I’ll go more in-depth soon with how I’ve been loving the GH2, but wanted to post a quick free app I found that’s been very helpful in analyzing video files.

First off, I hacked the GH2 to get a bitrate of 44 mbps. Great stuff, but it leaves me with AVCHD files that need to be transcoded into something else. As I experimented with different codecs, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t undermining the work of the hack by encoding to something with a lower bitrate. But bitrate is not something that pops up in the Finder info window.

Enter MediaInfo. This totally free program gives you all sorts of data on you video files, no matter what the format is. So I can compare the original MTS file to the new codec in the MOV I want to analyze.

Very handy. Very free. Good for Mac and PC. Download it here.

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2. History of Online Video Infographic

People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.

via The Brainstorming Process Is B.S. But Can We Rework It? | Co.Design: business + innovation + design.

Really interesting article on Co.Design that basically says the IDEO / BBDO way of unfiltered group brainstorming is ineffective. The three points: we’re more creative working alone, criticism improves the brainstorming process, and creativity is about happenstance, not planning.

I wholeheartedly agree with points 1 and 3, but have reservations about 2, criticism. The argument is that ideas usually come from the need to find a solution to a problem. Criticizing refines and redefines those problems, which gives the mind more to work with.

I’d agree with that, as long as there’s a constant flow of news ideas running. Some criticism isn’t bad. What is bad is when one person shuts down everyone else’s idea because they’re trying to cram their own idea down everyone’s throat. Or worse, they don’t have any of their own ideas.

I’d love to hear a reaction to this from IDEO.

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While not usually a problem for fiction films (unless it’s a stylistic choice), most documentaries find the only visual media available for some parts of the film are still photos. The most common method that comes to mind to add movement to still photos is the Ken Burns effect.

While obviously effective and the staple of many PBS films, with the advent of After Effects and other tools, there are many more ways to dynamically include stills in movies. Here are five.

The 2.5th Dimension

Using Photoshop and After Effects, you can achieve amazing results by removing elements from still photos and compositing them in a 3D space. These moves can be as simple as a pan or dolly with a little depth, to full blown camera fly-throughs of entire composited scenes.

Last Best Hope

American: The Bill Hicks Story

El Pais Campaign

U2 – Window In The Skies (Alternate Version)

Maybe adding eye blinks is going a little too far.

Tutorials

Here are some tutorials on creating this effect:

Video Copilot

YouTube Tutorial Series

Stills with Sound Design

Through interviews and/or really good sound design of the scene in the photo, you can add life to the stills. This is a technique that would work really well if you have access to a bunch of raw negatives. Or you could even shoot a film in the this style with a still camera and audio recorder. The entire Stories From the Gulf series was done this way.

For Marwencol, the images themselves are a part of the story told in the film.

Stories From the Gulf: Living with the Oil Disaster

Marwencol

Use the Contact Sheet

Back before digital, when you developed a roll of film you’d lay out all the negatives on an 8×10 piece of photo paper and create a contact sheet to figure out what negatives to print more of. I think contact sheets are beautiful in themselves, and Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison incorporates them into this film about Cash’s prison concert in a very effective way. Your film more contemporary? I’m sure it’s not too hard to make a digital contact sheet in Photoshop.

Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison

Stills in the Scene

American Greed and some of those other true-crime shows on cable do a great job of using stills and documents from the story and creating a dramatically lit scene with them, which they then shoot the crap out of and get tons of b-roll. They’ll put pictures in frames or tape them to the wall and constantly go back to them for people they couldn’t get on camera. Easy to do and effective.

American Greed

Fast Cut Transition. Ken Burns on Steroids

Who says you have to hold on a still for a few seconds? Got tons? Throw them all in, 1 frame each. The film below uses them to act as transitions and intercut with archival footage, giving it a really dynamic feel. We can process images a lot faster than we think.

Dogtown and Z Boys Trailer

Ken Burns

Just in case you live under a rock or have never touched an Apple product, here’s Ken Burns in action.

Ken Burns’ National Parks

Ken Burns on Ken Burns Effect

Photo to Movie on App Store

While Apple products make this move very easy to do, they don’t give you a lot of control with having multiple moves over the same photo. And doing the effect in Final Cut Pro 7 or After Effects can get very tedious. Enter Photo to Movie, a $30 app on the Mac store that seems to give you full, easy control to add whatever move over a still that you could ever want. I say “seems,” because I haven’t tried it yet.

This post was based on a Doculink thread going around.

Got more examples?

