In LA

The most stylish (yet very shy around foreigners with iPhones) girl on the subway. Her very fashionable parents saw me try to take her photo and approved, and then her Dad took my phone away and proved himself with this photo the better photographer of this particular subject.

A sparkly owl coat, seen on the streets of Songjiang, Shanghai, China. If you’re ever curious if a given photo was shot in Shanghai, just look for guys carrying their girlfriends’ designer purses –it appears to be the local custom.

My new sweater proclaims that I am "having a Fine Time with your Friends" and exhorts all that "You Must be a Eiffel Knit Life". Word.

A “Betty Boop” store.


The Table Tennis section of East Nanjing Road’s big Li-Ning store.


Pleasant Goat wishes you all a jittery, happy, new year.

Rachel encounters a sidewalk butcher shop on the streets of Hengdian. Hengdian is a 4 hour drive from Shanghai. Many movies and TV shows are filmed on the town’s huge sets, which include a full-scale¹ replica of Beijing’s forbidden city.

Shot with a Canon 550D/T2i running the Magic Lantern firmware. Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 lens, Steadicam Merlin. Internal mics for audio, one channel without digital gain, one with about 18db.

If you are so inclined, you can download the video and watch it in higher quality from its vimeo page.

1. I’d venture it’s actually 4/5ths scale, but it’s pretty huge [↩]

A still from the film "The Prestige". Shot on film, photochemical finish, the entire film looks fantastic. Obviously, film can be awesome. Wally Pfister should be allowed to shoot on film, or sparklevision, or whatever he wants, for the rest of his days. See more stills from "The Prestige" at Beautiful Stills from Beautiful Films

Manohla Dargis just posted a fine article about the onslaught of digitally acquired films¹. She writes:

Some of this year’s most acclaimed and talked-over movies, for starters, including “The Social Network,” “Black Swan” and “Tiny Furniture,” were either partly or wholly shot in digital. It’s no wonder that more than a third of my 30 favorites this year — because, really, why stop at 10? — were a combination of the two. Does it matter?

Does it matter?

It matters to producers, as digital, used properly, can lower the cost of a shoot.

It matters to telecine and processing facilities, as –telecine? What’s that? Such facilities are quickly diversifying the services they offer, or are closing.

It matters to assistant editors, as they either have to deal with the constantly-changing workflows designed around different digital formats, or have to deal with transfers from film and keeping track of the relationship between the digital clips in the editing system and actual pieces of film.

It matters if you’re a Director of Photography with exacting standards, and you’ve spent your entire career building your knowledge and ability to achieve the images you want on film, surely. That’s probably the person to whom this debate matters the most, from the aesthetic side of the argument. But should it? Would adapting one’s style of shooting to a particular sensor be any different than adapting to a particular film stock? Can one choose particular cameras and sensors based on the needs of a project, as one did film stocks? I think this is already happening. But I can’t speak for DOPs.

But for audiences and cinema enthusiasts, “Does it matter?” was a good question, a year ago. Now it’s an afterthought.

Celluloid film is an amazing technology, and it’s dying, quickly. I’m no purist², but I’m a little sad about this, and hope I can work on a feature film that’s shot on film before it completely disappears.

A still from an as-yet unreleased short film I edited this year. Shot on the Red One with anamorphic lenses.

But as much as I love film, it’s exciting to see digital sensors catch up to film, and quickly. It’s a repeat of what happened in the world of print. I think we’re past the time in which the film vs. digital battle was spirited and relevant. That ongoing argument helped shape the new breed of digital cinema cameras, and it shows. It’s fast nearing the time to rephrase last years question, “Does it matter?” as, “Can we stop counting now, or pretending we can tell the difference?” At this point I’d venture that most³ of the more ardent celluloid enthusiasts and digital bashers have seen and unknowingly appreciated a digitally-acquired film. It’s the cinematic equivalent to the Turing Test, and digital started to pass a couple of years ago.

Dargis continues, and my mood darkens:

Digital images still don’t look as rich and sumptuous as film, which was developed to reproduce the way our eyes see the visible spectrum.

I can’t let either of these sorry old canards⁴ go unexamined.

First canard first: It is a bit unfair to compare the best examples from 100 years of celluloid film against the limited number of existing digitally-acquired films, especially considering that many of the films one thinks of (and notices) as “digital” were shot earlier in the decade⁵ –digital has improved in quality by leaps and bounds in the past few years. One has to compare to something, of course, but if you restrict your view to the best examples of recent digital, it becomes instantly clear that competently-shot digital images can look plenty rich and sumptuous. Even digitally acquired films from the past two years that don’t feature cinematography designed to take center stage, like “Cyrus”, look “rich and sumptuous” to me.

