CURRIE VISUAL MEDIA ONLINE COMMERCIAL FOR THENALA.COM
 SELECTED  A WINNER IN THE 33^rd ANNUAL TELLY AWARDS

Newport Beach, CA – The Telly Awards has named Currie Visual Media as a Bronze winner in the 33^rd Annual Telly Awards for their online Insurance industry video for theNALA.com titled “Daddy’s Boat.”   With nearly 11,000 entries from all 50 states and numerous countries, this is truly an honor.  The internet video was honored with two awards, one for media targeted to the insurance industry and another for lower-budget production.

The humorous spot highlights the importance of having local agents review policyholders’ coverage regularly, and is seen on insurance agent members of the National Association of Local Advertisers websites across the county, as well as the association site, theNALA.com.

The Telly Awards was founded in 1979 and is the premier award honoring outstanding local, regional, and cable TV commercials and programs, the finest video and film productions, and online commercials, video and films.  Winners represent the best work of the most respected advertising agencies, production companies, television stations, cable operators, and corporate video departments in the world.

A prestigious judging panel of over 500 accomplished industry professionals, each a past winner of a Silver Telly and a member of The Silver Telly Council, judged the competition, upholding the historical standard of excellence that Telly represents.  The Silver Council evaluated entries to recognize distinction in creative work – entries do not compete against each other – rather entries are judged against a high standard of merit.

“The Telly Awards has a mission to honor the very best in film and video,” said Linda Day, Executive Director of the Telly Awards.  “Currie Visual Media’s accomplishment illustrates their creativity, skill, and dedication to their craft and serves as a testament to great film and video production.”

“Working with the team at theNALA.com on their online commercial initiative has been a real pleasure as a producer and director,” said Currie Visual Media President Victor Currie. “Online budgets can be challenging, but they gave us the creative freedom to work around those challenges and we ended up with something special.”

About Currie Visual Media

Currie Visual Media is the production company of director/photographer Victor Currie, headquartered in Newport Beach, CA. Currie has overseen projects for Fox Television Studios, A&E Networks, satellite broadcasters, syndicators, and more. He has directed award-winning commercials in both the USA and Europe, multi-camera live and live-to-tape broadcasts, and corporate marketing media. For more information, visit www.currie.tv.

Contact Currie Visual Media for inquiries: info@currie.tv or call (877) 741-5990

I remember first visiting the old Channel 13 studio in LA in 1966 with my dad (I don't remember exactly why, as I was only six years old at the time, but I do remember visiting the set of Dialing for Dollars at one point, so I'm guessing Dad was doing some kind of appearance or exhibit at the time and promoting it. I wonder how many people actually watched that show... But I digress). It's being demolished now, and having spent much of my life and career in-and-around broadcasting, I couldn't help feel a twinge of nostalgia as the big old dishes lay in the dirt. It felt like a metaphor for the broadcast industry today.

The Drobo people overnighted me a new drive chassis. I popped the old drives in and everything was still there working perfectly, without any reconfiguring. 6 Terabytes of data/photos/video clips safe and sound.  Good product, great support.  Thanks Drobo!

There are huge gaps when I simply thought that what I was doing was more crucial than my important social media responsibilities--you know, stuff like work and charity and board meetings and other superfluous things.  It seems that I have not lived up to my responsibilities to inform/entertain/annoy my online friends.

Sorry about that.

Of course, I've got several dozen if not more Facebook postings and at least 100 tweats since my last blog posting, so what the heck...

Catamran off Newport Harbor. ©2011 Victor Currie

With some testing under my belt now, I'm saying goodbye to the program until (if) Apple gets its act together and makes it work for collaborative workflow.

I've been using Final Cut Pro for the last five years, but I'm not a fanatic about it like many others. It's functional, and I vastly prefer Apple hardware and OSX to Windows.  It was better than Adobe Premier Pro at the time when I started using it, and I wasn't an Avid interface fan.

Unfortunately, Final Cut Pro 7/Final Cut Studio 3 is stuck in 32-bit architecture land, which is fine for people working in HDV and the like, but for those of us moving video and still files around from our Canon 5D Mark IIs and the like, it's way to slow and plodding.

I've been using Premier Pro intermittently for the last eight months or so for two main reasons: It saw HDSLR files natively in the timeline, and it was built on 64-bit architecture, so for the 70+ percent of what I've recently cut, it was a vastly faster workflow.

While I was initially impressed with FCPX's speed at working with HDSLR files in the timeline, and love the background transcoding to ProRes, it just doesn't work for me.  I hate the "events" based file structure, and it's just too clunky right now.  While I usually count on Apple to point the way to the future in design, completely eliminating the ability for professional filmmakers to work intuitively eliminates any speed advantages that the program and its keyword-based search capabilities.

