youtube

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get my latest posts directly in your mailbox. Thanks for coming to the Foo!

Hungry Man/Grey London has made this new commercial for Toshiba, employing 200 hidef cameras.

20.000 gigabyte of data. 2 1/2 million individually renamed frames. $4.7 million dollar.

Some background footage:

Some facts

• The TV ad was shot using 200 Toshiba Gigashot Cameras: the highest number of moving image cameras ever used in a film sequence
• This particular technique, viewing looping action in 360 degrees, has never been done before
• The rig was custom built weighing approximately half a tonne, including 200 cameras and electronics
• The rig measures 14m diameter circle and 1.8m high
• The 200 cameras were all triggered using a single remote control
• Once the rig was built, four focus pullers spent three days focusing and aligning all 200 cameras
• The time spent processing footage from 200 cameras was over four weeks - 24 hours a day seven days a week!
• New offline and online editing software had to be specifically built for the job
• In terms of data, this is one of the biggest jobs a post-production house has ever taken on - 20TB of data

Credits

Production Company: Hungry Man LTD
Director: Mitch Stratton
Editor and editing company: The Whitehouse / Christophe Williams
Post-production company: The Mill
Music: Crystal Castles – Air War
Voice-over: Kira Lauren

(from the Press Release)

I try to stay away from politics on this blog, but when politics meets film, technology and life, I cannot resist.

Director(s): David Morgasen , Yaroslav Kemnits (Director of Special Effects)
Writer(s): David Morgasen
Producer(s): Dmitry Lesnevsky (Exec. Producer), David Morgasen (Exec. Producer), Elena Muravina

A good friend, who is both a programmer and dancer, sent me this well made french dance film from 1994, Le petit bal perdu. Love the feel of film (and can you spot the matte box?)

In the media world, one has to work with many different persons. Most of them have come to their position because of their talent and hard work. But every once in a while someone climbs the ranks just by making others believe that they can do the job. They probably manage to make a living off it, but no one really likes to work with them.

To these Big mouths I dedicate the following clip:

(via)

Finally some solutions for still lenses are coming along for the Red One camera. And with it some exciting new possibilities, like simple remote focus and iris control. And image stabilization; all lenses that have IS will make for very sexy, light handheld lenses:

Videos are very popular, and most don’t think twice before uploading their own films to sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. Those are popular and very convenient - you just upload your video, they transcode it to a webfriendly format, give you the code to easily embed your video in your blog/website, and they handle all the traffic. But the downside is that you have to give away some rights.

Vimeo is becoming quite popular amongs independent film makers, for Vimeo has an exceptionally good quality. But reading their legal text, I stumbled upon this mumbo: 

you hereby grant [...] a worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, sublicenseable (through multiple tiers) and transferable license (with a right to create derivative works) to use, copy, transmit or otherwise distribute, perform, publicly perform and display your Submission for any legal purposes whatsoever now known or hereinafter becomes known. 

In other words: While you still own the copyright to the film, you have now given Vimeo and its partnes the right to make new films out of your work. And even if you change your mind and remove the video, Vimeo still has the legal right to use your video. Forever. And it doesn’t stop there. Vimeo can license your film to another company. And that one could again sub-license it. You’ve essentially lost control of your video.

Distraction

Another downside is that your visitors might easily get sucked into watching other videos offered. And suddenly your visitor becomes YouTube’s/Vimeos’ visitor.

Not to forget that those video services also have to make a living, which usually boils down to advertising on your film.

Solution

So what to do? Bite the bullet, spend a few dollars on your own hosting (I can recommend Media Temple) and serve your video from a source your have control over.