As I have said many times in the past, the HV20/30 are the best consumer cameras in terms of picture quality. Various high-end AVCHD models (HF100, SR11/SR12, SD9) tried to compete this year with the HV series, but they were still lacking that bit of extra quality that you can squeeze out of the HV20/30.
Well, that’s all the past now.
Canon has just announced in Japan two new models, the HF11 and the HG11, which can record in 24mbps AVC, which is the highest bitrate that the AVCHD standard is asking for (higher bitrate is used by some prosumer camcorders, but that’s not part of the official standard).
With the HF11 and HG11 recording at full 1920×1080@24mbps MPEG4-AVC, the HV20/30 with its 1440×1080@25mbps MPEG-2 has no chance in hell to keep the reigns any longer.
Today the tape died, as far as I am concerned, with this fall of the HV20/30.
The HF11 is largely the same camera model as the HF10, but the HG11 was completely reworked compared to the HG10. It has a brand new body, better lens, better usability, 120 GB drive with ability to also record in SD card, 12x zoom instead of 10x. I would have considered the HG11 if it wasn’t for the stupidity of Canon of going down to 37mm filter thread, and not staying with HG10’s 43mm. I have a gazillion accessories for the HV20 that would have work with any 43mm camera. Step-down rings are not good in my case as large and heavy lenses and adapters would break the step-down ring and the camera’s filter thread if I was to mount them in the HG11. It sucks to be stuck in something as trivial as a filter thread.
The hard drive in my PowerBook G4 just died.
I have hard drives happily at work that pre-date the first coming of Christ, but of course, Apple had to put in a cheap, crappy drive and now I’m fcuked.
The funny thing? System Profiler sees the drive, but Disk Utility doesn’t. I’m - naturally - out of warranty, so, uhm, yeah.
“When the four letters [of God’s Hebrew unpronounceable name] are flipped, he says, the new name makes the sounds of the Hebrew words for “he” and “she.” God thus becomes a dual-gendered deity, bringing together all the male and female energy in the universe, the yin and the yang that have divided the sexes from Adam and Eve to Homer and Marge.”
All I have to say is this: Good politics mate! You should run for office.
Perhaps there is justice in this world after all.
Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.
Radovan Karad?i? will finally be brought to justice. One of the biggest criminals in history will finally have to answer to the Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague - 15 years too late, but hey, better late than never. His victims, and the people left behind, deserve his head on a platter.
As you all know, I vehemently oppose the death penalty - but gosh I wish my principles were for bending in this case. This is a great day for justice.
I've been pretty liberal in completely redesigning my website for some time now. I built this site sometime in August of 2000, using my own HTML. All dynamics were achieved... well... faked... via re-uploading static HTML files. Version 2.0, a major overhaul, arrived shortly thereafter, and version 3.0 completely migrated to PHP as the base. The site thrived as a Phish music archive and when I moved away from that, I retired what was then version 4.0, and several versions followed until this one, version 9. But alas, shortly, I will begin the design of firsttube.com version 10, and it will be a chore, as I intend to modify most of the tables in my underlying database. Many features I wish I had implemented long ago - such as subscribing to threads and letting users enter a website, thereby not exposing their email address - are long overdue and virtually omnipresent in other weblogs. I've even tossed around using another blog engine and just migrating my data, but then, where would I play?
My primary goal, though, for firsttube.com 10, will be a radically simpler and more attractive interface. I like some Web 2.0 mainstays. Expect larger text, brighter colors, AJAX where appropriate, and simplicity. My new comments page, which I've been playing with, is already stripped down and already kind of overwhelming. So back to the drawing board, it appears. Stay tuned for more updates than necessary.
Tags: Meta, Web Design, Web 2.0
I am trying to clean up the office so I have 4 machines to give away (I won’t bother trying to sell them): an AthlonXP 1.6 ghz, a Duron 1.3ghz, a dual Celeron 533 mhz, and a Pegasos 1. From all these machines, only the Duron works properly and the Pegasos only when used with Morphos 1.4 and not with 2.0. I installed Ubuntu on the Duron and it’s ready to go, while the Pegasos could actually land me at least $100 if I could install morphos 2.0 (the CRT monitor goes out of sync when loading the installer CD). The AthlonXP and the dual Celeron are completely dead, they don’t start at all. It still is weird to see a machine go completely dead while it was working the last time I used it (granted, about 2 years ago).
