I learned Magento in and out for about 6 months straight, and well… Now our company is running smoother than ever on it.  It was a large project with close to 10 000 SKU’s.

Above is the video intro page, I shot the segments on the 5d and cut them in Premiere Pro .

Above is the Canadian Landng Page.

This is the flash catalogue conversion.

Now I can build E-commerce sites to showcase the cool stuff like video, photo, awesome graphic design..  A perfect environment to be familiar with for content publishing, it generates income!

At first I found magento very difficult to get used to, but with enough time it’s possible to pull massive projects off single handedly,  that would have taken a large team not too long ago..

Warning: Music is a bit of a downer.  Skip to the motorcycle video if you want something a little more “upbeat”.

Nostalgia (flare-free version) from Edgar Maguyon on Vimeo.

My first shots with the camera would not even play on my MacbookPro 2.0Ghz.  The raw shots off this camera are 1920pix X 1080pix at about 40MB / second.  That is a ton of info just to play back.

Getting the footage to work in an editing program in real time is another thing all together.  Here’s my workflow.

The transcode into the AIC codec will bring the file size up quite a bit.  The 5d mkII uses the .h264 codec which saves file size but eats your computer power.

Once your files are all rendered into the AIC codec Premier Pro CS4 [or CS3 I guess] should scrub the files in real time.

NOTE: You can only encode to the AIC codec on the Mac,  It is  a free codec that comes with OS X.

There is a lossy compression going on in this process.  The alternative intermeidate codecs for editing are ProRes [Final Cut Studio] or Avid DNxHD.  Both of these are closer to a lossless compression but also require more power to decode and edit in real time.

Have fun!

UPDATE:

check the comments, I’ve moved to a proxie workflow, it’s not that hard I promise and it will save you countless headaches if your longing for real time renderless editing with a mobile workstation.  I am running a MBP with 2.0Ghz processor.

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RED Camera Demo

The “ripple effect” I mentioned was caused in part by the groundbreaking camera designs that RED has created, crossing over film/video/photo industries like never before…

The significance of this convergence is massive for the visual arts.

For photographers, cinematographers, videographers, and even digital content producers.

It’s not just another camera… Lets take a look at the resolution that this camera can produce.  The 1080p footage that comes out of the groundbreaking Canon 5d Mk2 is less than half the size of the frames coming off this camera.

DVD resolution is the VERY BOTTOM!

The ability to shoot 120 frames per second at 4k resolution creates individual frames around 10 MP[this varies depending on who you ask], which is more resolution than my old Canon D60 SLR and many other DSLRs can shoot in stills!

Creating amazing content with these new multimedia tools is rapidly changing creative environments.   There is so much oppertunity to get out in the field and create something that has never been done.  Go do it!

I needed to sync a team of PC’s and Mac’s and iPhone, Blackberry phones.  This was not fun, for a while I used basecamp to do this in a roundabout “4 years ago” kinda way…If you are a PC user, use the Google Calender CalDAV method so that you can deliver a shared and 2-way editable calender to both Mac and PC users without excuses..

-  Sync and post ical entries across multiple computers

- Syncs ical to iPhone

- Syncs to Blackberry

- Share to both Mac and PC calenders

- Free and Reliable

Well it look likes Google stepped up to the plate here.  Google Calender mixed with CalDAV is the answer.

I have found this combo more usable than any other free solution.  It can be totally web based, or native across a diverse range of both desktop and mobile platforms.

I am constantly looking for new ways to decrease how much thinking I have to do.

If you work in a crap environment how can you be expected to produce anything but crap?

I find that some of the most straining focus is caused by looking at long lists of folders that all look identical.

I am a huge fan of colour coding folders based on intensity.  I make the “hot” folders red, and the stable ones green and blue.  This way it’s possible to jump immediately to the most traveled folders on your system even if you’re blurry eye drunk.

But colour coding can only go so far.  I’m talking about changing the whole damn icon.. Create a theme of your operating system so that you don’t have to think where things go…

I used icons from the free section of “the iconfactory”, you should head over there and check out the great stuff they have there for new custom os x icons.

Once you download the icon packages, you can copy and paste them onto the default ones in the “Get Info” dialogue box [Commad + I].

Basically you sign up for the service and design your “Sprout”, use their “Sharing tools” or embed the code directly to your blog or facebook page, and thats it!  

The difference with Sproutbuilder is that these widgets actually look sharp!

Another amazing aspect of Sproutbuilder is that any update you make on the Sproutbuilder site will AUTOMATICALLY update all of your published widgets.. wherever they are!  There is no need to update them individually.

This is one of many web 3.0 [yep you heard it!] applications about to hit the market.  Click on the image below to see how strikingly similar to Flash and Photoshop the online interface is.

Although the widget is deployed as a .swf [flash] behind the scenes, the application is built with an Adobe technology called Flex.  Flex uses the Actionscript 3 language to build rich internet applications that can be ported to actual standalone applications [user can install direct on their computer and  run offline].  In addition, Adobe Labs has created “Adobe Air” to convert applications to installable stand alone programs.

Just to get a glimpse of where this is going, my 15 year old brother built this sprout without any help at all…

The ability is here!  The Flex framework is allowing developers to create amazingly portable applications in a fraction of the time it used to.

Now all you have to do is learn AS3 and cash in[:

Peace, 
Frost