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2. 5 Ways to Become a Future Hollywood Power Player

I’ve been following Ramit Sethi for a few years, back when I interviewed him for my doc You 2.0. He just had his blog, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and offered a different approach to personal finance advice. He works really, really hard and in the years since has done a great job becoming the next generation Suze Orman.

Lately I have mixed feeling about his content. It seems like most of his emails have the one goal of trying to convert you to buy one of his courses.

That said this interview with photographer Chase Jarvis has some of the best advice I’ve seen, especially for creatives who make their living from job to job and don’t get a steady paycheck. Finding clients, negotiating, figuring out how much to get paid. It’s free, it’s an hour and a half of good content, and it has some concrete tips you can walk away with.

You should also check out Chase’s interview with Tim Ferriss. If you read 4 Hour Work Week or are familiar with Tim’s work, it’s mostly a rehash of that. But if not, you can get caught up in less than an hour (the last part of the hour and a half video is Tim playing photographer with a model).

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A DSLR that doesn’t overheat, doesn’t have a recording limit, shoots the gamut of HD frame rates, autofocuses while filming, and is less than $900…does it exist?! Yes.

The Backstory

I’ve been sitting on the sidelines for the past few years during the DSLR battles. For my needs in documentary work, there seemed to be so many limitations with DSLRS (specifically the most popular brand, Canon) that having shallow depth of field wasn’t worth the tradeoff for no audio, short recording times, overheating, and lots of additional support gear needed.

I’ve had my Sony EX1 for nearly three years and I still love it. The only DSLR experience I’ve had was with Andrew’s cameras, and they weren’t positive. First he got a Canon T2i and that was a flaming turd. It would constantly overhead and shutdown. Recently he upgraded to a 7D. While it doesn’t overheat and is a really good overall camera for stills and video, it still has a lot of limitations, especially during interviews.

We just did a project where I used my EX1 as the main camera for the interview, and as the main source for sound. The 7D was a secondary camera. The EX1 can roll forever without needing to stop. The 7D would keep reaching it’s 12 minute recording limit and then you’d get an obnoxious shutter clicking sound right in the middle of the interview.

However, besides shallow depth of field, the other thing DSLRs have going for them is they are very discrete. I walk in a room and start filming with my EX1, everyone thinks it’s a big production and knows I’m filming. Which is usually fine, especially with client work.

But I’m about to embark on a project where I don’t want attention called to my filming, and a DSLR is perfect for that.

So now I was in the market for one. While obviously the 7D and T3i are cheaper, it didn’t make sense to save some money if the camera wouldn’t meet my demands. I was thinking about going for the long standing king of the DSLRs, the Canon 5D MK II, especially since they’ve lowered the price to under $2,000 with a bunch of extras to sweeten the deal for Christmas promos.

By chance I was reading a Filmmaker Mag blog post from doc maker Jared Flesher. He talked about shooting his movies with a Panasonic GH2 and its lack of issues you find in the Canon cameras. I was intrigued.

The Panasonic GH2

Technically the GH2 is not a DSLR, because it doesn’t have the flipping mirror that reflects the image to the viewfinder. But for video that doesn’t matter, because in video mode on all the cameras the mirror is permanently flipped up anyways. The GH2 is a Micro Four-Thirds camera.

The GH2:

• Has no recording limit.
• Has very little reports of overheating.
• Can shoot just about every major frame rate.
• Not only can you autofocus (with specific Panasonic lenses, of course) while filming, but you can touch the screen to tell the camera where to focus to. Built in AC!
• Built in mic is surprisingly good, and there some minimal level controls.
• Flip out monitor.
• No moire.
• Free hacks available.
• Being a Micro Four-Thirds camera, there are a wide range of adapters available to take just about any lens.
• Also, as a Micro Four-Thirds camera, the viewfinder is a video screen, which means you can use it while filming since a mirror isn’t blocking it.

The best part – the camera with a kit lens is available on Amazon for less than $900. How come no one talks about this camera!?

It didn’t take me long to order this beast.

First Thoughts

Holding the camera for the first time, it initially felt like a toy. It’s light and has a plastic body. It was way more in line with the T2i than the beefiness of the 5D or 7D. Plus, the Micro Four-Thirds mount is small. Smaller than I expected.

But in the end that doesn’t really matter. I like the small size – I can palm the whole thing in my hand, or easily throw it in my bag.

I had to upgrade the firmware in order to get the 1080P 30 fps settings. But once upgraded everything has been working great.

Autofocus works as promised, along with the touchscreen focusing. But it’s autofocus, not an AC replacement, though useful for run-and-gun.

