If, like me, you’re excited about the new Canon Rebel T2i DSLR¹ and plan to buy one when the price falls a bit, and you’re in the USA, you’re in luck. Though I expect all stores will sell the camera at exactly its MSRP² for months, I’ve found a way to chop that price down by about 10%.

Remember Microsoft Bing? The search engine that Microsoft will pay you to use? That’s step 1.

1. Go to www.bing.com, sign in or create a “windows live”³ account, then search using bing for popular product lines like “ram” or “xbox”.
2. Look at the top of the search results for a “Bing cashback” link to eBay like the one I’ve annotated above. Click the words “Bing cashback”.
3. You’ll be taken to eBay. There’ll be a banner at the top of the page telling you that you’ll get an 8% “Bing cashback” if you purchase the item using eBay’s “Buy it now” link and if you pay via paypal. The key thing to note here is that the cashback happens regardless what item you buy at eBay, it doesn’t have to be RAM or XBox. In your case, search eBay for a Canon T2i.
4. In your search results, click the “Buy it now” tab to filter your search to only show items that can be purchased using that method.

Unless you want a gray market product, I’d advise you to be wary of any vendor with less than 99% positive feedback, or who is located overseas, or who doesn’t explicitly state the list of items included in the unopened box and that it comes with a Canon USA Warranty. But there are plenty of legitimate physical camera and electronics stores who use eBay as their internet storefront, and they’re listing the camera for the same price as Amazon and B&H.

Microsoft’s cashback takes a while. But a month or so after your purchase, they’ll deposit the cashback value directly to your paypal account. eBay has their own sort of cashback program going on, called “eBay Bucks”. For your purchase, you’ll earn 2% of its value in eBay Bucks, which can be used for future transactions. So within a month or two after your purchase, you’ll have received 10% of the total in Bing Cashback and eBay bucks.

I’m sure if you can wait six months a better deal will come along. Maybe the Canon T2i will be available at Dell Small Business store and you’ll be able to get %15 off buy using a coupon. But if, like me, you’re ready now to replace your several-generations-old DSLR, this is probably not a bad way to go.

1. At least in part due to its HD video capabilities [↩]
2. $799 for the body, $899 for the body in a kit with lens [↩]
3. The terms “windows” and “live” are meaningless Microsoftian buzzwords that are completely unrelated to this context. But the marketing folk at Redmond are only satisfied when those words are platered on top of every product. [↩]

If you’ve got a bunch of clips in a Final Cut Pro Browser window, and you’d like to quickly generate a still frame for each clip, you can use the “Still Image” feature of FCP’s ancient “Batch Export” feature to automate much of the process. Here’s how:

The result will be a folder full-resolution PNG images, each named after its parent clip, deposited in the chosen destination folder.

I often end up processing directories full of such uncompressed images further using the excellent command-line Imagemagick utilities using the tcsh shell’s¹ “foreach” command to iterate through all the images.² It generally goes a little something like this:

$ tcsh
% cd directory_of_images
% foreach foo (*.png)
foreach? convert -geometry 330x800 "$foo" "$foo:r.jpg"
foreach? rm "$foo"
foreach? end

The result of this command is a set of JPEG-compressed images, one per clip selected in step 2, each resized proportionally to fit within a 330×800 rectangle.

