Movie titles, lower thirds and video bugs are a great way to add a professional element to your videos, brand your product, and enhance the viewer’s experience through additional information. However, if not done properly, titles and graphics can have the opposite effect, resulting in your video being labeled as the work of an amateur.

Videomaker’s The Art of Titles and Graphics Webinar will help you design titles and graphics that will increase the effectiveness of your message while adding value to your production. In our webinar, we will cover purpose, design and placement, as well as mistakes to avoid. You will learn how to create great-looking titles and graphics that are clean and professional.

Following the webinar, all registrants will receive a copy of a special report. In addition to valuable information and the free special report, The Art of Title and Graphics Webinar will also include a live Q&A segment; our team answering your questions. The Art of Title and Graphics Webinar starts at 11:00 AM (PST) on Wednesday, Feb. 8, so be sure to sign up soon!

Not interested in The Art of Titles and Graphics? Videomaker’s Webinar Training Series provides a wide variety of webinars that cover topics including Advanced Editing, Documentary Production, Lighting for Video, Advanced Shooting, Audio for Video, and much more.

Video may well have killed the radio star, but until recently the internet had yet to kill the video star. Though  plenty of music videos have been sold and watched through online portals such as Apple’s iTunes and YouTube, they have in reality, stayed the same. The only difference was that instead of plopping down on a couch and watching your favorite band’s music video on TV, you could sit in front of your computer watching the videos you wanted to see when you wanted to see them. That was until now. Harnessing the power of HTML5, several innovative bands have now created online music videos that have upped the ante in how fans can interact with their music. Instead of the tried and true method of piecing together multiple clips and letting the viewer sit back and watch, these bands are allowing fans to not only choose what they want to see in the music video but are making the place you grew up part of the story as well.

In the latest iteration, OK GO, a longtime internet star going all the way back to their famous treadmill video for their song “Here it Goes Again“, used HTML5 to spell out a user-supplied message with the band member’s feet in their video “All is Not Lost“. Quite an accomplishment considering that the designers not only had to spell out all 26 letters of the alphabet with people’s feet –  but synchronize them as well.  Arcade Fire does something similar toward the end of their masterpiece, the “Wilderness Downtown” but also incorporated a Google Maps version of a user-supplied childhood home as part of the story in their music video. Amazingly, they were even able to use some 3D effects of HTML5 in order to make trees look like they were growing right over the satellite and street views of your own home. Danger Mouse went a slightly different but equally innovative direction with their music video “3 Dreams of Black”. Their video allows users to not only change their point of view, but to create some of the 3D elements at the end of the video as well making for a truly interactive experience.

Though these are new and interesting experiences for music video fans everywhere, the real question is if this trend will last. If so, it will be a redefinition of what can be done with  music videos and will require that video editors not only know how to helm programs such as Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects, but HTML5 code as well.

As we’ve already mentioned in a previous post, Apple has been under heavy fire for missing many components of Final Cut Pro 7 in their new software. In fact, as it currently stands, Apple has more 1 star reviews of Final Cut Pro X than the total of all their other reviews combined. That’s not to say the new software has gotten all bad press. There are actually quite a few 5 star reviews as well as many pro editors who have been touting how much easier and faster the new program can be. Looking at Apple’s App Store, it would seem that the features that most editors loved the most was the style of the new interface, the quick rendering times, and the simplicity of the magnetic timeline. However, with a lack key features such as multi-cam, XML support (both of which Apple has since stated they will be including in their next major release), and the ability to import old Final Cut Pro projects, it seemed only a matter of time before other software companies would start to come out with deals of their own.

Just this last week, Adobe decided to take advantage of the dissatisfaction with Final Cut Pro by announcing an upgrade program for anyone who has bought any version of Apple Final Cut Pro or Avid Media Composer. Basically, those who make the switch will get a 50 percent discount on either Adobe Premiere CS5.5 or Adobe CS5.5 Production Premium. In their press release, Adobe was also touting the ability to remap keyboard shortcuts to match Avid or Final Cut Pro presets. They also lauded their close integration of Premiere with their other popular applications, After Effects and Photoshop. Of course it’s interesting to note that just days before Apple announced the new Final Cut Pro, Avid announced its own switch program in which owners of Final Cut Pro could buy Avid Media Composer for only $950, a significant savings on their usual price.

