James Tupper

Sometimes you need to leave the camera gear at home, grab a board, and go cruise. That’s what I did this day and it only took about 10 minutes of skating before I realized what a grave mistake I had made. Luckily the iPhone 4s has pretty solid 1080p, so that got me through the rest of the day. Enjoy Jed and Dan dorkin around on the amazing NC winter weather.
Guest feeble: Brett Abramsky

It’s been a while since I’ve used Windows for anything other than playing video games.  Now that Apple has come and turned the NLE market on its head, it’s a great time to experiment with editing software other than Final Cut Pro 7.   After giving FCPX a fair 6 month trial, I came to the harsh reality that, although it’s a great program, it scales very poorly with the size of your project and it simply isn’t for me.   As it stands, FCPX simply isn’t suited for professional use.

I ended up moving to Premiere CS5 and it’s great.  Well, it’s only great if you have the right system running it.  I can’t stress this enough – if you don’t have a fast system with a Mercury Playback supported video card, then you won’t have a great time in Premiere CS5.  After figuring this out, I went out and built a custom Premiere editing station for about a grand.  And now, thanks to Apple’s slow move away from the professional market, I’m working in Windows.  The last project I made in Windows was Carolina Love and I swore I would never go back.  Well I was wrong, and Windows + Premiere is running like a dream.

More details on my editing setup to come.

I went to NYC recently with Beth to get away from Raleigh for the weekend.  It’s amazing as always.  Seeing The Book of Mormon on Broadway was an amazing experience.  It’s unfair how much talent Trey Park and Matt Stone have.  Here are a few shots that I took along the way.  (You can use the arrow keys or just click / tap to the right and left of the photos to navigate)

Post22 is repping pretty hard in the new Focus!  Jed’s got an ad, Alec has a writeup and I have a small interview.  Be sure to pick up the latest issue from your local skate shop!  Huge thanks to Mazur for reaching out to us for content.

Testing out the 120 FPS capabilities of the new GoPro2 HD camera. All of the footage is raw (no color corection or post processing). The original files are 848×480 and HIGHLY compressed. I scaled them up to 1280×720. My conclusion is that the footage is good enough for fun videos on the web and it’s even good enough for some artistic looks for bigger screens. Don’t film anything crucial at 120FPS. The 720P and 1080P modes are much nicer looking (in between iPhone 4Gs and a DSLR).

I’m busy these days.  I work full-time at an IT corporation during the day and full-time again in the evenings running my skateboard company.  The line between my work life and personal life is usually a blur, but that’s what keeps me on my toes.  If I’m not spending at least 12 hours a day practicing a skill, then I’m slacking.

I created this website to share some of my projects, stories, experiences, and knowledge with anybody who is interested.  You can expect to find content related to design, photography, skateboarding, branding, video editing, programming, small business, video games, motion graphics, and general nerdom on this site. Enjoy.

Side note: The domain jamestupper.com had been occupied for a long time because of this kook, but I waited patiently for years for it to expire and was lucky enough to grab it recently for a modest bid of $50. Look out James, I’m coming for my Google ranking next.