Cinemek's Hitchcock Storyboard Composer for iPhone

Hey that looks pretty cool. Too bad I don't have an iphone.
Any chance you'll have an Android version of this app?
 
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Sweet! Just bought it...

Update: This prog is awesome; perfect for throwing ideas together on the move. Also for creating quick shot lists...
 
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yeah i thought it looked kind of cool too until i saw the price tag. with the general app firmly pricing ingrained in my head, i stick to 99 cents as a standard price for normal decent apps, and $5 or so as the high end for something really good. over that and i don't bother messing with it.

unless there's a cheaper or free lite app to test with first. hint hint.
 
Joshua Brown said:
Looks a bit spendy for just an iPod app.
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I guess that depends on what you expect from apps. I will pay top dollar for anything that will allow me to work more efficiently. We are hoping to open peoples minds as to what the iphone and ipod touch are actually capable of.


Joshua Brown said:
Is there a desktop client version to accompany it?
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Not yet but there will be in the future. We are working on many new features which will be built into future versions.

Thanks for your feedback.
 
JHouser said:
I guess that depends on what you expect from apps. I will pay top dollar for anything that will allow me to work more efficiently. We are hoping to open peoples minds as to what the iphone and ipod touch are actually capable of.




Not yet but there will be in the future. We are working on many new features which will be built into future versions.

Thanks for your feedback.
Click to expand...


I see what your getting at, but given the percieved value of 99%of the apps on the iPhone it may be a little hard to convince people. At such a comparatively large intro price, it may be hard to "open peoples minds". I am sure many people will find it useful, but I don't have that money to spend when my pocket notepad serves most of my purposes. (sent frommy iPod :p )
 
slimchrisp said:
yeah i thought it looked kind of cool too until i saw the price tag. with the general app firmly pricing ingrained in my head, i stick to 99 cents as a standard price for normal decent apps, and $5 or so as the high end for something really good. over that and i don't bother messing with it.

unless there's a cheaper or free lite app to test with first. hint hint.
Click to expand...

I can see that. There is a onslaught of cheap apps on the app store which sets a trend of devaluing apps. The issue is how Apple structures their apps. Professional tools are right next to ifart. :) So we are working to change the idea that you can actually have a valuable tool on a mobile device. After all, the nearest competitor is FrameForge and that weighs in at $399. $20 is a steal compared to that. With Hitchcock, you can take it with you.

We have many videos online to preview.
http://www.vimeo.com/channels/hitchcock
If you don't like it. Feel free to return it.

Thanks for your feedback. It took us a while to settle on the price, so this kind of user input is great.
 
With the "Return It" line you just might have some folks hooked. Shoot I might even have 20 lying around sometime soon if I can also get the iPod with a camera (or iPhone), now THAT would be useful. But your right on the app store marketing structure. Simply putting "pro" apps in a separate section of the app store would increase their value. If you can really provide above and beyond support and guarantees on your app then I think it will do well.
 
Downloading it now. Hope to find it useful for a couple of projects. :)

Hey, I've spent $20 on things not nearly as promising as this app.



Edited to add: Please make your 15 minute tutorial video available on YouTube. My laptop struggles with Vimeo clips. Thanks!
 
Terry,
Thanks for checking it out. Looks like they pulled the original because the 10 minute limit. (keep forgetting about that) So I split it into two versions. Should be up in a few hours. Thanks again!
 
I felt $20 was not too much for an app like this. If there were a $20 desktop app that offered the same functionality, most people would not question the price.

I downloaded it, and I like it. There's a lot of functionality built into a small space.

My only criticism: You need to go a little farther with the "figures" feature. Your Vimeo examples assume that the user will have actors available when putting together the storyboards, which for me is never the case. So I need more extensive options in terms of differentiating the figures.

1) I'd like to be able to change the color of a figure. That way, if I have two men -- say Bill and Chris -- I could follow a convention across multiple panels where the "Red Man" is Bill and the "Blue Man" is Chris.

2) It would also be nice to have a few extra poses, like sitting and lying. The front/profile poses aren't enough to tell most stories.

Not sure how to gracefully integrate these features into your very compact UI, but they would be nice to have.

Other nit-picky issues:

1) I wish the zoom and push-in arrows adjusted to match the end frame. Right now, if the end frame isn't centered, the result looks sloppy.

2) I wish there was a way to set some options for the PDF. For example I don't like that it prints a duration under each frame. The "Duration" concept is OK for playing back an animation, but for printed storyboards it's irrelevant as the real duration will be set by the editor (as well as the actors and director on the set.) And if you don't care about the animation feature, and don't set the durations, every printed frame has a "Duration: 0:03:00" under it. Looks stupid.

Possible bug? At one point I let the phone go to sleep with the Hitchcock camera open, and when I unlocked the pone, the camera "froze" and the iris wouldn't open. Even if I exited Hitchcock and went to the standard iPhone camera, the camera was still in "Hitchcock mode" (no video/still switch) and was still frozen. I had to completely power down/restart the phone to get the camera unfrozen. However, I was unable to reproduce the problem a second time.

Thanks,
Kevin
 
Some app feedback

Some app feedback

Jonathan,

I just bought Hitchcock. At $20, it seems expensive compared to $0.99 specials. That said, it seems like a great app even for my modest needs. IMO, it's worth the money.

