John August

Follow Up

iMovie 09 is much better, still maddening

Follow Up, Software

follow upA few weeks ago, I [expressed exasperation](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/imovie-09-almost-certainly-maddening) upon seeing demos of iMovie 09, which seemed to be working hard to fix exactly the wrong problems. Now that I have it installed, I’ve been able to spend a few days playing around with it. And you know what?

It’s actually a lot better.

Yes, that could be damning with faint praise. iMovie 08 was terrible, a one-fingered monkey’s paw of doom. But iMovie 09 is genuinely useful and fun. The new themes are incredibly powerful; throw it a bunch of photos and you’ll have a slick slideshow in under 60 seconds. ((Granted, it will probably look like everyone else’s slick slideshow, so do yours first.)) The filmstrip-like browser is a smart way of showing projects. In addition to new eye candy, many little grievances have been fixed.

To demonstrate, here’s a slideshow of some of my [Africa photos](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/photos-from-malawi) that took three minutes from drop to export. Yes, it could be better, but the point is that it’s fairly competent even on automatic.

A big public thank you to all the Apple folks who clearly put a zillion hours into making it better.

That said, there are still a lot of little grievances. The interface is confusing at times, with a lot of unlabeled buttons, and contextual menus that only show up with a left click, rather than a right click. The only way to save a project is to duplicate it first in the project browser, so if you make a horrible muddle, there’s no going back to an earlier version. ((True: iPhoto doesn’t have a Save command either. But you’re not likely to spend an hour tweaking a single photo. And iPhoto always lets you revert to the original.)) I have no idea why Clip Trimmer exists. With the exception of very short clips, it simply lets you drag the handles you’d think you could in the normal view.

In short, iMovie 09 makes it easy to do very complicated things, and complicated to do very easy things.

By far the most maddening thing for me is iMovie’s bizarre alternative to a timeline, an unlabeled space I guess is called “Projects.” ((If you hover over the double-arrow button that divides top and bottom, it offers to “Swap Events and Projects.”)) As I’ve already confessed…

> Yes, I have the curse of knowledge: I know how an editing system is “supposed to” work, as it does in Final Cut, Avid and to some degree, the original iMovie. But I’m always game for a new and better idea, particularly if it makes heretofore complicated things easier for newcomers to understand.

This Projects space is a mess, no matter what your experience level. For starters, it wraps like a word processor. Every single piece of video you’ve ever seen on the web has had a playhead that goes from left to right. In iMovie, it goes left to right, top to bottom.

And I still have no idea why. It’s a fundamental decision Apple made with 08, and it persists. I wondered if it was to help people with smaller monitors, so I tried it out on my 13″ MacBook. Nope. It’s actually worse on a little screen. You see very little of your movie at a time. On a big monitor, you can make the area big enough to see most or all of a movie.

It’s not like a horizontal timeline is too complicated for the average user. GarageBand is nothing but a stack of scrolling horizontal tracks. (In fact, if you export a movie to GarageBand, you end up with a rough approximation of what the interface could be.)

Responding to the problem it created, Apple came up with Precision Editor, a genuinely clever way to visualize cuts and transitions that I hope and assume will gravitate up towards Final Cut Pro. I think they made the word-wrapping thing work as well as they could.

But it’s a good implementation of a bad idea.

For example, let’s say you need two songs to play — maybe you’re switching back and forth between them. In any other editor, this is trivial — you slice them up and put the pieces where they need to go, perhaps checkerboarding them. But, sticking with its word-wrap philosophy, iMovie only lets you treat music as an envelope wrapped around the whole thing. You can “unpin” music to slide it around, but if you’re coming back to a song six times, you need to add the same track six times. ((Yes, you could do this in GarageBand. But the point of cutting to music is *cutting* to music.))

iMovie 09 does a lot of things right. Some of its choices, like keeping sound effects pinned to a specific frame, are smart. And many of its new bells and whistles, like video stabilization, will be a huge help.

iMovie 10 needs something resembling a horizontal timeline. It doesn’t even have to have “time” per se. Since iMovie makes everything magnetically click together, it’s not nearly as important that the horizontal scale represent seconds. Just give us a playhead that shows us where we are in the project and lets us line up simultaneous events. (The current version comes tantalizingly close at times, such as when you add picture-in-picture, so it’s clearly an achievable goal.)

The new version is good enough that I’ll certainly use it for some projects that I would otherwise do in Final Cut Pro. That’s a big reversal for me.

The biggest TiVo in the world

Film Industry, Follow Up, Television

follow upIn my post on [Cablevision and the infinite TiVo](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/cablevision-and-the-infinite-tivo), I argued that a proposed virtual-DVR service could be a Very Bad Thing for the film and television industry, and anyone who aspires to work in it.

But as a consumer of content, I would love it. That’s why studios, networks, guilds and operators need to keep working on ways to make it legal and cheap to watch any show, any time.

They just need to call it what it actually is: video on demand.

