Creative Producers User Group Supermeet

The Supermeet is a highlight of the week at NAB where 2000 show attendees converge to see special demonstrations and presentations for production and post. On the productions side, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera made an appearance as expected although, again, the camera was not monitored so we could not really witness the camera's capability. There were demonstrations of Autodesk Smoke (spectacular) and Premier Pro 6 (very promising). Smoke is an advanced editing tool, with a wealth of new features. In the demo, a tracked, layered mat was inserted into several shots creating a reflection in a character's glasses. The speed and ease of this was impressive. Of course the editor onstage was a whiz, but Smoke makes it very possible to try things out quickly and execute them flawlessly, indeed a powerful tool. It would be great to add this level of experience to our program. This may be a good way to converge some activity between Animation and B&F too. Premiere Pro 6 is a major upgrade pushing Adobe's editing platform into the limelight as a major contender. Given the problematic development of FCPX, it looks as if Adobe is finally realizing that they are sitting on the possible contender to challenge FCP. In the demo, we could see a new look and feel, a vastly improved set of tools and ways to quickly get from stage to stage in an edit.

Although Avid wasn't demoing at the event, their presence was felt. Avid's presentation was the highlight of the night as documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock talked for almost an hour about his past and present filmmaking activity. Spurlock is a big Avid user with a dozen edit suites on the go, collectively working on several of his productions at once. Spurlock talked about the making of Supersize Me. Produced on a shoestring and a fistful of credit cards, Spurlock pushed his credit limits and amassed a credit card debt of $250,000. He was booted out of his apartment and living on a couch at his office. But he persisted and the film was programmed at Sundance where it was a critical success. Even so, a year later, despite the film's success, he was still $200k in debt. But it launched him and allowed him to get funding for subsequent work. Currently he is producing series for Hulu and Google.