The f-stop on the kit lens is obviously not great, so for about $25 I picked up a Nikon adapter. This is where the camera has truly shined.

I know I said I didn’t buy it for the shallow focus, but it looks so damn good! Using my 24mm 2.8 and 50mm 1.8, the depth of field has been amazing.

Plus, the ISO noise level has been truly amazing. While expectedly noisy at high levels, so far I’ve found the noise to be acceptable, while the noise on the 7D is atrocious and unusable.

I also forgot to stop filming once, but fortunately this proved that there is no recording length or overheating issue.

The camera is quick to boot, you can keep it in movie mode so you don’t have to switch modes every time you start up, and the battery lasts a long time, even while filming a lot.

I did buy the GH2 Shooter’s Guide eBook from EOSHD. It’s a book specifically written on how to get the most from the GH2 for filmmaking. While I think the $30 is a little high for the book, I’m glad someone took the time to write it. It goes beyond just what menu settings to use and includes gear and lens recommendations. Though with some time you could probably figure out everything in the book through Google searches and just looking at EOSHD.com archives.

Drawbacks

So far the only drawback I’ve found is the file format it records to, AVCHD. While I wouldn’t natively edit Canon QuickTimes, at least there’s a file I can quickly preview in Finder.

The AVCHD files are buried in the most bizarre file structure on the SD card. The only way you can play them natively on a Mac is with VLC. Or you can edit them natively with Adobe Premiere.

For Final Cut 7, you can encode them with Log and Transfer. But this only gives you the option to encode to ProRes. I like to keep everything in XDCAM codec, because it’ll probably be mixed with XDCAM footage anyways and it takes less space than ProRes.

So to encode straight from AVCHD to XDCAM I have to use Adobe Media Encoder.

Slight annoyance but something that’d have to be done no matter what DSLR I’m using.

Bottom line – this camera is amazing. Panasonic seriously needs to up their marketing and make this Lumix line of cameras seem more professional. When I tell people I have a GH2 it doesn’t hold the same cache as saying I have a Canon 5D.

Panasonic has a sub $1000 camera that holds its own against bigger DSLRs but is talked about very little. I hope that changes.

Additional Resources

• Canon 60D versus Panasonic GH2 Full Review Part 1
• Panasonic GH2 vs Canon 60D
• Panasonic GH2 Shooter’s Guide
• Improve GH2 Audio
• Audio Hacks

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1. Now I can blur the s#!@ out of anything

Yes, I got on the DSLR bandwagon. Well, technically it’s not a DSLR as the Panasonic GH2 is a Micro Four-Thirds camera that lacks a flipping mirror. But for the sake of video, that’s actually an advantage.

About a week ago the GH2 wasn’t even on my radar when I started thinking about DSLRs. After playing with it for a few days, I don’t understand why it isn’t on more people’s radar, and in their gear kit. I’ll go way more in-depth next week with all the features, but so far, it’s blown every Canon I’ve used out of the water.

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1. The Panasonic GH2 Review – Small, Awesome, and Less Than $1000

With DVD sales for Bots High, I’ve been handling the fulfillment myself. Order volume has been low enough that this isn’t a big time suck, and when I learned I could order and print postage straight from PayPal and avoid the post office I was sold.

I’d log into PayPal and view the latest orders. I could either click each one and buy postage individually, or launch PayPal Multi-Order Shipping, which is a completely separate web app that let’s you make batch changes and apply presets to numerous orders, and then print them all out at once.

I’d place my orders and print them on regular letter size paper. (This only works for US shipping. Interntaional required a customs form that is available to buy online, I just haven’t made the jump to get that and the sticker label I’d need to mount it to the package.) It’s formatted so you can cut or fold it in half, and then stick it to the package. I’d tape all four sides with packing tape and drop it in the mail.

Not a terrible workflow, but my dream was to print out a bunch of labels with all the shipping data, slap it on the package and drop THAT into the mail. Bam! Done.

Unfortunately my Brother label printer wasn’t listed as compatible with PayPal. So I decided to get one that was. Or at least try.

I got the DYMO 450 Turbo, which technically isn’t on their list, but that’s because it’s so damn old they haven’t removed the now discontinued DYMO 350 Turbo. 450 is the new version and a quick web search said that was the one to get.

I got the label printer, hooked it up, went to print some orders, and…it printed the fragment of a label formatted for another printer, rotated 90 degrees the wrong way.

Went into the settings, set everything to format it for the DYMO 450 Turbo with the PayPal specific label 99019.

