I’m downloading it now for the first time.
So is the rest of Red Giant Software.
In the past two months, Red Giant has cancelled two products and one appearance out of uncertainty regarding Final Cut Pro X’s support for the cool stuff we love to build for you guys to get your work done.
Response to my previous post has been wonderful. Ben Zotto, the creator of Penultimate, blogged about it yesterday, and Daring Fireball picked it up as well, highlighting the bit about generalizing my specific need (storyboarding templates) into a general suggestion (user-customizable papers that are easy to share). “Good way to think about feature requests” comprised Gruber’s customary dense morsel of commentary.
Which commentary inspired Ben to craft a must-read post on how a good developer listens to customer feedback, and how a user can best make their case for new features. Hint: It’s not about feature requests.
I’ll give you an example from Penultimate. Early versions of the app had the eraser function, but the eraser was a fixed circular size (about the size of a fingertip). I got lots of feedback asking for selectable eraser sizes (small, medium, large). That was the feature request: “add other eraser sizes.” But more eraser options, as such, was not what these users were really asking for, which was usually a way to do detailed erasing in small areas. Instead of complying with the letter of the request, I like to think I did one better, which was to make the eraser size dynamic. There’s still just one eraser, but if you’re working in a detailed area, it’s tiny. If you make huge swipes, it’s large.
That’s the difference between an elegant app that just works and a Homer Car of faithfully implemented features reflecting no singular vision. Read Ben’s entire post here, and think about it the next time you get inspired to make a “feature request.” I know I will.
Update 2015-01-06: When Evernote acquired Penultimate, they sadly took down Ben's Coacobox blog. The links in this post now point to the Internet Archive copies.
There’s an iPad stylus review buried in here. But first, some background on why I’m so excited to be storyboarding on a tablet.
As I detailed in The DV Rebel’s Guide, storyboards don’t have to be immaculately drawn to be effective. Which is lucky for me, because I have let wither whatever drawing ability I once had. To me, the boarding process is about flow. I need a tool that allows me to bang out my ideas as they come. For as long as I can remember, that’s been printed storyboard templates and a mechanical pencil. That’s how I whip up my “thumbnail boards,” which are usually stick figures, arrows, and incomprehensible squiggles.
This process is then followed by a rather ugly chore of scanning, cleaning up, and cropping in Photoshop.
To speed the process and avoid the manual labor, I’ve tried using various storyboarding systems and software, including ClipSketch and Storyboards on the iPad and SketchUp on my laptop, but I always come back to the simple, expressive basics of hand-drawn boards. They may be simple, but they’re my simple, and the camera angles I draw are never limited by what clip art I had on hand.
In the early days of the iPad, one of the first apps I bought was Penultimate by Cocoa Box Design. Penultimate was designed to be your digital Moleskine notebook, a simple and elegant blank page on which to doodle, sketch, or write. Whether it was the elegance of the app or the fluidity of the pseudo-pressure-sensitive drawing, Penultimate earned a permanent place on the front screen of my iPad.
I approached the developer, Ben Zotto, about my desire to use Penultimate for storyboarding. The app then offered a selection of three paper styles; plain, lined, and graph. Rather than myopically suggesting he add storyboarding templates, a rather niche use case, I suggested that it might be of general interest to his users to allow custom papers. I must not have been the only one thinking this, because just this May, Ben released Penultimate 3.0 with exactly that feature. He even used a film storyboard as his example.
Why is Penultimate, a simple, general-purpose notebook app, the best iPad storyboarding tool? There’s a critical mass of features that add up to awesome:
The DV Rebel often repurposes tools from other disciplines. Penultimate is a great example of filmmaking software that isn’t just for filmmaking. I’m so fired up about my new storyboarding workflow that I’m sharing my Prolost storyboarding templates.
There are templates for HD aspect ratio and ‘scope, portrait and landscape. The landscape ones come in variations featuring a rule-of-thirds grid and a “blackout” look. Tap these links on your iPad and they’ll open in Penultimate.
Some tips:
Aside from better landscape support, what’s missing from Penultimate? Not much. The app allows single frames to be saved and shared as JPEGs, but only allows multi-page export as PDF. For my workflow, I’d occasionally like to export a series of JPEGs. I’d also like just one more pen color: a barely-there gray for roughing-in a drawing before refining it in black or dark gray.
The Boxwave Capacitive Stylus and the Wacom Bamboo Stylus for iPad
If you’re going to be drawing on your iPad, you’re going to want a stylus. I’ve owned three, the PogoSketch, the BoxWave, and Wacom’s Bamboo Stylus for iPad.
The Pogo Sketch is affordable enough to buy just to decide if you like using a stylus with your iPad. It’s also available at most Apple retail stores, although you’ll have to ask for it — it’s not on display.
The BoxWave is almost as affordable as the Pogo, but I found it to be much better. It’s small, as these things seem pathologically intent on being, and light. But the rubber tip gives a great drawing feel on the iPad screen, and it features a clever tether with a plastic plug at the end that fits in your tablet’s headphone jack, which improves your chances of actually having the dang thing with you when inspiration strikes.
Wacom makes the wonderful and not inexpensive tablets and Cintiq pen displays, so leave it to them to come out with a premium capacitive stylus. Their Bamboo Stylus for iPad is the most expensive one I considered. It’s got a nice heft, it’s long enough for grown-ups, and it has the finest tip I’ve seen on an iPad stylus — which may or may not mean anything tangible, but it just seems to feel better in use.
Expensive things are expensive. But to me, a $10 stylus that I never use is more expensive than a $30 that I love and use often. The Bamboo is by far my favorite and worth every penny it cost, and every day I waited for it to arrive.
