My latest video creation

A new love that I’ve found since moving interstate has been that of filming and editing. I’ll admit I’m not the best in the world, and that there are probably much faster and more efficient ways of doing things, but at the moment as I grasp new projects, ideas, constructive criticism, and a creative feel, I’m enjoying learning about new and exciting techniques.

The most recent creation has been that of a carols promotional video. We planned to render (some elements), shoot, edit and colour all of it within a week. This surprisingly is what happened.

We filmed late on a Sunday afternoon, with time set aside for after the shoot, to do a time lapse of the park getting dark, to the incorporate it in to the video.
This worked really well, considering I had only done one time lapse attempt of something else at night, and this was only 3 days beforehand! This was of course after chatting to a camera nut who knows what to do properly of course.

The video was shot on a Canon 7D with a Sigma 24-70 F2.8 using the Cinestyle video profile. (Find out more here and here about this).  This recorded the footage in an incredibly dull looking footage. This is something I had never done before, so it was a little bit of a gamble, considering I only had one week turn around, and that Sunday afternoon was the only time we had to film. I did know however, that this was going on in the DSLR industry, so the thought of “how hard can it be” came to mind. The LUT was loaded using the Red Giant free software that can be downloaded here.

There were problems using this kind of colour correction. Firstly I like seeing my footage in full colour when editing (yes, not good workflow yet I know), but this mean I couldn’t do this without applying the Red Giant filter and having to render. Even without having this filter on, it was still going to have to be added at the end, and thus add to the rendering process, just like I was going to have to with many of the other effects applied – such as the Vignette and at times a quick Brightness/Contrast filter.

Many of the effects that were used came from one of two places; After Effects, or Motion.

The scribble effect that was used for the facepainting, jumping castle and also the pony ride was done in AE, as I couldn’t find an effect like this in Motion. There were several problems for this and they were:

• I’d never used AE up until this point, and so all I had to go by to get the effect was tutorials. Thanks to those who do them! They are a big help.
• I had to find the most efficient way to do the edit. I saw it as two ways. 1. Make the edit in FCP and then export the entire project via an XML plugin and send it to AE, which I didn’t like the idea of for several reasons. or 2. Create the elements and export them back to FCP – which I ended up doing.
• Exporting the “scribbled” elements was also and interesting concept, but once I figured it out as an Uncompressed with Alpha, it seemed to work out.
• Play back in AE also confused me, especially with RAM previews as well. (Different story, and a good gotcha for new users).
• Render times sometimes took a long time to finish, such as the Motion projects that were imported, and also the stars and cloud “footage” which were just images with slow moving tweens.

Once these new elements were imported, they were then arranged and shrunk/edited as required.

Motion was also used for some of the other effects, such as the rain, and the smoke on the BBQ – both of which are built in effects. Thanks Apple.

The video editing codec I use is ProRes 422 LT 720p @ 25FPS with Compressor being the main conversion tool. Why not use MPEG Streamclip? Well I use compressor, as I can use more cores, plus other Apple devices and spread the load around a couple of computers and speed up the conversion process. I’ve set up QMaster/QAdministrator to work. Not that often that you can get a MacPro with 8 cores all at 100%!

All of the audio was tweaked in the Audition. I’m a massive fan of Audition as I think it kicks the pants of Apple’s SoundTrack (sorry FCP fans). Even though the sound was originally recorded on a H4N Zoom, there were issues with the quality because of the environment it was recorded in, so we re-recorded the sound in a studio and imported it as uncompressed AAC as FCP doesn’t like MP3 files @ 44.1k when the sequence was @ 48k.

I also did a brief colour on the video using the 3 way colour corrector. I need to learn how to use Color.

So, that’s the technical information about the video, now here it is!

Hope you can come to the carols on Bradbury!

My solution to the jquery mobile back button problem

As I’m new to this new jquery mobile, I’m bound to run in to troubles and find unique ways of accommodating solutions.
So, the my first problem I’ve encountered has been trying to implement a back button. After playing with codes and a few options, I got frustrated and have decided to do it my own way.

By default the back button shows, which is great, if your entire site is on one page. It stays self contained and works really well. But, if you are like me and need to use a CMS or implement a site on to multiple pages, you are going to find it a little harder. I could be wrong, and welcome comments on this, but It seems that when you move to an external page from where you just were, the jquery looses it’s history and can’t do a back to the previous page.