With all of this activity in the pro editing software marketplace, it will be very interesting to see how each company responds. Of course, don’t forget that Videomaker will have a review of Final Cut Pro X online in the next few weeks so keep your eyes posted to see what our reviewer thought of Apple’s latest product.

BERG and Dentsu London have been exploring and perfecting the ability to use an iPad to create 3D stop animation using a complex light painting technique. By developing 3D models they are able to perform a virtual CAT Scan that generates an outline of the animations, this paired with a strategic series of complex long exposures of 3-6 seconds while moving the iPad through space, they’ve come up with some stellar floating 3D light forms. The Crew shot over 5,500 photographs, only half of those were actually used in the final edit!

Videomaker’s Webinar Training series continues next week with an all new topic: The Art of Title and Graphics. Our live webinars are taught by our experts and feature a wide spectrum of video production and post production topics such as Green Screen and Special Effects, Advanced Editing, Advanced Shooting, and Documentary Production. Next week, Videomaker’s team is pleased to present The Art of Title and Graphics.

Great titles and graphics can add a professional element to your video production. However, if not done properly they can be the tell-tale sign of an amateur.Videomaker’s The Art of Titles and Graphics webinar will cover purpose, design and placement, as well as mistakes to avoid. You will learn how to create great-looking titles and graphics that are clean and professional.

In addition to valuable information, our The Art of Title and Graphics Webinar will also include a live Q&A segment; our team answering your questions. Next week’s The Art of Title and Graphics Webinar starts at 11:00am on Wednesday, September 15th, so be sure to sign up soon!

In this article, we look at the benefits of 2, 4 and 8 core CPU’s. When does an 8 core really make a difference over a 4 or 2 core unit and is there any real benefit to the extra cost?

Background

All new desktops and workstations today have CPU’s with multiple processors or cores on them. This is a relatively new phenomenon which Intel introduced in the second quarter of 2005. Up to that time Intel’s CPU’s all had one processor and were based on an architecture called Netburst that had been around since the early ’90’s. Intel’s original intention was to take Netburst all the way up to 10GHz. By the time the company had reached 3.73GHz however, the amount of heat that the CPU was generating was so great that there was no adequate way of cooling a 4 GHz CPU that Intel was developing without resorting to radical methods like water cooling. The joke making the rounds at that time was Intel had diversified into making space heaters that occasionally doubled up as processors. Intel had dabbled with new computer case designs in an effort to aid cooling, but this effort was for the most part rejected by case manufacturers. They resented having to spend millions of dollars in retooling simply because Intel couldn’t get its heat issues under control. More pressing was arch rival AMD’s introduction to the market of CPU’s that were proving to be faster yet cooler than Intel’s offerings. This was a shock to Intel. The company had been dominant in the CPU market since the late ‘80’s yet its products were now being outperformed by a much smaller upstart with nowhere near the resources that Intel had.

Intel’s response was the Pentium D line of CPU’s. This was a crude product with basically two single core processors on a single piece of silicon. In truth, this was only a partial solution. The vast majority of applications at that time did not take advantage of multiple processors and since it was based on the same Netburst architecture, there was still the same heat issue to contend with.

Finally in the summer of 2006, Intel introduced the “Core” architecture, the company’s first new CPU architecture in over a decade. The Core architecture was 30-70% faster than previous generation CPU’s yet ran significantly cooler. The new architecture had been developed in Israel and was based on a design that was originally destined only for laptop CPU’s. This new design however was fast with such low energy requirements and heat output that it was modified for the desktop market. The resulting Core architecture was a resounding success, with CPU’s that were significantly faster than products from AMD. Intel quickly regained lost market share and since then, the company has never looked back. Intel has resorted to a two year development cycle for its CPU’s. Minor tweaks are made to the CPU architecture after the first year and a complete revision takes place after the second. In fact, the shock that Intel got from AMD in the first half of this decade has generated an atmosphere of real innovation within the company. They are now cranking out CPU’s, which are fast highly energy efficient processors. No other company in the world comes close either in terms of speed or efficiency.

