# Off-topic Rants

Written by Chris Hocking on 19th July 2014 We recently teamed up with Sportsbet to produce three little funny online videos based around the World Cup. Enjoy!

Michael Shanks recently helped out with Visual Effects on this beautiful and quirky music video for Vance Joy’s debut album, Dream Your Life Away, directed by the very talented Luci Schroder. We first worked with Luci on a TVC she directed for The Big Issue back in 2009 – and it’s so nice to see she’s still kicking goals and creating wonderful art.

Michael Shanks recently helped out on this impressive (and slightly silly) music video for Dan Webb’s debut album Sandstorm, directed by our good friend, Kess Broekman-Dattner. It was colour graded by the amazingly talented CJ Dobson from Pocket Post, and crewed by some of our favourite people in the world (including Austin Haigh, Tom Savige, Jesse Maskell and Glenn Clayton). Enjoy!

One of the most popular blog posts we’ve ever done has been on Calculating Timecode in Excel. Even though it’s now around 3 years old, it still gets a constant amount of views each week. Although the Excel article is still relevant and useful – personally, I don’t actually use Microsoft Excel very often any more, much preferring Apple’s Numbers (which comes free with every Mac; and iPad/iPhone for that matter). Unfortunately however, getting timecode to work successfully and reliably in Numbers has never been something I’ve been able to fully accomplish. Hopefully one day someone puts together some incredibly clever AppleScripts that add this functionality, however in the meantime…

fcpxgrilllogo As someone who spends a lot of time driving from shoot to shoot, I’m a massive fan of audio podcasts. My good old trusty Fifth Generation iPod is constantly stocked up with a huge amount of nerdy film and tech related podcasts such as: – SciFi Idols: Maggie McFee chats about Sci-Fi history, trivia and things you may have missed about your favourite sci-fi film, writer, robot, artist, creator or filmmaker. Maggie is awesome, and it’s great learning the history of such amazing projects and films. – The Nerdist: Chris Hardwick, Jonah Ray and Matt Mira have a very informal and normally completely random and hillarious conversation with someone famous. Listening to this podcast is like gate-crashing a discussion at a house party. – digitalCINEMAcafe: Chris Fenwick & Alex MacLean have an open discussion with industry professionals. Chris and Alex are awesome – and they bring on some truly fantastic guests. – The Edit Bay: Shane Ross tells stories from the edit bay. The bad clients, the disasters, the triumphs… the fun stuff. This is a really short, really tight, really awesome scripted podcast – highly recommended! – The Terence and Philip Show: Terry Curren and Philip Hodgetts bring their not-politically-correct opinions on Avid, Adobe, Apple, post production, production, distribution and pretty much anything they want to talk about. The show has no fixed duration or schedule, taking the form of a free-form discussion between the hosts, who bring their years of industry knowledge to the discussion. Terence and Philip aren’t afraid to talk about extremely complex and technical subjects – which is great. – This Week in Enterprise Tech: Father Robert Ballecer, aka Friar Tech explores the complex, cutting edge world of enterprise technology with IT professionals explaining the ins and outs of enterprise solutions. This podcast gets very nerdy, very quickly – and it’s definitely not film or television related what-so-ever, but if you’re into routers, switches, firewall’s, VPNs and cabling, then this is the podcast for you! – This Week in Tech: Leo Laporte and other tech luminaries such as Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, John C. Dvorak have a roundtable discussion about the latest trends in digital technology. Released every Sunday by midnight Pacific. Leo is king of the tech podcasting world and has created an empire from this little podcast. Highly entertaining and enjoyable. – The Coloristos ColorCast: Josh Petok (a colourist working on reality and episodic television in Los Angeles), Juan Salvo (a colourist and online editor for films and commercials in New York) and Jason Myres (a colourist and post-production engineer in Los Angeles) talk about Film and Television Color Grading, Color Science, and Post-Production. Josh, Juan and Jason are incredibly talented, and very, very smart – and because they work in different markets all have a very different perspective on highly complex creative and technical discussions. – That Post Show: Kanen Flowers has a roundtable discussion with industry experts about the art and science of video, film and post production. Kanen is one of the best interviewers in the podcasting space. He’s super intelligent, and just a joy to listen to – he also gets some of the best experts in the industry to chat on the show. Rather than focusing on the super high end – Kanen really tries to focus on the independent scene, which is fantastic. – Ruining It For Everyone: A weekly podcast for geeks, by geeks. Your hosts Maggie McFee and Christopher Harrington discuss everything in excruciating detail, from video production to how to make your own giant robot. Each week they take a topic, deconstruct it, and if you’re lucky, put it back together without any leftover parts. Nerdy. Fun. I spent a lot of time yelling at the radio. – fxphDOD: John Montgomery and Mike Seymour talk about the inner working of their online training site, fxphd, but also spend a lot of time discussing VFX and film industry issues in general. Very casual, and very enjoyable. – the rc: Mike Seymour and Jason Wingrove talk about digital cinema, filmmaking and cutting edge imaging. I absolutely love Mike and Jason – they’re incredibly smart and enjoyable to listen to. Although the show is quite structured, they’re not afraid to go down some serious rat holes! – fxpodcast: Mike Seymour (and occasionally Jeff Heusser & John Montgomery) talk with industry professionals about high-end visual effects, production and post. This is a serious hardcore interview show. Mike chats with some of the most senior and high-end artists and technicians in the industry and gets extremely detailed and geeky. – the vfx show: Each show Mike Seymour and friends discuss the VFX and filmmaking of a single movie in a huge amount of detail. What’s great about this show is that most of the time you have three people on the panel with completely different views and opinions on the films. Sometimes it gets heated – but it’s always a incredibly intelligent discussion.

I sat in the bumpy back seat of the car gazing out the window, surrounded by rugged cliffs, leaning palms and paddy fields, wondering what my Christmas day would be like this year. As we got closer to our destination, the low clouds began to reveal the volcano of Gunung Gede and the thought struck once again (as it often does in this region) that Indonesia really is a breathtaking country.

Men’s 500 metre In Sochi’s Baby Park Stadium. Created by: Michael Shanks Commentary by: Michael Shanks & Nicholas Issell Featuring: Nicholas Colla and a Banana Special Thanks to: Chris Hocking & Louie McNamara

Michael Shanks recently helped out on this beautiful music video for All The Colours, directed and shot by our very good friend, Edward Goldner. It was colour graded by the amazingly talented CJ Dobson from Pocket Post. Enjoy!

UPDATE (JUNE 2017): The PEAppDebugPreferencesModule.nib file no longer exists in the Final Cut Pro 10.3.4 package, but has been replaced with PEAppAudioPreferencesModule.nib and PEAppUserPreferencesModule.nib. Back in November last year, I was listening to a FCPX Grill episode with Alex Gollner, where he talked about talked about a secret “debug mode” he discovered whilst looking through all the FCPX .plist and .nib files.

Last night, thanks to the fantastic people at the Australian Screen Sound Guild, I had the opportunity to check out the latest ground-breaking Dolby Atmos technology at Soundfirm’s amazing new Port Melbourne facility – the first and only post production theatre in Australia to deploy this truly awesome technology.