Nature Sounds (video)

Today Jim and I heard some nature sounds from our room! I decided it would be cool to make a video about it.

Also Today I've been doing some of the bookkeeping and keeping up in general with my camera, that's been experiencing a weird problem at high F numbers like sixteen and twenty two. It worked fine last night when I only needed to go to F/4 once, (I was hanging out at 3.5 all night because it was, well, night.) So right now I"m charging the battery, which was one of Nikon's reccomended steps. I've alreayd done the two-button reset, and I'm afraid that if this continues even after I've fully recharged the battery, Nikon is going to have a quite unhappy Cory on their hands.

Hanging out at work.

Meaghan and I did an awkward shift-trade thing today and I ended up with 7 hours from 2 to 9. Not too bad really, at least I didn't have to take the whole 9 hours with only 20 minutes notice.
I've been using the time to work on photo crap, and since all of my OS X install CDs are at the helpdesk for some reason, I took a moment to install iMovie '06 on my iMac.

So I made this video.



Enjoy!

Epic Song

Jim was browsing 7-Chan today, and we discovered this most-epic song. Here is a YouTube video of it.



I love the Internet.

In other news, I discovered something called Ruckus. It's kind of stupid and kitschy at first, until you realize how much awesome, free music can be attained from it.

NAB!

The National Association of Broadcasters tradeshow and other related events is happening this week, and I'm here to provide some reactions.

Apple's announcements are obviously very interesting to me, so I'll start there.
Final Cut Studio 2.

That is pretty much it. - well, that and Final Cut Server, along with Apple's new Codec ProRES 422 and the special i/o device for that codec, AJA's new io-HD, which looks like it was actually designed by Apple.

The RED Digital Cinema Camera is apparently finished. It looks cool and it's really inexpensive for what it is. The base unit is $17,500 - which is about as much as you'd pay for a high end XDCAM or Panasonic P2 camera, but this camera's got an actual 12-megapixel more-than-4k resolution sensor, and can record an uncompressed full resolution signal. If this, in combination with "inexpensive" computer editing gear and software like the MacPro Final Cut Studio, isn't basically the best thing ever to happen to digital cinema, I'm not sure what is.

This could even bring cinema-quality shooting to Electronic News Gathering, or to more independent filmmakers. I'd love to use one at some point in time, it seems like a reasonable size, and the image quality from it must be AMAZING.

In other news, Sony is apparently expanding its XDCAM lineup to include a new prosumer product that will apparently be able to record onto a new 8 or 16 gig flash medium. With two 16 gig cards, recording times are apparently about 120 minutes. I am interested in seeing it for sure, it looks like Sony is trying to bring the XDCAM to the places Panasonic's P2 system is already at, but with better recording times.

Oh - one final note regarding Apple's announcements of the past week. No Leopard means no 64-bit Final Cut Pro, and no 64-bit Final Cut means limited addressing space for users dealing with redcode and other high-def files. I can't wait to see how Final Cut flies on systems with 8 or more gigs of ram, once we get Leopard and 64-bit Final Cut.

No Talk Show Pilot?

Well, many of you may know that I was dedicating my Sunday to two things.

1. Sitting at my computer next to the phone all day long, waiting for Courtney from NAULive to call.
2. Recording the pilot episode of Courtney's talk show for UTV62.

Unfortunately, my least favorite of those things happened for 14 full hours - I didn't leave my room all day except for one 45 minute breakfast run at 10:30 a.m. The thing I actually wanted to do, record the pilot, did not happen. I spent most of my day sending e-mails to Courtney, and I never got a reply.

Naturally, I did have fun with the GL2 the other evening, I'll put the results of my 2-cam videoblog shoot online next weekend sometime, after I've captured the results from both cameras and edited them, including some of my brand new Motion opening graphics, and of course, my Soundtrack Pro themesong for the videoblog. (I may need or want to rework the Motion opening sequence, but I've basically got what I want.)

The second naturally in my post is something UTV62 related. I am naturally going to have a discussion with Courtney about showing up and calling people. I don't know if I made this clear to her, but I cannot call cell phones because they are usually long distance, so if I want to talk to somebody whose number isn't on-campus or local, I need to wait for them to wait for them to call me, or I need to e-mail them. This is bad when people who I need to contact never call me or check their e-mail.

I hate to say it, but I am extremely frustrated because I had multitudinous opportunities today to go hang out with other friends (I'm still sorry, Megan!) and get food - instead I sat here all day waiting for the highlight of my weekend, and nothing happened other than me browsing some websites about old macs, and chatting the day away. Oh, I did COM200 and GER102 homework as well.

DV Recording

I've got a really cool toy to play with this weekend. It's a Canon GL2 in what I think is basically the most awesome configuration ever. It's got an MA-300 Microphone adapter, and two dynamic mics (One lav and one hand held), plus the appropriate (long enough) XLR cables.

I am going to use it on Sunday to film a pilot episode of a talk show for UTV62.

Until then, I've got Camera+1 sitting here in my room, so I've decided to do a few things with it.

The first thing I shot with it here in the dorm was actually a screen capture of the old Toshiba laptop (aka TWL) booting IBM OS/2 Warp 3 and loading one of the IBM Works applications. The screen cap worked fairly well and it made me realize exactly how slow that old laptop is.

