Where I lead the BBC follow!

I spent hours last year re-cutting episodes of Torchwood so that my kids could watch it - they are monster Dr Who fans and were devistated when they realised that the spin-off was going out after the water-shed. Anyhow - click the link in this entry's title for details of my workflow.
I was very pleased to see that the BBC are now doing it for me! By the end of season one I was knocking out a dozen DVDs per week to keep up with the demands of school friends!

After Effects, Kona and video colour-space

Final Cut Pro is a proper video app that knows about video hardware. If you have a Kona card (or worse a Black Magic card!) then you ingest YUV data off tape and lay-back in the same way. The colour space is the same throughout the process and there is no colour space conversion.
See a previous entry here for details on TV colour space matrices.
Anyway - we're finishing a project at five and we discover they want to use a feature of the Kona card called Desktop Passthrough (or somesuch) which allows the SDi output to appear as a second GUI monitor. It is a feature specifically for those apps that don't know about video hardware but where having a preview on a video monitor would be useful. As far as After Effects is concerned the Kona card is a second Mac desktop monitor and you can send it's output full-screen to that display. My initial worry was that being an RGB-only program how would the Kona deal with the RGB feed? I imagined it did a quick and dirty transcode, probably not paying any attention to the 601 or 709 matrix (depending on standard or hi-def). We were pleasantly suprised when (after having calibrated the SDi monitor for correct colour in FCP) we found the probe telling us that the whites out of After Effects were bang-on!

Microsoft Research Group Shot

Group Shot helps you create a perfect group photo out of a series of group photos. With Group Shot you can select your favorite parts in each shot of the series and Group Shot will automatically build a composite image. This image was made up from three taken at Sarah's folks' on Christmas day - in one image one of the kids is making a silly face, but in another Brenda has a nice smile - it took about ten minutes to build the composite image. I know you can do this sort of thing in Photoshop but this automates the process entirely. I haven't played about with it much but the examples online suggest that they don't even have to be very similair so long as there are common details the algorithm can find.

End of Torchwood!

The trouble with Torchwood is that it's not really clear who it's aimed at. It contains swearing, blood and sex, yet still somehow feels like a children's programme. Thirteen-year-olds should love it; anyone else is likely to be more than a little confused. Which isn't to say Torchwood is bad. Just bewildering. And very, very silly.

Charlie Brooker, Oct 28, 2006 The Guardian

I said this all along - a series that was ideal for my three except it has a few adult add-ons. Quite quickly I realised I'd get little peace unless I did them a version and so every week for the last three months I've dutifully copied the MPEG2 transport stream file onto my laptop (captured straight from the BBC Freeview mux - see Media Portal in my previous entry) and cut it down (using Video ReDo - again see previous entry) into a version I'd be happy for my seven, eleven and thirteen-year olds to watch. In most cases it's been very easy - just the Father Jack language (¨arse¨, ¨feck¨, ¨girls¨!) - I know they hear it all the time at school and on the bus but the youngest does have a habit of picking up what he sees on the tele and I want him to stay a innocent just a bit longer!

Episode 6 - ¨Countryside¨ was the most brutal (check out the cut-list, right) involving cannibals and required a bit of work to make the story hang together and yet keep it out of nightmare territory! Still - I think as far as cutting a P as B goes it worked out well and we made our own set of DVDs of the whole series (with annimated title screens etc.) which has proved very popular with parents of school friends! If only I had access to the rushes I could do a proper CBBC version!

Now, I could cut some of the extracted Torchwood footage into the Sarah Jane Adventures to make a late-night BBC3 version of that show!