Movie Making - 'Best Practice' question

All,
I didn't quite know how to title this question.
I am in the process of capturing lots of video of my daughter's track team (summer Junior Olympic team).
I am planning to put many shots (all pretty short duration - 2-5 seconds each) and match with music. There will be many transitions, effects and the like - in other words a pretty 'busy' movie.
I am also planning on using between 5 and 7 pieces of music - total video length about 20-25 minutes or so.
I am thinking of making one movie per song, then exporting to Quicktime, then combining each of the Quicktime movies into one final overall movie. This would give me much better control of each of the songs as all the songs and clips won't be in the main movie.
I would then pull into iDVD for the menus and titling and the like. Basically one subtitle for each song/movie.
In the past - and with last year's team video (and other bball videos I did) - I put all the songs/clips/effects/transitions in one movie - which in my mind is a bit risky if I moved something early on - and didn't notice it - my timing could become messy.
Questions:
1) Does the export to Quicktime, then importing back to iMovie make sense? Is there an even better way?
2) Quality of the final product using this system?
3) is this what most people do?
thoughts?
thx
rory

Before answering your specific question (about making
separate movies, and then pulling them all together
into one) I thought that the first thing you
ought to know - just in case you didn't know - was
that ..and this flummoxes and floors many other
people who come here after they've tried doing
what you're doing, and they have their head in their
hands.. if you "..use one song as a soundtrack and
make a movie with all the photos, clips, transitions,
titles and the like.." you do need to be aware - in
case you don't know it - that adding transitions,
after you've arranged your clips and photos to music,
will shorten your clips or photos so that they become
out of sync with your music.
Yeah, I went through that about two years ago and figured that one out. that's why I mostly use 'Overlap' as that does not mess with the timing of the transition as opposed to 'cross-fade'.
I personally build my movies linearly anyway - (starting from the beginning to end anyway) and also learned quickly to turn off the volume level in video clips so you can 'stretch' or 'shrink' the ends of the clip with the mouse. I had to stumble onto this one too (as opposed to attempting to 'split' the clip into exact time sequence - that SUCKED).
But having mentioned that (..and having enjoyed the
Choc Choc Chip and Vanilla mixture..) I agree in
every way with Roy who did answer your
question.
Gotcha - maybe I should have stated that I have only one camera - yet with all the editing I plan for each of the 7 songs within the one movie - and because of the issue of timing tracks to the video - I feel rather vulnerable putting all that work into one single movie with the potential to mess things up later in the movie if I tweak a scene earlier in the entire movie.
hence my thought of doing this:
build iMovies (1 song per movie - LOTS of clips, pics, transitions, etc within that movie).
iMovie1
iMovie2
iMovie3
iMovie4
iMovie5
iMovie6
I can edit iMovie 'objects' individually without touching the others....
THEN when I am happy with the separate movies then convert them to full quality QT movies.
iMovie1 --> QT1
iMovie2 --> QT2
iMovie3 --> QT3
iMovie4 --> QT4
iMovie5 --> QT5
iMovie6 --> QT6
Finally, stich them back together in iMovie (as I have some personal 'interviews' that go in between each of the Songs/iMovie'x'/QTx
the Final iMovie looks like:
QT1 + interview1 + QT2 + interview2 + QT3 + QT4 + QT5 + QT6
Adjust the timing between the finalized QT movies and interviews, put in chapter markers, then it is done and go to iDVD.
And yes, I don't allow iMovie to render, I pull the project into iDVD for redering....
So I was simply trying to be helpful, and to
anticipate any problems which you might have, before
you'd realised that you might have those problems.
Thanks, I probably should have mentioned a disclaimer about a certain level of experience with iMovie...

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Andreas,
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Hello user,
In order to change your environment, what you could do is go to the Hardware tab -> Network. Within here you can create new networks and also change via the Edit this Network pencil icon what networks should manage what roles (i.e. Virtual Machine, Cluster Heartbeat, etc). In my past experience, I've had issues changing the cluster heartbeat once it has been set. If you have issues changing it, via the OVM Manager, one thing you could do is change it manually via the /etc/ocfs2/cluster.conf file. Also, if it successfully lets you change it via the OVM Manager, verify it within the cluster.conf to ensure it actually did your change. This is where that is being set. However, doing it manually can be tricky because OVM has a tendency to like to revert it's changes back to its original state say after a reboot. Of course I'm not even sure if they support you manually making that change. Ideally, when setting up an OVM environment, best practice would be to separate your networks as much as possible i.e. (Public network, private network, management network, clusterhb network, and live migration network if you do a lot of live migrating, otherwise you can probably place it with say the management network).
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Thanks in advance.

