In LA

A while back I posted a video of one of my more successful tests flying a Canon T2i DSLR on a Steadicam Merlin. In the Vimeo comment thread, people asked for my recipe¹, and I promised to post it. Time passed². I experimented with other, heavier lenses on my camera, and adjusted the Steadicam to each, erasing the previous settings.

The other day I ran second camera on a commercial shoot, needed to use the kit lens and Rode Videomic, and thus had to dig up my recipe. And there’s the recipe above, that image, taken with a cell phone camera. That’s pretty much all I recorded of my recipe, the rest is easy to derive from there. Here’s how I’ve got it set at the moment:

• Stage Mounting Hole: N
• The stage mark is lined up right about at -1.25.
• End Weights: 1 start, 2 full
• Middle Weights: 1 full, 1 finish
• Arc size: if “-” is -1 and “+” is 1, I’m set right around -0.15 –not sure if that’s the same setting as in the photo.
• Gezornenplatz screw is in place, and the arc joint is locked. The setup works best when it is as stiff as possible.

Balance is everything on the Merlin, so any change to the weight or center of gravity of the stabilizer’s payload will make this recipe a starting point at best, if it’s of any use. Using a different lens, or zooming the kit lens from 18mm to 55mm would change the balance. If I were to configure the camera with anything other than a Canon T2i with the kit lens³ and a Rode Videomic (don’t forget the pencils or pens), I’d probably recommend ignoring this recipe and starting from scratch.

I hope this information is of use to someone.

On a semi-related note: I just ran the NeatVideo noise-reduction filter on that steadicam clip. To my eye, it once again did a nice job removing noise from video shot on the T2i at the 6400ISO setting. Click the thumbnail at right to see a large example frame.

Edit (2010/08/03): After a day using this reconstructed recipe and reviewing the resulting footage, it’s obviously more bottom heavy than the recipe with which I recorded that clip I’d posted to vimeo. Though this recipe balances the camera, there is sway when changing direction as a result of the bottom’s greater inertia. I think I’m going to try reducing the spar angle and lowering the gimbal so as to better equalize top and bottom. I want to get back to a 3-5 second drop time.⁴

1. A combination of steadicam weights and settings for a particular camera configuration and style of shooting is called a “recipe”, in the parlance of our times. [↩]
2. Sorry about that y’all. [↩]
3. A slow, but very lightweight and sharp 18-55mm lens, with Image Stabilization [↩]
4. Yep, I see that Garrett Brown, the inventor of the Steadicam Merlin, recommends a 1-second drop time in that video. But I think I’ve gotten better results with a markedly less bottom-heavy setup, though it actually does make the device more difficult to balance at first. [↩]

Green Sea Turtle in Kona, Hawaii. 6/2010 from ZachFine on Vimeo. If you’d like to watch the video in HD, start playback of the video, make sure the “HD” toggle is set to “on”, and click the video’s full-screen button () during playback.

I was a first-time visitor to Hawaii recently, and shot a lot of photos and video. I’ll be dribbling it to my blog in bits and pieces as I go through the footage. Here’s a taste: a green sea turtle at Ho’okena Beach in Kona, Hawaii. This turtle popped up as I was snorkeling in deeper waters and swam alongside me all the way back in to shore. A beauty. Perhaps she was amazed to see a film/video editor out in direct sunlight?

Meandering tech notes:
Shot with a Creative Vado HD solid state 720p camcorder (1st generation)¹, in a Creative-branded Aquapac underwater housing.

The Vado HD is very similar to the Flip Mino HD and the Kodak zi8; I like it because it features a much wider-angle lens than its competitors. The Aquapac is basically a $30 very clear plastic bag with a watertight seal. Though this one’s branded for the Creative Vado HD, it’s probably large enough to fit two of them side-by-side². One one of my snorkeling adventures I brought along my Canon HV20 in a dive housing, and its remote control (to start and stop the camera’s recording) in the Aquapac alongside the Vado. I probably could have put my cell phone in there as well but didn’t trust the bag yet and honestly didn’t really want it along.

This turtle clip is from the 2nd day of my trip, before I’d figured out that if I squeezed out all the air in the Aquapac before sealing it, the plastic would remain taut over the lens, resulting in a sharper image. Less air in the bag also would have resulted in a tighter fit against the screen of the Vado HD, which would have given me a fighting chance of seeing the image on the Vado’s screen underwater –most of the footage I shot on the trip, including this turtle clip, was shot by blindly pointing the camera and hoping.