Much of the criticism in the ensuing comments came from one Anonymous poster, who claimed he wasn’t a lawyer, but sure wrote like one. And he didn’t deny that he worked for Cablevision, so it’s no surprise he had a strong opinion and very specific knowledge of the legal [proceedings thus far](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/cablevision-and-the-infinite-tivo#comment-167455):

> If you read the 2nd Circuit holding you will see that it is simply not the case that the holding could inadvertently extend to the very different system you imagine. If the Supreme Court hears the case, neither will their holding inadvertently extend to completely different systems. Agree with them or not, the justices are hardly a group of fools. The Court is certain to tailor the decision quite deliberately.

>That the system you imagine is achievable is irrelevant. Cases get decided based on the facts of what parties actually do, not based upon completely different facts that others concoct, regardless of whether those concocted facts are achievable.

But of course, the point of a blog is conjecture and analysis. And the job of a screenwriter is to ask what-if questions. What if the Yellowstone supervolcano exploded? What if monsters were afraid of us? What if SkyNet developed consciousness?

I’m certainly not qualified to argue about the language of the 2nd Court holding. But I’m very qualified to ask what-if questions. Nothing about the system I outlined in my original post is crazy. In fact, it’s all so reasonable that it seems very likely to be implemented, if not by Cablevision, then by another provider.

Anonymous [continues](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/cablevision-and-the-infinite-tivo#comment-167531):

> Let’s also remember that even when major changes are faced, the only thing that can be assured is that there will be widespread predictions of doom. Doom actually occurring is much less frequent. The Betamax case is an excellent example of such a change that spawned similar predictions of doom for the film and television industry, yet went on to have the exact opposite effect, vastly increasing revenues into that industry.

Revenues increased because *copyright holders* suddenly had an entirely new market for their product, which had hitherto been sitting on a shelf. The system I foresee Cablevision building wouldn’t create a new market. It would redefine an existing market (video on demand) and let them keep the profit for themselves.

I disagreed with almost everything Anonymous wrote, but it was a pleasure having such an eloquent spokesperson for the other side. I was serious when I said he/she needed to get a blog of his/her own.

[Sérgio Carvalho](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/cablevision-and-the-infinite-tivo#comment-167356) wonders if we’re just putting off the inevitable:

> You do understand that if personal DVRs are allowed, forbidding Cablevision’s “community disk” is a stopgap measure. It buys about ten to fifteen years. Moore’s law (applied to physical storage) coupled with codec evolution means personal DVRs will reach a virtually unlimited storage capacity at some point in the near future.

There’s a big difference between unlimited storage capacity and unlimited access to all television aired. Even if you had an infinitely big hard drive, you couldn’t simultaneously record every channel; there isn’t an infinitely big cable coming into your house. No matter what the storage capacity, a personal DVR is still limited to recording those things you’re interested in, or think you might ever be interested in.

[Nick](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/cablevision-and-the-infinite-tivo#comment-167361) offers a perspective from north of the border.

> In fact, in Canada, where the laws are different (though no less draconian in several ways) many cable companies are already offering a service like this: you can watch any show in an on-demand fashion if it is currently airing, but eventually those shows cycle out of your list of available shows.

The U.K. has a similar system, and it sounds useful. It’s the kind of thing networks and providers can offer jointly, with profit for both. While some WGA’ers disagree with me, I think it’s reasonable to define a window of time in which an episode is considered “new,” and doesn’t require any additional payment. ((To me, the window is a week. Maybe ten days.))

No matter what happens with the Supreme Court case, I think you’re going to see the clash between networks and providers become a much more public brawl in the next few years. Recently, Viacom threatened to pull 19 channels from Time Warner Cable when they couldn’t reach a deal. They played rough, with print ads featuring a crying Dora, and ultimately got the deal done.

If a company like Viacom decided they didn’t want their channels recorded on Cablevision’s DVR service, they could make that part of the deal — or walk. Cable isn’t a monopoly anymore. While Viacom would lose a lot of money, they don’t need one cable company as much as that one company needs them.

But again, the smarter solution is to work together find ways to let consumers watch any show at any time for the right price. Sure: easier said than done. But that’s the only way to ensure sustainability.

The rat is dead

Follow Up

follow upLast month, [a visitor](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/the_visitor) made an unwelcome appearance in our kitchen, eating oranges on the counter. He was first caught virtually by my laptop’s iSight camera, then later physically by a classic spring-lever trap.

It was loud; it was unsettling; it was over.

I actually like rodents as pets. I grew up with gerbils and hamsters, and enjoy watching rats in the cages at Petco. If my daughter wanted one at some point, I’d be game. But my qualms about nixing this specific rat were minimal. [Roof rats](http://www.extension.org/pages/Roof_Rats) like this one are not California-native, so trap-and-release would just be dooming some bird or other indigenous creature.

He was apparently a loner. Since his demise, we’ve sealed up a few possible entry points. He likely came inside to escape an unusual cold snap earlier this year.

The Duluth Dilemma

Follow Up

follow upIn [Banging a chainsaw against a tree](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/like-banging-a-chainsaw-against-a-tree), I expressed my frustration at those who complain how unfair it is that screenwriters in, say, Duluth, aren’t taken seriously. It got a lot of responses.

