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"Life At The Speed Of Light" - J. Craig Venter REVIEW

2014-02-17T13:43:00.000-08:00

Introduction - Catching Up On Reading

As you see in a lot of regular personal blogs, I've neglected to write for quite some time. I've made New Years Resolutions in the past to update more, but not this year, mostly because I don't find myself reading my friends' blogs as much as I'd admit. Though this last week, I was updating blog posts on my professional site, based on industry-related topics, and forgot how fun it was to simply write out thoughts and then be able to go back on them for reference at a later date. Particularly, I was bummed to find that a lot of the writing I did for previous companies is no longer available online (I'd really love that Googlejuice, to be honest), because it feels like lost months and years. Some I've been able to dig up in my email archive, and was thinking of updating and reposting them somewhere, but until then, I thought it'd be nice to once again write something.

In going back again that I haven't been reading friends' posts as often as I should, I have recently made the decision to severely reduce the amount of regular web articles I read nightly, as I realize at the end of each week that I've spent hours and hours reading, and don't necessarily feel like I've learned anything. Without going too far into the debate of the quality of articles online, it is pretty clear that most are being written for sake of SEO and social shares, and are mostly awful. I'm no better, but I have instead decided to dedicate the time towards books, as I just have an ever-increasing virtual library of books I've been "meaning to read." Although I have been reading pretty regularly for the last few years, they've been mostly referential how-to pieces that aren't really meant to be enjoyed cover-to-cover, or even particularly finished at all. So it was with some surprise that in only six short weeks since the new year, I've completed 3 books, and felt the disappointment of completion that I hadn't felt since college.

So with that, I'll be killing two birds with one stone: reading more, and writing about what I read. This'll be very casual, and probably reveal how little I understand of anything, but it's something to just generally practice and play around with. Again, in the tech world, it's easy to forget how fun doing stuff is.

"Life At The Speed Of Light" by J. Craig Venter

I've always had a long-running, minor interest in genomics, despite my godawful understanding of Biology and Chemistry, and I've been interested in Venter for years. I read A Life Decoded when it was published in 2008, and thought it was a very clear and understandable explanation of the history of molecular biology, at least as far as the 20th century, and Venter gave a taste of where the field was going in the future. Life At The Speed Of Light is more of a published thesis of this future.

In a word, every living thing on this planet has a DNA sequence composed of four nucleotides that describe its common and unique characteristics. Thus, every living organism can be described by its basic coded sequence, which we can infer into a coded sequence that can be read and written like code in a computer. So not only can we define biology like reading the words from a book, but we can actually articulate where in the code we want to find information, and where we want to control information. For example, if we want to find our susceptibility to a hereditary disease, we can examine our own DNA code and see the percentage likelihood of developing the disease, and take proactive measures to fight it, as Sergey Brin is researching and fighting Parkinson's Disease. Or, if we want to generate alternative fuels and combat global warming, we can create an algae that will breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out methane. Not only is genomic sequencing the next step in understanding our world, but also in building upon it.

Life begins with a short history of molecular biology, and right off the bat we see Venter's notorious character as he blames the lack of basic scientific questioning as "holding us back for 50 years" in research and understanding, when scientists believed proteins were the source of genetic information, not nucleic acids. Forward to modern day, when scientists are now able to decode genomes at an ever-more faster and affordable rate, and are even able to specifically build custom genomes one sequence at a time. The J Craig Venter Institute recently "created life" in the lab this way, by rewriting the phi X 174 virus with a custom-implanted sequence, and it was able to live and grow on its own (I already know that last sentence gave a thousand biologists nose bleeds). The most exciting chapter describes projects undertaken at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) program, which has students and experts work projects as fun as, "bacteria that glow in the dark and, in the case of the MIT “Eau d’e coli” project, that smell like wintergreen while they’re glowing and like bananas when they stop."

The final chapter posits the name of the book topic, whereby once an organism's genetic code is sequenced to it's base 4 letters, we can transmit the information faster than the organism is capable of traveling: as data traveling at the speed of light. The closest and most practical current implementation of this is in vaccine generation. Currently, it takes approximately 28 days to develop the recipe for a vaccine, which then have to be manufactured in a lab and either dispersed directly or sent to hospitals. Venter suggests that we can decode a disease within several hours, generate the vaccine within days, and email the information to wherever its needed to be manufactured to a scale much larger than the current process, and in a quarter of the time. In the more abstract implementation of data-transferring genomes, we can send rovers to far-off planets, where they can decode genomes and email the information to us, and we can build and study the alien life here at home.

My Thoughts

Again, biology and chemistry were never my strongest fields, so I can only trust that the descriptions are sound. Venter's ambition is very well known, so he publishes Life to say, 'this is how we get here, this is where we are now, here's where we should go and how I'm going about doing it.' He did not mention any of the ethical arguments against his research, which would have the opportunity to proactively counter-argue skeptics, but again, his ambition pushes him forward. In Decoded, he describes how his invention of the "shotgun technique" of sequencing was rejected by the science community, and was later adopted as the standard, so I'm not surprised he didn't want to waste his time debating the issue.

Like I mentioned before, the anecdotes of the science teams working on fun, experimental projects were more interesting to me, and I liked to think of the prospective uses of the field. The section on how a genomic lab can improve the time to deliver vaccines, compared to the lousy delivery of H1N1 in recent years, was the most fascinating to me. I would have liked to know more about the fields of genetics and bioinformatics in general- what applications have come in recent years, and what are the challenges currently being faced.

This is by no means Venter's last book, and I haven't read any other on the subject, but like I said, it's a field with an absolute infinite potential both in our current understanding of all life, and what we want to create for ourselves now, so I'll probably check out more in the coming months.

