Monday, February 5, 2024

Timothy E. Liebe Resume 12/2024

TIMOTHY E. LIEBE

(917) 378-0831 385 Palisade Avenue, Unit 1

Jersey City, NJ 07307

    drdarkeny@gmail.com

Voice-Over Artist/Screenwriter/Video Editor

SUMMARY:


⦿ Radio Performer, Writer for NPR THEATER 

⦿ Voice-Over Actor and Announcer for Over Four Decades

⦿ Highly Proficient in Audacity, Proficient in Adobe Audition 

⦿ Highly Proficient in Adobe Premiere and Davinci Resolve, Proficient in Final Cut Pro



VIDEO PRODUCTION & MULTIMEDIA:


DR PRODUCTIONS NYC

December 1995 – Present

Freelance AV Consultancy. Write, produce, narrate promotional online videos, consult on social media.

Clients include Penguin Random House, Marglo Products, Oddly Enough, Tamora Pierce, LLC.

 

FULL CAST AUDIO

February 2005 – May 2023

    Audio Production Company specializing in "full cast" audiobooks. Performer for

THE CIRCLE OF MAGIC and THE IMMORTALS Quartets by Tamora Pierce; THE STAR BEAST

by Robert A. Heinlein; ENNA BURNING by Shannon Hale; and ODYSSEUS, THESEUS,

and CYRANO by Geraldine McCaughrean.


TAMORA PIERCE, LLC

April 2002 – October 2016

Creative Services company. Promotional Media Producer, Narrator, Copy editor. Produced promotional

videos, designed/maintained website, coordinated with public relations and promotions for publishers,

designed social media strategy.

C/NET January 2000 – January 2002 Consumer Electronics Website. Columnist on video postproduction (“Freeze Frame”), article/review writer.

VIDEO MAGAZINE June 1993 – June 1999 Contributing Editor, Product Testing for national Consumer Electronics Publication.

ZPPR PRODUCTIONS Original radio drama production company for NPR, Pacifica Network and Dove Audio. Five years’ experience writing & directing radio comedies & mysteries; performing in radio dramas; audio engineering.

“INTIMATE SCULPTURE”  Promotional Video for Gansevoort Gallery “INTIMATE SCULPTURE: Art Smith & His Contemporaries 1940-1945”.

“ORIGINAL SIN” Produced & Directed installation video of sculptor Adam Kurtzman’s sculpture of death and transcendence.

“THAT’S ELEMENTARY!” Produced & Directed Humorous pastiche of Sherlock Holmes utilizing various film styles. Reviewed in Sherlockian journals, BILLBOARD MAGAZINE and PSYCHOTRONIC MAGAZINE.


OTHER RELEVANT EXPERIENCE:

REEDSY.COM

Developmental & Copy Editor/Proofreader with Military SF, Fantasy,

Historical/Steampunk Mystery, and Screenplays (proficient in Final Draft).

Clients include Michael Gabriel Chance, Mira Kween.

COMPUTER GAME ENTERTAINMENT PC Gaming magazine. Hardware Editor; upgraded & maintained Windows PCs; copy editor/proofreader; columnist (“Under the Hood”), article & review writer.

OSER COMMUNICATIONS GROUP

Publishing company for trade show journals. Desktop publishing consultant, promoted after four months to Production Manager; part-time Proofreader.



CLICK HERE FOR AUDIO REEL


Thursday, January 6, 2022

$200 Movie Makers: Edit your home movies

 by Timothy Liebe

You don’t need a Titanic budget to edit and/or archive your home movies. The following titles, all under $200, let you cut, paste, add titles, transitions, music, narration, and even a special effect or two. We tested the following applications with AVIs captured using Pinnacle System’s MIROVideo DC10Plus, a $229 Motion-JPEG capture board. Using a 540MHz PII, 128MB RAM, 10GB hard disk and Windows 98, we captured three sequences at 608 x 456, dropped in two titles and four transitions and timed how long it took each application to render the final movie using both the Studio DC10Plus’ proprietary M-JPEG compressor and Intel’s Indeo.