[Mike](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/like-banging-a-chainsaw-against-a-tree#comment-168036) writes:

Why can’t he complain if no one takes a screenwriter in Duluth seriously? If he wrote a damn good screenplay that someone (producer, agent) read and wanted to get involved, why would it matter? ‘Oh he lives in Duluth. Bin it.’…? No. It’d be a phone call and a plane flight away if his or her writing were good enough.

The film world does not revolve around Hollywood or L.A. anymore and less so in the future. I think you’re a great Hollywood writer John and I love your blog, but some of your practical advice is somewhat conflicting and unreal at times. It’s just as hard to get a film off in Hollywood/L.A. as it is anywhere else on this spinning globe of ours.

[Kevin Arbouet](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/like-banging-a-chainsaw-against-a-tree#comment-168079) disagrees.

The fact is, the film industry absolutely does revolve around Los Angeles. Los Angeles is the primary hub for film and television much like New York City is the primary hub for theatre.

And I think you’re misunderstanding the whole Duluth thing. With the exception of those great (and mostly fake) PR articles about some dude who worked in a factory in Maine, wrote a screenplay, mailed it to Alan Horn, and then got a movie deal, screenplays are not sold in that way.

[Paula](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/like-banging-a-chainsaw-against-a-tree#comment-168068) agrees with Kevin.

The point is that you have to be in L.A. to take the meetings that lead to work. The spec sale is a) rare and b) not a career. Most writers write on assignment a good deal of the time, including all those who make a living at it, and many who sell specs never work again.

Kevin and Paula are offering a variation on what I call the “Nashville Argument.” The country music industry is based in Nashville, Tennessee. If you’re a country music singer/songwriter, you could stubbornly refuse to move there. You could record your demos in Denver and put them on your MySpace page and play all the local clubs.

But while you’re doing that, a hundred other singer-songwriters are in Nashville, surrounded by an industry that is looking for the next great song, or the next great star. If you lived in Nashville, every third person you met would have a connection to the industry. You could learn from the best performers and technicians in the world.

Moving to Nashville is a smart, proactive move. But you could stay in Denver and just hope for the best. And if your career never takes off, at least you’ll have some heartbreak to write a song about.

On the other hand, LA is the root of all evil
=====

[From Duluth](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/like-banging-a-chainsaw-against-a-tree#comment-168138) is not a fan of Los Angeles:

So you really take those a-holes who sit in Starbucks sipping on their mocha-cappa-frappe-crappie typing a screenplay seriously? It seems to me that quite a bit of the really interesting ideas that get turned into films come from outside LA (as in the rest of the world), while all the well worn, heavily remade, formulaic films come from LA. This is a major problem with the “industry” right now and it amounts to what can best be described as creative incest.

[Nick](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/like-banging-a-chainsaw-against-a-tree#comment-168162) argues against the stereotypes:

You’re trying to make your point by overgeneralizing — acting like every screenwriter in L.A. is a delusional doofus who sits in Starbucks all day, while the serious creative folks are nested away throughout America’s heartland.

That just isn’t the case. I’m not going to argue that there aren’t good writers outside of L.A., but I will argue (correctly) that there are plenty of jackasses from Oregon to South Carolina who think that they can write a totally awesome screenplay just because they saw The Matrix 40 times. (Pay a visit to the TriggerStreet site if you don’t believe me.)

You’re also conveniently ignoring another important fact when you trash the artistic landscape of Los Angeles. The reason it continues to be the world capital of film is that creative people from all over the world choose to come here to write, direct, act, design sets, and so forth. They don’t just sprout up fully formed in front of the Hollywood sign. They’re bringing their individual perspectives to L.A. because its where they believe they’ll have the best opportunity to express themselves. Most of the time, the output of that expression is deeply flawed. But, as Kevin points out, it’s no different anywhere else in the world. You’re just judging the L.A. film industry more harshly because you’re more familiar with the spectrum of films it produces.

Finally, [The Other Side](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/like-banging-a-chainsaw-against-a-tree#comment-168151) calls me out:

I had always believed that your first concern was with making art; now I see that your primary preoccupation has been with careerism.

Initially, I wanted to rant and rail against you and shake you from your ignorance. But then, you are completely right. If one wants to make a living as a screenwriter then a move to LA is of a huge advantage.

I’m sure you would agree that it was by living in LA that you secured the job of adapting Roald Dahl’s “Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”?

Funnily enough though, Dahl — also a sometime screenwriter — found he did his best writing in a garden shed. In Wales. An entire ocean of solitude away from sushi-lunches and free diet cokes. You were later paid handsomely to rearranged his ideas, and probably far more than any advance paid to Dahl for his novel.

Considering TOS knew about garden shed, I’m surprised he didn’t get the title of Dahl’s book right. But he inadvertently makes my point: you can be a novelist anywhere, even a garden shed in Wales — or Duluth. A novelist can largely function as a hermit. A screenwriter can’t. A screenwriter’s career consists of meetings and pitches and endless social interactions, many of them aggravating, which may be one reason Dahl’s screenwriting career was so brief.