I got it to display the correct layout for the label, but still it wasn’t printing correctly. The most annoying thing is that the label loads in a Java program that bypasses the normal printer dialog box, so I don’t have the great options I’m normally used to with rotating and scaling. All you can do is pick which printer to send to.

The closest I got was 90% of the label printed correctly, but the super important barcode was getting cut off, which made the label useless.

So what else could I do? I could try to print the label to a PDF, and then print that. But the printer dialog box that gives me the PDF option won’t show up, so how?

After a lot of searching, the Etsy forum proved most useful. Yes, this is an issue for a lot of people, and it’s pretty much only an issue for Macs.

One post recommended exactly what I was looking for – CUPS-PDF. It’s a free program that adds a printer to your list but it automatically creates a PDF when you “print” to it. Since the only option I’m given with PayPal’s Java label printer is what printer  to use, this would be the perfect solution.

I sent the label to CUPS-PDF, pulled it up in Preview, printed it on the label and voila, I got my mailing label on a sticker.

So in the end it works, but not exactly the seamless workflow I envisioned. It won’t work with PayPal Multi-Order Shipping, so I have to individually type all the memorized weight and package info into each order, print it as a PDF, pull it up again and then print it to the label.

But less paper, less tape, and a more professional packaging look. Anyone have any better experiences with a different label printer through PayPal?

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Got back from Haiti – great trip, I’ll write about it soon. For now I just wanted to highlight some of the ways I use my iPhone to stay in touch without paying the ridiculously high data/voice rates.

(These tips are from first hand experience with an iPhone on AT&T. You’ll have to check your own provider for their data rates.)

Enable International Roaming

Whether you use your phone’s data or not, for AT&T you need to enable the International Roaming service. It’s free, you just need to have had an account in good standing for a few months. I did it over the phone with an AT&T rep, but you might be able to do it online.

For about $6 a month there’s a World Traveler add-on that will give you lower minute rates when using your phone in other countries. But that’s just an additional option to the free International Roaming.

SMS and Twitter are your Friend

After landing and turning on your phone, it will automatically connect to a cell provider. You’ll also get a text from AT&T with the current data rate for where you’re at. When landing in Haiti, it was $19.97 per Megabyte!

By default, International Roaming, an option in Settings, is off, which means your phone won’t use data when abroad (though you might want to double check that it’s off before you leave).

So aside from WiFi (which you should definitely try to find), the only other way you can transmit data to and from your phone is SMS text messaging.

For AT&T, it’s free to receive (or just deducted from your regular plan) and $0.50 to send. You can also pre-buy an international texting package, like 50 texts for $10 ($0.20 a text).

Twitter was natively built to work with texting (thus the 140 character limit). When setting up a Twitter account, it’ll ask for your phone number. Once setup, you can simply text a tweet to 40404.

What are the advantages of this even if you don’t use Twitter? Simple. 1 tweet, 1 text, unlimited recipients.

When going to Haiti it’s far easier and cost efficient to send one message anyone can read to know my status and well-being (well-being is more a family concern).

Family not up to par with technology? No problem. Any cell phone can follow you via SMS. For example, anyone could follow me by texting ‘follow @C47‘ to 40404. Done, that’s it. Updates go straight to their phone. Here are some more Twitter SMS tips.

It’s also a good idea to turn on SMS notifications for Twitter news feeds to get them sent to your phone, like CNN. And easy way to stay in the loop.

That’s all I got. This lets me keep people updated without paying crazy rates. If you need to communicate locally you can also buy a prepaid phone.

I’ve heard of unlocking phones and swapping SIM cards to have a local number (and be able to use data). Anyone have more info on that? Or any other tips?

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I’m gearing up for an early Monday morning flight to Port-au-Prince, finally returning to Haiti. It’s been a year and a half since the earthquake and nearly two and a half years since I was there for the first time.

This time I’m returning (along with two awesome people from PR company CVOX Group) to produce documentary style videos on the mobile banking system Tcho Tcho. Nearly 85% of Haitians have a cell phone. In a partnership with YellowPepper (mobile financial network), Digicel (the extremely popular cell phone provider), and Scotiabank, Haitians can have bank accounts and perform banking functions without the need of a physical bank branch. You can get a better overview of the system from this Fast Company article.

We’re looking to highlight how the system works and how it helps Haitians better conduct business. Though it’s only a two and a half day trip I’m excited to be returning.

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Two Thursdays ago marked the long awaited Bots High screening day, a launch for the film that enabled anyone to host a screening of the film for free (plus they could tune into a live streaming Q&A). The highlights: 27 cities, 7 countries, and a release of the film into the world, for sale on the website and Amazon. I had hoped it would be on iTunes by this time but Distribber under estimated the iTunes approval time. And still trying to get onto Netflix.

