Video is traditionally a sit-back-and-watch type of media. Not so with the ClickBerry Editor from Actio-Media. This editing program allows viewers to interact with your video, click on links for information or make decisions. For example, you shoot a 24-year-old friend’s birthday party and just like you would tag that friend in a photo, you could create a hyperlink to their profile so that others may learn more about the birthday boy or girl. (You’re still a boy or girl at 24, right?)

Many businesses will seek to connect your clicks on objects in the frame, such as people or products, like invisible buttons that will open up new tabs with pertinent information. Of course, creativity will come in handy, since I foresee scavenger hunts, trivia games and great reference tools here. There’s no telling what the producer will send you to. And I do mean “send you” because, upon clicking one of the hyperlinked objects in a video, a new tab pops up while the video continues, it has a good chance of becoming distracting if you don’t pause the video at the same time as your click.

The reality here is that  businesses are constantly looking to get a message delivered to an interested audience, if you do come across a video edited with ClickBerry Editor, expect a well directed ad, but hey, what better way to reach exactly the intended audience? The other inherent aspect of videos with interaction are replays, and online video already does this very well. One of the examples brings up choose-your-own-adventure as a very interactive video, and another starts with multiple decisions, the more often the video will be played again and again, just to find out all the different scenarios.

Promoted for its simplicity and three-step publishing, it is up for you to decide just how you want to use ClickBerry Editor.

ClickBerry Editor costs $289 and comes with 10GB of cloud storage. There is also a free app for Facebook making it as easy as possible to share with people you know.

On February 24th, major Hollywood motion picture, Act of Valor, was released to theaters nation wide.  While this isn’t earth shattering news on its own, it is worth noting that the film was shot on the Canon 5D Mark II DSLR. Here is a camera that anyone can buy at their neighborhood electronics store being used on a blockbuster film. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if you have any desire to make a movie, you have no excuse not to do it now!

“Nothing is as small and nimble as our Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera packages,” said Act of Valor’s director of photography. “Never have I been so excited by the creative possibilities a camera offers cinematographers.”

Now, obviously, this doesn’t mean that Act of Valor’s Hollywood level production budget is attainable for everyone, as the cost of lenses alone can dwarf the price of the DSLR body, but it does indicate the crumbling of one of filmmaking’s most daunting barriers of entry.

Act of Valor isn’t the first national release to use the camera. The 5D was also used to shoot the opening title sequence for the 35th season of Saturday Night Live, as well as an episode of House titled “Help Me” which first aired in 2010 on Fox.

The continued popularity of prosumer DSLRs for video have caused the market to explode with new products targeted at DSLR shooters. Canon’s 7D has become quite popular as of late, and Nikon’s D800 and D4 appear promising.

“More than anything, what I love about the Canon 5D Mark II is that it’s part of a global revolution,” Hurlbut continued “The 5D Mark II is causing a paradigm shift in the production industry because it provides film-like quality combined with lightweight operation and amazing mobility. It’s also affordable, so it’s giving a lot of people a voice who’ve never had one before. I think the style of filmmaking that’s going to come out of the use of the 5D Mark II will be a whole, fresh new style that hasn’t even been named yet.”

While I would argue that the same could be said for many DSLRs currently on the market, it is true the accessibility of cinema ready cameras is changing the face of filmmaking.

You can read the entire press release from Canon about Act of Valor’s use of the 5D Mark II on Canon’s web site.

Whether you’re just starting out in video production – or have been into cinematography for years, taking a video production course can help you break out of a rut with new ideas as you meet-n-greet with people who share your interest in video making.

People from all over the country – and all over the world, come to our small town of Chico California – 70 miles north of Sacramento, 2 hours east of San Francisco – for our three day workshop that includes lighting, shooting, editing and audio techniques as well as production planning and location and studio  setups. they learn to work with a crew, and study the many crew positions in the video production process including directing, audio mixing, lighting design, and, of course, shooting.

From our basic workshop that covers a bit of every aspect of being on a crew to our  intensive courses that include Intensive Editing, Intensive Lighting, Advanced Shooting, and Advance Lighting – we enjoy teaching our workshops and these tight-knit groups always leave on Sunday exhausted, but with a new knowledge and understanding of the field of video production.

this week’s Videomaker workshops includes Basic Production and Intensive Editing.

People from all areas of video production come to our workshops: those in video advertising and starting a home business; those interested in possibly moving on to specialized cinematography schools, making online documentaries or looking for television production jobs in the future. We get teachers and hobbyists, career-changers and those looking to enter festivals, contests and film competitions.

Videomaker is a good place to learn – and connect, and we recently added more dates to our 2012 lineup:

May 4-6:  Basic Production Workshop and Intensive Lighting Workshop
June 1-3:  Basic Production Workshop and Intensive Editing Workshop
Sept 14 -16: Basic Production Workshop and Intensive Lighting Workshop
Oct 12 -14: Basic Production Workshop and Advanced Shooting Workshop
Dec 7 -9: Basic Production Workshop and Intensive Editing Workshop

For those who have attended our workshops in the past, we are also updating some of the stories we shoot, the gear we work with and the class schedules. We hope to see you here someday.

Storyboarding is an often overlooked component of making great video. The best directors around will tell you that whether you’re making a feature length film or aiming to create the latest YouTube video sensation, a good storyboard will both ease you through the production and shooting process and make your post-production work easier. But not every videographer is also a gifted graphic artist. And while we all say that the storyboard doesn’t need to be beautifully drawn and that simple stick figures are usually good enough to do the trick, we all have occasionally let the perfectionist in us slow us down while we try to get our storyboard sketches just right.

