As is readily apparent from some of my past writings and reviews, CINEMA 4D is a very sophisticated, deep and multifaceted 3D animation and design package with such features as high-end subdivision modeling, advanced rendering, dynamics, and animation capabilities.

But that’s only the beginning. Let’s not forget the endless creative possibilities of MoGraph and state of the art character tools. I haven’t even mentioned hair, particles, 3D painting, and UV mapping options. And there’s more. Much more.

With one program offering so many capabilities, an important question becomes: how does one effectively learn, let alone master, all of the facets of an app as deep as CINEMA 4D? True, it does come with reference documentation accessible through the help menu. This is, in fact, done well. But, similar to many other large packages, the standard help menu doesn’t go deep enough in addressing the intricacies of the program or discussing higher level approaches like best practices.

That’s why Maxon created Cineversity. This online repository of video tutorials will take you through all aspects of the program. New users and aspiring gurus can dip into Cineversity’s vast warehouse of knowledge to learn new things, brush up on what they already know or venture into areas that they don’t.

The news here is that Cineversity has recently undergone a major redesign that makes this “University of CINEMA 4D” much more of a treat to dive into.

Users can access tutorials either as free users or as Premium members (which requires a paid subscription). Many of the free video tutorials will help newcomers get started and introduce them to important concepts. However, if you want to go deep, many of those lessons are only available to Premium users.

Another handy feature for Premium users is the ability to make your own playlists, placing the videos in whatever order you like. You might make a playlist about rigging, for example. Watch it whenever you like, and pick up where you last left off since Cineversity keeps track of which videos you’ve already seen and those you haven’t got to in the playlist. Want to brush up on the subject later? Simply resurrect the playlist and watch it again, since it is saved with your account.

However, one of the coolest things about the new playlists is that you can share them with others or even search other people’s playlists. This brings curation into your learning, which is a good way to discover more about a certain subject and find things you may have missed. For those who want a more regular learning experience, Cineversity also pre-curates “official” playlists.

Want to follow along? A number of tutorials offer associated lesson files, and you can download them right from the Cineversity site.

Searching tutorials in Cineversity

If you’re a teacher at a school that offers CINEMA 4D, you might like to set up a “teacher account.” This can allow you to add some structure to the lessons via custom playlists that students access via coupons made available to you. You could then monitor which tutorials your students watch, and make sure they view all the videos in the assigned playlist.

The Cineversity website also offers Cineversity Live, Maxon’s bi-weekly webcast with tips and other info about Cinema 4D. The updated site also features a Wiki knowledge base where premium members can contribute to and share information relevant to CINEMA 4D users and digital artists in general.

Wikis and curated playlists are just some of the up-to-date approaches to know-how on the site. Paul Babb, president and CEO of Maxon, U.S., expressed enthusiasm about the changes, and noted in a prepared statement that the site’s approach will increase “the artist’s proficiency and productivity.”

While CINEMA 4D’s user interface is very intuitive, any one working professionally in the industry knows that regular learning needs to be part of your schedule if you hope to stay current to today’s dizzying pace of tech changes.

Of course knowing a few more tweaks or a better way of working than the next guy can be a critical asset, giving you a competitive edge.

So what’s it cost? Premium membership starts with a one-time fee of $295; you can renew annually for another $95. Not bad if you compare it to the cost of courses at specialized institutes or universities, and a pretty good deal if you want to grow your career.

Cineversity is located at www.cineversity.com

Okay, I know what one of the first questions will be. What’s a review for a consumer-level editing program that retails for around $50 doing on this site?

(You can spend about $85 for the “Ultimate” version, well worth it for the video stabilization app, but especially for the quality titling via good old Boris Graffiti.)

Well, if you happen to be a journalist like me and not a professional editor, Corel VideoStudio Pro X4 is one of the speediest and most painless ways to edit the near ubiquitous amount of video you and I are faced with these days. There are similarly priced apps from Adobe, CyberLink, and Sony. But Corel delivers a fast working app that offers good titling, two concerns of mine at the moment.