Aside from the awesome people that hosted a local screening, it was pretty much a solo job to coordinate and market. But it wasn’t without the help of a lot of (mostly) free online tools. Here’s a recap of some of the tools that I used, along with the good, bad, and what I’d do differently.

Meetup Everywhere – 4/5

Everything started and revolved around Meetup Everywhere. Everywhere is similar to Meetup.com except the Meetups are all about the same topic or cause, in this case a Bots High screening. I’d direct someone to Meetup.com/botshigh, Meetup would detect their location, point them to a nearby group (screening) or give them the option to start their own. Plus when people join a city, they have the option to give me their email. So show up or not, they can get on the mailing list. This looked like a really good tool to help people organize and find screenings based on location.

And it was mostly good. My biggest issue was Meetup’s interface and lack of documentation. I ended up serving as Meetup tech support a lot, even leading to making some how-to screencasts. Some issues: not clear on how to actually add your city, in addition to adding your city you also need to join the specific Bots High screening day event, and not clear on how a user can become recognized as the Meetup Planner. Another issue was converting people who just listed their city but didn’t go the extra step to fill out the form and confirm the screening, for whatever reason. There are about 50 cities listed on Meetup Everywhere, so conversion rate to an actual screening was about half.

Aside from hiring a developer to make something custom from scratch, I don’t see any other tools that would accomplish everything Meetup Everywhere does. I’d just like to see them tweak their UI and have better documentation.

Cost: Free

Wufoo – 5/5

Wufoo is awesome. This was how I converted the Meetup planners to actual venue hosts and collected all the information I needed. Wufoo is a really simple way to create forms. I upgraded to a higher plan for the event which would let me collect payment through PayPal. This way I could have one form for the host to fill that would give me their information AND the option to buy add-ons, like a Blu-ray screener or fundraising pack, and pay for it right away. Made things a lot easier. Plus great integration with MailChimp.

Cost: Free for 3 forms. Plans from $14.95 and up. $29.95 for payment integration plan.

MailChimp – 5/5

MailChimp is the best newsletter service out there, and as a company they have such an awesome vibe. I use this for the Bots High mailing list, and I created a separate list for venue hosts, to make communication easier.

Really good free plan. Pay plans are based on total number of subscribers in all your lists (plus you get a lot of templates and more premium goodies).

YouSendIt Pro – 4/5

At first I was going to send a DVD screener to all the venues. But with no money this would have been a few hundred dollars. So I honored DVDs to those that had signed up before, but I switched gear to deliver the file digitally.

I briefly debated putting it on Vimeo with a password, but a lot of these screenings were at colleges and they have a habit of throttling bandwidth. So the movie had to play off the computer, and a file was the best way.

I have Dropbox and a server which I normally use for file transfers, so I never gave much thought to upgrading YouSendIt. But sending an HTML link to a large file or trying to explain FTP is a pain and leads to a lot of issues and delays. YouSendIt is really good at doing the hand holding stuff to make sure anyone can download a large file.

The free YouSendIt has a 100 MB file size limit. Pro or Pro Plus bumps you to 2 GB, enough to compress an SD copy of the movie and ship it. Plus they were running specials for about $60 a year for Pro Plus (normally $149), so I got an account. It seems like if you sign up for a basic account they’ll offer you Pro Plus for the lower price.

Livestream – 4/5

I had done a comparison of different live streaming services before and I found Livestream to have better options. Account is free (with ads). It has an extremely impressive Livestream Studio, which is basically a web based video mixer. You can mix camera sources, YouTube videos, lower thirds, scrolling text feed, bugs, and a bunch of other professional effects.

They also have a free desktop app that makes the streaming connection better. Only downside is they don’t have a native iPhone streaming app. You can connect it to Qik and stream that way, but whenever I do my videos have a blue hue over them.

Cost: Free or $299/month ad free

Google Hangout – 5/5

Will and Liz, two of the main characters from the film, are in college but I wanted them to join in on the Q&A. So I had a separate computer hooked up to the projector, with the sound feeding to the live stream computer, and I had Liz and Will join in through a Google Plus Hangout. I was surprised by how well it worked – good video and sound quality, plus it automatically switches the large monitor to feature whoever is talking.

Cost: Free

Related posts:

1. Meetup Everywhere – Organize an Audience for Your Film
2. I’ve Got a Finished Movie, Got Rejected from SXSW, and Other Adventures From These Past Months
3. The F1 Screening (And My Blunder Got Bigger)