Rachelle had a clear vision of what she wanted in the video and we both love how it turned out. Check it out below:

Check out the latest issue here: http://lapetitemag.com/current-issue/

After months of waiting after NAB, Final Cut X is finally here – as soon as I get my hands on it I’ll write a full review, but for now here are a few things worth noting….

Magnetic Timeline
The timeline as we know it has been completely redesigned. At first glance it looks as though it’s more intuitive and fluid which is a plus. Currently there is a lot of limitations when it comes to editing starting and ending points of clips – especially when there isn’t enough media to do a transition. A potential drawback could be the lack of frame by frame precision in trimming clips. This has been necessary for surgical edits especially when it comes to audio.

Media Organization
This is a very welcome change – FCP has been antiquated for years when it comes to managing media – as projects have grown more complex and video has gotten higher in resolution, storage and media management have been a nightmare. Every editor that I teach has their first big meltdown when they open a project to find the dreaded “Offline Media” warning and has felt the pain of searching and reconnecting all that media.

It isn’t clear how the new FCP stores the media (I’m guessing that it may pull it into a project file similar to iMovie rather than a simple EDL) but taking advantage of meta is very nice as well as the algorithms that automatically identify key characteristics. The browser looks very nice – a huge improvement from double clicking each piece of media to see what’s inside Scrubbing footage now can be done like photo library rather than a icon archive.

64 Bit
This is perhaps the biggest leap forward – no more limitations on RAM and Processor… if you have a beast of a machine then great – throw all you got at it. This also opens up the market for rack based render farms

Integration
One of the big questions was weather the suite would remain. Looks like Apple officially killed a number of apps in the suite and integrated them into FCP or Motion – namely Livetype (which for all intents and purposes was dead with Motion 4), Cinema Tools (which is commonly used to conform high frame rates to lower frame rates), Color (looks like it’s fully integrated), Soundtrack Pro (which was never very useful – audio engineers use Logic or Protools and most video editors use Garage Band to score if they need something original), and DVD Studio Pro (given that there is no Blu-Ray authoring as of yet, Apple may be betting on physical media being a total thing of the past).

Audio cleaning, color correction and grading, and sound editing all are integrated in the new application. This makes the most sense to me given that in my experience I rarely went outside of FCP to do anything else unless it couldn’t handle it. I’ll keep my current versions of Color and DVD Studio pro to do what I need, but I’m sure I’ll depend on them much less.

All in all, this is a welcome rebuild of a staple editing application and my guess is that Adobe and Sony (not to mention DigiDesign) will be scrambling to catch up over the next year.

Way to go Apple.

At last I have finally got these Christmas songs out of my head and in my iTunes library This project was such as blast to work on and it couldn’t have been done without the talents and time of the following people:

Marc Herring (producing/mixing)

Frank Hernandez (bass/kids choir/vocal mixing)

Seth Wright (engineering)

Dustin Lamont (drums)

Keila Bates (percussion/hand bells)

Tracy Wilde (vocals)

Kirsten Grove (vocals)

Meagan Murphy (vocals)

Mark Thornton (vocals)

Julie Clark (cello)

Preview and purchase the album here: http://bit.ly/dY5rsK

I was wrong.

And Curtis proved it to me.

After looking at his research and the case he had outlined that extended all the way from thinkers before Karl Marx to our current administration, I came to the same conclusion – our culture is being changed from the inside out by a movement bent on transforming the ideals of liberty and freedom to consolidated power in the hands of the few in the name of the public good. The path to this end is the subject of Curtis’ film, Agenda: Grinding America Down.

After being introduced to this project, Curtis graciously asked me to co-edit his film, lending the gifts God has given me to this project. Over the next year, we worked to bring this film to the cohesive presentation that it is today. I am privileged and humbled to be a part of this project and honestly, the credit goes to God alone for the inspiration, success, and continued blessing on this film.

Curtis first got his inspiration to make Agenda at the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival, and fittingly Agenda was honored as Best Film in this year’s festival with a $101,000 cash prize – further evidence of God’s blessing on this family and this film. You can see the winning moment and Curtis’ acceptance speech here: http://www.saicff.org/multimedia/videos/festivalhighlights/

Thank you Curtis, for asking me to be a part of this project, and thank you Jesus for making it all happen.

To order you copy of Agenda, visit AgendaDocumentary.com – here is the trailer for the film:

Visit expansioninternational.org to donate or get involved!

I both loved and hated the final episode of Lost, which is arguably one of the most well-made and thought provoking shows ever on television. I’m left with a sense of satisfaction with the completed character arcs, and dissatisfaction due to the answers the show provided for the mysteries it raised.

I’m not in the camp that the ending of the show disregarded the answers – I think that they answered the questions that were raised, however it seemed to fall short on the creativity scale for me. I would have preferred and ending whereby Jacob’s goal was accomplished… in the mythology of Lost, Hurley was the incorruptible soul, so to me it would make sense that all the characters would pay for their sins and Hurley would emerge as the human reset button on depravity, taking on the role of redeeming humanity.

Of course, as a follower of Christ, there is only one Redeemer, and maybe this is why the writers of the show chose to avoid that storyline. Ultimately the story isn’t about redemption of mankind, but about redeeming the characters in the show.

The fact that they completed their redemption in the afterlife is reminiscent of recycled paganistic religion or even the construct of purgatory that everyone seems to be comparing the alternate reality to, but don’t mistake the warm fuzzy reunion for an accurate picture of the afterlife. Rather, use it as a starting point for a conversation about the afterlife.

Lost was and is my favorite show on television – it will be a long time before someone tops it and I really do appreciate how the finale honored the journey of each of the characters that we’ve come to know so well over the last 6 years. What’s better is the fact that we have a show that explored themes of the divine and of humanity and has provided us with a great platform to talk about the Gospel.

Here’s a great review by James Harleman, a pastor at Mars Hill church relating to the themes of Lost. You can see more of his reviews at cinemagogue.com.

Here are the videos that I made for the event.

Brilliant

Thanks to Keila Bates who cast the vision for this project!