6:00 pm - What's the BuZZ?

6:06 pm - Richard Ostella and Brian Ceponis - Executive Producers 24K Films

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Brian Ceponis graduated from the University of Notre Dame. After graduating, Brian went to work for SEI Investments in Philadelphia and then transitioned to Federated Investors in Pittsburgh where he was responsible for helping to grow a broker/dealer subsidiary to $5 billion in assets under management. Bria's passion for volleyball drove him from the office to the professional ranks, and he earned a spot on the roster with VBC Val-De-Ruz Sport in Cernier, Switzerland. After his volleyball career, Brian joined Confluence in Pittsburgh and became Senior Account Executive and Managing Director for their operations in Dublin, Ireland. Hollywood came calling a few years later, and Brian made the move to Los Angeles where he co-founded 24K Films.

A native of Detroit, Michigan, Richard has served his country, attended Columbia College, Chicago and then worked for Panavision. From there, he quickly shifted from rental coordinator to freelance grip. This position gave him the grass roots experience in media that has lead him through the ranks where he&Mac226;s now currently one of the producers on Fit Nation for the Discovery Channel's Fit TV network.

6:21 pm - Charlotte, NC Regional BuZZ

Steve Kahn - Owner Edit on Hudson and Producer of What's on in Charlotte.

6:26 pm - Pick our Brains

Your chance to get your technical and creative questions answered. This week we talked about: Motion Keyframes in Final Cut Express

6:32 pm - Forrest Maready - Developer of "Traffic" - node-based editing for Final Cut Pro XML

Forrest Maready is the developer of Traffic - the first node-based editing tool to work with Final Cut Pro XML data, whatever the source. Traffic, adds non-linear functions to Sequences and Bins based on nodes like the processing nodes used in Apple's Shake compositing software. Each node adds some functionality or processing to the source. As the creator, Forrest Maready, says "The traditional timeline interface presents the editor with the question 'When do you want to do something?' Traffic takes a different approach and asks 'What do you want to do?'.

Forrest developed Traffic between jobs as a Flame Operator and Avid DS Online editor. Frustrated with the inefficiencies of the timeline interface and enamored with node-based compositing toolsets, he set out to create a node based design that would appeal to editors and post-production companies who were looking for a way to streamline their complex post-production processes. In addition to picture editing and visual effects work, his background includes work as a sound editor, an ADR engineer, a 24-frame playback operator, and location sound recording.

Traffic handles logic-based tasks that otherwise would have been delegated to an Assistant Editor, so in many ways Traffic can be considered to be an automated Assistant Editor with functions based on logical "if this is true" "then do this". If there's another tag in the Bin then add it to the spot and create a new sequence named after the tag's clip name and output it to an XML file.

As well as this logic-based workflow, Traffic also allows for quick and easy updating. For example, if the font is wrong in the Sequence of Lower Thirds generated in Traffic, changing it in one place will change the font for all the Lower Thirds; if there's a typo, changing the spelling once will correct all instances.

We'll learn from Forrest what inspired him to create Traffic and what he believes are the implications for professional editors. There are case studies on the Traffic website that demonstrate some of the potential: for example how to automatically add lower thirds to a Sequence based on the clip name and duration, so the right Lower Third is added to the appropriate clips, with automated fade up, fade down and length durations as set. Another example shows how to shift through a Sequence to separate effects clips from non-effects clips, to send to the appropriate parts of the post-production chain. But my favorite automation step was to automatically add pre-rendered tags to the same spot, outputting the completed spot into one long Sequence or individual Sequence for each tagged spots.

6:50 pm - BuZZ in Depth

We'll take the important BuZZ from the week and look at it in depth so you know what's really important now, and what will become important in the future.