Back to print. Has National Geographic stopped looking sumptuous since they started publishing photos shot on digital cameras? Have people been writing complaints in to Playboy? The shift of the field of still photography from film to digital is relevant to this discussion, as digital sensors for moving imagery and for stills are as closely related as their celluloid counterparts are. The complaints, worries, and about digital for stills seem to have vanished over the past decade as the technology improved to the point that only an engineer could tell the difference.

Regarding Canard #2: So much of the film vs. digital argument has for so long been couched in pseudoscientific mystical pronouncements, and the idea that film is somehow better suited to replicating the way the human eye sees the world than digital is one of such. Both film and sensors designed for photography are designed to create pleasing images for people to stare at. Neither technology really reproduces “the way our eyes see the visible spectrum”, nor would anyone really want that.⁶ What film and sensors can do to reproduce the qualities of the visual spectrum that our eyes can sense, they do. Digital sensors follow film note for note in this regard. Both have the same design goal. The statement that film was designed to reproduce the way our eyes work and the implication that digital sensors are not, is simply wrong from any angle.

Nit picking aside, the article’s worth a read.

The battle that made the question “Does it matter?” relevant, is all but over. But “Will it blend?” –I think celluloid’s got a lock on that one.

1. I nearly put the word “films” in quotes, but if I did that I’d have to start calling the “bins” in Final Cut Pro what they look like: “folders”. [↩]
2. That should be obvious, given this blog post. [↩]
3. It’ll be all, by the end of 2011 [↩]
4. Well, if they haven’t achieved canard-status it’s not for lack of trying. [↩]
5. It’s also worth noting that many of the digital films shot until recently chose to go digital for reasons of flexibility or cost-containment, and didn’t place a priority on picture quality. The results speak for themselves, and should not be compared to the visual impact of films that put a priority on appearance, such as Lawrence of Arabia, but instead should be compared to similarly oriented uses of celluloid such as 60’s man-on-the-street news footage or Monty Python’s outdoor segments. [↩]
6. Human vision is fantastic, but that’s mostly the brain’s doing –in many ways our eyes are surprisingly crappy. The brain creates fantastic imagery out of surprisingly little information, and a lot of what we see is the result of pattern recognition and quick deduction in the visual cortex. Our impressions of color and light are relative to neighboring colors, rather than absolute measurements, and the way we see images is in a sense hallucinatory.

   Though neuroscientists and opthalmologists would love to get together and watch a sequence that actually reproduces the way our eyes see, it’d be jarring to an audience to watch footage that features a tiny, darker circle of very high detail and color saturation in the center with blues that tend to the violet, a larger empty black spot nearby, and all surrounded by an increasingly blurry and warped bright green-blue miasma in which motion is detectable but not details. Of course the view would continuously jitter around at high speed and never hold still so that the tiny spot of clarity can flit from detail to detail and take in enough for the brain to make its assumptions and create what we see. [↩]

The greenscreen shoot. That 16:9 frame at right represents the frame of the video player that’s part of the facebook page. Clamps hold breakaway blocks with tracking markers.

If you have a facebook account, you might¹ enjoy checking out this bit of Jackass 3D promotion that I helped plan and coordinate. It was a pretty complicated greenscreen shoot, put together on an extremely short timeline. The Jackass guys were hilarious and game, and their crew was great (special thanks Tripp and Barry). The creative team at Paramount, Picture Production Company, and the folk at Powster did a bang-up job initiating, commissioning, planning, and putting the whole thing together. It’s nice to see the finished result online and to be able to tell people about it. It is an app, you have to give it access to your entire life, but it’s² no more insidious than Farmville³.

A small section of a final result, composited live in a web browser.

Also part of the same shoot, this baseball-themed game.

All’s well that ends well eh? Now go see the film. How else are you going to see excrement fly at the camera in 3D?⁴

1. Or you might not. There’s no accounting for taste. [↩]
2. As far as I know. [↩]
3. And far far less annoying. It also doesn’t spam your friends with every smiling sheep you’ve mulesed or smiling automated milking machine you’ve installed or whatever people do in that Farmville thing whose updates drove me from Facebook. And seriously, what’s better, virtual happy farming, or dudes hitting baseballs into each others’ nuts? The world’s answer to that question can be found in the box office receipts for Jackass 3D. [↩]
4. Neither a trip to the zoo, nor the blue Navii “tribal bio-expelled tactical paste” seen in the upcoming director’s cut of Avatar count. [↩]

A frame from last night’s camera tests. Noise removed and image sharpened with the NeatVideo plugin.