What do you do with all these drawings once they’re done? You might consider dropping them into Storyboard Composer (UPDATE: Now available for iPad as Storyboard Composer HD) or build an interactive presentation of them in Keynote or the excellent Portfolio (all of which would be much easier with multi-page JPEG output). You might bring them into After Effects or your favorite NLE to cut them into an animatic. Our you might just work with them as a PDF or a printout. Whatever you do, I think you’ll find that drawing storyboards on your iPad is finally ready to replace paper and pencil.
See also: What I Do With My iPad Part 2: Write With a Keyboard
Update
on 2014-01-08 18:13 by Stu
A lot has changed since this post! Penultimate was acquired by Evernote, and I’ve switched to Noteshelf for my storyboards—and built a cool tool for animating them automatically, called Boardo.
Update
on 2014-05-04 05:58 by Stu
My wife Michelle Stock and her sister Diana Stock just launched an online boutique called Small Gunns. Their first products are a custom-designed line of graphic tees for kids. My contributions included some photography on their site. And celebratory cocktails of course!
Check it out if you have kids (or know people who do), and bookmark it (or follow @smallgunns on Twitter) if you don’t — their next product will be available in adult sizes and you’re gonna want it.
I’m a huge fan of Dropbox. I use it every day both to make my work computer-agnostic and to collaborate with others. I wrote about how I use it to monitor After Effects renders.
But there’s a problem with Dropbox, one that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever had a roommate. Actually, anyone who’s had more than one roommate.
If you have one roommate, the house stays pretty clean, because there’s accountability. If I see dishes in the sink, I know who left them there. I am unlikely to leave dishes in the sink, because I know that my roommate will know it was me who did it.
Add a third roomy to the scenario and an important thing happens: Now I can’t be certain whose dishes those are in the sink. I might be tempted to leave dishes in the sink myself, because no one roommate will know with certainty that I’m the messy culprit. Instead of accountability, I now have just enough anonymity to be a slob with impunity.
It gets worse. As soon as one dish gets left, and it most certainly will, the next anonymous roommate will almost certainly add his dish to the mess. The sink is already full of untraceable dirty dishes, what’s one more?
I share Dropbox folders with a great many people, and the only ones that ever sprawl out of control are the ones I share with more than one other person. It’s become enough of an issue that I decided to write up my three rules for a tidy Dropbox.
With Dropbox, you can share a folder with one or more other people, and this becomes a synced folder on both of your computers. This is one of the fundamental awesome Dropbox features, and it’s where people immediately go wrong — by naming the folder something that makes sense to them, but not to the person with whom they are sharing it.
I have countless shared folders in the top level of my Dropbox directory called “Stu,” “Stuff for Stu,” “Red Giant,” “Client,” “Files for Stu,” etc. These folder names made perfect sense to the person making them, on their hard drive, but on mine they are criminally useless.
Thinking of a folder name that makes sense for all the people accessing it is surprisingly hard, but I have a system that I use, and that I wish you would too if you ever share a folder with me. I name all my folders “Stu & ______”, with the blank being filled in with the name of the person or organization with whom I am sharing the folder. My favorite part of my Dropbox is the long list of folders that look like this:
There are two things that this naming scheme is accomplishing. First, and this is always the guiding principal when naming shared folders, it’s the simplest possible expression of what’s actually going on. The primary feature of this folder is that it is shared among these people. No need to call out a specific project or event — that can be done with subfolders.
Second, since my name is first, you can assume that I “own” the folder. I invited you to it, not the other way around. I’ll set the tone for the organization within the folder, delete old files, and delete the folder if we don’t need it anymore, not you. If you want to wear the pants in a Dropbox folder, create one called “Handsome Reader & Stu” and invite me to share it.
Or pick another system and stick to it. The point here is that when you’re creating that shared folder, you’re naming for two — or more.
Now that you and I are sharing a folder, the name of which makes good sense on both our drives, let’s make sure the contents of the folder make equal sense. There are an infinite number of ways to organize projects, but one technique I come back to again and again is the idea of “from” folders with a date in the name. I’m I’m sending you new files via Dropbox, I’ll first add a folder called “From Stu” with today’s date tacked on the end. I’ll format the date YYMMDD, so that it will alphabetically sort in chronological order. So you might see folders like this:
Within each of these folder are the files I sent you that day. If I need to distinguish among posts on the same day, I’ll add alphabetical suffixes to the dates:
That’s what I do. You might like something else. But as the owner of the folder, you decide. Set the precedent early and watch your collaborators follow suit without you even having to ask.
There’s only one thing left to say, and that’s simply to clean up after yourself. Like the dishes, this is all about accountability. Since it’s now clear who owns each folder, and who posted what within those folders, it’s also clear whose responsibility it is to tidy up. Remember, if you delete something from Dropbox and want it back, you can restore it from the web interface — so there’s no reason not to be ruthless.
I know, this is nerdy stuff. But when you share files via Dropbox, you’re sharing what many people consider to be their most personal living space. Dropbox is wonderful, but there’s a slippery slope from collaboration Utopia to file frat house. Be a good Dropbox roommate.
Update
on 2011-06-10 08:03 by Stu
@klavr adroitly pointed out on Twitter that you can rename shared Dropbox folders, and that the new name will only be visible to you. So you can share a folder with me called “Files for Stu” and I can rename it to “My Friend is an Idiot.” But I don’t like this feature, because it means we no longer have identical file paths. You call me up and tell me your latest awesomeness is in Dropbox in the “Monkey Sauce” folder and now I have to remember what I renamed that to? I bought a computer so I don’t have to remember stuff.
Still, it’s a powerful feature of Dropbox and one you can use to impose tidiness on an unruly roomy.
