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Light and Dark

Engines

I recently shot some video of an engine rotating in place. The lighting was tricky because when shooting an object from all sides, you need to set up the lighting, and then rotate the object, and see how it looks, and rotate it again, and see how it looks, etc. With a still photo, you can light for your shot, at a specific angle, and of course, re-light if you change angles, but with video it all has to work no matter where in the rotation the view of the object is.

I shot the engine on black, focusing on lighting it, but not the background, as we wanted black, not “black dimly lit.” It worked out well, and I just had to mask out a bit of the background that wasn’t fully black.

But then, the client wanted to see it on white. Setting this up proved more challenging, as the focus became lighting the background to make it disappear, and since the background was not seamless (remember, the engine is rotating during the process) I ended up focusing most of my efforts on lighting the background, not the actual subject, the engine.

There is a small amount of shadow to the front-right side in the white version, which is fine, as I was really just trying to avoid any shadow in the back or side where the seams were, to make it all look seamless, and keep me out of masking hell.

All in all, I’m happy with how it turned out. (I personally like it better on black, but hey, that’s just me. :)

(Update: You can now see some sample footage.)

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Video Installation (Part II)

If you remember my quest for a decent video installation, here’s the conclusion.

We ended up getting a TV with VGA input, and connecting an old PowerMac G4 to it. From there I loaded videos into iTunes and played them full screen. One problem, iTunes does not support looping in a video playlist. The solution: make a “smart playlist” which contains your videos, as smart playlists do support looping. I just tested this, and it all seems good.

Thanks to all who made suggestions. If you’re interested in seeing the display, and are available the evening of Friday, September 12th, 2008, let me know…

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Video Installation

So we’re working on a video installation and we’re planning on putting up a big LCD TV, and want to be able to show photo slide shows and video on it.

Our first thought was, get a DVD player and connect it to the TV (behind the wall as the TV will be mounted flat or recessed to the wall) and we would then author DVDs and play as needed. This could work, but we’re then looking at the DVDs being standard definition versus high definition. So while this option is cheap, and somewhat easy, the quality would be low. (And burning HD or Blu-ray DVDs is not something we are currently doing.)

We also thought about connecting an old G4 to the TV. We currently have a G3 connected to an LCD monitor doing the photo slide show thing, and connecting a G4 might work, but we need to deal with actually connecting it to a TV, which would probably have HDMI but not VGA, and VGA would probably look like crap.

So, I’m starting to think an AppleTV, at $229 is the best option. It’s pretty much built to do what we want. We could manage the content through iTunes and the AppleTV interface, and make playlists that could loop, and… am I missing anything?

Update: It seem you can’t make playlists that loop on the AppleTV, which is a “WTF!?” type moment when people hear that…

Update See Video Installation (Part II)

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Empty Pockets [video]

This is a video I made for the song Empty Pockets, which I recorded back in February 2008 for the RPM Challenge.

(Originally uploaded to blip.tv)

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Multipurpose equals Slow

I’ve heard that multitasking burns more brain cycles due to switching between things, and even though you may think you are getting more done by multitasking, you really aren’t.

You know how your computer seems really fast when you get it, and then after a while it seems like it’s not quite so fast? It’s because of all that crap you add along the way. Those widget, and music scrobbling clients, and Twitter clients, and calendar agents, and notifiers, and on and on…

Video editing is resource intensive, and what I’ve found is that if I’m going to do just editing, I will log out any other users on my Mac (damn you fast user switching!) and then reboot, and then launch Activity Monitor, and quit (or force quit if necessary) any process not directly related to my task. So with a fresh reboot, and no silly little processing doing silly little things, I can go about my work. Alternately, I suppose I could create an account dedicated just to editing, and boot into that, but that’s more of a pain to me…

The reboot and quitting of processes is probably a five minute process, but saves me well over five minutes of time within an hour of editing.