I finished shooting and editing our Youth Camp promo video yesterday.  It was the first time I have done a video without any part of it hitting my desktop PC (Well, at least since we started doing them that way).  Doing it on the laptop added a great amount of flexibility to the schedule since we could edit on location while we were taking a break or waiting for someone to get back so we could film.

As I've mentioned before, my laptop is skewed toward portability rather than performance, so I wasn't sure if it was up to the task, but I never dropped a frame in or out.  It also gave me an opportunity to edit with some of the kids that were interested in doing that kind of thing on their own. We had a great time, and I felt alot more at ease making editing decisions that would impact the screen time of an actor when I had a couple of the kids around to ratify them.  It came out pretty good.  As usual, I didn't have time to do all the stuff I wanted to do with it.

I need to get back on my shotgun mic project, though.  We ended up shooting in a couple of places with horrible acoustics that plagued us when mixing audio.  I also wasn't able to get the kind of shots I wanted to because I had to keep the camera so close to the subjects to hear them.

I can't wait for some sunny weekend weather.  Lately, we've had beautiful weeks and it's just overcast and rainy on the weekends.

Over the weekend, I completed my first completely 24p (24 progressive frames per second) project.  Traditional film runs at 24p, and it's this framerate that is responsible for that “film look” that you can't quite put your finger on.

I've done several 24p projects, but always added 3:2 pulldown at the end to but back on miniDV to show.  I've also done several projects with mixed rates for a “flashback“ type effect.  This project was different in that it was completely 24p all the way to the DVD. (I've only just recently figured out the intricate MPEG flags and settings for proper 24p DVD encoding.)  It wasn't that big a deal, it was really just a for fun project that Dave and I shot last year that I finally got around to encoding to MPEG2.  Some of you have seen my NFL-films-style mockumentary, “The Road to Catathalon, 1987“, about our cats training for an athletic competition.

I have a Panasonic DVX100, which shoots in native 24p and encodes it on miniDV using an advanced pulldown technique to make removing it a lossless conversion. (DV is stuck at 60i, or 60 interlaced fields per second)  To remove this encoding, I use Maker, a deinterlacing tool with special settings for my camera.  This tool is excellent.  The latest version can even convert 60i (that all video cameras us) to 24p!  I thought several of my readers might find that particularly interesting.  I haven't tried it out with my Sony Digital 8 camera yet, but the results are supposed to be pretty good.

The guy who wrote the software runs a Digital-to-Film transfer house in town, and actually lives right down the street from me.  He also has a great book out called Shooting Digital, which has some very valuable material in it.  I recommend it highly.

I am looking at Vegas Video as an alternative to Premiere and Encore for editing and DVD creation.  It is alot cheaper, and supports a 24p editing pipeline with much fewer hassles.  Does anyone have any experience with it?  I've heard good things, especially about customer service, something that Adobe is notoriously bad with.

Hey hey! I'm taking some time here at lunch to reflect on the holidays.  I was hoping to have some time to work on some FilmProjects and other things, but ended up not spending much time at home.

We had a wonderful time in Belton with my family for Christmas and and in El Paso with Becky's parents for New Years.  I got more video games than I have time to play now.

I also got upgraded to the new version of Adobe Premiere.  I haven't had a chance to do anything but pull up some projects I'm working on and play.  The main new features I was looking forward to were:

• Sub-pixel motion paths rather than the crap for crap motion effects in 6.x
• Better color correction capability.  The new version keeps everything in the YUV colorspace so there's no loss in a YUV-RGB-YUV conversion.  This also makes it easier to do correction for broadcast since NTSC is all YUV-based.
• Audio enhancements - 5.1 audio mixing.
• Better DVD support - It was a pain in the rear to export to MPEG2 for DVD, especially for true 24p 16x9 projects and I was very jealous of iMovie's quick DVD capabilities.

Things I wasn't expecting were:

• Nestable timelines - Fantastic for organizing scenes
• Transitions on any video track - I'll have to get used to not having the A/B track editing, but that's been discouraged for a while anyway.

That's all I can think of right now.  I'm working on sort of a music video montage for the Three Nails Short CD Release Party.  I've got TONS of footage captured from analog sources that has to be organized, and already the new tools are helping.

Several of you know that for the last year or so, I've been toying with building a camera crane, or 'jib'.  I've been putting it off for technical reasons until recently.

The main thing that was deterring me was building a pan/tilt head.  I have one pretty much designed, but I really don't have the equipment to be able to do a proper job of testing it as I go.  I even have a microcontroller programmed with my assembly program for controlling the stepper motors with a standard computer joystick.  Anyway, it was too big a job for a simple hobby.

I went as far as designing a crane with no pan/tilt head, attempting to acheive it all through pulleys and cables.  It wasn't capable or portable enough to be much use for my projects.

So, I'm going back to my original design, but I'm purchasing an off-the-shelf solution for a pan/tilt head.  I managed to find a full solution for around $100, and it's simple enough to be easily stuck on the end of a very long jib arm.

Hopefully by Friday I'll have a crane to use at the CD release party for Three Nails Short, a band that one of my former Sunday School students is in. I've talked about them before.

No one but Webdell seems interested in my Wiki.  I've got a few projects up there.  I'll give it a few more weeks to catch on.  I really find it useful for quickly cross-referencing my thoughts on stuff.

I'm going to try to explain this as concisely as possible.  For a long time now, I've wanted to do a video where a character does really dramatic slow motion things to the music from "The Natural" specifically the part where he hits the home run and the stadium lights explode.  Then, as the video progresses he does more and more mundane things until at the end he's doing something really stupid like dramatically eating cereal in slow motion.

I've never really had a good ending or any kind of real plot to it...until today.  He needs a partner, one who at first is completely obsessed with being as dramatic as he is, but whever he tries it, he fails miserably, falling on his face or running into something, or dropping/breaking something.

Then, as the dramatic character does more and more mundane things dramatically, the roommate (or however he's related) gets more and more annoyed that he's not as dramatic as his roommate.  Then, during the one-upsmanship, the lesser roomate dies somehow, like leaps to catch a falling knife and gets stabbed.  Then, the final scene is of the dramatic guy reading the newspaper in slow motion with some stupid headline like, "Non-dramatic man dies".

So, what I need are some things that would be really funny in dramatic slow-motion with "The Natural" music, and some things that could go wrong if the not-dramatic guy tried to do them.