Books for Actors
This month’s theme is about the thespian’s craft, so we’re reminding you of two great craft manuals from Michael Wiese Productions covered here in the past year.
Casting Revealed
Hester Schell
$20.95, Michael Wiese Productions (2011)www.mwp.com
The book makes a solid case for casting trained actors. The amount of time saved during rehearsals and shooting pays off. The book provides industry-standard tools a casting associate is expected to handle, like headshot sheets, with tips for ideal compositions for actor photos. Standard acting resume
layout is provided. The full review first appeared in Imagine News February 2011.
Voiceovers: Make Money with Your Voice
Terri Apple
$26.95, Michael Wiese Productions (2011) www.mwp.com
Here you learn VO work takes great acting chops- secondary to your great voice and ability to read copy. You also get the entire range of voice employment, wisdom about unions, and good detail about administrivia in voice employment, and good copy samples to exercise. Voiceovers include short interviews with practicing casting directors and talent. The full review first appeared in Imagine News March 2011.
Chroma Light
MSRP $649.00, Litepanels, Inc.
www.litepanels.com
This is a junior softlight with extras.
Compared to early models like the low-end Micro-Lite, which had battery and filter holder issues, the fit, finish and redesign here are apparent. Croma’s main attraction is its ability to mix alternating bands of LED hues to quickly create indoor or outdoor lighting balanced to existing ambient or main sources. It also makes a lovely spot fill light in studio work. At 6 feet in full daylight mode, it’ll throw over 9 footcandles/98 lux with an even spread, flicker-free, better than a small tungsten unit with the inevitable hotspot.
Croma was designed for news and event videographers and DSLR shooters. Even without the included slide-in diffusion gel it features a hallmark soft white diffused glow. Intensity is controlled by one knob, able to ramp from 100% to zero with no noticeable color shift, while the second knob lets you quickly dial in any color temperature mix between 56K (like sunlight) and 32K (like tungsten sources) on the fly.
You can power your Croma four different ways: with 6 AA alkaline or rechargeable batteries (lithium-ion cells can also be used but excessively heat up the unit, which will automatically shut down when detected); employ the included AC adapter; add the optional D-tap power cable for sources such as Anton-Bauer packs; or you can piggyback on camera battery power with optional plates for Sony, Panasonic and Canon. The kit comes with a diffusion gel, a ball head socket with camera shoe and tripod screw
receptacle in its base, and handsome carrying case.
As you’d expect from any cool tool, it runs with little or no heat.
Tech Tool Pro 6.04 and TechTools
Protogo
Checking and repair utility for Macintosh 0S9, OSX 10.4.11 and later on PowerPC and Intel machines.
TTP 6.04: $99.00, TT Protogo: $169.00
www.micromat.com
The standalone version of TechTool Pro 6 can be used to boot into a troubled system via DVD disc on recent Intel Macs. You can
purchase the product in disc form, or download file, which easily allows you to make a bootable DVD. Because DVD’s are gradually going away, MicroMat counsels using their eDrive, a special partition you create on an available hard disk to boot from in emergencies. Edrive plays well with OSX 10.7’s new HD Recovery feature, but TTP adds file recovery of erased work, and file defragmentation or volume optimization as well.
Or get TechTool Protogo, designed for mobile digital desktop doctors. It’s handy for either freelancers who work on several different Macs around town, or an administrator servicing varied Mac models in one location. Protogo comes with a choice of startup profiles for PowerPC (back to 876 MHz Macs) or Intel machines; booting OS9 or OSX. It can plug into any Mac from the past decade or so. I easily built a flash drive containing both OS9 and OSX bootup partitions—knowing full well the OS9 partition would not boot—OS9 didn’t support remote booting via USB, only FireWire.
I plugged it into the rear USB 2.0 slot of my ailing Quicksilver G4 Dual 800 —it wasn’t booting correctly into OSX for some time. It wasn’t even qualified for TTP. When the main dashboard came up I let it take overnight do a full computer check, including a surface scan- a detailed, block-by-block examination– on all four ATA drives installed. The scan would have been faster had I created and booted from a FireWire drive, but it did complete the tests. It also told me every disk passed the scan with no bad blocks detected.
The 10-year-old G4 still gave me bootup problems, but Protogo is not a sealed system. By allowing me to boot from a cheap 16GB flash drive I could then invoke Alsoft’s DiskWarrior to repair the disk directory and Apple’s own Disk Utility to repair the disk’s permissions, which led to successful boot-up. You can easily add these and any other of your favorite free utilities, like Onyx, or paid utilities, like Drive Genius, to the Protogo flash drive, limited only by space. If you instead use a FireWire drive, as with the flash volume, be aware that installing Protogo requires the entire drive and wipes any previous data.
TechTool Pro has new tools including tests for iSight cameras. It has a very good file and volume optimizer to defragment severely discombobulated files or entire volumes. You will feel the difference in loading times and writing files to disk after living with high defragmentation.
The graphics are friendly. My G4 Dual 800 was listed as an 876 MHz system, but that was me, pushing the envelope to troubleshoot an unsupported model. TechTool Pro doesn’t seem to be multithreaded on my PowerPC—only one CPU was engaged during scans and other operations. It is certainly multi-core aware on my Intel 8-core.
TechTool is a both a checker, repair, optimizer and preventative maintenance utility, and TTP Protogo adds a gracious host for everything else you like to use in troubleshooting. These are cool tools with unique abilities which I’m glad to have available.
Loren S. Miller reports for IMAGINE
News and other venues, edits longform drama and docs coast to coast, and teaches college level post.
Reach him anytime at
techpress@mindspring.com