MLC FLASH NEWS

For Leverage, which premieres Sunday on TNT, Executive Producer Dean Devlin devised “an end-to-end Final Cut workflow” that allowed him to deliver a highly-produced show on a cable TV budget. “We color corrected in Color, we edited in Final Cut Pro, we mixed in Soundtrack Pro. We delivered the show without ever going to an outside post house.” Final Cut Studio, Devlin says, “really exceeded all of our expectations.”

From Portales: beginner’s Spanish to the advanced A Buen Puerto: Fast Forward in Spanish, you’ll find a variety of Spanish course material from the Open University on iTunes U. And once you’re conversant in Spanish, you could sample the German and French language courses, as well. Want to explore still more languages on iTunes U?

To capture, process, and tag images for a recent National Geographic shoot, David Liittschwager took Aperture out to the beach. After all, that’s where the nudibranch hang out. There, Liittschwager tethered his Canon 1Ds Mark II to a shrouded MacBook Pro and used Aperture to make on-the-fly light and focus adjustments as he shot. How else has Liittschwager come to depend on Aperture for his work?

If you want to get someone a phone and still surprise them, Jefferson Graham (usatoday.com) offers some advice: “Buy a gift card.” He notes that you can now purchase “a special ‘iPhone 3G Gift Card’ in any denomination you choose.” And when redeemed, he explains, a representative at the Apple Store will “customize the home screen, personalize the ring tone” and perform other setup chores.

The stampede begins as soon as the winning goal is scored or the sprinter crosses the finishing line. That’s when the photographers covering Olympic events madly rush to the massive Kodak Photographer’s Center, download and process their images, and file them with their news bureaus back home. And as David Schloss (macworld.com) reports, most are doing so on Macs running Aperture 2.

Whether you like watching them or creating your own, you’ll find a wealth of fascinating material about documentaries on iTunes U. Especially from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. There you can hear poets, photographers, and filmmakers speak about creating documentaries, and you can listen to audio documentaries recorded by Duke University students.

Think you have what it takes to be selected as one of the top emerging photographers of the year? If so, you have only one day left to submit your work for consideration in American Photo’s 2008 Emerging Photographers project. All you need is ten outstanding images, Aperture 2, and the free Portfolio Review export plug-in that you’ll find — along with complete details — on American Photo’s website.

We think you’ll really enjoy Off the Air, Pizza Box, Throne, and Calming Teas, the four latest TV ads now playing on the Get a Mac site. While you’re visiting, you may also want to watch the long version of Sad Song. It’s a classic. Maybe your friends would like to see them, too.

You may depend on Preview to read and annotate PDFs. But did you know that you can use Preview to crop, rotate, and resize photos? Using tools available in Preview, you can also adjust exposure, saturation, and sharpness. Or make Auto Levels adjustments. Preview even lets you remove backgrounds. To find out how to make easy photo edits in Preview, watch the latest Quick Tip of the Week.

“The latest rankings from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) show that Apple has dramatically outpaced its rival computer makers in the hearts of U.S. consumers,” reports Asher Hawkins (forbes.com). The ACSI survey “ranks Apple at 85” out of 100, “11 points above the computer-maker industry average.” In fact, “Apple’s rating is also an all-time high for the computer industry.”