Hi,
let me turn teh question around: How many tools do you have at home beside of a hammer ? In other words, its the problem you need to solve (and use cases are problems) that should determine the use of bounded task flows and its granularity. Note that for each use case the bounded task flow makes a good candidate for delivering it. Doesn't mean that every single page needs to go into its own task flow. For general bounded best practices have a look here
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2. Some Java at the backend grabs these details and emails them off somewhere
I am thinking of doing the following, but whats the best way?
1. HTML form submits and data is sent directly to a JavaBean (FormBean.java)
2. FormBean.java contains standard getters/setters but also contains a method called sendMail(), is this bad practice? Do I need a second Bean sendMail.java? Or is this completely the wrong way to do things i.e. should I do this entirely in a servlet with only 1 bean to grab the data (FormBean) and then access from servlet?
Just a bit confused on whats best practice for this stuff?
Thanks!

2. FormBean.java contains standard getters/setters but also contains a method called sendMail(), is this bad practice? Do I need a second Bean sendMail.java? A better approach is this way
a) Have all the form data in the form bean
b) Write sendMail in a all together different class, as action.
c) Send the form bean as a parameter to sendMail for processing and sending an email
This way your sendMail() will become a kind of a service. Tomorrow you might have some other data, which you will have to send it in an email. In that case, you just reuse sendMail() method. Otherwise, if you have sendMail() in form bean itself, then if there are many form beans, then you would have to write sendMail() in every form bean, which is a bad practice. One principle of OOAD is to separate the functionality, which is redundant in your classes and make it as a separate module. If there are changes to the sendMail() functionality then, by having it in one module, you only have to change it at one place.
Or is this completely the wrong way to do things i.e. should I do this entirely in a servlet with only 1 bean to grab the data (FormBean) and then access from servlet?You can have a servlet which acts like a controller, which receives the request parameters, constructs the form bean and invokes appropriate Action (in your case sendMail()). This is same as an MVC framework. Instead of you re-inventing the wheel to create a servlet controller, form bean, action etc. You could use one of the several MVC frameworks available in the market, such as Struts or Spring MVC.

Design Pattern / Best Practice Question

Hi,
I have been using Flex for a while now, but there is a
scenario which I still have not found a solution I'm entirely happy
with. I'm wondering if anyone else out there might have suggestions
on a design pattern or best practice.
Suppose I have a view which depends on model data which
resides in some back end systems. That model data may or may not
have been loaded (e.g. via a web service or remote object call) at
the time the view is displayed.
I don't know if the user will ever visit this part of the
application so I would prefer to defer retrieval of the data until
the user actually navigates to this view. Or I want to retrieve the
data each time the view is displayed because the data is dynamic
and could change between one presentation of the view and the next.
Because the data comes from several systems, I cannot simply
make one service call and display the view when it completes and
all the data is available. I need to call several services which
could complete in any order but I only want to display my view
after I know all of them have completed and all of the model data
is available. Otherwise, I can present the user an incomplete view
(e.g. some combo boxes are empty until the corresponding service
call to get the data completes).
The solution I like best so far is to dispatch a single event
(I am using Cairngorm) handled by a single command which acts as
the caller and responder for all of the services. This command then
remembers which responses it has received and dispatches another
event to navigate to the view once all the results have returned.
If the services being called are used in different
combinations on different screens, this results in proliferation of
events and commands. An event and command for each service and
additional events and commands to bundle the services and the
handling of their responses in the right combinations for each of
the views.
Another approach is to have some helper class listen for all
of the model changes and only display the view when the model
enters some state that is acceptable. It is sometimes difficult to
determine just by looking at the model whether it is in the right
state (e.g. how can I tell that a collection is the new collection
that should just have been requested versus an old one lingering
from a previous call). The logic required can get kind of
convoluted and brittle.
Basically, all of the solutions I've come up with so far seem
less than ideal and a little hackish. I keep thinking there is some
elegant solution out there that I am just missing ... but so far,
no luck finding it. Thoughts?
Thanks.
Bill