In keeping with its two year timetable, Intel introduced a completely new architecture in November 2008 and named it Nehalem which again has made significant strides over the previous Core architecture.

The Contenders

In this review we examine how four different CPU’s fare when attempting to transcode “The Battle of Britain” from MPEG-2 to QuickTime. We use a highly popular application called handbrake to do this. We use handbrake because it uses all the physical cores available in a CPU. It is highly popular with users who want to watch their DVD’s on an iPod.

The four CPU’s we are testing are:

1. AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+. This CPU was introduced on May 31, 2005. This CPU was beloved by computer enthusiasts everywhere and was instrumental in destroying Intel market share and causing a real shake up at Intel. In benchmark after benchmark, AMD’s CPU’s wiped the floor with Intel’s offerings until Intel introduced a new architecture in mid 2006. At the time, it sold for around $700. We include it here to show just how far CPU’s have come in the last three or four years.
2. Intel Celeron E1500: Celeron is Intel’s brand name for its budget CPU’s. They are usually identical CPU’s to their mainstream brethren, except that some of the CPU memory or cache is disabled. The E1500 is a dual core CPU running at 2.2GHz and is based on the Core architecture.
3. Intel i7 920: This is a quad core CPU running at 2.66GHz with exactly the same architecture as the E5520 except that it can’t run in tandem with another CPU as the E5520 can.
4. 2 x Xeon E5520: The Xeon E5520 is a quad core 2.4GHz CPU based on the Nehalem architecture. We use two of them in an 8 core workstation.

Each CPU is tested with 4GB of RAM on Windows XP Pro.

The Results

The Conclusions

• The most obvious conclusion here is that in video rendering and transcoding, more cores are better. CPU’s 3 & 4 are quad and 8 core machines respectively. CPU’s 1 & 2 are dual core. The quad and 8 core machines are four times faster at completing the same task.
• CPU 1 has a frequency that is 10% slower than CPU 2, but since CPU 1 has 8 cores as opposed to the four of CPU 2, it is able to complete the same task 15% quicker. In other words when comparing CPU’s with the same architecture: More cores at a slower frequency are more efficient at transcoding than fewer cores at a higher frequency. This is one reason that I advise customers that plan to do a lot of video rendering and transcoding with their new workstation that it is better to choose a slower 8 core than a faster 4 core computer.
• As stated above, CPU 2, the AMD processor that was beloved by gamers and multimedia power users and cost $700 in 2006 is barely faster than today’s Celerons which retail at less than $50. This is one indication of just how far processors have come in the last three years. If you are struggling to edit video or photographs with a computer that you bought before June 2006, you now know that all the marketing is not just hype! You do have an option.

Unfortunately, as implied above, not all applications make efficient use of all the cores in a CPU. Multiple CPU cores represent a significant paradigm shift in software programming because in order to make efficient use of all cores, the CPU has to be able to process instructions in parallel as opposed to sequentially as was the case with single core CPU’s. For example, games such as Crysis rarely make use of more than 2 cores. This is why companies that specialize in gaming computers don’t usually sell 8 core workstations – there is no performance gain so it is difficult to justify the extra cost.

As shown above however, photo and especially video editing take significant advantage of 4 and 8 core CPU’s. This is worth noting if you are a photographer or a videographer who has to work to deadlines – multiple core CPU’s will significantly improve your productivity. Finally, more cores mean better multi-tasking – the ability to run several programs simultaneously. This is especially true of the Windows 7 operating system which has been specifically developed to take advantage of CPU’s with multiple cores.

Choosing the right CPU for Digital Content Producers.

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Regis Mencer is principal of Cerise Computers, a custom computer company dedicated to helping video editors choose the best hardware for their software needs.