In LA

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.

Looong Steadicam Merlin + Canon T2i shot from ZachFine on Vimeo.

This is not the most exciting shot in the world to watch, but it was for me the most successful of my increasingly steady pairing of a Steadicam Merlin with Canon EOS Rebel T2i and Rode VideoMic .

In order to stop down the kit lens’s aperture enough to achieve anything approaching deep focus in the relatively dark location, I had to shoot at the camera’s 6400 ISO setting. My next big purchase will probably be a fast superwide zoom, maybe the Tokina 11-16mm f2.8 . My Canon 20mm f2.8 is just not wide enough –it’s the equivalent of a 36mm field of view on these APS-C sized sensors.

The steadicam was balanced so that it was just barely bottom heavy. About a 4-5 second drop (when the contraption is swiveled so that the camera and the counterweight are both level in front of me, it takes the camera about 5 seconds to float back upright). I enjoyed working with it so balanced.

The terrain was a little tricky. I had to weave around furniture, adults, and running little kids. It’s not the smoothest path I could have carved through the space, but I’m pleased with the improvisation. Around 45 seconds the camera tilted a bit, probably after I ran into something. I tried to tip it back.

The Rode Videomic is just directional enough to isolate bits of conversation in front of the camera. I can clearly hear my cousin Bruce explaining the intricacies of the game “Risk” and my Uncle Bob talking about a play he’d seen called “The Whipping Man ” as the camera passes each of them.

I applied a very temporary color correction with Final Cut Pro’s 3-way color corrector filter, and applied very sophisticated titles and transitions, and exported to 1080p H264 using Compressor before uploading. Yay.

If it looks stuttery, try toggling “HD” to “off”.

I’m pleased with the look of the footage. The edit was just a quick bit of fun. Mostly this was about testing my DSLR video workflow, with a secondary goal of cracking my sister up.

If you set HD to ‘on’ and go fullscreen, or click through to the video’s vimeo.com page and find the download link low in the right column, you can see this one at 1080p resolution. If the embedded video doesn’t play smoothly, try pausing it and waiting for it to finish loading before hitting play, or toggle HD to off.

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

A little video of an evening of pizza-making and camera-dodging.

Shot and uploaded at 1080p resolution, so feel free to toggle HD to on and play this one back fullscreen.

Video shot with Canon Digital REBEL T2i DSLR set to the “superflat” picture style. Canon 50mm f1.8 lens.
Converted to Apple Prores, edited in Final Cut Pro 7.0.2, graded in Apple Color.

Exported to the QuickTime H264 at 1080p24, restricted to 8000kbps, audio 44.1Khz 16-bit AAC 128kbps.

Music: the first third of “free space incesticide” by Eight Frozen Modules.

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.

“Things just seem to happen to people who don’t drink Wilkins”

So says the character “Wilkins” just after his best fiend “Wontkins” once again meets his maker after proclaiming a distaste for Wilkins Coffee. Who knew Jim Henson could put together such a psychotically violent set of advertisements?

There are many more compilations of wilkins coffee ads up on youtube. They’re all worth a look. These 8 second TV commercials are the work of Jane and Jim Henson, with Jim doing both the Kermit-like voice of the character “Wilkins” and also the Waldorf-like voice of the grumpier “Wontkins”.

If these commercials ran today, they’d be very effective. I’d eschew water for Wilkins Coffee, wear the T-shirt, buy a gun¹, and “convince” everyone I knew to drink Wilkins. Yeah.

1. Other weapons used in the ads: cannon, club, explosives, arrows, motor vehicles, trees. [↩]

It’s a lovely evening here in Studio City, and the sunset inspired me to attempt a quick sketch in Brushes. I got lazy after a while and stopped sketching in streetlights, there were hundreds more. More interesting to me were the sky and smog, and it was fun to try to evoke their colors through the application of tons of overlapping semitransparent brushstrokes.

I added this .brushes file to my gallery, along with a full-resolution and a quicktime export. Here’s its entry:

16.brushes
Jul 23 2009
Brushes (77.56 K)	Tiff (15.8 MB)	MOV (13.2 MB)

I’ve posted a few sketches I’ve made using the fantastic iPhone app “Brushes” to this blog, usually by exporting the images at iPhone resolution to the iPhone’s photo album, then emailing the images to my posterous blog using the phone’s built-in mail application. It’s a fun and seamless workflow.

But in the process I sell Brushes short. The application is capable of much higher quality image exports.

12.brushes
Jul 21 2009
Brushes (52.56 K)	Tiff (15.8 MB)

As one paints, Brushes keeps track of each stroke as a vector, not as a series of altered pixels tied to the screen resolution. While painting, one can undo and redo a massive number of strokes (all of them, I think). When finished, one can transfer the resulting “.brushes” files to a Mac, play back each and every stroke to watch the painting form onscreen, and most importantly can have the strokes rendered to several different image file types at much higher resolution than the iPhone’s screen –all using the free “Brushes Viewer” application.

If you’re curious what a Brushes file looks like when rendered at high resolution, or would like a Brushes file to test with the Brushes Viewer app, I’ve placed all my Brushes sketches in this gallery, formatted as in the example at right. Each sketch is available its original Brushes file and an exported 1920×2800 TIFF file.

