In LA

If any y’all have thought of building a 3D printer and have been waiting for a kit to reach your low cost and complexity threshold, this new “Printrbot Simple” might be the one. It’s from the folks who made the “Printrbot Plus” I’ve been having fun with for a while, but is tiny in comparison and costs $299 for the kit ($249 for a very short time as a beta).

Read more on their page, Introducing the Printrbot Simple.

To my eye, the design looks very interesting. Most parts I’ve printed would fit fine within its 100x100x100mm (3.5″ cube) build envelope, and something that small would be nice and portable.

Just figured I’d pass it along while the discounted beta price is in play.

Fitz and the Tantrums – Out of My League from Jordan Bahat on Vimeo.

My friend Jordan directed this music video for the band Fitz and the Tantrums (released on 4/22 on VH-1 and on the band’s web page and on vimeo in better quality), and I got to help plan and execute a technically unorthodox portion of the shoot. It’s a little odd for me to be involved on the production end of a project and to not work all the way through post-production (on films, post often lasts for more than a year) –but it was fun to shoot a bunch of stuff, hand it to the producer, and then see the final result weeks later. Now I know a little better how production folk must feel. Kudos to Jordan and producer Taylor for seeing the project through to the end.

At around 30 seconds in, you’ll start to see the lo-fi 3D imagery I helped capture and visualize –point clouds and wire-mesh renditions of members of the band, rendered from various virtual camera positions.

The data was shot head-on from a fixed camera position¹, using a Canon 5DmkIII DSLR to capture video and a Microsoft Kinect sensor connected to a laptop to capture a video depth map. The DSLR and the Kinect were locked to one another with a 3D-printed mount. Jay Trautman² (thanks!) operated the laptop while I manned the DSLR.

The depth information for each pixel (or ‘D’) captured on the Kinect was recorded and later paired with the video info for that pixel (RGB) using a piece of free software³ called RGBDToolkit. It’s fun to play with. If you’ve got a Kinect and a video camera, you might give it a try.

There were some even-more-ambitious 3D data capture techniques at play during the shoot, involving an array of kinects and cameras (thanks Cedric!), which I’ll talk about another time. The non-3D shots were also captured on a Red Epic camera by D.P. Andrew Wheeler and his team.

My cousin Jenny did some great storyboards for the video, if they make it into her portfolio I’ll link to ‘em. A ton of other people worked on the video. I’ll link to the full credits soon if I can find them.

1. i.e. the camera was locked into position using a tripod [↩]
2. I worked with him previously on The Man with the Iron Fists [↩]
3. free as in beer and as in “MIT license” [↩]

I’m feeling pretty happy about this one. It’s my first somewhat complicated CAD design, and it works well. It’s a mount which holds a blower fan next to the extruder on my 3D printer and aims a stream of air towards the plastic as it prints, to cool it quickly so that the next layer is printed on a solid base.

There’s something really satisfying about measuring the dimensions of an item using calipers, sketching out a part meant to fit, designing it in a computer, printing a copy, fitting it, making changes to the design, fitting it, and ending the process with a working part that fills a need.

The files for printing and additional images are available on thingiverse.

Woot’s got refurbs of the Blue Yeti USB mic for $59 today. That’s a solid condenser mic with a nice full sound when used well. We recorded a ton of temp ADR on The Man with the Iron Fists using a Blue Yeti (and at least one of those temp recordings is in the finished film). My recommendation: Set this mic to its cardioid pattern (the others are useless for this purpose and pick up additional background noise), move it a few feet further from your CPU fans than is convenient, and then place it within a foot of the performer’s mouth (unless they’re yelling).

My configuration of recording equipment didn’t look sane, but worked well. Because the A/D converters are all inside the mic, the device to which it is connected has no bearing on the quality of the recorded audio. For the sake of mobility and because the device is fanless, I recorded using the mic connected to an iPad. –But the Yeti draws just enough power over USB to cause an iPad to disconnect and complain. So I connected the Yeti to one of those split USB cables that come with portable hard drives; One end of the split cable went to the Yeti, the other split end went into a USB battery pack to provide additional power, and then finally that cable was connected to a USB mini hub which was connected to the iPad using the iPad Camera Connection kit. The free iTalk app was used to start, stop, monitor, and transfer recordings.

I always think of online retailer Monoprice.com as a place to buy good and inexpensive audio and video cables, but they’ve been branching out. Recently, they’ve added microphones, an 8-channel mixer with USB IO, a $390 27″ IPS¹ WQHD² resolution monitor (which may be using the same panel as Apple and Dell’s 27″ IPS displays), and an interesting pair of audio monitors to their lineup. These are all the kind of items I use to outfit editing stations, so I’ll be keeping an eye on their new items. But I’m especially curious about those audio monitors.

