"Our self-study courses start in January and end in November each year, allowing you to have more flexibility with additional time to complete the coursework at your convenience."

This is the original article linked to in the previous Newsletter item: "Floating-point notation and gamma are both techniques that trade precision for dynamic range. However they differ fundamentally. Gamma is a non-linear function whereas floating point remains linear."

This week Amazon revealed the eye-popping budget for Season 1. It's remarkable.

"A federal judge says it is plausible that consumers don't know that access to purchased content can be revoked." Suddenly, those BluRay's look like they might be a good deal after all.

Scroll to the bottom of the page for the entirely reasonable restrictions: "Offered completely free of charge and available for Windows and macOs, the newly released Mistika Boutique Education Edition offers all the functionality and feature architecture as the paid editions of SGO’s professional color grading and full-finishing solution Mistika Boutique."

(video) "In this second video, we dig into how to correctly conform an EDL/XML in DaVinci Resolve."

"There are several other new features accompanying Calman 2021, including a new Pattern Insertion option, Calman Ready AutoCal support for LG 2021 series TVs, ASUS HDR Monitor calibration workflows, 1D LUT support for the Flanders Cube Generator, and the ability to lock design mode on custom workflows."

(video) "You'll learn the basic ins and outs of the SCRATCH animation editor - and also a few particular things, that make it super efficient."

(video) "In part 2 of this series, we're moving from the theory we covered in part 1 to the practical aspects of setting up an ACES workflow which facilitates optimal efficiency and problem solving."

"Flame’s integrated finishing toolset also sees significant updates with a new creative LUT Loader and ability to drive Flame’s colour grading and effects environment from a tactile colourist control panel. In response to the shift to remote work, you can also now share full screen, high-quality video, enabled by Network Device Interface (NDI®) video preview streaming."

(video) "Watch over the shoulder of senior colorist Cullen Kelly as he works through his first pass on a feature film and shares his approach."

(video) "Learn to measure audio/video sync issues with a smartphone, and compensate in DaVinci Resolve using Fairlight's B-Chain"

(video) "Learn to use DaVinci Resolve's Fusion page to build custom, reusable transitions to work inside a node based ACES pipeline."

If you run a QNAP and haven't heard about this, you best click through: "QNAP owners have had a busy year, with a large number of patches being pushed out to protect against a variety of threats.  Their work is not yet done as another wave of patches and mitigation steps need to be applied ASAP, lest they fall afoul of QLocker or eCh0raix.   These two ransomware attacks are spreading like wildfire across the net..."

"The new product, which incorporates key elements of Colorfront’s On-Set Dailies, Transkoder and Colorfront Engine technologies, ensures that everyone collaborating remotely on a project . . . can simultaneously see the same material with identical color accuracy and in grading-suite or screening-room image quality."

A somewhat pity article that answers: If you're a power user hanging on to your iMac and wondering if you can finally update - is that time now?

If you're using a MacMini as an external scopes/database server, this makes for a compelling upgrade. Article includes a rundown of the current MacMini lineup.

To keep my PC friends happy on this Mac-laden news week: "For simple configurations like mirroring or pooling there are options within Windows 10 which can be used without needing special hardware. This guide will cover a couple of those options and how to set them up."

"The act of coloring is a wonderful stress reliever — and as kids know, it’s a lot of fun. The Adobe Coloring Book features a wide variety of coloring pages that you can color digitally or by hand. So let’s get coloring!"

Art restoration with perspective: "Shot from the conservator's perspective and captured with binaural microphones this is an immersive ASMR experience that captures just what it's like to be working in the studio."

The Tao Treasurer doesn't know it yet, but I think I want to go down the composting road to help fertilize the lawn. Yes, this seems fun to me.