IMSI Lumiere

Lumiere is the most powerful and the least expensive NLE app in this roundup, offering most of the features found within Adobe Premiere. We’ve read complaints that Lumiere’s got Premiere’s overhead without its power. While that was true a year ago, Lumiere at that time was being compared to Premiere and Ulead’s Media Studio Pro (two apps that cost $400 more than Lumiere). While it’s still slower than Media Studio and Premiere, it’s the fastest in this roundup, beating the other four contenders by as much as eight minutes in the render speed test.

Lumiere’s chroma key feature isn’t as good as Premiere’s, but it’s better than VideoWave II’s. In addition to “Blue Screen” and “Green Screen” (standard keying colors), there’s also a “Chroma” option that lets you select a keying color from the video with an eyedropper — VideoWave handles it the same way. There are also “Difference Mattes,” which only include changes between your foreground and background clips. In all cases, there are adjustments for key smoothing and types of image merging as well as key tolerance (how exact you want the match to the key color to be).

As an added bonus, Lumiere comes with a CD of royalty-free music and a limited version of Sonic Desktop’s SmartSound. This clever applet, which Pinnacle’s DC10Plus also offers, lets you generate royalty-free music and sound effects for your production. It contains six musical “QuickTracks” and three sound effect QuickTracks. Each QuickTrack contains several different “styles” with preset tempos, instrumentations and moods. They can also be set to specific lengths which repeat the basic melody line, then add beginnings and ends. If you’re not satisfied with what’s available, you can purchase additional QuickTracks from Sonic Desktop at www.smartsound.com.

Our affection for Lumiere doesn’t blind us to its faults, though. Its clip trimming application is wonky. If you double-click on the clip in the Project Window, a Video Controller window comes up complete with Mark In/Out and “Punch” (trim) In/Out icons. Don’t use that to trim your clip, though, because it won’t trim the audio at the same time! To trim video and audio together, you have to either drag on the ends of a clip, or preview it in the Project Window, then use the Punch In/Out controls located in the Movie Bar along the left-hand side.

Lumiere also lacks a built-in titler—a major faux pas in our book. As a workaround, they bundled Corel’s PhotoPaint Plus 7. The manual recommends that you create titles in PhotoPaint Plus with solid color backgrounds, then use the Transparency option to key title over video. This is a clumsy solution at best.

Video capture and “building” (rendering) inside the application are both multi-step processes that should be streamlined. For video capture, you not only have to select capture options beforehand (including frame rate, capture card and audio options), you also have to select both video and audio options after the capture’s done. To build a video, you first go into Options to select output size, audio settings and frame rate. Next you go to Build, name your clip, select Compressed video, then Export to start rendering. You don’t get to select which codec to use until after the audio rendering’s over!

These flaws, along with a pretty steep learning curve prevent Lumiere from receiving a “Kick-Ass” award. However, if you take the time to dig into the application, you’ll find you can do a lot more than you can with the others. 

Maximum PC Verdict: 8 

Price             $79.00
Company      IMSI
URL              www.imsisoft.com

MGI VideoWave II

MGI’s VideoWave II is an improvement over its predecessor, with new features like “Darkroom” (to tweak your clips’ brightness, contrast and color), and enhancements on old features like chromakey and the titler. The manual’s better, too, clearly explaining how to perform chromakeys and multiple-scene previews. Unfortunately, MGI hasn’t rethought the overall interface.

VideoWave II uses a storyline rather than a timeline interface to make editing easier for beginners. Storylines may be easy, but they’re sure not flexible! Unlike other storyline applications in this roundup, there’s no timeline interface option that will let you, say, drop more than one title into a clip.

Moreover, almost every editing function, even one as basic as clip trimming, has its own separate “Mode.” To perform a function, you first have to click on the appropriate button on the Mode Selector. Modes like Title Animator and Video Animator have beginning, middle and end settings, which must be set separately, unless you’re willing to accept the defaults.

Because VideoWave II uses a storyline interface, it’s difficult to time music or narration over more than one clip. In the 320 x 240 test, we laid in a music track over a three-clip long introductory sequence using the Audio Studio. The software won’t preview multiple sequences with music, so it took several tries to get the timing right. Although you can include multiple sounds within a video clip and even layer sounds, it’s hard to hit a specific mark with the Audio Studio Control Panel.

