Lights. Camera. Name Badge
Paul discusses the future of Class on Demand during his interview with LiveStream at NAB
NAB week was hectic with significant traffic in two book stores, where we had prominent displays. Paul was running from one hall to another to a string of meetings with manufacturers, partners and the media. Some great things happening – keep watching this space!
While he was there, Paul was interviewed by Amanda Duncan from OneSource on the LiveStream booth. Paul describes who Class on Demand is and provides an overview of the breadth of courses we offer.
Paul also gives a sneak peak at Studio Backlot, a brand new initiative coming soon for video enthusiasts from Class on Demand. To watch the complete interview click on the image in this story.
Days of Their Lives Learns from COD
Residents who made careers in television continue to produce programming in retirement.
The Motion Picture Television Fund Retirement Center in Woodland Hills, CA provides production tools for residents to produce their own programming. Distributed on a dedicated cable channel at the facility, residents watch Channel 22 exclusively for the residents, about the residents, and made by the residents.
Programming is varied from standup routines, documentaries, interviews and a host of other programming. Most of the residents, at one time, made their careers in film and TV production so there’s no lack of experience. Like Marty Seidman who was a greensman for numerous TV shows in the 70′s, including Gilligan’s Island, and now dresses the community spaces with plants and flowers.
The staff approached COD with a request for training and we were happy to help such a worthwhile cause. “It’s fantastic to see the history of show business represented by so much talent at the retirement center,” says Paul Holtz, CEO of Class on Demand. “The fact that the residents are still open to learning new, powerful software tools like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere, in order to produce their programming is really impressive and we’re happy to play a small part in the future of Channel 22.”
To watch the full story from NBC Channel 4′s, Gordon Tokumatsu, click on the image in this story.
Get Caught Up in the Vortex
Doug Jenson and Vortex Media are the best in the business at teaching you how to use a video camera. They just released three brand new titles:
Doug doesn’t just tell you “what” a feature does, he also explains to you “why”, “when”, and “how” to use it.
Presented by well-known XDCAM expert, Doug Jensen, this in-depth video provides easy-to-understand explanations, real-world examples, step-by-step tutorials, suggested settings, and 
proven techniques that are simple to put into practice. There is simply no better way to learn both the fundamentals and advanced features of Sony cameras and state-of-the-art tapeless XDCAM workflows. In fact, this is as close to a one-on-one training session with Doug Jensen as you can get without actually hiring him for personal instruction. You can count on Doug to get you up to speed on all of the camera’s features and functions — plus share his favorite tips and tricks for getting great shooting results.
Interviews are the foundation of video and television production and are essential to almost every type of program. For today’s high definition productions, the quality of interview lighting and the overall “look” of the setup is more critical than ever. Regardless of your budget, what type of camera you use, what kind of video you’re shooting or how much time you have to set up, there’s really no excuse for not consistently shooting great looking interviews. How to Set Up and Shoot Awesome Interviews with LED Lights is now available on COD.com
Wizards of OS
Getting Started with Windows 8 now available on COD.com
(click image to see more)
COD has always kept a current set of titles for the latest operating systems. The introduction of “Getting Started with Windows 8″, instructed by Dan Gookin, means we are staying true to form.
If you’re still plugging away on Windows 98 (you know who you are) and have not played with Windows 8, it really does have some slick features. First and foremost, they’ve put all the things you really care about in the new Start screen (see image to right). Tiles on the Start screen are connected to people, apps, folders, photos, or websites, and are alive with the latest info, so you’re up to date at a glance.
Windows 8 has been designed to work with only a mouse and keyboard, with touchscreens, and those with both. Whatever kind of PC you have, you can easily switch between apps, move things around, and generally find things you want easier.
Dan takes you through over four hours of instruction to demystify Windows 8 and all of the little “do dats” that make this generation one of the most user friendly OS yet. Check out all the COD OS training titles here.
Gift of Education Pays Off
An example of the creativity with Photoshop of a Singley Academy High School freshman. Click on the image for a gallery of their work.
The Jack E. Singley Academy in Irving, Texas serves a low-income district of the city. The Academy calls itself a “technical high school” and aims to give students interested in technology and arts a head-start for college.
Steve Poirier, a career videographer, producer, graphic artist and photographer, is in his second year teaching students at the Academy in the Digital Media Art program. Steve has worked in corporate, commercial and broadcast video throughout his career and decided to give back to his community through teaching. He teaches freshman year at the Academy.
While the Academy is quite literally “the High School on the Hill” students come from a predominantly low income community. “For some freshman students it’s their first real introduction to computers and we teach basic PC operation,” explains Poirier. “We take students through a curriculum of graphic arts, photography and video production” he adds.
Resources are limited and budgets are slim at the Academy so students team up to tackle course work and projects. During the video production activity students are assigned various roles such as; director, camera operator, lighting/grip etc. Following basic classroom instruction on lighting techniques and shot composition, projects get increasingly more complex through the latter half of the year from music video and interview techniques, to news production and documentaries.