There's a lot of great potential in the program.  In fact, it's that potential that Apple showed off in pre-release previews that probably backfired on them.  The integration of some of Color's functionality, and the auto-match clips idea are huge.  But that's not enough when you can't work happily with others.  As a producer, I often look to others to do animations and other services that are out of my editorial skill set.  And on larger projects when I'm either directing or producing and having someone else post, I--and everyone I know--need a collaborative workflow.

So for now, I'll just bye for now to Final Cut, and hope that the inevitable updates will make it worth coming back.  And thanks to Apple for waiving their rules about not refunding App Store purchase and giving me my money back.  I'll  be using it for the Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 upgrade.

In 1994, when most people were still on tape, a partner and I evaluated the up-and-coming non-linear editors of the period, narrowing at the end to Avid Media Composer, Media 100, and the iMMix TurboCube.  We ended up going with the iMMix because its interface made complete sense to me, and it did almost everything in real-time.  We built a facility around that and upgraded it to several seats of its successor system, the Scitex StrataSphere.  These were fast (and expensive) machines that used proprietary hardware to do the vast majority of editing in real time.  That's why I didn't go with Avid. I hate rendering with a passion, and back in those days Avids were clunky, slow, and a pain to work with (though their vastly superior data management which survives to this day made them a better choice for people doing long-form film and television).

The decision to go with the more faster, more stylish and cool interface made some sense at the time, since 90 percent of the work work that went through our post department was creating regional commercials, corporate and investor relations video, and editorial projects for others (infomercials, etc.).  In the long run, it wasn't a good business decision, since we were an LA-based company and lost out on a lot of editorial work we could have taken in the down times had we gone with Avid.  When you're investing in expensive systems, you need to keep them working to pay for them.

What does all this have to do with the new Final Cut Pro X?  Perspective.

Just as Scitex told all of us TurboCube users that their new system was going to blow us away with it's new bells and whistles (and 50-layer compositing with four-layer real-time previews!), Apple has released a version that isn't ready for prime time, and suffering big-time backlash for it.

Fortunately for Apple, it has virtually unlimited deep pockets and can ride out the storm as long as it gets the more pro-oriented features turned on quickly (which I have little doubt they will).  Scitex, which in my opinion had what is still the best non-linear editing interface ever released with the StrataSphere, couldn't weather the storm as their initial release wasn't stable enough (and in fact drove us out of the post business because we couldn't reliably guarantee outside clients that the system wouldn't freeze up), and they dumped their video division off to Accom, who didn't seem to have a clue how to sell to end users instead of their core clientele of video engineers, and finally killed the product line and its successors altogether.

The new FCPX is scary fast.  For someone like me, who likes to make editorial decisions quickly and move on, that's great.  It even blows away the speed of Premier Pro 5 on my system (which has a beefy nVidia 4800 card to get a lot of real-time performance from Adobe's Mercury Playback Engine).  I've been doing a lot of spot work lately shooting on Canon 5D Mark IIs and 7Ds, and Premier's 64-bit architecture allowed editorial to move so much faster that I dragged myself kicking-and-screaming in the past few months in that direction (despite my dislike for the way Premier make effects handling kind of a clunky After Effects-lite) because FCP7's older 32-bit system and transcoding requirements were driving me crazy.  FCP7 felt as slow as editing on an Avid in the mid-90s.

If--and I qualify this is a major IF--your primary business is video-for-the-web, and you do not need to interface with the larger professional broadcast/film post-editorial world, FCPX is pretty darn impressive for a 1.0 release (and we do need to keep it in perspective that this truly is a 1.0).  For fast-turnaround corporate work and regional commercials, I think it's going to be awesome within a few months of updates.  I'm going to use it over the next few weeks for several projects that I know can stay within the program, and from my initial tests think it will be great to work with, because as I mentioned before, when it comes to editing, I'm a speed freak and it's really fast (especially if the color correction clip matching lives up to the hype).

On the other hand, having interfaced a lot over the years with studio, network, and ad industry technical requirements for video (on both sides of the fence as an editor, a post supervisor, and a producer), I wouldn't think of using this initial release for anything that's going out-of-house.  The limitations to interfacing with other programs and being able to work within a shared network infrastructure smoothly are deal breakers at that level.

But we have to remember that 98 percent of the people doing video today are not working in the studio system.  They are content creators working as small companies and one-person-bands, and for them the barrier to entry to create good looking content just got lowered even more.  Living outside LA now, that's probably 90 percent of my video work as well these days too.

The question will be whether the next few rounds of updates will iron out the issues for the professional post community, or whether Apple has decided that the general content-creation business in the new-media world is where Final Cut's future lies.  If it's the latter, I don't doubt Apple's stock price will continue to increase because the web is screaming for more and better quality video content right now, and that demand isn't going away any time soon. 

So for now, it's sucky for professional post, but pretty awesome for the rest of the business.  I can see myself using it a lot once I get the new interface down.  For creating news segments, it's a high quality reporter-friendly interface that has to be looked at seriously as a cost-conscious solution for field editorial.

But I live in both worlds, so for the first time since 1994 I'm seriously evaluating Avid Media Composer again.