Update: Today is not my day. One of my PDAs died too (well, just the battery, still works when plugged in).
Just a clarification for those who don’t recognize the drummer of my latest music video, Dolorata’s “You?ve Gotta Want It“. Dawn Richardson used to be the drummer of “4 Non Blondes”, a band that had a big hit back in early ’90s with the song “What’s up“.
* I watched the indie film “First Snow” tonight (trailer) and it is one of the best movies I have seen lately. It has a rather low rating on IMDb, in my opinion it’s vastly underrated. The movie is the epitome of “character development”. First time director Mark Fergus does an excellent job, and cinematography is great too. No wonder it’s a good movie, as Fergus also co-wrote “Children of Men” and “Iron Man”. Great talent and one writer/director to watch for.
* I managed to upgrade my iPhone to 2.0 firmware and unlock it last night. This wasn’t easy. I had to try 2-3 times to get it in to the right “restore” mode.
* This article says that Indie music is dead. It reminded me what the older people tell to younger ones: “in our generation, we did things better”. The article is just wrong in so many ways that is not even funny.
* Google’s Jeremy Allison blogged about LinuxHater (thanks for the link Dimitar). He gives a lot of good points, but he ends up saying that the problem with FOSS is “just a few bugs”, while the problem really is leadership, culture, and project management.
* This is why I am an atheist. Because cults, mysticism, dogmas and all that shit, don’t make any sense whatsoever.
* Larry King has hosted UFO-related shows many times, and the most recent one was a few days ago. I feel that he is a believer even if he will never admit it publicly.
Facebook today launched their long in-the-works redesign. I've been following it for at least 4 months or so, and today it appeared live. After many iterations, this may actually be the one I like best. But alas, I use Opera, and strangely, this version doesn't play well. Many links flat out don't work, there's weird Flash that Flashblock blocks with every page load, and worst yet, the thing is actually parsing A LOT incorrectly. Check out the below screenshot, and be sure to click on it for the full size version.
Tags: Facebook, Websites, Web 2.0, Bug
WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS: Do not read any further if you do not want critical plot points revealed
I saw The Dark Knight on Friday afternoon. Like many movies, I need a few days to truly digest the film. Sometimes, I like a film and later decide I didn't like it as much as I thought (see: Spiderman 3, Die Hard 4). Sometimes, I like a film and decide later it was better than I thought (see: The Matrix, The Bourne Ultimatum).
In this case, I knew I liked the film. It was very true to Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins film in both storyline and dark overtones. But, like James Bond, I fear there are some real breaks with reality that I struggle to accept. Nothing in the Bourne movies I mentioned above requires major suspension of disbelief. But The Dark Knight pushes reality a little too much. Let's examine some aspects of the film:
Cast and characters
Again, masterfully done. I enjoyed the acting quite a bit. Christian Bale, Michael Cain, Morgan Freeman, Aaron Eckhardt, Gary Oldman, Nestor Carbonall, all were fantastic. Heath Ledger - while I won't call him Oscar-worthy, primary because I don't really understand what makes one role Oscar worthy but not others) - was truly genius. I say this for several reasons: firstly, his facial expressions, voice tone, and eyes were masterful. Secondly, because I largely forgot it was him for most of the film. To me, this was the Joker, not an actor I've known for over a decade.
Storyline
Like the last film, pretty well executed. The entire thing felt a bit rushed - they crammed a lot of plot into a little time (note it still runs well over 2 hours), meaning some characters got a little short-changed, primarily Two-Face. The fall from do-gooder and justice-seeking Harvey Dent to the conscious-less Two-Face was a bit too harsh and dramatic. Such a cool character would have been a great long-term adversary.
Bruce Wayne was a bit brash, which I suppose was how they wanted to keep him, a trait established last film. Alfred Pennyworth and Lucious Fox were consistent. The Joker was perfectly executed in that we learned virtually nothing about him and his origin remains a mystery.
Where Things Went Wrong
Okay, I'm a stickler for plot bending. I don't like when an otherwise semi-realistic film, requires me to entire dicard realism. So there are several key points here:
- Amazing Explosives!
- How did the Joker get the hospital wired so effectly and so quickly with no one noticing and no real team of goons to speak of? That were a LOT of very well placed explosives that would surely require a very skilled expert to help design that implosion, no?