After screen capping the Toshiba, I decided I'd try a different method just for fun. The GL2 has an S-Video input and when the camera is in VCR mode, it can do analogue input for recording to the DV tape, or for recording straight to computer. So I got out my trusty new S-Video cable and the PowerBook G3, and did a few OS X screen captures in the camera's VCR mode. This was definitely interesting because it was essentially a perfect example of Mac OS X's failings in a low-resolution setting. The default size for everything is basically awful when outputting at 720x480.

Bored with screen capturing, I performed what I think is the most important and interesting of the tests - a direct comparison between the DV and Video8 formats, and of course the Sony HandyCam I've got and the Canon GL2.

For the comparison, I set both cameras up at about the same height on tripods, each in a different enough location so that I could look back and forth to make it seem more like a legitimate multi-cam shoot. I then got the dynamic hand held mic and the Canon Mic Adapter. I decided I wanted a direct comparison of the audio as well as the video quality, so I actually took the headphone output of the GL2 and attached it to the Microphone input of the HandyCam. I pressed record on both cameras, sat down and just talked about the setup for a few moments.

Doing such a shoot is definitely interesting, I am certainly happy to have a comparison done, and I can't wait until Monday when I can start to capture the tapes to hard disc. I'll have to capture at the comm building, and then bring the footage back to my iMac on the iPod or something.

At any rate... I certainly can't wait to do the actual talk show shoot, but I am concerned because I received a phone call today (after the EM checkout desk closed) saying that for the show, three cameras and a minimum of three microphones (two lav if possible) will be needed, so I hope the now-wimpy one camera, one lav and one hand-held will be acceptable.

If we were allowed to shoot S-VHS, I'd run out and buy another S-VHS tape and shoot with two or three of the big 3-chip S-VHS cams, but I don't think NAULive has enough tripods for that, unfortunately.

Thoughts on HDV.

Hey Everybody! This is actually something I wrote as a forum post, and then liked, so here it is on my blog. If you'd like to follow the discussion, click here.

This evening I was reviewing the procedure for getting video from my sony handycam (video8) onto the computer, and usable by a nonlinear editing system such as Final Cut Pro or Final Cut Express. One of the things I discovered is that FCE/FCP doesn't like plain mpeg4 DVD rips, so my procedure for using (any analogue video source with a composite or svideo output really) Video8 now includes using Quicktime Player to convert the .mp4 file to a .dv file.

My main concern with this is that it has become a bit of a time consuming process to prepare my video for final cut, and that the filespace advantage of using a ripped DVD file (which is about 700megs/hour) versus a .DV file (which is about 13 gigs per hour) is now gone, without any of the actual quality advantages of having imported from a real DV camera.

I've been looking at newer camcorders, and what I've seen is that while DV (and digi8 too, if I were going to go that way...) is become less expensive, so are DVD cams, hard disc cams, as well as HDV cams.

DVD cams are interesting because they seem to promise nice, DV quality, but they don't use tape. However, I've noticed that those don't mix well with the iMac. Plus, that only eliminates one (admittedly the least fun) part of the current process.

MiniDV cams are attractive because they are inexpensive (bhphotovideo.com has one for $199) but I am concerned that this format (along with all other things standard def) may be a bad investment (at least to buy new) because of the growing popularity of all things high-definition.

Hard Disc camcorders are significantly more expensive, one of the cheapest ones around is $430 and this is still standard definition. Unfortunately what I've learned is that the current hard disc camcorders are extremely difficult to use with Macintosh video software, and they're even difficult to use with PC software, but very slightly less so. The idea is good, but it's still not been executed properly I think. Add to that, these units are still standard def, which could mean in the long run, it'll be a bad investment.

This brings me to HDV. I've noticed that there is now at least one HDV camcorder for under $1000, the Canon HV-10 for $800, and the Sony HDR-HC5 for $999. Canon's upcoming HV-20 is also going to be available soon, for $1099.

This format seems to be the future, it uses MiniDV tapes (though higher-grade "HDV" tapes are available, which supposedly improve the quality of the format significantly), and it can record 1080i or 720p (I bet it can record 1080p but the low end cameras don't do that apparently.)

My question is whether or not it seems like HDV is really worth it yet, especially for those of us who might already have access to other high def equipment, if some hypothetical person is interested in getting a camcorder sometime within the next few years.

Naturally, there are not really any HD-capable disc burners within a reasonable price range yet, but for displaying HD works on the TV, there's always the component video output on the camera, and there isn't anything saying that bluray or hddvd burners won't come down in cost in the coming years.

Another thing that may be worthy of noting is that HDV is the same data rate as DV, so in the end (storage-wise) if I record an hour of video with my handycam and put it on the computer (after converting to the .dv file), and an hour of video with an HDV cam and put it on my computer, they take up about the same amount of space. (at least this is my understanding, it may or may not be correct.)

I think if I were to adopt HDV today, I'd go for the Canon HV10, it's a smaller size than the Sony offering, as well as being better in a few ways even than its upcoming big sibling, the HV20. The HV10 has the ability to record analogue audio/video from its line-in port to a DV tape, for example. In fact, just about the only down-side to the HV10 is its lack of a microphone port, but that isn't that big of a deal for me, considering I only first started using an off-cam microphone a few weeks ago. Plus, another advantage I've got is that I'd still have the old handycam hanging around if I needed to make recordings using the microphone.

I like the idea of the extra video quality that HDV offers, especially if I intend to do some sort of independent or experimental film at some point in the future, but I am unsure if it's really worth it right now, especially given the fact I've already got the Handycam... well, handy.