April 2003

MTV News has an article about the making of Shynola’s badass video for Queens of the Stone Age’s “Go With The Flow”. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of technical information in the piece (about all I took out of it is “they filmed the band and then they used a computer”), but they did drop one interesting piece of info: the visual style for the video was inspired by comic book artist Frank Miller, specifically his series Sin City.

These days I find myself becoming less and less interested in comics, but the Sin City series (not to mention Miller’s ground breaking Legends of the Dark Knight), plus Mike Mignola’s Hellboy (soon-to-be a major motion picture), will always be on my bookshelf. Do check them out, if the opportunity arises.

At NAB (which I’m told you don’t pronounce as “nab”), Apple announced Final Cut Pro 4. From what I’ve read, it seems that FCP has evolved from a stand-alone application to a suite of apps. New additions include Compressor (Apple’s answer to discreet’s cleaner?); a scoring program called Soundtrack (which means little to me as I’m not an audio guy); and LiveType, a titling app. And with LiveType comes LiveFonts, an Apple original format for animated fonts, which sounds interesting, although the examples on the site look a bit cheesy. The previously separate Cinema Tools (formerly FilmLogic) is also included. All that for the current $999 price tag. It is scheduled to ship in June.

Apple also previewed DVD Studio Pro 2. Besides having its price cut in half to $499, DVDSP2 appears to have a new interface. There aren’t many screenshots on the site, but it looks like the previous version’s somewhat frustrating flowchart model is gone. Also new are templates and something called “Context Sensitive Drop Palettes”. It should be available in August.