The Basics

The app, which runs under Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows 7, sports a well-designed interface that’s flexible, stable and offers useful capabilities such as stop-motion (with onion-skinning so you can see the position of the prior shot) as well as easy Blu-ray and AVCHD burning.

There are some limits, of course. Compared to other programs around the same price, video tracks are limited to seven (main video track, six overlay video tracks, two title tracks, three music tracks and a voice track). While the number of tracks you can work with isn’t limitless like Adobe Premiere Elements, seven still seems plenty for someone like moi doing short news items for a web site. A more decisive lack is that you can’t tag your clips–metadata is becoming crucial for any media-handling these days–nor is search very flexible.

Upon launching, you’re presented with the Corel Guide; it offers, help, video tutorials, and downloads within one compact window. The interface is pretty simple as you have three main modes that govern all your actions-Capture, Edit, and Share. You’ll understand the interface pretty quickly, as most NLEs now offer a more or less similar look: the three-pane view puts content and effects in the upper left, a video preview in the upper right, and the timeline along the bottom portion of the screen. You can move these panels around wherever you’d like, to the point of running some of them on a separate monitor.

Clips are handled in a standard fashion: just drag and drop from your source tray to add it to your timeline. Many other capabilities are similarly intuitive, e.g. you can zoom into the timeline via the mouse wheel. In general the performance is snappy especially if you have an Nvidia CUDA-based card. Along with an Intel Core series processor, it offers quick up rezs to HD when necessary, though I can’t vouch for the quality. The program creates proxies to edit HD files to speed things along.

Double clicking on a clip opens it in the Single Clip Trim window, while the Multi-trim Video tool allows you to set multiple in and out points, so you won’t have to create a lot of separate clips.

Items of Note

There are some “instant” options that you let you toss together a video or add music more or less automatically. But I don’t think anyone with tastes above the average consumer will want to bother with these. A more useful capability allows you to group clips, photos, sound, effects, titles, and transitions into one project file. That’s useful when either opening a project at a later period, or editing on a different computer. In the latter case, as long as that computer has a copy of VideoStudio Pro installed, that setting will gather up all the projects’ files automatically, allowing you to begin editing straightaway.

There are all sorts of other capabilities including 150 easy to use transitions and a text tool with 24 pre-formatted title and subtitle animations. There are also some 69 special effects. While most of them won’t be all that appealing–think glows and image mosaics–you’ll also find image correction tools like anti-shake, color balance, noise reduction, and light enhancement.

You can output all the standard formats-MPG, WMV, AVI, QuickTime, and more; burn DVDs or Blu-ray discs; send the results to mobile devices like iPods and PSPs; and upload directly to popular video sharing sites such as Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo, and YouTube.

Conclusion

Corel VideoStudio Pro X4 compares well with its competition: CyberLink PowerDirector 9; Adobe Premiere Elements; and Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD. You can pay more and get additional advanced features in Avid Studio and Apple Final Cut Pro.

But for fast, painless video editing, especially if you are working on short projects or just need to burn some files to DVD, Corel VideoStudio Pro X4 is a great deal and deserves to be in your app collection.

At last year’s NAB, DaVinci released the first software-only version of Resolve, which it had acquired earlier from the renowned color correction company. Pricing at only $995, the Mac-based software brought a recognized name from high end color finishing suites down to where the average editor and color finisher could afford it.

DaVinci Resolve 8 released at this year’s NAB. Important new features include multi-layer timeline support with editing, XML import and export with Apple Final Cut Pro 7 and Adobe Premiere Pro, support for OpenCL processing (improved results on Apple iMac and MacBook Pro computers), real time noise reduction, curve grading, advanced multi-point stabilization, and automatic stereoscopic 3D image alignment.

Also announced that the show was a free version of the color correction program: DaVinci Resolve Lite. Available for download this past month, the app is in a crippleware version but instead limits projects to SD and HD resolutions, two color correction nodes, a single processing GPU and a single RED rocket card.

