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.

I thought this would be an interesting venue for logging my video ideas and getting feedback on them from some of the people whose feedback I need the most...insensitive jerks. Just kidding. Here's one I thought of this morning. Kind of an excuse for a very action/stunt oriented short, so I can get sued by the parents of some of the youth who'd be my actors.

It's a spoof of the Matrix called "The Metrics" (or something like that). The world is not as it seems. Even though we use English system units, everything underneath is run on the metric system. Anyway, you get the idea. Agents, super-powers for some reason, etc. Maybe it's only funny to me. I'm prepared to accept that. I deal with alot of metric system vs. english system crap.

I've got some more of these. Expect to see more in the next few days.

Hey hey! remember me? The last few weeks have been some of the busiest of my life. Sorry for the prolonged absence. I've got to fill you in on several things, so to be efficient in helping you through them, I'll start with a list:

• I've been working on a skit/video for out church's youth-led worhsip
• Becky got her french horn "renovated" for lack of a better term.
• Becky is in Germany for three weeks
• My sprinkler system broke.

Josh (our interim youth guy, who is younger than Andrew) asked me to get some volunteers and come up with a skit for the youth led service that was this Sunday. So, it put together a sign-up sheet. I added an extra category for favorite Brady Bunch episode like Peter and I did in Cal II, which just confused people. They thought I wanted to do a Brady Bunch skit. Peter's probably the only one who understands that so I'll move on. So, as usual, I procrastinated until I thought we had just enough time to put it together and do it, at which point I found out I'd lose an entire week to the youth mission trip. Josh gave me a skit book, which should have been titled "Worst Skits Ever" and written by Webdell. (just kidding)

Anyway, it came down to last Wednesday, when we were going to finish filming our outdoor scenes. Why didn't I guess that that's when the hurricane would blow through. So, we went down to Wal-Mart and bought 12 sheets of that bright green posterboard and did all the scenes in front of a green screen. Needless to say, this added quite a bit of editing time. To make a long story short, I was up until 6am Sunday morning working on it. What I came up with was very similar to Blue's Clues, so I wished I had B-Dub to play the main part. I'll try to make some screen shots later if you're interested.

Ok, that was way too much, I'll try to keep my other points shorter. In fact, I'll combine the next two.

Becky is in Germany right now doing something called "EuroBrass". It's a christian group that tours the Germany area doing concerts and stuff and encouraging the German-based churches in their work. Since Becky is starting grad school in the fall doing horn performance, she's been wanting to get a new horn. (Don't worry the stories will converge). She did alot of research and tried out several horns. Her friend Janet (who is also in the EuroBrass thing) has a friend in Dallas who does custom horn stuff. He looked at her horn and gave her an estimate of the work that needed to be done and what he'd charge for it. We'd essentially get a new horn worth much more than we'd pay to have the work done, and we could sell it in the future to get a brand new one. Anyway, we wanted to get it taken care of before she left for Germany so she'd be used to it when she came back and had to do auditions for ensembles at UT. The guy did awesome work and the horn turned out very nice. So now she's in Germany with her "new" horn.

She has a horrible fear of flying, so she got some medication to take on the plane to help with anxiety. It must have worked really well because she said the flight was good.

I'm starting to think I should have broken this up into multiple entries. Oh well.

I had noticed that zone 1 of my sprinkler system wasn't spraying with quite the pressure it used to , so I turned it on this evening to have a look. When I did, up from the ground came a-bubblin' crude...water that is...clear gold...Texas tea...ingredient. One of the heads had broken off the main pipe and the water had created a tunnel to the surface. I dug it up and found that a large root had been pushing on the head and had finally forced it to pull away from the pipe. I got in there with my axe and chopped out a section of the root, which turned out to be about 6" in diameter. When I pulled the root out, the head came with it. The root has grown around the head so I couldn't even pry it out. The threads on the pipe seem intact, so hopefully I can buy a new head tomorrow and fill the hole back up. If there's more damage, there'll be more work for me.

Well, hopefully that brings everyone back up to speed. Our anniversary is this Thursday, so we'll miss it once again due to Becky being on a mission trip. Man, her priorities are screwed up.