RasterWeb!Here’s some interview footage Gabe and I got during Open Everything in Madison, Wisconsin on April 18, 2009.
We talked with Doug Whitfield of the Open Madison Group and got his thoughts on the event, and the ideas behind Open Everything.
You can also read my post from the event: Open Everything
(This video is also available at blip.tv and at Vimeo and is published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.)
PhotoCampMilwaukee will be held on Saturday May 2, 2009 at Bucketworks, located at 1340 N. 6th Street in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
You don’t have to be a great photographer to attend, you just have to bring your passion for photography. The event will be free (thanks to our sponsors) and the only entrance fee is your participation.
(This video is also available at blip.tv, Vimeo, and Flickr and is published under a Creative Commons Attribution License.)
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.)
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…
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)