Premiere vs Final Cut Pro X As mentioned in Part One of this blog where we discussed the reasons behind the switch from Premiere to FCPX (and PC to Apple) , as a video production company our choice of editing software is paramount and after eight years of using Adobe Premiere Pro as our preferred…

Adobexit: The switch from Premiere to Final Cut Pro (Part One) In 2016 when the UK was in the thrust of an epic debate between good or evil staying or leaving the European Union – which the British tabloids, and later the whole British media, labelled Brexit – we at Viva La Zoom had our own vital…

American carnage by LEXINGTON | WASHINGTON, DC “CARNAGE”. That word—one not usually associated with inaugural addresses or any appeal to national unity—formed the smouldering, incendiary core of President Donald Trump’s first speech after taking his oath of office on January 20th. The term is how Mr…

Photo Illustration by Stephen Skalocky When Randy Lanier sped to Rookie of the Year honors at the 1986 Indianapolis 500, few knew his racing credentials, let alone his status as one of the nation's most prolific drug runners, smuggling in tons of marijuana when he wasn't on the track. Now, after 27…

Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.] AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 16 April 1963 My Dear Fellow Clergymen: While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statementcallingmy present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer…

Can ballet express a modern view of the sexes? In the Western contemporary world, women and men often hold equal status at work, as leaders, as voters, as breadwinners. This kind of equality, however, is precisely what ballet cannot show. Instead, it creates an either-or dualism from the difference…

One of the pleasures of music-streaming services is that, day after day, they remind you effortlessly of the almost incredible wealth and beauty of American popular music—from the blues and Tin Pan Alley to jazz, R. & B., country, rock and roll, and on to hip hop—and of its strange, snaking unity.…

The musician Mitski Miyawaki knows how her voice sounds when she’s singing. But when she hears her recorded speaking voice, she said, she is often surprised at how high it sounds. Jessica Lehrman for The New York Times I have a big, dumb, deep, goofy voice. But I’m reminded of it only when I hear a…

From left, Caleb McLaughlin, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown and Gaten Matarazzo in “Stranger Things.” Netflix Almost half a century ago, if you had enough disposable income and a certain amount of technical agility, you could have your own YouTube channel. Sort of. You could share your videos…

A reporter there for the creation gets Apple’s exclusive take on the “Jesus Phone”’s 10th birthday. . W hy do a phone? I asked Steve Jobs ten years ago today. On the stage at the Moscone West hall in San Francisco, Apple’s CEO had just unveiled what would become the most transformative product since…

Photograph from Geoff Dyer I came across this photo in 2011, shortly after my mum died. When my dad died five months later, I became both the only surviving person from the picture and the only person who might know anything about it. The task for photographers is always to make a picture more…

A promotional poster for D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation Getty Images HBO’s prospective series Confederate will offer an alternative history of post-Civil War America. It will ask the question, according to co-creator David Benioff, “What would the world have looked like … if the South had…

(Morguefile.com) I was recently listening to a distinguished historian of Russia talk about the difference between Angola’s economy and Russia’s. There’s not much, he said. Both are run by authoritarian regimes, both are dependent on resource extraction, both have the means to improve their…

I’m standing in the acute neurosurgery ward of Innsbruck University Hospital. The senior consultant has asked me to tell him about my son Miles, who is lying motionless on the bed beside us. I tell him that Miles has been a joyful son to have, my firstborn child. That from the beginning he has been…

When Americans think of Communism in Eastern Europe, they imagine travel restrictions, bleak landscapes of gray concrete, miserable men and women languishing in long lines to shop in empty markets and security services snooping on the private lives of citizens. While much of this was true, our…

Jesse Draxler; Photo: David Hume Kennerly / Getty It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of…

There are no self-help books for those who have unintentionally killed someone. Illustration by Brian Stauffer Until 3:35 P . M . on June 15, 1977, Maryann Gray was happy. She was twenty-two, and had just decided to take a leave of absence from Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, where she was…

P olice descended on the farm at dawn, speeding past the gate and down the long driveway. Through her car window, twenty-eight-year-old Ontario Provincial Police detective constable Erin Burke appraised the mountains of junk that came into view—old snowmobiles, water heaters, drywall. The…

Grab bag Finally, as we do every year, there’s a big pile of little things scattered throughout macOS that are significant enough to mention but small enough (or self-explanatory enough) that they don’t merit deeper exploration or explanation. Welcome to the Grab Bag! Mail When you’re using Mail in…

Philip Jett | The Death of an Heir | St. Martin’s Press | September 2017 | 27 minutes (7,489 words) Below is an excerpt from The Death of an Heir , Philip Jett’s absorbing new book of true crime, about the botched kidnapping of Adolph Coors III, the Coors brewery CEO, which launched one of the…

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, left, with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, speaks during a news conference about gun legislation on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, October 4, 2017. Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP A parable: A village has been built in the deepest gully of a floodplain. At regular intervals, flash…

An unspoken charge given to arts educators is that we inspire in our students an enthusiasm and interest in our craft, provoking and stoking their capacity for creative problem-solving and critical thought. We use many ends to achieve this, but one constant that besets anyone and everyone occupying…

Y ou’d be forgiven if, settling into the fall 2003 “Literature of the 16th Century” course at University of California, Berkeley, you found the unassuming 70-year-old man standing at the front of the lecture hall a bit eccentric. For one thing, the class syllabus, which was printed on the back of a…

Illustrator by Odd Job One day you’re just a smiley PR lackey; the next, you’re a major operative in the nuttiest campaign in decades. Such is the strange year in the life of Hope Hicks, the 27-year-old accidental press secretary for Donald Trump. How did she get here? And how much longer can she…

Even top news photographers have their work digitally enhanced these days. Mounting competition in the market for news images is forcing photo-journalists to make their output as dramatic as possible. But where are the limits of cosmetic improvement? The photo looks like a still from a movie. A…

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is…

Excerpt from John Jeremiah Sullivan's "Pulphead," on his brother's electrocution, and what it did to his brain: "On the morning of April 21, 1995, my elder brother, Worth (short for Ellsworth), put his mouth to a microphone in a garage in Lexington, Kentucky, and in the strict sense of having…

Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press/Corbis Images In the late 1990s, when his fellow University of Chicago professor Barack Obama had just run for the Illinois State Senate and long before a newly inaugurated President Obama named him to his Council of Economic Advisers, the economist Austan Goolsbee…

Traditional American values and the superstar economy by M.S. TYLER COWEN identifies three problems that interfere with the ability of “the traditional, pro-wealth cultural vision” of conservative and libertarian ethics to appeal to contemporary Americans. The first is that “higher status for the…