In LA

If you’ve got an iPad and enjoy classic arcade games or have ever thought of building a MAME cabinet, you might want to jump on this deal. Bed Bath and Beyond is clearing out their stock of iCades for half-off, at $49.99. I haven’t tried this, but it may be possible to even bring the price down further — Someone online says “Sign up for emails and get a printable 20% coupon bringing it to $39.99!”¹

The iCade is a cabinet for the iPad that features an arcade-style joystick and eight buttons. It connects via bluetooth to the iPad as a wireless keyboard, and support for it is built into several gaming apps, including Atari’s Greatest Hits. Here’s one user’s review.

If you’ve got a jailbroken iPad² you can use the iCade to control imame4all³ and other emulators. It’s great to play such games with a real joystick and buttons. I’ve been using an iCade for a while, and still plan to replace its joystick with a real sanwa, which apparently isn’t that difficult to do.

I don’t know how long this deal will last, but I think it’s a good one.

1. Not my exclamation point, I should perhaps include a “sic” of disapproval. [↩]
2. jailbreaking the thing is very easy to do right now and is legal [↩]
3. just jailbreak and then install imame4all via cydia [↩]

I just happened upon a deal and figured I’d pass it along. If you’ve been thinking of getting a video-capable DSLR, you can now get a refurb T2i at under $500 shipped.

The Canon T2i is my bang-for-the-buck camera of choice. It shoots video that’s identical to that of their more expensive models T3i and 7D, and it’s also easily hackable to run the Magic Lantern open-source firmware. Magic Lantern gives the camera a ton of new useful features, such as time-lapse, HDR multiple-exposure bracketing, focus peaking, focus zoom, and more.

Canon’s discounted the price of some refurbished cameras by 15%. Which brings the T2i down to what must be its record low price.

The Deal:

• Here’s a link to the EOS Rebel T2i Body Refurbished – $475.99.
• They also sell it with a very good, cheap kit lens: EOS Rebel T2i EF-S 18-55mm IS Lens Kit Refurbished – $543.99.

According to the site at which I found the deal, “Shipping is $5 for $150+ purchases with coupon code SHIP11 [Exp 12/11]“.

Shoot right with this camera, and it can look ridiculously good. I bought mine back when the best price for the T2i body alone was $799 about a year-and-a-half ago, and have no regrets. It allows me to shoot video to a large sensor (APS-C size) using my excellent Canon lenses and even old Nikon lenses using an adapter.

A few clips I’ve shot on my T2i can be found here. They’re not best-of-breed, but should give some idea of what video from the T2i can look like:

• my first online DSLR video
• Looong Steadicam Merlin + Canon T2i shot
• On the streets of Hengdian, China

My first video shot on my T2i:

pizza and the dream of not being filmed from ZachFine on Vimeo.

I’ve thought many a time about how much fun it’d be to have a very minimal but smooth little dolly, which I would use to move my DSLR in lines and curves on a smooth surface while shooting video. A number of products have popped up over the years. Here’s a list of the ones I’ve noticed:

Click any image thumbnail to see it embiggened.

Item	Price	Image	Note
The P+S Technik Skater Mini Camera Dolly	$5400		The one that started it all, I think. Costs a little less than the last used car I bought and undoubtedly moves more smoothly. Out of my price range until I start shooting for Spielberg.
Omni-tracker Slim-Line “LITE”	$495		The Omni-tracker looks a bit like a P+S Technik carved of purest PVC plastic and endowed with a carrying handle. This may be the only item in this list that will float in water1. They make heavier duty models as well, it costs $1500 for their top model.
KONOVA Scaled Rotational Axis Skater Dolly	$125		This looks a lot like what I’d probably build if I were to make my own, but I’m not sure that’s such a good thing. Something about them doesn’t appeal to me, but I can’t put my finger on it. If I put my foot on it I could probably skate. +Who named this thing?
DIY Skater Dolly	$20-$∞ + time		Pictured is dvxuser forum member Texanite’s rather gorgeous acrylic skater dolly, he sells them for around $400 when they’re available. This is an example of the kind of thing one could build with infinite time, materials, and skill.
Cinetics Cineskates	$275		An innovative skater dolly consisting of a set of super-engineered wheels that connect to a “GorillaPod Focus”. It’s a Kickstarter project, so the pricing will change soon. I’ve quoted the cost of a full kit, with tripod and ballhead. The wheels by themselves are $150 for a set of 3. I’m a little curious how rigid it’d be, but 930 kickstarter backers can’t be wrong. My resistance to spending $50 per wheel keeps me a step short of buying, but I’m tempted by its bizarreness and quality.
Pico Flex Table Dolly	$65, or $90 with friction arm extension		I give up. This newcomer looks like it will be too much fun. I’d probably spend $65 or more building my own, and mine would be less well engineered. Check out a video of the item in use here. It’s a very simple-looking item, but it does appear to be flexible enough, small enough, and smooth enough for my purposes. Their price for the friction arm is also very good. Ordered.

Cineskates popped up on the net the last week of August and got me interested in thinking again about skater dollies after more than a year of ignoring the category. The Pico Flex, which appeared on the net a week later, is where I’ve ended my search for now. I’m excited to play with the thing when it arrives.

1. I’ll keep that in mind for nautical use [↩]

My cousin Jenny is an internet superstar now due to the existence of this very entertaining music video.

I think Nathan J. Barnatt directed, edited, dances, and flips about in the video as well. Martin Starr tunes it in at the beginning.

Word on the street is that no green screens were used, it’s all implemented using early 20th century filmmaking methods –except for the digital music, camera, editing software, etc.

I like, +1, etc.

By popular demand¹, and to give me a reference so I can remember my settings when I inevitably lose them, I present my Steadicam Merlin recipe for the Canon T2i with attached² Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 lens. It’s the exact setup I used to shoot this little video of a sidewalk butcher shop in China.

These images show the combination of weights used, the span angle setting, the hole in the mounting plate to which the camera was attached (hole N), that the gezornenplatz screw was in place, and the position of the mount plate.

Full setup

middle weight and span setting	end weights	mounting plate
mount plate position

1. i.e., a single message sent to me on Vimeo [↩]
2. as opposed to unattached? [↩]

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 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? [↩]