I heard from a friend of mine, that the new film Speed Racer was shot with a new, revolutionary camera, that focused the foreground, and the background at the same time…giving a flattened “Cartoonish” look…
And apparently the camera is so new…it came with guards to protect it’s secrecy…
Here’s an article that further explains this…
http://www.collider.com/entertainment/news/article.asp/aid/5290/tcid/1
Local television in Wisconsin has began displaying a countdown until the analog to digital conversion changeover that’s happening in February 2009. The countdown appears in the top of the screen, as of today April 8th 2008 we have 391 days…
Convenient yes…but do we really wanna see a countdown for another year? Probably not, the countdown was accompanied by text that explained what the countdown is, and where to get more info. Which would be www.DTV2009.com…
And I also wrote at one time about the coupons being issued for the Converter boxes, I received those in the mail last week, but I haven’t had a chance to open them, or get caught up with my mail…so expect a blog post when I learn more about those…
This is a really interesting topic that I personally have been following since I heard about it two years ago. It’s becoming a reality now…
I just heard about this HD Camera, known as the Phantom HD…it can shoot 1000 frames per second, which is ultra slow motion…
Check out some of these YouTube videos giving an example of it’s capabilities:
A ball bearing through a wine glass
Pretty neat stuff, there’s a lot of videos on youtube showing what the Phantom HD can do, but there’s also a lot of cool videos just shot in super slow motion…
More info on the Phantom HD can be found here - http://www.visionresearch.com/index.cfm?sector=htm/files&page=camera_HD_new
Here’s in interesting look at the difference between technology today, and 20 years ago…
It’s pretty neat to see how much better technology has gotten in 20 years, and how significantly the price on technology has gone down.
I remember I had a friend who had two computers in his house, which was pretty rare back then, and my family couldn’t even afford 1 computer until I was well into High School…Now it’s so affordable to have a computer that pretty much every member of my family has their own computer, and in some cases we have two…
Interesting article worth checking out…
http://tech.msn.com/products/articlepcw.aspx?cp-documentid=6328095
So I am a video guy, I create…I’m not a sports fan, never really was.
So if you ask me what I thought of the New York Giants vs the New England Patriots, I’d shrug and say I have no idea…
But if there is one game I watch every year, it’s the Super Bowl, but for two reasons 1) the Half Time show, and 2) the Commercials.
It started for me when I took a History of Advertising class, and I was required to write a paper about the Super Bowl Commercials, I learned about the Apple Computers’ 1984 commercial, and all other famous SB Commercials. But from that point on I went out of my way to pay attention to the commercials during the big game.
And this year with a price tag of 2.7 Million Dollars per 30 second advertisement, you know they better be good. And attention grabbing…but, I’m here to say that I was completely disappointed by the commercials I saw this year.
Often times we see commercials that are both funny, and/or heavy on the CGI…with a few movie trailers thrown in for good measure.
This year was no different, except I found that most of the commercials were only mildly amusing, but yet still heavily laden with CGI.
Some of the commercials I did like, were the Career Builder Commercials, especially the one with the Jiminy Cricket like character coming to the aide of someone looking for a new career. I liked the Macy’s Day parade commercial for Coca-Cola, where the Underdog balloon, and the Stewey Griffen balloon fight for a balloon of a coke, only to have it taken away from them by Charlie Brown. I thought that was my favorite of the evening.
I did like the Pepsi commercial with Justin Timberlake getting dragged across the street, I thought that was a clever play on the idea of “Getting you closer to something”
Any of the other commercials that aired, if it didn’t get my attention or it isnt’ one I can remember, then chances are it wasn’t that good… And out of all the commercials that aired, those are the ones that garnered the most impact. A lot of them I felt as though I’d seen before, a lot of them I probably have…
The Budlight commercials which in years past have come up with some clever advertisements, and that remains to be true with one exception…Will Ferrell dressed up as his character for the new movie Semi-Pro, pictching Bud Light…that was clever in a two fold way, 1 because it advertised the movie, and 2 because it advertised Bud Light, and people like Will Ferrell so that could help out both campaigns…however the commercial wasn’t as good as it could have been.
Overall I was completely disappointed by the commercials this year, I thought for awhile that maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, but reviewing the commercials that aired today, I find that that’s not true…I do remember seeing these commercials and they just didn’t do it for me…
Well there’s always next year.