- Sonar on your mobile?
- After months of work, presumably, Lucious Fox was able to design a prototype "sonar" using CDMA or GSM technology. He was able to rig a device to use it. He was able to make it work through existing mobile networks with neither the networks, nor the satelite owners, nor the military noticing it. We must presume, given these facts, and the limitationsof existing hardware, that the data was tranferred as internet data. Not much later, with no previous knowledge of the project or how it works, Bruce Wayne, never an engineer, was able to decipher, understand, and deploy this technology to millions of existing phones, most of which, I'd wager, do not have internet plans, a good portion of which is using half-decade old technology. We must also presume that the Wayne R&D department has the necessary bandwidth to receive the data from millions of phones and that their ISP and the phone carriers wouldn't notice this incredble spike in traffic. Oh yeah, did I mention that they somehow were able to locate a particular crystal-clear voice amongst this overwhelming parade of sonar? Pshaw!
- Extra! Extra! Commissioner Dead!
- Explain how the Joker and/or his minions were able to get into the commissioners office, replace his booze with poison, and get him to drink it at the exact time?
- Mayor Assasination Attempt Thwarted by Gordon
- So, uh, the Joker anticipated the Batman locating a name that was NOT actually him and going there and breaking in? And conveniently, some cops who had recently been kidnapped were all there waiting? And the Mayor, while under fire, delivered a speech in a neighborhood with more Windows than a room of government computers without a protective shield or bulletproof glass? What the hell? Who runs Gotham security? Find him and smack the bitch upside his stupid head!
- A Boatoad of Trouble
- Lastly, why didn't the boats explode at midnight? Did Batman somehow disarm it off camera? It was the BACKUP Joker was holding. That means the original device failed. But how? By the way, give me the remote while I'm on a ferry with my wife and kids. The scene would be like this: "Give me the remote!" BOOM!
All the foolishness aside, I still really liked it. I really hope there's a third entry to this series.
Tags: Review, Movies, Batman
Update 1: Vimeo has server problems.
Update 2: Video is back up.
My second music video. HD version, info, and feedback here.
Bestest best friend Renate and her boyfriend Bart spent the evening at my place, watching some films, some TV, you know. At the end of the evening, I dropped them off at Alkmaar North station.
Good, I say to the happy couple, next time, we’ll meet up at your place.
Before the words even left my mouth, I hear a sound of a suddenly braking car inside my head. Bart starts running, and hides behind a wall. Renate starts laughing.
I look at her, I try to correct myself. I mean his place… HIS place, damnit…
Sometimes, my mind is WAY ahead of things.
For the last two months I’ve been in correspondence with Chandra from Nepal. Chandra has a band, and he had just bought the HV30, so we exchanged a few emails about how to shoot a slowed-down music video etc. His very first video, is now ready to be seen. For a first video, it’s a really good effort and the song is nice too! HD version here.
A new series on my blog, an extreme color grading example each week.
After extreme color grading
I wrote in a hurry two months ago about how I shot my first music video, but having already shot my second one, I have done some adjustments into my workflow, which I will share with you below. As I have explained in the past, nearly all the professional music videos are slowed-down, even when they don’t look like they are. And of course you don’t need lots of money to shoot a music video, you can do it on a budget.
1. Acquire the audio CD of the song you want to shoot a video for. Compressed audio formats like MP3, OGG, and AAC won’t work correctly, you will end up with an A/V sync issue eventually, so get the original audio CD. Load the CD into iTunes. Go to “preferences”, “advanced”, and “importing” and change the importing format to WAVE like this:
Then, rip the CD with these settings via iTunes. The ripping will create a .wav file on your iTunes library folder, usually somewhere around here: C:Documents and SettingsUSERNAMEMy DocumentsMy MusiciTunesiTunes Music for Windows, or somewhere on your ~/Music/ folder if you are on a Mac.
2. Install Audacity 1.3x from here. Load Audacity, and then open into that audio editor the .wav file that was ripped earlier via iTunes. Click “Effects” and select “Change speed”. Make the audio’s speed 25% faster like this:
Then, save the audio back as wave (.wav) with a different file name via Audacity.