I snorkeled with the Vado in the Aquapac bag all week and had no problem with leaks. I was a little worried about this, but wasn’t risking much as the 1st and 2nd generation Vado HD go for $49 these days (B-stock of the 4Gb versions on Creative’s website as of 7/2010).

I think the iPhone 4G’s video quality may best that of the Vado HD and competitors, and the iPhone definitely has the edge in terms of viewfinder (screen) quality and recording capacity. I’ve placed one in the Vado’s Aquapac case, and the iPhone’s capacitive screen was usable even while it was in the case. I suppose salt water might interfere with that use due to its conductivity. It’d be interesting to try using an iPhone for underwater video recording on my next trip, and I may be fool enough to risk it.

1. I’ve written up the Creative Vado HD previously here and here. [↩]
2. 3D anyone? [↩]

The stereo in my friend’s 2010 Prius¹ has a very useful feature: bluetooth audio input. As soon as he steps inside his car, his iPhone connects to the stereo wirelessly, and he can then play music from its library or using Pandora without connecting any cables.

I noticed that DealExtreme sells a bluetooth stereo music receiver for $12.99². This tiny, battery-operated device looks like an ugly cousin of an old iPod shuffle, sporting a big bluetooth symbol in the middle of its control pad. It’s designed to accept wireless transmissions from your iPhone, computer, or other device that supports bluetooth audio streaming, and then play that received audio out headphones connected to its jack. $12.99 falls well within my speculative hacking budget.

So I bought the device and have tested it out. When I plugged a cable between its headphone jack and my car’s audio input jack and streamed audio to it from my iPhone, it worked a treat. It shows up in the iPhone’s bluetooth menu as a device named,”BCK-08″.

There are a few problems. The device’s built-in battery is pathetic, and within an hour or two of use it begins to beep every few minutes to indicate that the battery needs a charge. I also think the audio quality decreases in direct proportion to the battery’s charge, but am not positive about that.

My goal is to take apart this device, wire it to be powered directly from my car, and leave it permanently connected to the car stereo’s auxiliary input jack.

I’ve found a few resources on the net that may be of help:

• The data sheet for the chip used in this device, the ISSC IS1621N. I wish this PDF file were available to simply download. To have to view it in a flash-based viewer feels archaic, and overprotective for information the manufacturer should want to widely disseminate. I do see a button labeled “download” (in Chinese), but to download requires an account on the website and I don’t feel like jumping through account creation hoops in Chinese right now³.
• A page about the chip at its manufacturer’s website.
• The page of someone who has already taken apart the BCK-08 and is planning to do a similar project. He mentions a desire to get line-level output from the device. I think that’d be nice, though I notice no mention of a line out in the chip’s pinout, only an amplified headphone out.
• Wikipedia’s writeup of the LM317 adjustable voltage regulator, which is probably the part I’ll need to use to take my car’s 12V as input and supply 3.7V DC to the BCK-08.
• Or perhaps I could use this constant current-regulated LED driver⁴ to bring my car’s 12V down to 3.7V. It’s designed for high-power Cree LEDs, which take 3.7V input, so I’d guess it might be about right. Would save me some time designing my own circuit with the LM317, and it only costs $2.39.

1. I’m sure many other cars also have this feature. [↩]
2. The device’s full name on DealExtreme’s site is “Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP AVRCP Stereo Music Receiver and Handsfree (Black)” [↩]
3. I’ve been out of China for 3 years now and don’t feel like spending an hour fighting my way through the website with a dictionary in hand [↩]
4. Also from DealExtreme –how about that? [↩]

From a recent trip to Kona. I’ll post a link to the rest of the photos on Flickr as soon as I finish editing them.

Rachel and I were driving along Coldwater Canyon Blvd in Studio City this morning when we spotted something that’s a not-infrequent sight around here: Jay Leno driving one of his very cool vintage cars down the road.

I grabbed her cell phone¹ and snapped a couple of pictures. He did the same. I don’t think he has a blog in which he posts photos of people in the act of taking his picture², but if he does you’ll now be able to find a photo of me on it.

1. It’s an iPhone 4G. I’m pretty impressed by its camera’s image quality. I don’t think I gave the phone enough time to properly set its exposure for that 2nd shot, there’s likely have been better highlight detail had I waited a couple of seconds. [↩]
2. which is something I’d definitely do if I were any sort of celebrity [↩]

I thought this screenshot might amuse. Click the photo to see it at full-size. At the top of the image are photos that include Chow Yun Fat, cropped to just the automatically recognized face. Below a line are photos that Aperture 3 thinks may be the same person. To refine the computer’s idea of what his face looks like and tag more photos with the appropriate name I had to select all Chow Yun Fat photos from the bottom part of the screen and drag them to the top, above the line.