Now a useful video has been uploaded to Vimeo. This is a pretty good place to start, as the instructor Warren Eagles of International Colorist Academy takes you on a straightforward path to setting up for your first session.

You can find more help by visiting Blackmagic Design’s page devoted to the freeware version. Creative Cow’s page devoted to DaVinci also has info on using the Lite version.

Sachtler introduced its Cine DSLR fluid head at NAB 2011.

Tomorrow, May 12th, will see the debut of the “first official online extension” of the April NAB convention using something called Virtual View.

Well that’s no more than online streaming to me, but if you didn’t get a chance to go to that hectic annual confab in Las Vegas, this is a chance to see and hear some of what you may have missed. It’s all free, which helps.

You’ll see the requisite product demos and showcases, see a few one on ones with folks like 3ALITY’s founder & CEO, Steve Schklair (the company is one of the leaders in practical, usable 3-D systems) as well as an interview with New York documentary legend Albert Maysles, who received a lifetime achievement award at the show.

Yes, you’ll have the chance for live chats with “industry thought leaders”, downloadable content within the interactive showcases, on-demand playback of recorded sessions from the NAB Show, even a “social media component” that is said to enable “seamless exhibitor and attendee engagement” if you so desperately seek such entanglements.

It’s an all day event too, that runs from 10am-6pm EST

Of course this will come across as a bit more sales pitch than the breathless result of a dogged reporter’s discovery, but you can’t dismiss that selling is the main reason that they hold the April show in the first place.

What to expect

The day’s schedule

Free registration

Most will agree that the mere act of attending classes or earning a filmmaking degree doesn’t make you a filmmaker. Certainly that’s true of prior generations of filmmakers—Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, for example, never completed undergrad film projects since film schools didn’t exist…assuming they would have attended one in the first place. Marty Scorsese remains one of NYU’s most storied film school grads, but Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino picked up all they needed elsewhere.

But MovieMaker Magazine, via its training arm MovieMaker Institute, plans to convince those who hope to write successful screenplays of the value of concentrating for two days on some of the specifics with the likes of Spike Lee, Brad Anderson and Alexandre Rockwell.

To be held this June 11th and 12th at Hunter College, the encouragingly named Screenwriters Success Weekend includes a further discount for the “first 50 people who sign up today”—that’s today as in Friday, April 29th—and who use the promo code MM50. Do this today and you’ll bypass the conference’s full cost ($299) and pay $149.

Again, this is screenplay specific. That oft cited group of “industry professionals” will be in attendance to teach students how to “write a screenplays that sell”, how to ID and find some use for various industry trends, tell you just what must be in your kit bag in order to be your own producer and finally, how to land that “once-elusive” distribution deal, which, unless I’m mistaken, is still pretty elusive for most.

You can find out more about the conference, and how to sign up, by clicking here.

Although its existence might be news to most in the New York production community, Jerusalem’s Sam Spiegel Film & Television School has garnered credit over the past 20 years as pivotal in the renaissance of the Israeli film industry.

Yesterday, attendees at The School of Visual Arts’ Chelsea theater got some idea what the fuss is about at the launch of three days of screenings and talks to celebrate that 20th anniversary. Three of the city’s top film schools, Columbia University School of Arts, The School of Visual Arts Film School and NYU Tisch School of the Arts, are hosting evenings of screenings for students. The Israel Film Center at JCC offers the one public screening this evening.

Among those speaking were Reeves Lehman, chair of SVA’s film school, and Larry Kardish, MoMA’s film and media department curator. Renen Schorr, founding director of the Sam Spiegel school, noted how its start in 1989 under near riot conditions as students at the country’s major arts university demanded a program focused solely on film and television production. Then mayor of Jerusalem Teddy Kollek pushed for the institute to be located in that city instead of the more obvious location of Tel Aviv. Part of that reasoning, as Schorr noted, was an attempt to use the arts to move beyond the ethnic and religious dichotomies that so characterize Jerusalem.