VideoWave II is marketed as an easy-to-use NLE application for beginners. Though it looks easy at first glance, the multi-step interface will drive you bananas.

Maximum PC Verdict: 4

Price               $99.00
Company       MGI Software Corp.

URL                www.mgisoft.com

Ulead Video Studio 3.0

Ulead Video Studio 3.0 wants to beat VideoWave at its own game, and it mostly succeeds. It’s a decently-designed storyline nonlinear editor that lets Joe Consumer add transitions, titles, music and narration to his/her home videos. For precision editing, there’s an optional timeline interface. A feature called “Smart Render” saves transitions and titles only, so previews and rendering take less time.

If you’re a novice editor or in a hurry, you’ll love Video Studio’s “Video Wizard” feature. A “training wheels” video editor, Video Wizard uses a simplified storyline to walk you through projects from capture to final creation. There’s limited flexibility (only nine transitions, and no title keying), but it’s a breeze to use and has a great clip trimming feature.

There are two ways to trim clips inside Video Studio itself. The default one makes you drag the Trim Bar in the Preview window to mark your in-points and out-points, which is frustrating. Fortunately, there’s a workaround mentioned in the manual which uses the F3 and F4 keys to mark in-points and out-points. That’s much easier, and the one we recommend using. 

Video Studio lags behind VideoWave II in a couple areas, though. There are no drop-shadows or outlines on titles, and only three audio tracks (live video, background music and narration). Narration can be recorded while previewing, though.

Video Wizard, Smart Render and the timeline interface option, make Video Studio 3.0 a good bet for beginning video makers. However, we’d like to see the lack of drop-shadow titles addressed in the future. 

Maximum PC Verdict: 7

Price              $99.95
Company       Ulead Systems, Inc.
URL               www.ulead.com


Avid’s Avid Cinema

We’re all for ease of use, but we don’t like being painted into a corner to get it. That’s what Avid Technology, Inc.’s done with their first consumer NLE application, Avid Cinema. It only supports six capture cards, three of which have no video output. If you have a card that Avid Cinema doesn’t recognize, the installer says your computer doesn’t have the minimum system requirements. There are workarounds for this, but you’ll have to call Avid Tech Support for them.

Avid Cinema’s Edit Movie interface is limiting. The Trim Handles are supposed to make trimming a video, audio, title or transition clip easier by letting you drag it to the correct length while watching the Viewer. However, there’s no project time counter or time bar, so it’s tough to cut to a specific length. Since that’s the only way to trim, you can forget splitting a clip. And why aren’t there drop-shadows or outlines on the titles?

There are limited rendering/output options. Your sizes are limited to 320x240- or 160x120-pixel QuickTimes or AVIs, or RealMedia unless your supported video card has 640 x 480 output. If you have one of the three supported cards without video output or an unsupported card, you’ll need a scan converter to print to tape.

Avid Cinema does have its good points. The Storyboard, where you plan and build your projects, is an idea that more NLE apps should incorporate. It lets you arrange clips and include notes for shooting or editing, which you can then print out.

It’s hard to believe this product comes from the company whose name is synonymous with nonlinear editing in Hollywood. Only beginners would find it useful, and they’ll outgrow it in a hurry.

 

Maximum PC Verdict: 3

Price              $139.00
Company       Avid Technology, Inc.
URL               www.avidcinema.com

 

Dazzle Hollywood DVBridge Analog-Digital Video Converter Review

by Tim Liebe

Score (DVBridge Hardware):
Features: 7
Look and Feel: 8
Performance: 8
Usability: 7
Value: 8
Editor’s Rating: 7¾ 
 
Score (MainActor Software):
Features: 6
Look and Feel: 4
Performance: 5
Usability: 3
Value: 4
Editor’s Rating: 4½

While most current MiniDV and Digital 8 camcorders have analog-to-digital recording capability so you can edit your old analog tapes on your FireWire (IEEE-1394)-equipped computer, very few older digital camcorders do. Even if your camcorder has analog A/V in, you still have to dub the analog tapes to digital before you can capture digital video to your hard drive. This is not only inconvenient, it also causes you to lose a generation in the dubbing process. 

