Events Rewind

On October 2, 2008 the DC Avid Users Group held a meeting at Future Media Concepts in downtown Washington, DC. We had a little over 20 people in attendance. Our main speaker was Charles Hoff of the DoDEA (The Department of Defense Education Activity). Charles spends a lot of time working in both Media Composer and After Effects. His presentation focused on the fine points of successfully moving a project from the Avid to After Effects and back again. He spent quite a bit of time discussing different color space issues and explaining what you have to do to avoid distorting your colors or your luminance values as you move back and forth. This is an important point to understand as most files (quicktime, etc.) don't contain this metadata, or the data in the file is often inaccurate.  Charles also discussed how it is important to keep your files organized so the project can easily be moved to another system or archived for later use. There were many excellent questions from the group, which kept the conversation focused on the real-world problems that our members deal with every day.

Our second presenter was Lindsay Lacher-Katz of MediaSilo. She flew in from Boston to tell us about a service that her company offers. MediaSilo is a low cost subscription service that allows editors and post houses to post video clips on the web for client review. She told us that their most common package is only $99 per month and allows for more or less unlimited use. MediaSilo automatically converts your uploaded clips to Flash and posts them on a page for your client to review. Clients are given a user name and password to access a special web page. Clients can make comments at specific points in the video. Editors and producers can review this feedback and use it to easily make the required changes. Lindsay offered everyone a free MediaSilo account with limited use so we can try it out.

 
Wilbur Allen took some great pictures during the meeting and he also helped out by selling the raffle tickets. Dave Kristiansen of EFX Media helped people sign-in upon arrival. The raffle was a great success. Brenda Bergin at Avid sent us a bunch of great Avid goodies. My favorites were the hand powered flashlights, which could also run on batteries. The group took in over sixty dollars for our treasury. Thanks to everyone for supporting the group.