So, I just did this:

<body>

<div data-role="page" id="MainPage" data-theme="a" >
<div data-role="header">
<span style="font-size: 9px; text-align: center;">Header</span>
<!-- Copy this 'a' code -->

<a class="ui-btn-left ui-btn ui-btn-icon-left ui-btn-corner-all ui-shadow ui-btn-up-a" data-icon="arrow-l" data-rel="back" href="javascript:history.back(1) " data-theme="a">
<span class="ui-btn-inner ui-btn-corner-all">
<span class="ui-btn-text">Back</span>
<span class="ui-icon ui-icon-arrow-l ui-icon-shadow"></span>
</span>
</a>

</div>
<div data-role="content">
<p>Please select a job type</p>
<ul data-role="listview">
<li><a href="#page1">Page 1</a></li>
</ul>
<ul data-role="listview">
<li><a href="#page2">Page 2</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div data-role="footer">
<h4>Page Footer</h4>
</div>
</div>

<div data-role="page" id="page1">
<div data-role="header">
<h1>Page 1</h1>
</div>
<div data-role="content" data-add-back-btn="true">

<ul data-role="listview">
<li><a href="Page1.html" rel="external">External Link 1</a></li>
<li><a href="Page2.html" rel="external">External Link 3</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div data-role="footer">
<h4>Page Footer</h4>
</div>
</div>
etc...


I used the cs5.5 dreamweaver code base originally, with it only needing these slight mods. Let me know how you go.

Dear Apple Australia. Please adjust your iTunes store

Dear Apple Australia,

I’m writing to ask you to update the genres that you categorise the music in the Australian iTunes Store and change the way the account system works to be able to buy from “International” stores.

Your big brother US store has a lot more content and genres, so why aren’t they matched?

My first concern is that music styles are being mixed in with the wrong types, of which the main category of concern is “Inspirational”.
For instance, the US store doesn’t have this genre under the music category. It simply doesn’t exist. I notice instead that those deemed “Inspirational” are instead placed into a better fitting category such as “Christian and Gospel”. Why does this category not exist in the Australian one?

If you have a look at the types of songs that are in the Australian Inspirational list, you’ll see “I still Call Australia Home”, mixed in with worship songs about God. These songs couldn’t be further from with each other. How these two types of songs be listed together has got me baffled.

So why doesn’t Apple Australia reorganised this? Is it because no one in there knows Christian music? Is it not cost effective as far as sales go? Why not just duplicate the US version and adjust the prices accordingly to the Australian matched ones?

There is so much good new Christian music that I think we as Aussies are missing out on.

How or why are we missing out? I’ll try to explain.

If one browses the US version of the site, there are plenty of genres someone can look at and see. We can look at and listen to all the artists and songs we what.
The problem comes when you want to buy the song, which is my second point.
If we want to purchase a song or video we like, iTunes suddenly is displays a message along the lines of “Oops, you need to change store because your account only works in Australia”. So now we’ve just lost our place of where we were on the charts and we are now back to the Australian home page with the browsing history cleared and saying to ourselves “Where was that song I just wanted to buy?”.

The iTunes store works great. Except for these two points.

Working in the radio industry this kind of thing would be very beneficial.

I ask you sincerely, please make some changes.

Transistion from Adobe Audition/Cool Edit to Ardour

Now I’ve always used Cool Edit/Adobe Audition and would consider myself a little more of a power user where I use multi-track features and plugins and things. AA is reasonably a fairly simple application to get your head around when seeing it for the first time. It was a long time ago when I first used it, but I haven’t really tried anything else since.

I guess being the fact I like to try out new softwares and things, and having compiled kernels in the earlier days from version .9, I’d sort of think I’m a little nerdy at times. These days though I try things on a needs basis. When looking for free alternatives of multi-track audio software, there were definitely limited options available. As I used Windows XP as my primary operating system there were even less options, and of those that were available most have been fairly unusable.

Along came Audacity, and it was great for what it was. I jumped on board early in version .82 to try it out and for what it is being free, it’s pretty good. But, there are limits. I think generally speaking you get what you pay for and as with a lot of freeware, this is the case. But, there are exceptions.

Years ago when using Linux in my testing phases of ‘look what this can do’ scenario and never actually using it for any real purpose, I discovered Ardour and realised it had a lot of potential. After installing it and importing a few MP3 files, I had a quick play and thought, yeah that works, but never took it to anything further.