i think a service class is right - to coordinate your calls.
i would have 1 event per call (so you could listen to individual
responses if you wanted to).
then i would use a flag. if you want to check for staleness,
you would probably want two objects to map your service flag to
lastRequested and lastCompleted. when you check, check if it's
completed, and if it's not stale and that your lastRequested is
less than lastCompleted (meaning that you're not currently waiting,
i.e. you've returned since making a request). then make the request
and update your lastRequested.
here's a snippet of what i mean.
./paul
public static const SVC1_LOADED:int = 1;
public static const SVC2_LOADED:int = 2;
public static const SVC3_LOADED:int = 4;
public static const SVCALL_LOADED:int = 7;
private var completedFlag:int = 0;
then each call would have it's own callback.
private function onSvc1Complete( evt:Event):void {
completedFlag |= SVC1_LOADED;
lastCompleted[ SVC1_LOADED ] = getTimer();
dispatchEvent( new Event("svc1complete") );
checkDone();
private function checkDone():void{
if( completedFlag == SVCALL_LOADED )
dispatchEvent(new Event( "allLoaded" ));

Group by best practice question

Consider this example:
TABLE: SALES_DATA
firm_id|sales_amt|d_date|d_data
415|45|20090615|Lincoln Financial
415|30|20090531|Lincoln AG
416|10|20081005|AM General
416|20|20080115|AM General Inc.
I want the output to be grouped by firm_id with the sum of sales_amt and the d_data
that corresponds to the latest d_date (i.e. max(d_date))
Proposed query:
select firm_id, sum(sales_amt) total_sales, substr(max(d_data), instr(max(d_data), '~') + 1) firm_name from (
select firm_id, sales_amt, d_date || '~' || d_data from sales_data
group by firm_id
output is as expected:
firm_id|total_sales|firm_name
415|75|Lincoln Financial
416|30|AM General
I know this works but my QUESTION is: is there a better way to do this and is the above approach to concatenate columns when you want to aggregate multiple columns against any best practices.
Thanks very much!

Here's a way that uses analytics (I just like them):
SQL> select * from sales_data;
             FIRM_ID            SALES_AMT D_DATE               D_DATA
                 415                   45 15-JUN-2009 00:00:00 Lincoln Financial
                 415                   30 31-MAY-2009 00:00:00 Lincoln AG
                 416                   10 05-OCT-2008 00:00:00 AM General
                 416                   20 15-JAN-2008 00:00:00 AM General Inc.
SQL> select firm_id, sum_amt, d_data
2 from
3 (
4     select firm_id, d_data
5           ,sum(sales_amt) over (partition by firm_id) sum_amt
6           ,row_number() over (partition by firm_id order by d_date desc) rn
7     from   sales_data
8 )
9 where rn = 1
10 ;
             FIRM_ID              SUM_AMT D_DATA
                 415                   75 Lincoln Financial
                 416                   30 AM General

ASO best practice question

After 8+ years of working with BSO, I'm working on my first ASO cube. It is for Federally mandated reporting, so the output is pretty well known what is needed. So far there are 3 different reports "Defined", we know there will be more.
Because the line items are not a simple 1-1 relationship with an account (typically there is a combination of members from 3 different dimensions that make up 1 line item to be reported) we have decided to try making formula members for the line items. The formulas are simple, just defining the slice (combination) needed for that line. Because this cube already had some formula members in "Time Periods" (Dynamic YTD members for each Month), and some different "Views" (MTD, YTD, and HTD) I am quickly getting lost in Solve-Order hell.
I am simultaneously building an ad-hoc sheet alongside the excel reports that are using these new formulas for validation purposes. The pure ad-hoc sheets I'm making continue to work, even when the excel retrieval using the formula members isn't.
So, "Best Practice"-wise, is it smart to continue pursuing the formula members for reporting (knowing that maintenance on them will be tricky at best) or should we persuade the business to simply let us build a report for them that will insure data integrity?
TIA,
Robert

Cameron,
The other way around.
I am mocking the reports in excel, that will be recreated in FR. I am building 2 different versions in excel, one which uses the formula members in the row of the report, and one which accesses the different members directly without using formula members (I had originally intended the direct member access to be my means of data validation).
The excel retrieval that is using the formula members is having issues with solve-orders (there 2 dimensions other than Accounts that already have formula members). The second sheet which is directly accessing the members is still displaying the correct data.
I understand your comments about letting the users "roll their own", I just had a converation with the BA where I told her that we may have to restrict all access outside of FR, and whatever input engine we build them so they can't "roll their own".
Time is running short and I am experiencing weird things because of solve-order.
Robert

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