Students have access to the Adobe CS Suite and become quite proficient in Photoshop and Premiere. “We start freshman out with Movie Maker but the level quickly leads to Premiere Pro. I’m amazed and inspired by how fast students pick up the software and demonstrate such creativity. A gallery of Photoshop images can be viewed by clicking on the image in this story.
Steve approached Paul Holtz, founder and CEO of Class on Demand with a plea for help. One of the founding principals of the company is the Gift of Education program, that provides access to COD training for students and faculty. We provided online access to Steve’s freshman class to Adobe Photoshop and PremierePro CS6. Our thanks go out to educators everywhere who teach the next generation the love and passion that can be delivered through graphic arts.
View Gallery of Student Images
We have a Winner!
Diane Herzberg, a winner of the COD NLE contest
“Not Less Editing” a winning entry into our NLE acronym contest last month. This gem submitted by Diane Herzberg.
Diane got her start in media production at a MCAT, the public access station in Missoula, Montana. She enjoys both the creative and technical aspects of video production. If she didn’t have a video camera and so many stories in her head that she would like to develop, she could easily slip into a life of Graphics Programming in C.
From her 3/4-inch tape editing days to her DSLR present, Diane has done about 60 projects ranging from documentaries, historical biographies, narrative shorts, PSAs, and event videos. This year she is working on a documentary of the prominent local figure of the early 1900′s, dabbling in Flash animation, creating some comedy shorts, delving into her first stop-motion animation, and will debut at directing in a 48-hour film competition.
Diane migrated back to Adobe with CS5 Production Premium about three years ago. It took about two-minutes to reconcile with her PC-based inner child. She is currently using CS6 Production Premium.
She is a part-time software/hardware engineer and dabbles in comedy in Fargo, North Dakota where she resides with her cat, Knothead.
Tim Kolb Could be in Seventh Heaven
Tim Kolb directed this very realistic CPR training for Meridan Studios (Click the image to watch the video)
Tim Kolb, an Adobe® Certified Expert, and Class on Demand’s Abobe® Premiere guru, is back in the studio this month producing his latest training. As the phrase goes, “we’d love to tell you what he’s working on but then…”
Tim is an experienced director and post production pro for television commercials and corporate video productions. Over his career, spanning 27 years, his vast knowledge of Adobe® software has helped him develop successful productions on Video, CD, DVD, and the Web for a variety of clients large and small. Tim has earned many accolades for his work including an Emmy.
As the director on a Meridian Studios production for Gold Cross, Tim was faced with creating a scenario on video that would be used to open a CPR training session with dramatic intensity that leaves students ready to learn with no doubt as to why CPR is important.
A father/daughter fishing trip on a cold day in November on the Wolf River in New London, WI goes bad when the daughter falls into the frigid water without a life jacket. In this case the father was portrayed by the client (the External Education Coordinator at Gold Cross) and the girl was actually was his teenage daughter. After the girl falls in the water and the father tries to rescue her with an oar, the canoe capsizes. The rescue is on, and the realistic action is captured by Kolb and the production crew, including Director of Photography, Tony Mata on the underwater camera.
“Sometimes the logistics with a shoot this complex can be challenging,” explains Kolb. “The client-scouted location was in a bend in the river with strong current and too deep for my diver/cameramen or the actors to stand.” Aesthetics are one thing, but for safety reasons, we moved the shoot area to a part of the river that was about 4 feet deep so anyone in the water could stand up in what was a relatively strong current.
The day of the shoot started before dawn. County and local law enforcement, rescue, and fire personnel were on site with an armada of emergency vehicles and rescue boats, getting staged and ready for their scenes. Local boat owners were employed to control boat traffic up and downstream as well as additional boats for makeup/wardrobe and a large pontoon boat was used with a jib for overhead shots to allow 2 camera coverage along with the crew in the water. Establishing shots on the water were handled by another videographer from shore before the crew boats were positioned and anchored.
Coordinating all the vehicles was a logistics issue as well as a continuity challenge. “We had police vehicles, two ambulances, fire and rescue service vehicles, 2 rescue boats and their tow vehicles, and a host of production vehicles and personnel on the set, which was basically a small parking area and a single-lane boat launch ramp,” explains Kolb. “Because we could squeeze only about 8 hours of shoot time out of the daylight we had, we shot the whole piece out of sequence, monitoring the location of each vehicle for each shot.”
“With shoots like this, you have to resign yourself to the fact that something will go wrong”, Kolb concluded. ”Between a leaky canoe, a pontoon boat adrift after losing engine power, and walkie talkies being fed to the fishes, no one had thought to verify the activity on the other side of the river.” A resident seemed to wait for the first call of “action” to start to chain saw a tree down, making audio acquisition impossible. Luckily, diplomatic efforts convinced the neighbor to saw another day.
