This cute little guy is the brain child of Sharkteeth Films.  It’s a website series designed for MTV it has promis for sure.   Shark Teeth claim that the series is for 7 – 12 year olds but it appears a little dark for the little ones who are just approaching the age of reason ( 7).  I’d say it’s great for 12 and up, but hey what do I know… at 26 I’m pretty out of touch with the tweens of today.

In case you were wondering, Small Foot is a costumed athlete, not totally CG.  I thought he was a muppet / computer hybrid.

“The style will consist of cutting-edge CGI, well-crafted sound FX and contemporary music. Smallfoot and the creatures he meets are played by actors wearing costumes. The actors chosen are martial artists, parkour athletes, acrobats and stuntmen capable of doing the insane flips, leaps and stunts required for the Hollywood-style action sequences.”

This is The Biz Media’s head of production, Justin Brennon Smith, trying out the office’s new T2i with a manual focus on the most feisty of subjects, Yoshi.

The lense being used in this video is not designed for moving subjects, so focusing takes a lot of… focus.

We are currently hotly debating our next camera purchase.  To Seven or to Five Dee? that is the question.  Until recently the 7D from Cannon was the gold standard for commercial quality 1080p video, recently cannon updated the firmware on their 5D line to allow for similar performance, complicating matters.

Now, the 5D is the higher-end of the two cameras, shooting with a full frame sensor – enabling better low-light and enhanced depth of field.  The 7D on the other hand has dedicated video buttons and a more established quality, which experts consider very close to 35mm film.

We are pretty much set on the 5D for it’s low light capabilities and enhanced audio capabilities, but we are still torn. or maybe we should just get a pair of T2is

What is your advice? please comment below.

The crew at ReelSeo have done a massive in-depth analysis of how closed captioning in Youtube benefits SEO.  Don’t toss that script after it’s read, upload and Youtube’s time coder will apply it for the audio impaired and general SEO.

We at The Biz Media have not been uploading our scripts , this must change.  For everything that we have uploaded already, we will download Youtube’s automated captions, edit them and re-upload them.

First impressions with Youtube Leanback are satisfactory. The recommendations provided were relevant to my interests and provided some decent surprises. The only issue that I have is that on the PC full screen doesn’t happen unless you f11 the browser, this is unacceptable.

I just want this on my xBox.

With the production of the the TEDx Toronto teaser, which was launched today we wanted to present

“The  universal nature of the TED conference with a Toronto aesthetic”

As is clear with the final product, we took  this motif quite literally.   The infinity of space intercepted by our favorite TED talks, ideas about the human condition spiral in to form our pale blue… err… red dot.  Unsatisfied with stock Toronto time-lapses, The Biz Media crew camped out for 5 hours at Poison St. on the east side of the Toronto Harbor to capture the sunset.

View Time Lapse TEDx Toronto in a larger map

We used the Cannon 7D to capture a series of 460 photos from a Cannon 7D, snapping one photo every 30 seconds from 7pm to 11pm, we were able to try our new Intervolomintor.  When we first started shooting, our shutter speed was set at 1/2000 of a second, by the end we were shooting at 13 seconds a frame.  We actually can’t wait to try this again, this time from the Toronto island with a complete 24 hour cycle.

The Biz Media will continue to produce all future video content including a multi camera live stream of TEDxToronto, bringing the world to the ideas of our fair city.

The iPhone 4 has three capabilities which make it the first pocket sized video production device that will suceed.  A very high resolution display so myultiple clips can be onscreen clearly, 512mb of ram to actual run the software and iMovie which is simple, fluid and already familiar to many. The addition of multitasking is an absolute nessisity as well, could you imagine getting a call while rendering?

When it comes to ground zero video, or video uploaded during or right after an event I believe that the iPhone will be where it’s coming from.  Witness something, edit and upload it without hesitation, no PC required.

There is a problem though, Apple does not allow users to upload HD video directly to YouTube by default.  PixelPipe will allow you to upload your vids both in batches and without bandwidth restrictions, it’s the way to go for video enthusiasts.

It took this long?  Really?   A new service come about that will give easy access to music for YouTube uploaders.  It’s cheaper than stock music and far far FAR superior.

Friendly Music is what the Internet has needed for a long while, an easy and fast source for legit music to be used in personal productions.  For obvious reasons the music supplied on Friendly Music cannot be used for commercial purposes.

If it wasn’t for the fact that The Biz Media employs music virtuoso Andrew Cariboni, we would be all over Friendly Music for our personal projects.

While the shakes weren’t felt at The Biz Media office — we work in a concrete box — The Biz Media writer Josh Saltzman was rattled while at home.  He captured great footage of the whole ordeal.

Dear Mr. Jobs,

As professional video editors and animators, our work-flow depends greatly on our ability to render and encode in a timely manner.  The lack of any Mac related announcements at WWDC is disconcerting for my production studio as we would like to upgrade our Mac Pros and Apple Cinema Displays.

The current revision of Mac Pros were released almost a year and half ago and the accompanying 30″ cinema screenhit the market almost 4 years ago.  We have been considering purchasing PCs because of the availability i7 Hexacore processors, which would really help with our rendering times.  Of course we are currently committed to Final Cut Pro, which will pose a problem.

Since we use Adobe’s After Effects and the rest of the Creative Suite, we are considering a move to Adobe Premier.  This will be painful to say the least, but in the end it could save a lot of time and thus money.

It’s clear that recent the slew of Apple hardware released is generating much excitement and high regards and for good reason. Your iOS based hardware units, including the iPad and iPhone are solid and revolutionary.  Business is good at Apple, new and existing  customers are buying your products in droves. You must remember one thing though, your professional users have always been your most loyal customers, ignoring their NEEDs for faster  high-performance hardware is frustrating.

It appears that Apple is slowly moving away from fostering platforms prime for digital media production and towards media consumption and hobbyists.  The “just works” ethos is fine but digital media professionals, especially in the video and animation space also need a assurance that things work effectively.  It’s not obscene to believe that the i7 Hexacore processors will reduce rendering time by significant percentiles, this is why we can only wait so long.

To tell you the truth Mr. Jobs, the longer I have to watch a progress bar, the less thrilled I am to have (be) a Mac.

Regards

~The Biz Media