Reeves Lehman credited the school for its emphasis on character and story as expressed in short films, and not the longer feature format that many film school attendees immediately aspire to. The evening’s screenings of Sam Spiegel grad film projects from the past 20 years exemplified that with their mix of quirky, endearing, and irritating characters, with a minimum of special effects save a wobbly, stuffed porcupine which causes a key traffic accident. New York-based producers Anthony Bregman, Ira Deutchman and Carol Polakoff are members of the school’s advisory board.

Later this year the school will launch The Jerusalem International Film Lab, which hopes to build itself to the status of The Sundance Institute. The lab will offer space for 12 “aspiring new international talents” each year, with eight spots available to anyone living outside of Israel. If you’d like more info on the application process, click here.

If the name Sam Spiegel sounds a little familiar, it should. Spiegel, an immigrant from Austria, was the acclaimed Hollywood producer behind classics including The African Queen (as S.P. Eagle), On the Waterfront, and Lawrence of Arabia.

Craig McKay at EditFest Shortcuts. Photo credit: D. Ochiva

You don’t get very many chances to spend an evening screening and interviewing a distinguished editor whose work on movies including Reds and Silence of the Lambs makes him a living legend within the cinema community. (He’s a very modest guy to boot, so he’d never use that attribution.)

I had that chance a couple of weeks ago when I attended the first EditFest Shortcuts, an event co-sponsored by Manhattan Edit Workshop and the Editor’s Guild that included a one-on-one screening and Q&A dedicated to explicating an experienced editor’s career, in this case, Mr. McKay, who talks about lessons learned working with one of the best editors we’ve had: Dede Allen.

My article is now posted on the Editor’s Guild website. If you’d like to see how a major editing talent began, and learned to deal with a variety of challenges in his career, you can read more here.

Rendering of the new Brooklyn College graduate film school. Photo credit: CurbedWire

When it opens in 2013, Steiner Studios’ president Douglas C. Steiner says his venture with Brooklyn College will be the “only graduate school in film embedded on a working lot”.

Mayor Bloomberg mentioned the new school briefly in his “State of the City” address this past week. Variety’s Sam Thielman notes that since Brooklyn College is part of CUNY, tuition would be much cheaper than NYU and Columbia’s programs, even while it fosters “greater diversification of the industry” and gives its students better access to jobs in the industry, according to Steiner.

Here’s the original Variety article.

If you’re a writer, or you’re just curious about some of the story potential of our increasingly networked world, you might want to turn up at this Thursday’s NYWIFT/Marymount Manhattan talk fest, which touches off at 6:30pm.

Stephanie Scott, Casey Brienza, and Harold Goldberg will offer their thoughts about the latest in narrative adaptation such as “Internet-based series narratives” and what’s involved in adapting manga for our market. They offer up a diverse enough group: Scott is the creator, producer and star of The Retributioners, a comedy web series; Brienza is said to be one of the “top manga experts” in the United States; and Goldberg is the author of an as yet unreleased book “All Your Base Are Belong To Us: How 50 Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture”.

Marymount College’s Maggie Bruen moderates the doings. More info here.

Photo credit: Abel Cine

High quality high-speed shooting with a camcorder became practical with Vision Research’s introduction of its Phantom series cameras a few years ago. The company’s imaging chops have continuously improved, and innovations in solid-state storage now make it practical to take these camera systems out of carefully set up insert stages. (You might want to check out one of their Miro crash cams to see how compact the technology has become.)

Now, Abel Cine Tech, which distributes Vision Research products, will offer two levels of courses on VRI’s camera systems. A three-hour introductory course offers a good high-level overview of the basic principles of Phantom high-speed cameras in a lecture environment. Meanwhile, the Phantom Intensive Training course is a full-day, hands-on course for anyone with a specific production in mind.

The introductory course will be held this January 25th at the company’s Greenwich Street East Coast headquarters. More info here.