In LA » Aj

An unexpected musical treat: Letters vs. Numbers

zach — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:56:26 +0000

The other day I unexpectedly received a CD in the mail, from a sender whose name I didn’t recognize. The band: “Letters vs. Numbers”, album: “Bone Tired”. The back of the sleeve was a handwritten list of other recipients along with a printed request that the recipient rip the album to their computer, add their name and location to the list, and send it to someone else.

Always one to obediently follow directions, I ripped, signed, and sent. I also listened, and damned if it isn’t a great little album. Here’s the first track, “Forget Everything”, for your streaming or downloading pleasure¹ :

01 Forget Everything.mp3 download mp3

I’d highly recommend that you receive this album by mail from a friend or an anonymous source. Failing that, the mysterious band² has a website, a myspace page³, and the album is available at both the iTunes music store and the Amazon MP3 store.

Hit the triangle button to play the track in your browser, or the download link to download the mp3 file
Their myspace page doesn’t list the names of band members, their number, or even a location.
The album can be listened to on the page in that icky myspace music player widget.

SmoothCam test #1: AJ developing a musical idea on a piano

zach — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:24:17 +0000

A SmoothCam Test – AJ testing an idea on the piano from ZachFine on Vimeo. Available in larger size for playback and/or download here.

This is a test of Final Cut Pro’s “SmoothCam” motion stabilization filter. I’ve set two videos side-by-side. On the left, the original clip. On the right, the SmoothCam version with the following settings:

Auto Scale: 1
Actual Scale: 138%
Translation Smooth: 1.5
Rotation Smooth: 2
Scale Smooth: 0
Mix: 100

The original clip was shot with a Canon HV20 mounted on a Steadicam Merlin, so it was fairly smooth to begin with. I was pleased with how well the SmoothCam filter ironed out the rotational skewing of the camera without being noticeable about it. I do wish the filter didn’t autoscale the entire clip to match the worst of the movement, and instead the adjusted clip could start with the wide and then smoothly scale in to cover the adjustments, then smoothly scale out for segments that were more stable. Had I shot with a higher shutter speed, the motion blur on the subject wouldn’t be as bad.

I’m sure I’ll end up using this SmoothCam filter on some footage one of these days. It’s a nice effect. I’ve already had FCP batch analyze all my footage from the SXSW festival. The fact that the filter works very quickly on clips whose motion has already been batch analyzed is a deal-maker.

Technorati Tags: Apple, awesomeness, Batch Processing, FCP Tips & Tricks, filmmaking, Final Cut Pro, Image Stabilization, live music, rock, Saint Motel, SmoothCam, video

Saint Motel “Stories” Live

zach — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 09:07:53 +0000

My cousin AJ edited together a live performance of the Saint Motel song Stories from their 2/15/2009 Spaceland “Zombie Prom” performance, using my previously posted footage along with footage from other video cameras that shot the same show. It’s paired with a non-burnt audio track that’s a huge improvement from the audio I captured.

“Stories” – Live @ Spaceland (Zombie Prom 2.15.09) from SAINT MOTEL on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: awesomeness, entertainment, live music, music, Saint Motel, rock, sound pollution, Spaceland, video

Final Cut Pro can batch analyze clips for stabilization, in the background yet

zach — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 05:35:13 +0000

A screenshot of the Final Cut Pro Browser and Background Processes windows showing the SmoothCam Analysis in progress. Click the image to see it at a legibly large size.

I ran around the South by Southwest festival last week shooting behind-the-scenes video of my cousin AJ and his band on my Canon HV20, stabilized with a Steadicam Merlin. I’m still learning to use the Merlin –it is a fantastically engineered piece of kit, but it takes a light touch to float it about, and it’s much easier to use for choreographed moves than for impromptu run-and-gun documentary-style shooting.

Final Cut Pro and Motion both inherited a feature from Shake called “SmoothCam”, which is a motion stabilization filter. SmoothCam analyzes movement within a clip and moves the frame around to compensate for high-frequency movement while preserving the lower-frequency moves –i.e. it tries to remove bumps and vibrations while preserving smooth, intentional camera movements. I ran a few tests on some of my relatively smooth clips, and SmoothCam seemed very good at doing exactly that.

When the SmoothCam filter is applied to a clip, that clip is put into a queue and Final Cut Pro begins to analyze the motion in the clip. Once FCP’s analysis concludes¹ , the SmoothCam filter will have data to use for its calculations and its effect will finally become visible. One can then adjust the SmoothCam settings and see the results instantaneously (with a computer of sufficient power).

I’m happy to note that it is possible to have Final Cut Pro analyze the motion of a batch of clips, and then later if the SmoothCam filter is applied to any of these clips its results can be seen without delay. The motion analysis data for each clip is written to disk alongside the clips themselves.

Since I may or may not want to use the SmoothCam filter on many of my clips, and I don’t plan to do any more editing on my computer tonight, I’ve set FCP to batch analyze the motion in all of my footage from the last week. To do so, I enabled the “SmoothCam” column in FCP’s Browser, selected all the clips I wanted analyzed, right-clicked in the column and chose “Run Analysis” from the clip’s contextual pop-up menu. Now the analysis is puttering away, and tomorrow I can play.

The things one can learn by glancing at the manual!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Batch Processing, FCP Tips & Tricks, filmmaking, Final Cut Pro, Garbanzo Beans, Image Stabilization, Macintosh, OS X, SmoothCam, software, vfx

The entire clip is analyzed, regardless whether only a portion of it is in use in a timeline. A clip’s In and Out points are ignored. The analysis can take a while, and I would strongly recommend converting any clips in a long-gop format such as HDV to Prores beforehand for markedly faster analysis.

AJ handing flyers to A-sharp

zach — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 01:47:39 +0000

The Saint Motel flyers were hand-drawn. They handed them out to people milling about on the blocked-off streets of downtown Austin.

The ban’s van is a massive old American number. Its design and ride seemed to be nautically inspired.

Posted via email from Zachary’s posterous

A few images from last night

zach — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:59:03 +0000

1. A train crossing. The automated gate was broken, so there was a man who stopped traffic and lit flares on the road just prior to the train’s arrival. 2. My cousin AJ (of the band Saint Motel), Hilary (of Bella Koshka) and a very cool mountain-country-is band performing in the street after 2am. It’s probably hard to tell, but the guy on the right is strumming a long string connected to a garbage can as a resonance chamber. It worked surprisingly well. 3. The aftermath of a chicken fight. Woulda been a photo of an actual chicken fight if the iPhone’s camera app didn’t take so long to be ready to take a photo.

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Zachary’s posterous