I’m pleased with some progress I have made in my ability to animate in 3D…I’ve been using blender 3D for some time now…and I am doing a simple animation of a company logo flying in and landing, which will ultimately go on that companies website…
The logo has a metallic shine to it, which is no easy task…briefly touching on color theory, something like silver or gold is not necessarily a color, it’s a reaction to the environment surrounding it. Just as an example, when I was in my first art class in high school we were given the assignment to paint a chrome ball bearing…and I heard a fellow student ask “Where’s the silver paint.” Silver isn’t a color, in order to paint or create the effect of silver, and make the object look 3D, you would have to paint objects and images that reflect in the surface of the silver object.
And if you look closely at a silver object you will see a lot of little detail in there that you would never have noticed before…the objects on the table, the room around you…these elements create the illusion of silver…it’s the reflection, the light bouncing back that creates that look…
But what is color anyway but the amount of or lack of light hitting an object…
I played around a bit today with Apple’s Compression program, compressor. This program wasn’t previously installed on my Mac, and in order to get a small enough compression to put on the web, I was rendering out a video in almost full quality in Final Cut Pro, then I was using Quicktime to cut the framerate down to 15 fps, and also the video size down to 320 x 240. From there I put it into Visual Hub…now VH is a great program I think, but with compressor I have the ability to do all of this in one step.
I first render a fully uncompressed video in Final Cut Pro, this step is unavoidable…you can go straight to compressor with it, but why not have that uncompressed version to work from. Anyway…in Compressor I have a ton of options to choose from, I can render it with all sorts of different codecs for all sorts of different purposes. So I found the one I have been using and that is compressing for Web, and I use the H.264 codec. And then I adjust the frame rate and the size as usual.
Two things I really like about Compressor is, first of all once you select the compression you want to put on the video, it gives you a split screen preview of the original, and what it’s going to look like after. Pretty cool…
The other thing I see, now I haven’t played with it to know for sure…but it looks like you can have multiple videos rendering at the same time…so I can be compressing one video with one codec, and a whole different one with a different codec.
Here’s a great video on the power of Apple’s Compressor:
http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/compressor/
Now I’ve only barely scratched the surface of this program, but it’s pretty cool none the less…
Am I an Apple guy or what?
I am adding another program to my ever increasing arsenal of software….Motion, which is another one of the programs that comes with the Final Cut Pro suite. I’m rather enjoying what I’m learning, I used After Affects for awhile now, and I used Mirage for some time in college, but I am liking the things that I am doing in Motion, it will be a great tool for creating motion graphics, and more interesting backgrounds to title sequences…can’t wait to learn more.
I read an article that AT&T will be cutting their payphone service by the end of 2008….we all knew this was coming, with the increase in Mobile Cellular Telephones, we aren’t using payphones anymore. I recently thought about this, and I thought about how I don’t even know how much a payphone costs anymore….
Oh well…we are a cell phone nation now.
So our the OnYourMark Studio purchased a new toy this week, we picked up the Nikon D-40, Digital SLR camera.
I’ve been taking pictures my whole life I started working with an SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera when I was in high school, and I never looked back…all other cameras to me were just junk, I liked the manual control and the interchangeable lenses, to me that’s what photography was all about.
Up until this weekend I’ve always been a film user, I love film, I love the mystery behind what photos will work and what photos might fail. Of course after years of taking pictures I have come to find that most of my pictures work, and very few fail. But still…I have been wanting to upgrade to a Digital Camera for years, my sisters and my friends all get digital cameras for Christmas and birthdays, but I want nothing less then my SLR camera…so I wait, and wait, and wait…
I am thankful that we got this DSLR here, because it’s like I now have a DSLR at my disposal…and albeit it isn’t mine, it’s still nice to have it and use it…I went out today to take some pictures with it around Milwauee…Miller Park, Downtown, the River…I wanted to do more but I ran out of time. Although a film camera comes with that element of mystery, it’s digital counterpart comes with much more freedom. With one 2 Gb memory card set on Raw shooting, I have the equivalent of 270 photographs, that’s 12 rolls of 24 exposure film…and at 5 dollars a roll for developing costs, I’m looking at 60 dollars to develop…that gets pretty expensive aftewhile. With the digital shooting, I can take 12 rolls of film, and basically it’s free (if you don’t print your pictures or burn them to a CD). There really is much more freedom…and the pictures are stunning.
So yes I will probably phase out my Film SLR in the next 6 months…but my trusty friend won’t leave me anytime soon.
As for the Nikon D-40, if any of you are wondering…it’s a pretty decent camera. I know the price was right on it, it’s a 6 megapixel camera. I’ve had the opportunity to work with two higher model Nikon cameras, and although they are more robust, and faster. I think the Nikon D-40 takes some really nice shots, and it’s a great camera for someone who is looking to get a start into the world of the Digital SLR…