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Today we found this tutorial for how to make a glamourous ring light for your video machine. More from the creator.

The talk was with Lisa Kavanaugh, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Ask.com.

We aslo hit up the 11th Annual Final Cut Users Supermeet. We showed up early and screened our It’s a Rough Life promo in their open screen theater.

You’ll recognize Johnny saluting the crowd in the vendor area. We then checked out all the new gear, and got a close look at Canon’s new C300. Drool. Unfortunately we did not make it to the presentation stage, instead opting for dinner in Dogpatch. We totally planned to go back… just didn’t happen. Word on the ‘net is that the highlights included CS6 and a change in name for the User Group.

We were deep in a couple of editorial jobs when it came out, so it would have been unprofessional to jump in. Then all the negative buzz kept us away when those projects finally wrapped. At the very least we couldn’t/ still can’t use our Matrox I/O devices with it, so that was a non-starter. Instead, we upgraded our Adobe package and planned to get cranking on Premiere Pro sooner than later. Well, we still haven’t done that either. We’ve been getting happily by with our trusty FCP7, but now there is a new update to FCPX.

It includes:

Bigger and better multicam
Better XML
Support for layered PSD files
The ability to open FCP7 projects with a $10 plugin/app called 7toX (big one for us)
Support from a grand sampling of the the plugin scene, including Red Giant
And finally support for I/O, just not Matrox… yet.

Read more here. And here. Is it time for us to try it out? Have you tried it? Thoughts? Let us know. The FCP7 road is coming to it’s end, but our post-production journey continues. Where should we go from here?

Scot Hampton is a creative director, DP, photographer, video editor, designer, writer, musician, analog artist, gardner, camp cook and a fan of all things analog, digital or a hybrid of both. Read more about Scot.

Below are a couple of his recent photos, check out his site for more!

You may have heard of Scot from his Award Winning video, The Falcon.

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Check out some of his other videos here.

This is a rad video we found on vimeo this morning. It’s by Douglas Koke and is a time lapse of footage taken at the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in Socorro, New Mexico. Read more about it here. Happy Monday.

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There’s been lot’s of controversy on Youtube and Reddit about the legitmacy of this one. Lot’s of talk about “real” born and raised San Franciscans vs. Tranplanted Hipsters in the Mish. We’re a little closer to the latter, and thus we thought this one was pretty funny. The missing Burning Man section was hilarious. But just to even it out, this video was posted on Reddit by “hokeydokey” as an example of what real SF locals would say.

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Pretty Classic.

Part of the fun with this project was the Color Correction / Grading. Exciting times with Magic Bullet! We were going for a dreamy, saturated look. What do you think?

Before - & - After

We found this gem on Reddit the other day. It’s a clip of Ira Glass, from of This American Life commenting on the unforgiving nature of producing films via his experience with Sleepwalk with Me. Enjoy.

This is a DSLR shoulder mount made from PVC. What makes this one different than the last PVC shoulder rig we posted is that it has a glider built into to it. That’s pretty cool, and really sets this version apart. Thanks to Jon Barnes for posting it on vimeo. Click here for more info.

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Johnny’s wife Paola got RNCK ink, and there was a banging teaser for the next season, which will be centered around the epic BART 2011.

Our plan for Rough Life is to kick it up a notch and go for the TV pilot. TV has always been the plan, so we need to carve out our pitch strategy. What the means for the web show is that it will be more developed and focused on the company. We plan to take all that footage we have from BART Tour and build out the episodes in such a way that gives the viewer a real taste of Johnny’s struggle to keep Roughneck afloat, and also to illustrate what that means to his family. Wish us luck, and stay tuned for more. In the meantime enjoy another look at two of our favorite episodes. The one posted above, and this episode from the SLC arc when Johnny learns that his sale’s rep doesn’t necessarily have his back.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now we’ve got some planning to do.