1. This is also easy to do with OS X’s default bash shell, but I’m more fluent in tcsh. [↩]
2. You may prefer GraphicConverter, Photoshop, or MS Paint. Imagemagick combined with the command line is mad fast for both image transformations and automatically renaming files. [↩]
3. Switching to the tcsh for this because I have yet to internalize Bash's foreach syntax. [↩]
4. If you're unfamiliar with command lines and shells, please note that the "%" character here represents the tcsh command-prompt, the "$" in the previous line represents the typical Bash command-prompt. Don't type these characters in your commands, they're just here for show. [↩]
5. "foo" is a placeholder of my choosing. There's nothing special about the string "foo". You can replace it with anything you like, such as "image", "placeholder", or "your_mom". Just make sure to use the same string in place of all the "$foo" commands below. [↩]
6. Each time tcsh iterates through your commands, it will replace the string "$foo" with the filename of an image from the set chosen by "*.png", which is every file in the directory ending in ".png". Adding a ":r" to "$foo" indicates that tcsh should expand the filename but leave off the period and filename extension –in this case "$foo:r.jpg" removes ".png" from the file and adds ".jpg" in its place. The quotes around "$foo" are optional if your filenames do not contain spaces or special characters. [↩]
7. Removing the original png file because all I ever wanted were the tiny JPEGs. [↩]
8. One more note from Captain Obvious: If you try to copy and paste any of these commands, be sure not to copy and paste the superscript numbers that lead to these footnotes. [↩]

It’s time to take apart some Final Cut Pro xml and add some newly received VFX clips to the VFX database. One of these days, I’ll explain all of these steps and how they might be useful in other workflows. For now, enjoy a look at a relaxing vacation from graphical user interfaces and mouse-clicks; A trip to the Terminal. If you have any Unix or XML knowledge, there might be something of interest in here.

Assistant-2:20100125 CAB$ xmlstarlet sel -t -m "//children/clip"\
-v "name" -o "," \
-v "out - in" -o "," -v "in" -o "," -v "out" -o ","\
-v "media/video/track/clipitem/start" -o "," \
-v "media/video/track/clipitem/end" -o ","\
-v "media/video/track/clipitem/file/timecode/frame" -o ","\
-v "media/video/track/clipitem/file/name" -o ","\
-v "media/video/track/clipitem/file/timecode/string" -o ","\
-v "media/video/track/clipitem/file/timecode/reel/name"\
-n 20100123_vfx_received.xml | tee 20100123_vfx_received.csv


52A-2_01_VFX_v1,178,0,178,0,178,,52A-2_01_VFX_v1.mov,,
52A-2_02_VFX_v1,141,0,141,0,141,,52A-2_02_VFX_v1.mov,,
52B-2_01_VFX_v1,152,0,152,0,152,,52B-2_01_VFX_v1.mov,,
53-3A_01_VFX_v4,307,0,307,0,307,,53-3A_01_VFX_v4.mov,,
54-3A_01_VFX_v1,188,0,188,0,188,,54-3A_01_VFX_v1.mov,,
C100_C016_0920LS_03_VFX_v1,102,0,102,0,102,,C100_C016_0920LS_03_VFX_v1.mov,,
C102_C011_0903RU_03_VFX_v1,79,0,79,0,79,,C102_C011_0903RU_03_VFX_v1.mov,,
C102_C011_0903RU_04_VFX_v4,256,0,256,0,256,,C102_C011_0903RU_04_VFX_v4.mov,,
C102_C011_0903RU_05_VFX_v2,200,0,200,0,200,,C102_C011_0903RU_05_VFX_v2.mov,,
C102_C011_0903RU_06_VFX_v2,147,0,147,0,147,,C102_C011_0903RU_06_VFX_v2.mov,,


Assistant-2:20100125 CAB$ cd thumbs/
Assistant-2:thumbs CAB$ tcsh
[Assistant-2:additions/20100125/thumbs] CAB% foreach foo (*.png)
foreach? convert -geometry 330x800 "$foo" "$foo:r.jpg"
foreach? rm "$foo"
foreach? end
[Assistant-2:additions/20100125/thumbs] CAB%

The starting point is a bin of clips in an FCP project. I’ve exported that bin as FCP XML, and have also batch exported the clips inside it as stills (to PNG, the default). The commands above are the meat of the process. Then the comma-separated-value list of clips I generate with the xmlstarlet command gets imported into an openoffice (or Excel) spreadsheet (a step I’ve ommitted here), and is massaged into a csv format for import into a Filemaker Pro database of VFX clips. Finally I import the thumbnails for each clip into the database. Fun stuff, pretty much.

