The Craft

• Prepared Looks - Impress your clients by having a nice selection of different 'Looks' and 'Treatments' to show your clients when they walk in the room. It helps to establish a common language and what they like (or don't like). This post includes some suggestions for a few initial looks you might want to have at your fingertips. (AaronWilliams.tv)

• Music Videos and Epic Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Chocolate - Mmmmm... Sandwiched by two pieces of DaVinci Resolve. Yummy. (VanHurkman.com)

The Tools We Use

• Autodesk Smoke: The Avid AAF Conforming Workflow (area.autodesk.com)

• Auto-Function Cheat Sheet: Part 2 of 4 - This time Avid Media Composer's auto- commands get documented. (MasteringFilm.com)

• The Simplest Test Chart You'll Ever Need - Amen, brother. Now all we need is for a test chart to actually make it into our suites... (ProVideoCoalition.com)

• New Arrival: Assimilate Scratch Lab - It's in the house. Get 'em while they're hot! (BHPhoto.com)

• Gradiest: Wireless iPad Multi-Touch Color Correction Surface - For use with Cineform's Neo and Neo 3D (NOT for Go Pro's Cineform Studio). The link is for the Vimeo demo. (vimeo.com)

• Chromagic: Wireless iPad Multi-Touch Color Correction Surface - For use with FCP 7. A fantastic implementation. Check it out. (nattress.com)

• Keyboard Overlays for Smoke & DaVinci Resolve (expo.nabshow.com)

• Win A Red Rocket Card! - You read that correctly. But you need to sign up via Facebook. And explain why you deserve it. (FaceBook.com)

• Little Frog Stumped - Why outboard scopes? To make you aware of problems like THIS. (LFHD.com)

• Avid: Exporting Split Multi-Track Quicktimes - Workaround for getting 4-channel splits into a self-contained Quicktime. (Community.Avid.com via @digitalreb)

Tools You *Should* Use

• 'Crash Analyser' Saves the Day - This is a terrific tool from one of my favorite software vedors, Digital Rebellion. On the Apple Support Site you can see first-hand the kind of insights it provides into otherwise inscrutable Crash Reports. (discussions.apple.com via @digitalreb)

Tools You *Might* Use

• NextLAB: On Set Data Wrangling and Post-Production - This is a Press Release, but it'll be interesting to anyone dealing with file-based acquisition during production. (DefinitionMagazine.com)

Outside 'The Box'

• Does Size Matter? - A roundup of the latest crop of large sensor HD cameras (FilmmakerMagazine.com)

Edumacate Yer'self

• The Great Camera Shootout: Episode One - The 2011 edition of Zacuto's wildly successfully Emmy Award Winning 2010 shootout has been posted. This year, the focus is on cinema cameras. (Zacuto.com via @bkmvincent)

• Technicolor's CineStyle for Cannon 5D, Explained, Visualized with Recommendations - FXGuide does its typical excellent job in this video - exploring why you'd want to load up and use the recently released Technicolor CineStyle Log profile.
  
  Including using LUTs and Red Giant's LUT Buddy. Plus, the advantage of the Technicolor profile for green- and blue- screen VFX work. Plus, an interview with one of the folks from Technicolor explaining what this picture profile does, and does not, do.
  
  If you or your clients do ANY 5D work, you owe it to yourself (and to your clients) to watch this. (FXGuide.com)

• Archiving For Indies v002 - Sacramento, California based VAR, Silverado Systems, has released an update to their White Paper on Archiving for Indie content creators. I never read v001 but just downloaded v002. It's almost free (requires a Tweet or Facebook shout-out) and a quick glance proves it's worth way more than you're paying. Read it and learn. Oh, and when you Tweet - let them know the Tao sent you! (Silverado.cc)

• Review: Fellowship of the Rings, Extended Edition - Another informative post comparing the original BluRay release to a new, completely remastered Extended Edition of this, the final film in the Trilogy. The grading is substantially different. They've got the screenshots. (BluBrew.com)

• CineGear Expo Roundup - NoFilmSchool.com does a good job rounding up videos from people who attended the Expo. (NoFilmSchool.com) 

• What Are Those Darn F-Stops, Anyway? (MasteringFilm.com)

• Large Corporate Installs of OS X Lion May Be Pretty Easy - The link is a direct PDF download from Apple about how to image Lion from an App Store download. (dl.dropbox.com via @silveradosys)

• DSLR Video: High-End Looks On A Middle Class Budget - From a live presentation. 1 hour. (vimeo.com)

Take a Deep Breath

• Job Posting: Colourist, New Media - It's a RED 4k gig. You must have a reel. You must have an IMdB credit. They will pay you nothing. Can you feel the collaborative spirit here? Yeah. Me neither. (Exhale, Slowly... and no, no link)

Commencement Season

• Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Royal Academy, 1796 - "The more extensive, therefore, your acquaintance is with the works of those who have excelled, the more extensive will be your powers of invention;" Good thoughts on the power of studying those who are successful. (Underpaintings.blogspot.com)

• Conan O'Brien: Dartmouth College, 2011 - "Whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity; and with clarity comes conviction and true originality." True, for much of the speech Conan's very funny. But the second half is very personal. A strong speech. (YouTube.com via Lifehacker.com)