Dazzle’s Hollywood DVBridge (SRP $299) circumvents this problem via an external box with 6-pin to 6-pin FireWire cable which converts analog A/V to digital, digital to analog, or pass-through digital to digital. It’s designed to work as both a converter and nonlinear editor for your FireWire-port Windows 98SE/ME/2000 PC or OS 9.0.4-plus Mac. To that end, the Windows version comes with a software bundle featuring MainConcept MainActor 3.5, a German-designed capture/editing/output software, as well as a full version of MGI VideoWave 4.

DVBridge can also be used as a standalone converter like Sony’s $499 DVMC-DA2, dubbing to either a second MiniDV deck or your current IEEE-1394 capture card and software. It does a good job duplicating what the DVMC-DA2 does for about half the cost. It converts analog video to digital, and vice versa, easily and intuitively. You just hook your dubbing cables up with DVBridge between the playback and record deck, push a button on the back of the DVBridge box to select your conversion option, hit Play and Record, and dub. 


However, as a nonlinear capture and editing application for your Windows PC, DVBridge’s MainActor software falls down badly - hence the split between the high hardware rating and the low software one. The System Requirements for Windows are a Pentium II 400 MHz PC with 64 MB of RAM, and you’ll need at least that if you want it to run right. We tried it out on a Pentium Celeron 400 MHz PC with 128 MB of RAM, and while it ran, sort of, it was real slow and prone to frame drops and system freezes. 

The product as shipped doesn’t come with an IEEE-1394 board, as Dazzle assumes you’ve already got one in your PC. This wouldn’t be that big a problem seeing as FireWire cards sell for under $100, except that MainActor won’t always play well with your FireWire card. 

In the course of this review, we installed DVBridge and MainActor on PCs with Pinnacle Systems’ consumer StudioDV and pro-level DV500, ADS Technologies’ Pyro and AVerMedia’s AVerDV cards. Over the course of three frustrating days and several phone calls to Dazzle Tech Support, we discovered that something in the various hardware/software combinations would always, at some point, delete or corrupt Microsoft’s DV Camera and VCR driver which the MainActor software needs to capture video. We had to reinstall MainActor several times on each computer, and swap out FireWire cards at least once per computer. We also discovered that neither the twenty-page User’s Guide, MainActor’s Help files nor Dazzle’s Website had any troubleshooting information. 

As problematic as the lack of troubleshooting information was, that was nothing compared to the fun&games we had trying to use MainActor once we had all the hardware and software working properly. MainActor consists of five sub-applications - DV-Capture, VideoCapture, DV-Out, VideoEditor and Sequencer. According to both the User’s Guide and the Help files, VideoCapture is to be used for analog-digital A/V conversion, while DV-Capture is to be used for digital-analog conversion. However, we found out that we had much better luck capturing analog files with DV-Capture, even though it doesn’t come with captured frame or dropped frame counters.

VideoEditor converts your captured video into a frame-by-frame list for (according to the Help file) “animation composing and processing”, while Sequencer is a timeline-based NLE software similar in features to Ulead MediaStudio Pro. However, Sequencer doesn’t have a Trim Clip window - you have to either split the clip then delete the portion you don’t want, or “push” the unwanted portion off the timeline like you would with the “MovieStar” editing software bundled with Dazzle’s DVC II. 

 After several days of trying to use MainActor, we gave up and used either the bundled copy of VideoWave, Ulead’s Video Studio 4.0 or Adobe Premiere for the DV500 to capture and edit instead. In all cases, DVBridge worked a lot better with the third-party software than it did with the included MainActor. 

If you intend to simply use DVBridge for conversion to tape or to your current NLE application, it works great and costs a lot less than Sony’s comparable DVMC-DA2. If you intend to use DVBridge with MainActor 3.5 as a total nonlinear editing solution, though, it’ll drive you nuts. Unless Dazzle intends to radically rewrite MainActor so it’ll work as seamlessly with its own hardware as everybody else’s software does, they should simply OEM all their software.

Timothy E. Liebe Resume 12/2024

TIMOTHY E. LIEBE (917) 378-0831 385 Palisade Avenue, Unit 1 Jersey City, NJ 07307     drdarkeny@gmai...