And here’s a time-lapse movie of one the creation of those sketches, rendered out of Brushes Viewer. I’m having too much fun with this stuff.

Yesterday I watched a movie, and it was the future. The details of the process by which I watched a movie are a little complicated and hackneyed, but the spirit of filmwatching future was in the room right there with me in so many ways:

1. The film: The King of Kong. This surprisingly riveting documentary film focuses primarily on an intense rivalry between the world’s two best players of the classic arcade game “Donkey Kong”.

   Why this is the future? Professional video game journalism has taken off¹, and professional video gaming will follow. One day its popularity will eclipse that of football². Howard Stern and friends may laugh at some of the wackier folk on display in The King of Kong, but video games are starting to move away from the sorts of repetitious action that favor people who these days get classified socially as geeks or diagnosed by professionals as OCD, Aspergers, &c. Nerds have already ascended to create the information economy³, next they’ll take over the world of sports, and the jocks who adapt and survive will be or become a little nerdier than those of today.

2. The player: I watched the film in Mac OS X’s built-in media center application Front Row, using the Understudy plugin to allow me to use the simple Front Row interface to browse to and watch films using Netflix’s instant streaming service. Movies and TV shows, streamed over the internet, at high quality, for a low monthly fee; This service is already good enough to start beating out premium cable subscriptions for geeks on a budget. Streaming entertainment has begun to slip from the future⁴ category into the present.
   
   Imagine this image displayed up on a large-screen TV. That’s what Front Row’s main menu looks like after the Understudy plugin is installed. I’d show what Understudy’s menu looks like, and a netflix queue displayed in Front Row using the plugin, but Netflix is down at the moment so I can’t do so.
3. The controller: Since my mac lacks an infra-red receiver, I could not use Apple’s simple remote control to navigate my way around Front Row. But why use an infra-red remote when my phone itself is a portable touchscreen device connected via wifi to the same network as my computer media center? Instead of ancient tech, I used an iPhone application called Air Mouse Pro, which communicates with a server application running on my computer⁵ over the local network. With this application, I could not only send keystrokes from my phone that were equivalent to the arrows, volume, and menu keys on the normal Apple remote, but I could also launch and exit Front Row, move and click the mouse pointer, and type anything at all on a virtual keyboard. All this without worrying about my distance from the media center or a need to maintain a line of sight between and IR emitter and receiver.⁶ Fortuitously, in my hour of need it came to pass that Air Mouse Pro was on sale for $1.99 (down from its normal price of $5.99, for one week). If it’s still on sale at this price, you can find it here: Air Mouse Pro SALE. Here’s a randomly-selected video review of this app from youtube, in case you’re curious how it works.

   So I streamed video to my media center and controlled playback over a network using a wifi touchscreen device. This is the slightly kludgy present, and a sign of things to come. You and your grandmother will all be watching movies and TV this way in a few years.

1. As the career of videogaming journalist and The Daily of the University of Washington alumnus Jason Ocampo can attest. [↩]
2. by “football” I mean the sport played with a truncated icosahedron or the other sport also called football that uses a prolate spheroid [↩]
3. I typed it, but I’m not actually sure what it means. Maybe one too few buzzwords? Information Economy? “Hey farmer, I’ll trade you this metadata-encrusted search result for that pound of soybeans…” [↩]
4. There’s just something so delightfully obnoxious about the capitalized phrase “the future”, don’t you think? [↩]
5. The Air Mouse server application is available for both Windows and Mac [↩]
6. I probably could have accomplished much of the same with a vnc application, but most of them are more expensive, and I wasnt sure how the vnc application would interact with applications that play hardware-accelerated video such as Front Row. [↩]

Since I don’t live in Europe, I often miss out on the better music that hits the charts over there. I’m not saying they listen to better crap than USians in general because that generalization doesn’t¹ ring true (case in point: Crazy Frog didn’t go nuclear over here, thank god).

But every once in a while I hear something awesome from across the pond, and am surprised it got a massive amount of airtime elsewhere and is completely unknown here. The songs of Soko, a French singer/actress, fall into that category. Here’s her demented folk-rock hit “I’ll Kill Her”:

I ran into the song because it was the inspiration and soundtrack of this great motion graphics piece:

http://motionographer.com/2009/07/08/joerg-barton-ill-kill-her/

Worth a listen and a look IMO. Broaden your horizons, listen to songs about murderous impulses from across the pond².

1. I nearly wrote “…that generalization doesn’t always ring true…”, meaning to imply that sometimes the generalization is true. But since a generalization that is sometimes true is by definition not a generalization at all, I left the original statement unqualified. To be clear, I think there’s plenty of great music all over the world, and plenty of crap. [↩]
2. After all my larger-world talk and attempts at drawing sweeping conclusions, I should point out that Soko has apparently moved to Los Angeles. So I guess that makes her yet another singer who lives in the US but is for now only well known and popular as a recording artist and performer in Europe, like David Hasselhoff or Steven Seagall. [↩]