But while the visual perfectionist in all of us may be stymied by a lack of basic drawing skills, we don’t have to give up. There are any number of storyboarding software applications available to do the heavy artistic lifting for us. As reported by Videomaker in the past, storyboard products run the gamut from simple to robust, from free to moderately priced. With a little research, you can make your “pre-visualization” work a strength of your video project, rather than an embarrassing weakness.

Atomic Learning Storyboard Pro is free and has a few features, from entering shot titles and types to importing existing images and video clips. that might be all you need.

Celtx Plus combines tools for writing scripts, storyboarding scenes and sequences, sketching setups, breaking down and tagging elements, and preparing informative reports for cast and crew. It’s iPhone and iPad friendly.

Storyboard Quick, from PowerProduction Software, allows you to import a script from any professional scripting software, choose the type of shot per scene, select the customizable actors from a Character’s Palette library, rotate props from and expandable library, pick a location for the scene (Interiors and Exteriors or your own photos), and utilize awesome export capabilities, including HTML. If drawing isn’t your bag, Storyboard Quick is definitely worth a look.

Toon Boom’s Storyboard Pro is a robust application that allows artists to conceptualize the story and bring it to life as animated storyboards. It boasts vector-based drawing tools with pressure sensitivity when connected to your tablet and preserves your own style with ink brush, air brush or crayon texture brush. Keyframe any object and enjoy onion skinning, multi layer Photoshop imports, overlay time code, and real-time playback. Toon Boom’s Storyboard has the ability to define start and end camera positions, and zoom and rotate on-the-fly. It can integrate with your editing program making it one of the most powerful storyboarding tools on the market.

Whether you’re using one of these capable applications or simply sketching your story out on a legal pad, the key is conveying your concept to your crew. Even if the “crew” consists of you and your best friend who is standing in as actor, gaffer, and sound recorder, a good storyboard will help you get your film out of your head and onto the screen.

Earlier this year, Lytro unveiled a camera that lets you take a photo, then adjust the focus afterwords. The current model only shoots 1.2 megapixel still photos (1080×1080 to be precise), but Lytro CEO Ren Ng recently dubbed using the Lytro technology for video “a possibility” but noted that it would need more processing power. Considering Lytro is a consumer product, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that a prosumer priced camera could meet the processing demands of a Lytro-esque camcorder. I predict that not only will we see this technology used in video, but similar technologies will work their way in as well.

Being the first product of it’s kind, it stands to reason that what Lytro is currently showing us will improve with time. That is, it will be able to handle higher megapixel photos and video. Just look at the evolution of the digital photo in the last fifteen years as an example of how fast the technology could advance. I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear about a new generation Lytro product next year with double the resolution.

So if adjusting focus in post is really in our future, what’s to stop technology from bringing us to the point where we can adjust exposure in post as well? We can already do amazing things with RAW formats, but there’s still no solution for fixing truly under or over exposed footage. Technology advances at a pretty remarkable rate, and anyone who could rid the world of exposure issues would make a fortune patenting the technology.

Given how far photography and video has advanced in the last 100 years, it’s not to difficult to imagine that in a decade or less, all we’ll have to do is light and frame our images and not have to worry about focus or exposure. Of course, such technology will never eliminate the desire to manually adjust video and stills in the field, but everyone, from consumers to professionals, makes mistakes when they shoot. Having cameras that captures a wide variety of focal depths and exposures simultaneously will be handy for everyone. Considering how much time and money these kinds of cameras would save in re-shoots alone, it’s only a matter of time before someone develops the technology to make them a reality.

This is HP’s first workstation to have it all. A 27-inch display that snaps open makes for easy upgrading of internal parts, the Z1 features high end Intel Xeon processors and NVIDIA Quadro graphics, with more than one billion colors from A-FRC technology. This brand new computer should stand up to the rigors of video production and render intensive projects.

The physical form of the Z1 is easy to handle since it eliminates the large desk-hog tower and does not require tools to get internal access. With seemingly little space for storage, options had to be made available, so between SSD, RAID, removable drives, memory cards, slot-load Blu-ray writer, and 7.2K and 10K SATA, most editors will find a method that fits their current workflow. Speed is always a question for video editing computers and with room for two internal 2.5-inch HDDs and one 3.5-inch HDD and as much as 32GB memory, the Z1 should be fast enough to keep up with lots of computers. For transferring data to and fro, USB 3.0 should suffice. The operation wattage comes to 400, which puts it close to that of mid-range towers.

The rest of the body houses the near 180 degree viewable LED display, IPS panel, 2MP 1080p HD webcam, and front SRS Premium Sound speakers. There are a total of 11 USB ports in and around the Z1, with the important 3.0 ones easily accessible on the side along with other commonly used ports for FireWire, mic, headphone, and media cards. The backside ports add LAN, SPDIF, line in/out, display port in/out and subwoofer. I get the feeling, this machine will make video playback a true joy.

Time may hold the best answer for how well the tool-less upgrades combine with the all-in-one package. Many across the globe will begin testing it for themselves in April when HP plans to make the desktop workstation available. With prices starting at $1,900 the Z1 may not only be a great investment for any computer shopper, but a space saving tool for any video editor.