I stayed up late yesterday with ¹ testing our new dolly, and for some inexplicable reason most of our camera tests included either pumpkins or skulls. I thought this frame in particular was very pretty.

Like every DSLR shooter with a slider (the non-professional term for a fixed-length dolly) I’m now constantly fighting the urge to post video clips of slow moving shots cut to ambient music. But the internet’s bandwidth is safe for now, as my hands are tied while the NeatVideo FCP plugin takes its sweet time² to remove noise and sharpen all the footage.

1. @dmcm is a person, but I think he should adopt the DMCM molecule’s diagram as his signature [↩]
2. On my quad-core it seems it takes 17 hours to do the denoising on 20 minutes of footage. 17. [↩]

I moved back to the US of A three years ago, so it’s time to retire my old Beijing-themed header images. I’ll miss the photo of the bicycle-based park barbers and the photo of the bicycle-based couch mover and even the photos of a younger version of myself in front of a red wall, but it’s time for a set that’s new and more relevant to Los Angeles.

So here are the header images I threw together yesterday, along with brief explanations:

In Los Angeles it is important to drive everywhere, regardless the distance. Yes, you could walk 3 blocks to your destination, but then you’d miss out on the many routes suggested by your car’s factory-installed GPS system.

An average sunset in the hills of LA’s "Studio City" district.

The pets of a film editor I know share an "American Gothic" moment. Part of the "A day in the life of Burbank" collection.

Disneyland isn’t exactly LA, but it’s close. This picturesque scene is part of the Grand Canyon diorama, one of the many sights to behold while enjoying Disneyland’s charming and ancient train ride.

Due to the extreme horizontal aspect ratio, it’s a challenge to edit images for the header. But it’s fun. The header image displayed per visit is chosen randomly. Once I’ve installed more images, you’ll likely see a different image each visit.

What you see above is an example of the beforeAfter jquery plugin in use. If you drag the controls overlaid on the image to the left or right, click anywhere in the image¹, or click the links just below the image, you’ll be able to compare the graded and ungraded looks of a frame from a short film I graded a couple of months ago.²

beforeAfter was written by admin at catchmyfame.com. You can find the original code, see some demonstration images, and read up on his reasons for developing the plugin in his blog post about beforeAfter.

I was very happy to come across this plugin. I’ve wanted for a while to be able to post before-and-after examples like this to my blog to demonstrate film grading and photo editing work, and this was nearly exactly what I needed. I took the code, wrapped it into a Wordpress plugin, and modified it to add a few features. Since I was to benefit from code released freely into the wild by its author, it’s only natural to release the modifications. The beforeAfter wordpress plugin I’ve constructed can be downloaded here:

http://zachfine.com/beforeAfter_wp.tar.gz

I wrote the plugin’s original author to ask for his blessing before releasing this altered version of beforeAfter, and he agreed. Below are excerpts from that email message, which explain my alterations to the code and also contains some instructions on how to use the plugin:

<email message>
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Zach wrote:
Hello there,

I was extremely happy to find your jquery beforeAfter script on the net. I’ve wanted for a while to post before and after images to my blog that help show people how to make adjustments to photos or grade video footage, beforeAfter seems like a fantastic way to do that.

I constructed a wordpress plugin based on your script and installed it on my server. It worked very well, but I realized while testing it that the following additional features would be very useful to me (and possibly to others as well):

• the ability to have an arbitrary number of instances of beforeAfter containers per page
• the ability to set custom “Show only before” and “Show only after” text strings via custom attribute in the container’s html.
• the ability to set a custom initial wipe starting point via custom attribute in the container’s html. The reason for this is that I want the beforeAfter controller and its function to be instantly obvious to visitors, so I want to manually place the initial wipe point over the area of greatest between-image contrast — or I might want to place the wipe point over the area I mean to emphasize.

So I read up on javascript and jquery and made a few modifications. It was only after making these modifications that I noticed the script’s license stipulates “No Derivative Works”. I think this means I can’t use the modifications I’ve made unless you give me approval to use my modified version of your script, though I could be wrong. I was planning on sending you these modifications regardless, thinking that in the best-case scenario you might like the modifications and/or make them available to others.

My mods to the script:

Example of container html:³

<div class="container" data-wipeto="35" data-beforetext="original" data-aftertext="graded" data-animateintro="true" data-introdelay="3000" data-introduration="3000"> <div><img alt="ungraded" src="http://zachfine.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/LB-01-00-57-05-original.jpg" height="254" width="450" /></div> <div><img alt="graded" src="http://zachfine.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/LB-01-00-57-05-graded.jpg" height="254" width="450" /></div> </div&

Note that I’ve set the user configuration settings above using valid html5 custom attributes. In this manner each container can have its own settings. The html5 spec requires that custom attributes be lowercase and begin with “data-”. Unfortunately this means no camelCasing, which cuts down on the readability of variable names. Maybe underscores are allowed?