Well, I didn’t feel like signing any autographs yesterday anyhow. (photo taken at Poquito Mas in Burbank, CA)

Montcalm road, Lowell, Michigan

My server’s been offline the better part of the last month due to the fact that I’ve been out of town and some errant process filled up my swap partition¹. So I’ll be backtracking in subsequent posts and filling in some details of my Michigan sojourn that I haven’t yet had the ability to post.

But here’s a bit of news from the present, surrounded by photos from my last drive into the countryside²: I’ve been in Michigan for a couple of months working on a film, and today I’ll be heading back to LA to continue working on the film for another month. My plan then entails relaxing for a couple of days with nothing to do, then a freak out and mad scramble to find another gig. I’ll be back in Los Angeles come Monday 10/26/2009. Let the wild rumpus begin³.

I will miss some things about this town. I’ll save them for a later post, which would have been an earlier post but for the problem noted in paragraph 1 of this post. Ah well, life goes on. It’s nice to be back online, and will be nice to be back home.

Oh hey, a cat. Who doesn’t love cats?

1. Yeah, one would think that swapping partitions was a “Free Love” era tradition, but it continues in all modern operating systems. There are even key exchanges. [↩]
2. Photos shot on 10/18/2009, click any of them to see them writ large. [↩]
3. ”Begin” is an anagram for “being”. Think about it. Stop thinking about it. [↩]

Ernest Borgnine, the vivacious 92-year-old actor who stars in the film on which I’m working ( The Genesis Code), dropped some impressive words of wisdom on a Fox News reporter a while back when asked for his anti-aging secret.

What he said.

This is what it looks like when editorial and visual effects teams look through sections of a film’s assembly edit to survey the tasks ahead, and come face to face with a number of lingering placeholders for visual effects shots that will need to be completed. At right is one such placeholder, a frame featuring the text,”CGI Missing: will match audio description”. The clip was very long. It was of such duration that I had time to snap the 14 photos required to stitch this¹ panorama with my iPhone, and its impact was of such gravity that nobody paid me any attention.

If our VFX team were less seasoned and capable, they’d see that placeholder clip in their sleep for the next few nights. But not this crowd –they merely laughed and then burst into song. It was amazing.

Post-production’s motto is “work hard, work hard”.

1. rather technically imperfect [↩]

A couple more panoramic photos shot on and stitched on my phone using the asswome app “AutoStitch“.

I present to you the Backwater Café’s hot turkey sandwich:

From this small sample size of local food photos, one would think Lowell, Michigan, is all about beige-colored carbohydrates.¹ Will a larger sample size prove otherwise? Stay tuned, I’ve a couple more months here.

1. for the record, the food’s generally pretty tasty [↩]

On my drive to work this morning I noticed that the sky and large plant-like things at the sides of the road were freakishly pretty and lush.

I finished my first solo drive to work without incident, and entered the editing room. As you can see, our editing room is no different than most feature film editing suites. Editors tend to like to work in the dark. Click the photo to see it at higher resolution.

After a day of work, the editor and I had dinner at "Sneakers Sports Bar". The bar had served the previous night as a filming location, and we’d visited late to watch a bit of the shoot. I think 10% of downtown Lowell might be visible in this photo. People can still smoke in bars in Michigan, so there was a nostalgic hint of cigarette in the air. Lowell is locked in perpetual battle with Disneyland’s Main Street for the title of smallest and cutest urban center.

Our waitress had worked at Sneakers for 20 years, yesterday she played a bartender in the film. I asked if her name was "Koko", as I was about to order "Koko’s chicken". She laughed and said no, and pointed to the menu item above my choice, which features her name. Rocky or Roxie or Rose… When I next eat there I’ll be able to pretend I’ve remembered her name simply by finding it in the menu.

You know when your food looks like this that you’ve entered the midwest. This here is "Koko’s Chicken". It was pretty tasty. Carb joke redacted. Anyone else as tired of making carb jokes as I am?