One thing I like is that you can quickly capture and use location scenes using the iPhone camera. And then add content. Even with just a few minutes of playing with it, I was able to capture my ideas. And then question those ideas immediately. I really like this tool. That said...

While the app is pretty straight forward and the tutorials do a good job explaining it, I could not find any quick reference docs/help page available - either in the app or on a web page. Watching a tutorial (multiple times) is not a good use of time when you're looking for a quick answer to something specific.

Regarding the issue I found...

I could not figure out how to compress the selected picture so that it fits in the Hitchcock windows. I could zoom IN on the pic, but I could not zoom OUT. Is this a software limitation? Did I miss something?

It's a great app and worth the money, IMO. However, I'd like find an answer to my issue and I'd like to see some reference docs.

Thanks,

Dan.

p.s. There's an old saying in business that you can fail because your product is wildly unsuccessful or because it is wildly successful. I think your challenge will be dealing with the latter. :)
 
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Dan Clark said:
I just bought Hitchcock. At $20, it seems expensive compared to $0.99 specials.
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I don't know why people are comparing Hitchcock to $0.99 specials, as they are designed for completely different market segments.

With luck you might sell 50K+ copies of a 99 cent app, while an app like Hitchcock that is geared for a much smaller market segment might have sales of just a few thousand.
 
kecorcoran said:
I felt $20 was not too much for an app like this. If there were a $20 desktop app that offered the same functionality, most people would not question the price.
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Thank you. We are working on changing the idea that apps are "lesser" because they are mobile. It is hard when you have a large number of iPhone apps which are just less useful ported versions of the desktop app. It will just take a matter of time before people start to understand that Hitchcock's biggest asset is that it is mobile.

kecorcoran said:
My only criticism: You need to go a little farther with the "figures" feature. Your Vimeo examples assume that the user will have actors available when putting together the storyboards, which for me is never the case. So I need more extensive options in terms of differentiating the figures.

1) I'd like to be able to change the color of a figure. That way, if I have two men -- say Bill and Chris -- I could follow a convention across multiple panels where the "Red Man" is Bill and the "Blue Man" is Chris.

2) It would also be nice to have a few extra poses, like sitting and lying. The front/profile poses aren't enough to tell most stories.
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Your sentiment is echoed by many including myself. I'm getting a fair amount of requests for trees bikes, dogs, cats, pencils....
So, let me take a second to say that Hitchcock is not FrameForge lite. I never intended it to be. 3D based desktop apps are REALLY amazing. I'm amazed what you can do with them. For hours. In your basement. Sometimes ,when you are done you don't even need to shoot a film.

With that being said, we need more detail in the characters.

kecorcoran said:
Not sure how to gracefully integrate these features into your very compact UI, but they would be nice to have.
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That is the part that is tricky. Most of the time it's not if we can do it is how do we do it and maintain the app's integrity. My current idea is to create an import feature with the (soon to come) desktop client. Where the user can either create on their own, or import png files from a current list of png's that we would have on our PNG repository. Users could upload PNG's to share. So eventually it would become a searchable repository for PNG's.

kecorcoran said:
1) I wish the zoom and push-in arrows adjusted to match the end frame. Right now, if the end frame isn't centered, the result looks sloppy.
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This is something that bothers me as well and is a future version update. This app would have never gotten done if I got everything that I asked for from my programmers.:)

kecorcoran said:
2) I wish there was a way to set some options for the PDF. For example I don't like that it prints a duration under each frame. The "Duration" concept is OK for playing back an animation, but for printed storyboards it's irrelevant as the real duration will be set by the editor (as well as the actors and director on the set.) And if you don't care about the animation feature, and don't set the durations, every printed frame has a "Duration: 0:03:00" under it. Looks stupid.
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Yea, it does look stupid in the PDF. Ill look into yanking it or making it an option. Although, I don't know why people would want duration in there anyways.

kecorcoran said:
Possible bug? At one point I let the phone go to sleep with the Hitchcock camera open, and when I unlocked the pone, the camera "froze" and the iris wouldn't open. Even if I exited Hitchcock and went to the standard iPhone camera, the camera was still in "Hitchcock mode" (no video/still switch) and was still frozen. I had to completely power down/restart the phone to get the camera unfrozen. However, I was unable to reproduce the problem a second time.
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I've been trying to reproduce it as well... If anyone can reproduce this please email me at support(at)cinemek.com

Thanks again for your input.
 
Dan Clark said:
Jonathan,
While the app is pretty straight forward and the tutorials do a good job explaining it, I could not find any quick reference docs/help page available - either in the app or on a web page. Watching a tutorial (multiple times) is not a good use of time when you're looking for a quick answer to something specific.
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I totally agree, We are working on quick reference guides now.

Dan Clark said:
I could not figure out how to compress the selected picture so that it fits in the Hitchcock windows. I could zoom IN on the pic, but I could not zoom OUT. Is this a software limitation? Did I miss something?
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Ok, so correct me if I am wrong, You imported your own image, now you are trying to get it to scale down so you can see it in it's entirety. Hitchcock does not allow you to scale the image smaller than the window, ie. you cannot pull multiple images in and make a collage. is that what you are referring to?

Dan Clark said:
p.s. There's an old saying in business that you can fail because your product is wildly unsuccessful or because it is wildly successful. I think your challenge will be dealing with the latter. :)
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Thanks!
 
I'm a fan...you had me at Hitch.

Now I have no grounds to avoid buying that iPhone
mad0245.gif
 
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