Because my goal was to allow an arbitrary number of beforeAfter containers on a page, I’ve changed the jquery selectors in the script to look for divs of class “container”, rather than id “container”. I’ve always used id’s to single out individual design elements on a page, and classes for a class of elements. I could be wrong about this paradigm.

This html produces the following

Redundant image removed –see demo at top of this blog post, it’s a working example of the result of that container’s html.

Any beforeAfter settings not set by the user in the html will get the defaults. The “wipeto” point will be set to “50″ (out of 100), the “beforetext” will be set to “Show only before”, etc.

Here’s the jquery code I use to iterate through each of the the divs of class “container” in the DOM, iterating through each div’s custom attributes to construct an object of options, and then calling the beforeAfter plugin on that div and passing it the set of user-set options:

<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
   $('div.container').each(function (index) {
      var $div = $(this);

      var userOptions = {};
      $.each(this.attributes, function(i, attrib) {
             if( /^data-/.test(attrib.name) ) {
              userOptions[attrib.name.replace(/data-/g, '')] = attrib.value;
              }
      });

// Adding just one more option to the object of arguments:                      
      userOptions['imagepath'] = '<?php echo WP_PLUGIN_URL . "/beforeafter/js/"; ?>';

      $div.beforeAfter(userOptions);
   });
});
</script>

This bit of script is in my wordpress plugin, with more comments, here: http://zachfine.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/beforeafter/beforeAfter-source.php

I made a few of changes to the jquery.beforeafter.js script to make use of the new “wipeto”, “beforetext”, and “aftertext” vars, and to remove camelCasing from the options/defaults vars to be consistent with the html5 custom attributes. My altered version is available here: http://zachfine.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/beforeafter/js/jquery.beforeafterZ.js
</email message>

I plan to use this plugin quite a bit in the near future. I hope you all enjoy using it as well. Thanks again to admin at catchmyfame.com for writing the original plugin and allowing me to distribute and use this modified version.

1. Clicking rather than dragging the controls works just fine on iPhone/iPad. [↩]
2. Yes, I really did track a “power window” to the actress’s face, matte-ing a selective color adjustment, to restore/enhance the blue color of her eyes. Thanks for asking. [↩]
3. Yeah, the formatting doesn’t look so hot after it’s wrapped by your web browser, but you should have seen it before! The demo of the plugin at the top of this blog post can serve as a more readable example –see the html code of the post. [↩]

Edit 9/21/2010: This deal now dead. They’re now selling on Amazon for $74.99.

Because I’ve bought or browsed similar items in the past, Amazon.com just sent me an email to let me know that the “Deal of the Day” is the Ultimate Ears SuperFi 4 Noise Isolating Earphones, which they’re selling today for $39.99. The email says this is 69% off the list price. I don’t know what Amazon’s regular price for these is as they’ve already changed their price for today’s deal, but I do know that these same earbuds go for $121.10 at buy.com, and they have sold for around $80 new on eBay¹. So this really is a significant price drop for what is normally an expensive item.²

The market has gotten pretty crowded since I first started using high-quality earbuds, and this particular pair is one of many I’ve never tried, but the reviews for the SuperFi 4’s look to be promising. For half price or less they may be a good choice if you’ve been considering a set of better earbuds than those which come with the iPod/iPhone/Zune/etc.

I like and recommend using earbuds over headphones when monitoring audio recording in a noisy environment, when watching or listening to a media player on a plane or train, or when listening to media in bed³. I’ve had very good experiences with Shure earbuds and with the Future Sonics Atrios. My Shure e2c’s I bought very cheaply on an earlier deal, and I use them for running⁴. The Atrios are part of my production kit, and I also use them when traveling. The fact that earbuds block a lot of surrounding noise, just as do earplugs, allows me to concentrate on listening at lower volume and without distraction. If you’ve got the need, these might be worth looking into while they’re discounted.⁵

1. My favorite way to determine the going price for an item is to do a search on eBay for completed auctions. [↩]
2. The last sale a search turns up for this item was back in July for $59.99. [↩]
3. I’ve slept with earbuds in and iPhone alarm on before when traveling or when sharing a room to avoid waking others. [↩]
4. Which I really need to get back to doing on a regular basis. [↩]
5. Or as Amazon says, “…while supplies last.” [↩]