from a wide variety of companies offering tools to simplify working from home. While I'm dubious about some of these, here are several that crossed my desk that I want to share with you.

Lumberjack System is offering a free month's trial of all the Lumberjack System apps. This editorial workflow assistant which offers real-time logging and text-driven video editing, works with both Final Cut Pro X and Premiere Pro CC. The offer states "No credit card. No commitment."

EditShare has made Flow, their remote media management platform, available for free through July 1st to any content creator. Flow enables individuals as well as large creative workgroups to collaborate on story development with capabilities to perform extensive review and approval from anywhere in the world.

Webpage Link: https://flow.editshare.com/new-flow-2020

Accusonus, the audio plugin folks, are offering a free, curated, Weather SFX pack with one-hour of royalty-free, high-quality recordings of weather sound effects to help you create unique content. It will be available for free download for a month. (Offer requires a newsletter subscription.)

Sennheiser is promoting their new Memory Mic. This wireless clip-on is used with a free smartphone app and is "incredibly easy to use." Simply attach the mic to the person speaking and record the video with your smartphone. Looking more like a name badge than a mic, it connects via Bluetooth and runs on both iOS and Android devices. It's targeted at people  using smartphones who need good audio from a distance. (I don't want to complain, but Sennheiser's press release didn't include a link to the product or their website...)

Garry Betta, with VideoGuys, created a webinar on picking the best live streaming devices, along with other gear to simplify streaming hassles. He looks at 12 different products across a wide budget range in this 25-minute webinar.

For something totally different, TurboSquid released Kraken Pro, the first turnkey 3D asset manager specifically designed for 3D teams. This is powered by the same tech used to run the world's largest 3D marketplace and comes with a new AI sorting tool that can automatically import, sort and tag 50,000+ models to get 3D teams started. It also works in the Cloud.

Just a reminder, Coughlin and Associates is running their annual storage survey. This survey is designed to determine the media industry's digital storage needs and expectations for the capture and creation of raw content, editing and post production, distribution of content, digital archiving as well as digital conversion and preservation. The results of this survey will be used to create the 2020 Coughlin Associates report on Digital Storage for Professional Media and Entertainment.

Turning to my articles, in addition to the news from Apple, Adobe and Avid, I have tutorials on how to work with vertical video in both Final Cut and Premiere, a review of the DataColor SpyderX Elite to accurately calibrate monitor colors, and a detailed tutorial on how to create illustrated lectures using PowerPoint, Keynote and video. This last came from a request from a professor who needed to set this up but wasn't an experience video editor. All of these are in the Articles section, below.

Lots of things to learn this week.

These are difficult times for all of us. Even if you aren't "locked" into your home, everything has changed. It is hard to be cheerful, not only because of the wrenching changes in our society, but from the upheaval in our personal lives. It is very easy to get discouraged. I don't know what the future holds, though I suspect we'll be house-bound well into May before this settles down enough for us to start going out. But, it seems the key is what we do with our time. Sitting and waiting and fretting will drive us all nuts.

For myself, I can't sit still. I'm focused on writing, reviewing new products (which I'll share with you in coming weeks) and learning new things. To this end, we made two changes to my Video Training Library. For the month of April, we are offering a one-month subscription for $4.99! Plus, you can cancel your subscription at any time. That's more than 1,000 titles on a wide variety of subjects. There's never been a better time to learn something new - and, now, it's more affordable than ever. (Use coupon code: ATHOME)