For more info on the facial recognition feature in Aperture 3, check here on Apple’s website.

I have about 16,000 photos in my archive, and though the process isn’t completely automatic, the facial recognition feature made it much more feasible to tag all the people in these photos. Even just the fact that the application can display an entire set of photos cropped and resized to only show faces alone would be a huge help, the fact that Aperture 3 makes decent guesses is a bonus.

5/19/2010 4:43pm Edit: I’ve been told this feature was in the previous version of the app. I just never happened across it

The official iPhone Twitter client is finally up in the app store, today, now. The app,”Twitter”, is actually version 3 of what used to be called “Tweetie”. Twitter bought Tweetie, and what was previously an excellent commercial app is now free and improved.

The “Nearby” feature of Tweetie v2, which showed a list of nearby recent tweets, has been updated for v3. It’s more difficult to find this feature in the new version of the app, as it is accessed via an unlabeled button, but it’s there and has been significantly upgraded. Now one can see not just a list of nearby tweets, but tweets in any area, overlaid on a Google map.

On the one hand, I’m all about openness, and it seems pretty cool to be able to see what people in a given area are tweeting, overlaid on a map.

On the other hand, the ease with which any of us iPhone Twitter users¹ can now be tracked down by stalkers, paparazzi, their mothers, and other ne’er-do-wells is a little scary.

Change. Scary and neato, at the same time.

1. iPhone Twitter users who opt-in for the app’s location feature when asked, that is. [↩]

When doing sound mixes, film/video editors often make use of hardware control surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal Pro. Such mixers connect to the editing system via MIDI. The editor slides the faders on these fancy control surfaces to adjust the volume for each of the edit’s audio tracks during playback. When the editor is not moving the faders, motors built into the control surface move them to match the edit’s pre-existing settings. The automatic movement of the faders can seem a little like something from Poltergeist.

Unfortunately, the motorized movement of these faders can also be noisy, especially the clacking sounds emitted as many faders pop into position at once. This can be distracting when trying to mix a quiet, emotional scene. These controllers are also pretty expensive, starting at about $1000.

Enter the iPad and Saitara Software’s “AC-7 Pro Control Surface”:

(problems with the embedded video above? try this direct link)

The control surface in the video looks very cool to me. It’s silent, can be seen in a dark editing room, appears to function as well as I’d need, and the cost of the app is only $9.99. I’ve played with a friend’s iPad, and know the touch-sensitivity of that screen is accurate and responsive enough that I’d have no problem adjusting several tracks at once with this interface. For those addicted to the feel of hardware faders this might not cut it¹, but for me it’d be a big improvement over moving the faders in Final Cut Pro’s “Audio Mixer” window with a mouse. I can’t justify spending $1200 on a set of faders I’d barely touch except a bit towards the end of a project, but $10² ? Hmm.

Yet another reason to consider an iPad. I wonder how long I’ll hold out? Sigh.

1. I don’t think this is just a matter of purely subjective preference –one can feel where a hardware fader’s control is in space, and there’s probably a bit of resistance built in so the user can feel when the level has been set at unity without having to look. [↩]
2. $510 if factoring in the cost of an iPad, which can also be used to access the iPoo social network. [↩]

Test of NeatVideo plugin; Noise removal from Canon T2i 6400 ISO clips from ZachFine on Vimeo.

if you’re on a fast machine, I’d recommend watching this full-screen with HD set to “on” –if you’d like to download the original QuickTime file rather than watch it embedded in a web page, there’s a download link low on the right side of the movie’s Vimeo page.

I shot some 1080p video in low-light with my Canon Digital Rebel T2i set to its 6400ISO setting, which resulted in very noisy video.

I tested the demo version of the NeatVideo for FCP filter to see if it could remove or minimize the noise. The results were encouraging, so I bought the “Pro” version of the plugin for $99.

This clip shows the results of the application of this filter to a couple of my more dramatically noisy clips. The filter renders very slowly, compounded by the fact that I’ve set the temporal filtration to use 3 frames.

You’ll see portions of the clips both with and without the noise removal, and split-screened sections for comparison. I think the result is pretty remarkable and usable, though the noise is peeking through the darker areas of the frame in the first clip. I wonder if I can smooth that out if I build a better noise profile or if I increase the temporal filtration?

Music:
“Do The Global Twist” by “The Neatbeats”, from the awesome album “japanese groupsound”.

I had to chop the song in half. Go buy the song or album to hear the very enthusiastic jam session in the middle of the track. Fun stuff.