That’s because the Monoprice “5-inch Powered Studio Monitor Speakers” look suspiciously similar to M-Audio’s BX5 monitors –the size and specifications are nearly identical³. But Monoprice’s sell for 40-50% less money. Here’s a little comparison:

The similarity leads me to wonder whether Monoprice and M-Audio are buying from the same factory. If so, I wonder if the speaker was originally designed by M-Audio or whether the factory sells the same model to all comers, and each company just changes the look of the enclosure. I’m always curious about manufacturing and the provenance of products, so I’m very interested to know more about how (if I’m right) both companies ended up selling almost the same speaker with a different housing and at very different price points.

Were I building an editing station from scratch right now, I’d probably be checking reviews of Monoprice’s mixer, their 27″ IPS monitor, and their audio monitors (once they are all released). These are key components of any editing system, and I’ve definitely spent beyond those prices kitting out my setup of hardware that has roughly equivalent specifications.

1. “In Plane Switching, a very nice type of LCD panel. [↩]
2. 2560×1440 [↩]
3. There is one minor difference I spotted between these models, and that is that the Monoprice monitor includes a “four-position high-frequency bias selector switch”, which is not a feature of the M-Audio BX5-D2. But previous versions of M-Audio’s BX5 did include such switches, so maybe Monoprice’s monitor is more of a match to M-Audio’s older monitor? [↩]

Perhaps that title is a bit dramatic. As best I can tell, one of the engines is bad, shut down in flight, and then its pylon snapped free from the wing. The copter/plane is all patched back together now, and will be ready to fly again as soon as I receive a new motor and two replacement propellers.

Video was captured using a GoPro camera mounted to the Quadshot Mocha multicopter’s built-in tripod mount, and an 808 keychain camera #11 with D lens velcro’d to the Gopro (accidentally rotated to the vertical).

More to come.

There’s a new server in town.

I swapped out the used and ancient IBM Thinkpad T41 Centrino laptop that was this server for a used Thinkpad T62 Core 2 Duo laptop. Hopefully there’ll now be more stability and faster page loads.

People often ask me for recommendations for DSLRs with which they can shoot video. I think the Canon Rebel series of cameras (T2i, T3i, T4i) are the best bang-for-the-buck in that category. Today, perhaps in celebration of Ridiculous_Invented-name_Consumerism-holiday¹, a couple of very good deals on nice entry-level Canon DSLRs have popped up. I read about these deals on the site cheesycam, which is a site I would recommend to any budget-minded filmmaker who is looking to save money and can manage to not buy so many good deals as to render the idea of “saving money” a bad joke.

Deal 1: $499 for Canon T3i DSLR Kit (includes a lightweight and dim 18-55mm lens with built-in stabilization)

Deal 2: $669 for Canon T3i kit with 18-55mm kit lens and 2 additional lenses (55-250mm, 75-300mm). I tend not to recommend lenses that cover long ranges as there are so many design compromises that go into maximizing that range that other qualities of the lenses suffer, but in this case they come out to costing very little. If you don’t like them you could probably sell them on eBay afterward and cover a portion of the cost of the camera.

As far as I know, the video quality of the Canon T3i is identical to that of the T4i and T2i, and pretty indistinguishable from that of the 7D and 60D. If you need such a thing, both of the deals listed above seem pretty good to me.

1. “Cyber Monday”, ew. [↩]

It’s not every day I see a film I’ve worked on listed on the Fatwallet Hot Deals forum as a hot deal. But today’s that day.

Assuming the deal lasts at least until this link is clicked, Amazon’s selling The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray] for $5.99. That’s a two-disc set full of tons of extras. Even if you’re just technically-minded, those extras alone are worth the cost, as it’s fun to see how the tons of VFX shots were executed. I’m not just talking about the head replacement –the boat floated in an impressive CG sea, actors were aged and youthened, foreign and domestic locations stood in for one another. Lots of groundbreaking VFX.

I’d previously posted when the film was at Amazon for $14.99 back in late ’09. I don’t really understand how film retaling works, I’d love to see a graph of its pricing over time, I wonder if this is a normal price decrease or if they’re hoping to spike Christmas sales.

Regardless the reason, this is a good deal. I think the DVD’s $1.99. But if you can play Blu-ray, go that route. It’s a great-looking film.