Well, since getting a little Mac laptop and getting ready to retire my pc laptop, I’ve been in need of something that is going to do the job properly of multi-track audio recording and editing. So, this is where Ardour comes in to play.

Since downloading it from www.ardour.org I’ve had only a few dramas. I’ve now got a little Behringer UFO202 device for my stereo recording, which the unit itself hasn’t caused my any dramas, but for a new user from AA, getting these devices and Ardour working together is rather confusing and at times frustrating. This is partly because I was sold a hardware device (from an Apple
Genius) that couldn’t do stereo recording. I returned that after a week and a half of trying everything, but that learning curve has since helped me in getting Ardour working properly.

So the biggest challenge for any new user of Ardour is the whole Jack Audio thing. Having read a little, I discovered that Ardour is one of a hand full of Jack-Native programs, whereby support for the Jack program is basically built in to it. Why does it matter? Well, Jack is like a way of taking care of the audio traffic. Internally, the audio data is transported and routed around the computer in and out, to each specific program. This is very very different to Windows computers, where you have 2 audio level windows – Audio In, and Recording Out, where you just select which device, of wav, line in or microphone as your recording device. It’s really different in a way. But, the basics of it are the same.

To get it working in Mac OS X, go to Applications, Utilities and run Audio Midi Setup. Now, I got Ardour working without using Jack and the Core Audio driver, but it is easier and the recommended method to use Jack OSX (http://www.jackosx.com/. Follow the instructions there and you should be right.

Having just posted on the Ardour website, I got a couple of replies straight away, which was great. But I think I may be going about using Ardour in the wrong way… But we’ll see. If I can use it the way I’d expect or find a way, I’ll be trying… http://ardour.org/node/3769

The blog is back

It’s been a long while, but now that I’ve found my blog again, it will be making a comeback.

Thankyou to all who had followed in the past.

Steve

Last weekend just gone

I thought I would share about the weekend I just had up here. Although I didn’t exactly ‘do anything’ physically as such, it was one of the most enjoyable. Why?

Well. There’s a Go-Kart track out here, and they had a come and try day. So with some friends, we wandered out there to have a go and just be there. As it turned out, all we did was ‘be there’. Because there wasn’t enough daylight for us to have a go in the karts. But it didn’t matter. Those of us that were there just had a great time standing around talking, about everything, about nothing, and having fun.

Afterwards we went back to a friends’ house and ordered pizza and watched Top Gun and even Edward Scissor Hands. It was a night of the classics. But there was much fellowship and enjoyment in it all that we could have stayed and yacked for a much longer time, had we didn’t all have to get up earlyish the following day.

Something worth enjoying – good friends and good fellowship.

Getting involved in town

So, I’ve been lazy on the writing stuff on this blog front. But, that’s okay. I’ve been busy with other things. Anyone who know me well, would quickly realise that I can’t just sit and do nothing. I’ve got to get involved, out and about and just doing something with a project somewhere, or something. 

Tonight I’ve just been out to the Sprint cars in Broken Hill with the SES helping with safety and stuff. We didn’t have any major crashes and things which was good, ’cause although I was assigned to it, I didn’t particularly want to play Fireman Sam. 

I’m starting to fit in down there and find my place in a unit of about 15-20 regulars.

Hey, my grass is starting to grow! Yes. It’s green. Well, in patches. I may have to think about a lawn mower at some stage. I wonder if stealing a goat would be out of the question. I remember seeing hundreds on the road from Mildura to Broken Hill.

Last weekend, I flew down back home for a wedding of two friends. It was really good. The wedding, and seeing lots of people again. I don’t plan on coming down too often to Melbourne because of the cost, but each time, it’ll be worth it. Strangely enough, I even managed to turn out with Paky SES while I was back. They were in a bit of shock when I wandered in.

The house I’m living in up here needs work I’ve decided. If it was mine and I could afford to, I’d rip out the walls in the back part of the kitchen, put in plasterboard and fix it up. Tiles need to go up around the sink and wet areas too. And, the biggest thing. I think the main kitchen window should be replaced with an aluminium frame sliding window so I can see out the back. At the moment it’s a louvre window and someone’s stuck a blue tarp on it! It may stop the wind, but it stops the light! I’d also put insulation in the roof of the kitchen too, because I don’t think there is anyway.