3. Go back to iTunes. Load the sped up version of the song created by Audacity above to iTunes by adding it to the iTunes music library. Place an empty writable CD-R on your optical drive. Place the sped up song on the “Burn” playlist of iTunes. Burn the song as an audio CD twice. Keep one copy, and give one copy to the band to rehearse the speed up version a few days before the actual shooting.
4. When the shooting day arrives, use a portable audio CD player to get the singer to lipsync, or if you are shooting in the band’s rehearsal space, use their audio CD player which is possibly hooked into big speakers. Shoot your video with that sped up audio. If you are using a Canon camera, use “Cinemode” and “neutral color” to make the video look as desaturated as possible (the duller it looks, the better it color grades in post processing). Do a lot of takes. Shoot in 1080/50i if you use a PAL camera, or in 1080/60i or PF30 if you use an NTSC camera. I suggest that don’t shoot in 24p, because by the moment you slow-down the video on step #6, you will need all the frames you can get to make it look smooth. Don’t worry, it won’t look like home video because of the slow-down involved. 1080/60i or PF30 are the best ways to shoot (compared to PAL modes or 24p) because the kind of slow down we do here is perfect mathematically: 60i/2=30/25%=24p. What this formula means is this: “After you de-interlace a 60i stream, you get 30p. Because we make that 30p stream 25% slower on step #6, we get a true 24p frame rate across time”. And that’s the frame rate we export at the end of step #8. If you are concerned about 60i having too high of a shutter speed, consider using PF30 (found on all new Canon HD cameras), which is as good as 60i in terms of the “mathematics” involved, but it uses lower shutter speeds. I would be using PF30 for my music video projects if my HV20 supported that. In fact, I hereby declare the Canon HV30 the best consumer HD camera right now to shoot music videos, because of its PF30 shooting mode and overall quality.
5. When the shooting is all done and you are ready to start editing, load the footage on your video editor. I will use Sony Vegas for my tutorial here, but Premiere and FCE/FCP are equally capable. Copy away to the video’s project folder, and place in the audio track, the originally ripped .wav file (not the sped up one, but the normal one you ripped on step #1). On Vegas, it’s very important to have the right project settings before you start editing. Click “File”, then “Project Properties”, and a new dialog will pop up. In there, click the right outmost icon called “Match Media”, the one that looks like a yellow folder. From there, select one of the files you will be editing with, and click “open”. Make sure “none/progressive” is always selected in the “field order” option, and for quality select “Best”. If you shot interlaced (e.g. in 50i or 60i), make sure that for the “de-interlacing method” you select “interpolate”. For NTSC 60i HDV for example, it would look like this (you can safely ignore additional settings not shown in my screenshot but found on Vegas Pro instead of Platinum).
6. Then, place a take of your footage (hint: dragging a clip from the project media tab to the timeline with the right mouse click rather than the left, allows you to place in the track the video across the timeline without its accompanied audio). Right click on the clip event in the timeline, click “properties”, check “disable resample”, and change the “playback rate” to 0.800. This change has effectively made the video slower now, which will sync perfectly to the non-sped up song. Now, left-click on the right side of the video take and drag it to the right to make the video longer. Stop when a little arrow appears, as in the picture below. We need to do that extra step because when we changed the playback speed to the slower 0.800x, Vegas doesn’t automatically resize the video in the timeline to fit the whole take.
7. Add more of your takes on different video tracks and adjust them as in step #6. Then, try to sync up the audio and video on each of these takes. It will take some practice, but it’s possible. On Vegas, if you select a clip in the timeline and then you keep the ALT key pressed while also pressing the numbers 1 or 3 in the enabled numerical keypad, it will move that clip frame by frame left or right in the timeline, so that can help you be more accurate with the audio syncing. You can even “lock” a clip in the timeline so you don’t move it accidentally while editing. Then, edit away. Be aggressive with cutting scenes, as rock videos require quick change of shots. Slow-down even more some shots that don’t require syncing. Color grade aggressively too at the very end.
8. Export in 24p (that is, 23.976 frame rate), progressive field order. I suggest h.264 at 4 mbps for video codec, and AAC 128kbps for audio, with the MP4 container at 1280×720 resolution for HD, or at 874×480 if you shot in widescreen miniDV SD. This exporting also makes the video compatible with AppleTV, Vimeo, XBoX360 and PS3, so it would be easier to enjoy it in on an HDTV.
Now, go help your favorite local rock band!