As a Filmmaker and Digital Tech, Jeremy Wilker at TWEAK Digital will shoot, edit and deliver award-winning HD video and provide digital tech services on-set of your shoots.» Hire TWEAK Today!

Shazam Bugs Your Life

I recently saw the new Star Trek movie with my wife (we enjoyed it quite a bit) and in the pre-movie adver­tis­ing there was an advert with a Shazam logo on it and if you tagged the ad audio using your Shazam app it would hook you up to a store site so you could directly buy the stuff shown within the ad.

As an indie film­maker, this imme­di­ately intrigued me: how could I put this to use in mar­ket­ing my film projects? So when I got home I did some research. And was shocked by Shazam’s big-brother impli­ca­tions.

Did you know that the newest ver­sion of Shazam con­stantly mon­i­tors your surroundings?

shazam

Accord­ing to them, they only “sam­ple” brief moments of your audi­tory life to see what “might” match up and you have to opt-in to this intru­sion, but I have no rec­ol­lec­tion what­so­ever about mak­ing the choice to click on any option to con­stantly mon­i­tor my life.

And as we’ve seen with sites like Face­book (men­tioned in The Atlantic arti­cle), once it amasses enough users and busi­ness comes call­ing, well, kiss your pri­vacy goodbye.

No sir, I don’t like it. But it did give me an idea…

DataTale Thunderbolt RAID Review

The DataTale SMART 4-bay Thunderbolt RAID.

The recently released DataTale SMART 4-bay Thun­der­bolt RAID caught my atten­tion as an afford­able Thun­der­bolt stor­age unit for video edit­ing so I con­tacted Oyen Dig­i­tal here in the Twin Cities and they sent over a unit for me to review*. I sup­plied my own 2TB Toshiba 6Gb/s 7200rpm dri­ves (four of them) that I bought…

6 Sundance How-To Tips

Six days in Park City at Sun­dance 2013. Six days of watch­ing movies, attend­ing meet­ings, rid­ing buses, walk­ing on ice, eat­ing very ran­domly, drink­ing at par­ties, avoid­ing celebrity-seekers, snow­board­ing, and a lit­tle sleep­ing are finally done and while the jour­ney is always tir­ing, it is invig­o­rat­ing and moti­vat­ing and I am already miss­ing it badly just two days after return­ing. Being immersed in such a movie-loving-and-making envi­ron­ment induces hor­ri­ble with­drawal, like you’ve been denied your cof­fee fix sud­denly and with­out warn­ing. But the peo­ple you meet! The movies you see! It’ll get you going for the com­ing year, no doubt…

Blackmagic Cinema Camera RAW

BCC RAW Frame as JPEG

The guys from SlashCam.de have posted some Black­magic Cin­ema Cam­era frames from a shoot, includ­ing an orig­i­nal Cin­e­maDNG frame. I decided to take it into Light­room 4.2 (LR) and have a look myself at the detail and range.

The State of Crowdfunding Panel

The State of Crowdfunding 2012

Join me to dis­cuss the state of crowd­fund­ing your movie projects at the 2012 Fly­way Film Fes­ti­val this week­end, on Sat­ur­day, Octo­ber 20th. I’ll be joined by Slam­dance co-founder Paul Rach­man and con­sult­ing film­maker Lucas McNelly. Armed with the data from our own mul­ti­ple suc­cess­ful cam­paigns, as well as the data from hun­dreds of others,…

Transferring Video Files

I’ve had a few requests lately to send very large video files to clients online. If this is a new world for you, here’s why send­ing a portable hard drive might be more efficient.