the jon acosta blog.

If you get pleasure out of helping others, isn’t that technically considered a “selfish” act? 

I don’t consider myself a selfish person, but before I started my production company, I used to do this every single day at Apple, as I trained my customers how to do use their Macs in ways that simplified their lives and blew their minds all at once!

There’s just something absolutely gratifying about seeing the lightbulb go off in people’s heads when you teach them a vital piece of knowledge that they’ve been trying to sort out themselves. 

As such, I’ve been in development for the last 3 months on a video training series that I’ll be offering very soon for the world to learn how to do what I thought was once only a dream. The difference in this training content is that I reinforce the mistakes made every single day by most of the amateurs that I’ve run into and witnessed along this path to storytelling awesomeness-icity.

screenshot from my upcoming training series I’m doing entitled “The Storyteller’s Guide to Video Production”. 

In the meantime, I started “Tutorial Tuesday (yeah!)” on Youtube a couple of months ago to entertain those questions that I get asked on a weekly basis via video editing in After Effects, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Premiere.

If you’ve got a question, please feel free to ask me through Tumblr, email me, or even publicly question me on Twitter!

Stay tuned as “The Storyteller’s Guide…” launches later this month!

-@thejonacosta 

The virtual tour of our new home in San Leandro, CA, posted on my youtube vlog channel:

After a week of searching and house viewing, we finally found a place to call home in the quaint and awesome town of San Leandro, just 20 minutes across the bay from San Francisco. 

We’re excited to call this place home and begin transforming our unusually massive garage into the new Downstairs Studios “Cloud Room 2.0” & Acosta Productions “SL Editing Lab”.

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In this video tutorial, I discuss the travesty of FCPX, why 80% of editors in our industry were so baffled by what Apple decided to do to our beloved “Final Cut Studio” suite, and why Acosta Productions is now running whole heartedly in Adobe CS5.5.

If you’re a serious editor, seeing how dynamic linking will help your workflow tremendously is a must if you’re on the fence about where to go after Apple’s release of FCP X in July of 2011.

Enjoy!

-Jon

Recently, my creative partner Drew Gibadlo, owner of Downstairs Studios, sat down with me to discuss exactly how he handles our audio post-production when it comes to TV Commercials and other heavily induced sound FX projects.

We took a very simple commercial that we were working on and broke it down into a simplistic fun-filled venture for you to see exactly what goes on when the cameras are off and magic is being stirred in the digital audio pot via Logic Pro and its foley advantage packages.

Check out this quick video to get a feel for what we do after production is wrapped and we’re hard at work in the audio lab making everything you experience via mass broadcast a multi-sensory experience… with a bit of humor, as always. :)