Council employees save money while learning
The London Borough of Tower Hamlets provides innovative training programs for employees
Through EPCIS, a scheme run for employers by Accentuate Training Limited, employees of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets can take delivery of a brand new computer or iPad together with their choice from dozens of software titles under an innovative training program offered by the council. Under UK tax law, training is tax exempt. The employee selects the type of device they would like to receive their training on; computer or iPad, then selects the training course(s) they would like to learn. They pay for the training program with a modest monthly deduction from their regular salary over the two-year term of the scheme. They are given a computer to use for the duration of the scheme and at the end they can keep the computer if they wish. As training is tax exempt, the employee is not required to pay income tax, National Insurance contribution (Social Security taxes), or VAT (sales tax) on the value of the computer and the training. For the employer, this also eliminates their need to provide National Insurance contributions on behalf of the employee for the value of the given benefit, currently 13.8% of all deductions. London Borough of Tower Hamlets is due to save £25,000 per annum through their latest launch of the scheme, which began at Christmas 2012.
The training packages start from around £25 per month (about $40) for 24 months. This includes the free use of a computer, the latest Windows 8 and Apple Mountain Lion operating systems and Microsoft® Office (for PC or Mac) with accompanying training, and three years’ support and warranty. By comparison to buying the same package at retail, the realized tax-exempt savings to the employee can be significant; usually more than 50% over the equivalent high street price.
The EPCIS program benefits the employee and employer alike. The employee receives the latest computer technology and training programs at a significantly reduced price. Plus they are able to make themselves more valuable to their employer and more qualified in the job market. The employer fosters an environment of employee training and benefits from increased knowledge and employee productivity. The financial benefits to the employer, through national insurance tax reductions, can be significant as more employees take advantage of the program year on year.
The London Borough of Tower Hamlets, which serves London’s East End, has been offering this program to its employees through a partnership with Accentuate Training Limited, who came up with the tax efficient EPCIS Scheme. Accentuate provides the computer platforms and tax advice, and works with COD’s UK reseller, ISV Group, who delivers and installs the training software programs. Not surprisingly, our operating systems training for both Windows and Mac are popular titles. As is our Adobe suite of training from Photoshop to PremierePro. While it’s clear that the London Borough of Tower Hamlets is not teaching all their employees to become the next Martin Scorsese, having access to such a wide variety of training from COD, as part of this innovative training program, is a huge benefit to the employee in their work and personal life.
The Talented “Crish” Meyer
Title sequence for the Talented Mr. Ripley produced by Chrish Design. Click image to see their port folio.
Chris and Trish Meyer are the founders of Crish Design (formally Cyber Motion). The company name is a nod to their friends’ mashup of their first names. Chris and Trish are world-renowned for their instructional books and videos on Adobe After Effects. The After Effects Apprentice Series contains 16 separate chapters covering every aspect of this amazing software tool.
At Cyber Motion, they were one of the first companies to produce effects for major motion pictures using desktop tools. They have also created promotional videos for corporate clients from Apple Computer to Xerox. Their design and animation work has also appeared on shows and promos for CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, The Learning Channel, HBO, and PBS. They enjoy working in unusual formats, having animated for IMAX, CircleVision, the NBC AstroVision sign in Times Square, and the four-block-long Fremont Street Experience in Las Vegas.
Chris and Trish devote much of their time, from their home in the East Mountains area outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico, producing world-class training but they are always on the look out for work that allows them to stretch the limits of their desktop tools and creativity. One such project was the title sequence for”The Talented Mr Ripley,” staring Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow. The entire eight-minute opening sequence was kept in the Cineon color space, consuming over 200 GB of storage. The title sequence is a throw back to the Blue Note jazz album of the 50′s and 60′s and was composited entirely in After Effects. You can see more of Crish Design’ port folio here.
The New Face of COD.com
The new face of COD.com (click on the image to see for yourself)
You spoke, we listened and we’re proud to introduce the brand new classondemand.com. The new design provides easy navigation to the title you’re looking for. Search by Product, Topic or your favorite instructor. We’re a video-based company so, as you might expect, video plays a prominent part of our new website. Plus, our current top sellers are featured together with other recent releases in each of our major training categories.
“We’ve dramatically expanded the number of titles we carry through our own production and our publishing partnerships with Pearson and Peachpit (see Class Matters October),” explains Paul Holtz, CEO of Class on Demand. “Many of these titles are for IT professionals and software developers and those titles were hard to find among the hundreds of media titles we carry for professional producers and enthusiasts. The new homepage delivers top level navigation for our growing diverse audience.”
From our customer research, most visitors to COD.com know what they’re looking for. They know who develops the product such as Avid, Adobe, Genarts, etc. or they know the subject they are looking to learn more about such as: Compositing, 2D graphics, animation, etc. Some people told us they only watch training with Sue Jenkins, so we even gave them a way to find training by instructor.
We provided a top level menu to quickly navigate to the content you need. Lots of customers told us that their training purchase decision is often based on the fact they just purchased new software or an upgrade and find themselves stuck learning new features or updated operations. They need training now! Our online training library is the answer but previous navigation sometimes made it hard to find exactly what you were looking for immediately. We hope you’ll agree the new homepage and site navigation fixes that – tell us what you think, after all, there’s always room for improvement!
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