Film

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Here’s a short that was apparently shot in just two days. Director/writer/DP/editor/visual artist all in one.

I’ve only seen northern light once — so far, and found it awe-inspiring. Here is a great shot on how this phenonemon looks from space:

(Via: Only Dead Fish)

In the past months I have written about a number of upcoming exciting technologies, namely the ability to enhance video using high-res stills, a new lens that will allow you to chose the focus in post production and of course an on-line lens cleaning tool.

Video sensors have a lower contrast range than film, meaning how much darkness and highlights they can record. This manifests itself in blown out windows, and noisy shadows.

4 million ND filters

Video sensors also have the tendancy of getting an always increasing pixel count. 4k cameras are already being sold by the thousands, and next year will see 3k video cameras aimed at the mass market and professional cameras exceeding 5k resolutions. At the same time digital cinema maxes out at 4k resolution (with many cinemas opting for the more affordable 2k solution). Technically, it is possible to make 16k cameras. But isn’t that just overkill?

Well, some smart minds have come up with a novel concept. Rather than using the extra - but essentially unneeded - resolution as such, why not use it for something else, more useful. Why not cover every other pixel of the sensor with a tiny ND (neutral density) filter? That way one could extend the contrast ratio of that sensor by several stops. Thus yielding a higher contrast ratio than film.

This is exciting!

Dogs will be a cameraman’s best friends

Robots are also on their way into our lives. One particular type of robot will be of great help for documentary film makers, and other shooters out in the wild. A robotic dog that acts as a mule.

BigDog runs at 4 mph, climbs slopes up to 35 degrees, walks across rubble, and carries a 340 lb load.

Ever increasing demand for moving pictures

Pretty much every web site nowadays has some video on it. Soon every company will have a presentation video, and manuals are getting pushed aside for instructional videos. And now, e-ink is taking a first leap into mainstream. Esquire will distribute 100.000 copies of its October magazine with an e-paper cover that includes moving type.

In other words: the demand for quality images increases; at the same time novel tools for their creation are added to our palette.

Exciting times, indeed.

What is the safest way for a film maker to become a millionaire?

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A few days ago I got a phone call from a producer, asking my availability for an “easy” assignment; basically a one-hour job. Well, today I filmed 12 hours, mostly standing in awkward positions, occasionally handling 2 cameras at once. And tomorrow I have another half day like that.

It is fun, and I enjoy it. Just never believe that a job will be “easy” and “just 1 hour”. (And charge accordingly.)

On a current job the client wants the videofiles on an external harddisk in FAT32. One of the problems with FAT32 is of course that it doesn’t allow for file sizes of 4GB or bigger, which translates to roughly 20min of DV material, and less on better codecs.

One way would of course be to use Final Cut, iMovie or QT Pro to mark each 15 minute segment, and export that to the external harddisk. This means a lot of button pushing, when there are hours of material to be transferred.

Doing a longer search on Macupdate did not come up with any easy solutions. So here is a step by step guide for non-geeks. Those who know their way around UNIX will probably know of a quicker solution…

Solution

1. Fire up OSX’s Terminal (Go to programmes > Utilities > Terminal, or just do a search from Spotlight)
2. Enter this command (copy & paste works; this will make the Finder restart and then display also hidden files): defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder
3. Download the manual install version of QTCoffee - look for the .dmg file, or the “manual install package”.
4. Open the disk image file (double click on the just downloaded file.)
5. Open the QTCoffee folder.
6. Open the bin folder
7. Open a new finder window (pressing Command-N or from the file menu)
8. Open your system disk
9. Open the bin folder
10. From the other finder window, drag the file “splitmovie” to the newest window
11. In the Terminal enter defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder This restarts the Finders and hides the system files again.

Now you are done with the installation part. Now, if you want to split a video file, simply enter the following code into the Terminal: splitmovie /volumes/sourcedisk/original.mov -duration 10:00 -self-contained -o /volumes/targetdisk/split.mov Sourcedisk is the name of the disk that contains your source footage, target is the name of the targetdisk and duration is the length of each segment (in this case 10:00 minutes). Afterwards you can drag and drop the split files from the finder.

If you need to split AVI files, you can have a look at Explicit.