Work is going well. I’m still just making ads and things. Some are good that I enjoy hearing, because they sound great. Others are just ok. It’s hard to give a plain voiceover extra spark, when it doesn’t have any… Well, sometimes I can ‘hear’ an ad in the script and imagine how it should sound. Then I make it. Other’s are just plain. But it’s all good. We’ve got changes coming to the studios in the future, which we are looking forward to. I’m content working there, and the staff are cool and we all laugh and enjoy ourselves. It’s funny, just like LightFM, we’ve got upstairs and downstairs staff.

Anyway, I’m off. It’s late and I’m tired. Enjoy. Bye.

-Steve

Do I miss home? Yep.

Well, it’s been a long while since I’ve actively kept this blog current. Why? Nothing interesting to write I guess.

Tonight I sit here in South Australian time in a building owned by the Broken Hill Church of Christ. What is the building? Well, it’s an old convent they purchased years ago. Now it’s lived in by a few church families and it is also used for temporary accommodation – such as myself. I’m in a long skinny section with 5 bedrooms all coming off a hallway, which has a little kitchen in the middle of it all. I’ve got it all to myself, and my stuff is scattered up and down the hallway.

They have been very generous here at the church. On Sunday I went to their service with mum and dad just before they left back for Melbourne, and it’s a bit of a family church. They are pretty close and very friendly. Anyway, so straight after church, everyone filed out, jumped in cars and drove 4 blocks to someone’s house. 2 people got baptised in a backyard pool! It was pretty cool. Then we all came back to church for a lunch, where I hung out with a few blokes my own age, which was nice.

Today, I went to work and made radio ads, I even had to voice a few. It’s a little challenging at the moment, as I’m still getting my head around how the system still works here. It appears that there have been a few people doing production – like myself, and so I’m going to be working through getting a little more order amungst the organised chaos on my pc. But I’m happy to say that things are going forward.

The outside temperature today was about 32. I wore jeans and sat in my little office with the air conditioner on! My biggest concern? I’ll get pastey skin! I don’t exactly want that. I haven’t got a window in my room. I have speakers, a computer that occasionally crashes, a mixer and a little recording desk, oh and a squeaky chair. But no window.

I think I’ll bring in a picture of the beach.

Today I went for a walk after work to get out and about. Thanks for the call dad!

Well, that’s enough from me.

I still haven’t got a house to live in and I’m starting to loose faith in real estate companies as they don’t keep to their word of calling when they promised they would.

London
New York
Paris
Pakenham
Rome

Do I miss home? Yep.

Apples and Oranges…

Oh, to have money to invest right now…If I was rich, I reckon I’d buy shares in Apple. 
Why? Well, they’ve just released figures of their best ever quarter in history, with earnings at $9.6 billion.Not only that, their share price, like everything else at the moment, has plummeted to $150 or so, from a staggering $200. This in my opinion, is that there is only one way to go from here.Up! Apple Share Price  In 6 months time, tell me if I’m wrong. If I was wrong and you invested… well… I’ll say sorry now.  

Ah, Christmas. Not long now!

Ah, I love this time. As I look in the bank account and wonder how I’m going to afford things, I smile and remember that it’s seasonal.For good reason too. I’m very fortunate that I’ve got a close/tight family and lots of them and that we all get on well, without fights and things that I know other people have to go through.We had yet another family do Sunday, with probably 30+ people all crammed in to my Auntie’s house. Did I know them all? No. Does it worry me that I don’t? Not really. It’s just great to be there amongst it all. This was once again, one section of my tree. Grandpa’s side. So his brothers and their kids, kids etc…But it’s made me wonder I guess. What should I get people for Christmas. Now there is no way I’m going to be buying for the entire family, just my immediate family and a couple of selected others. But what do you get for everyone? Do you regift? Or are the usual socks and jocks too far out of the question? This year it’s a bit different.Andy’s now married and moved out, so with Christmas being a little different, we buying presents differently this year. We buy a (or many) present(s) for 1 person up to a certain value, and that way we don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on stuff that people don’t want or need.I’ve already got mine organised. And I didn’t even select it! Very nice I thought. I’ve just got to pay for it now.Completely changing the topic now, I’m going to be house sitting for the next few weeks in Doncaster. Which will be a nice little change, instead of driving a long way each day in traffic for work.Work has been really great recently. I’m doing stuff I love with some awesome people and I just enjoy it. What more could ya want really?