Glitch Fiction

2014-02-13T10:22:00.000-08:00

Reduce Waste At Lunch

2014-02-10T11:05:00.001-08:00

How do you reduce 20% waste in people's lunches? Cut the plates.

bznz

2013-06-07T16:35:00.000-07:00

My new girl and the special bed I had made to keep her toasty

2007 - Four-Hour Workweek Method
1) Make up a few products with several names, descriptions, and images.
2) Buy Google Adwords on each product and variation.
3) Track which product gets the most clicks, and start selling that item.

2010 - Kickstarter Method
1) Design and manufacture a product, and prepare your business model for producing at scale.
2) Create a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to scale up production, and reward "backers" with lower-priced "pre-orders."
3) Ask all journalists that write blogs on the success of your Kickstarter campaign to link to your store site.

2013 - Reddit Method
1) Build a product.
2) Post a pic to Reddit that either you or "your friend" made it themselves on a weekend for the hell of it.
3) Launch your Etsy store two weeks later.

The Hobbit: High Frame Rate Is A High Disappointment

2012-12-28T11:19:00.000-08:00

Like any other industry, the film industry loves to get into a fury about everything. And it really makes sense, because Hollywood is a multi-billion dollar industry whose impact is felt through businesses and customers all over the world. And when it's stride has been built and standardized for the better part of a century, change is a big deal. Especially when it concerns a blockbuster like The Hobbit, the cinematic sequel to a multi-billion dollar franchise.

Director Peter Jackson already broke some solid ground with everything about the Lord Of The Rings, and came out very successful in the end. After already converting over to working on a purely digital format (The Lovely Bones was his first digitally-acquired feature), he quickly moved onto 3D- a process a lot of great filmmakers quickly adopted. Audiences, however, have been slow to praise 3D because the picture is eye-straining and the premium on ticket prices make it difficult to believe the experience is that much better. But ticket prices be damned, the theory that a higher framerate in projection can reduce the headache. So after countless press from director James Cameron that 48fps would solve all problems, Jackson was the first feature director to stick his neck out to this new paradigm.

My friend Renn Brown wrote a fantastic article on CHUD about how all of the criticisms and debate of the new format are a fallacy- no one has said all features should be shot this way, and in fact Jackson even said this is a "tool" to tell the story (rather, it's only the brush and not the whole "canvas," as Brown puts it). Digital projectors are able to show a wide range of framerates, so it's perfectly possible for a feature to be 24fps, become 48fps for a particular sequence, and then revert back.

So how does the Hobbit come across in 48fps 3D for a full three hours? In my opinion: not great. And I was bummed about that. I absolutely love new, experimental processes, and that the medium is what we make it. I've never minded 3D (over time, I've concluded it isn't worth the additional 50% premium in price for the ticket). I once had a conversation with a director I worked with on a 16mm short film that had a 60p television sequence that we were both getting a little tired of watching 24fps all the time (this comes after the 24p evolution and HDSLR revolution has made nearly all video we see on television and online 24fps). I first saw the film first in 24fps 2D, and loved it. So when I saw it in 48fps 3D, I was heartbroken how disappointing it was.

I don't want to call it the "disaster" it feels like everyone is describing it, but the fact is I was conscious about it the whole time. And as an audience member, if I don't get lost in the story and characters and only think about how everything looks sped up and cartoony, that's a big problem. Some sequences in the new framerate I thought were fantastic- contrary to Vincent Laforet (whose long article inspired me to write out my opinion), I thought the whole Gollum scene was beautiful. That was one of the few sequences I thought the 3D looked great and the high framerate was not a problem at all. But that was the very first sequence they shot (so I wonder if the crew worked harder on that sequence during production to get it perfect than they did on the rest of the film), and the movements of the camera and characters weren't as grand as other sequences.

What I'm very curious about is what will happen to the next two films in the series- production has ended and is in the can with this 48fps style. As we see, there can be 24fps 2D and 3D extracted from the material (which, as far as 2D, I think looks great), so will the ratio of HFR releases be reduced to just a handful of theaters? Or, to put it more accurately, just be through a handful of showtimes on the same projectors that screen it the other ways for the rest of the day? Will James Cameron back down on his own loud, public stance that this is the future and we just need to get used to it? I highly doubt it.

What I wonder is could this have been experimented with in a different way? Particularly with 2013's release of Oz: The Great and Powerful. The Wizard of Oz was one of the first full color features, and it aesthetically fit to the story- the real world is two-toned sepia, Oz is beautiful 3-strip technicolor. Could the real world in Great and Powerful be 24fps, and Oz be 48?

Luke Letellier prepared an example of what this looks like by applying a frame blending effect to the Hobbit trailer, making the 24fps version into 48fps. If you can ignore the artifacts of the filter (particularly in quick movements, edges have an odd "stretching" quality), the video is pretty accurate.

My Digital Shoebox, Pt. 2: Film

2012-12-05T18:57:00.001-08:00

Mom fishing, circa 1956.

A few weeks ago, my grandfather passed away, so my family has been working on handling his estate and personal items, which of course includes a lifetime of photographs. For the memorial, my mother handed me a shoebox of some prints and slides she came across that she wanted me to scan and project on the wall during the ceremony. The family thought I did so well with this that they handed me all of the remaining slides they've found, and asked me to scan and share them all.

This is something that's interested me for some time (preservation and restoration are subjects I've covered here before), and it's something I always thought I'd pursue as a long-time hobby- collecting and restoring old photographs. Of course, this is one such service photography stores around the country are continuing to offer, which is excellent for most people, but I wanted to get a good understanding of what exactly it would take to get a good digital file out of these old keepsakes.

I'd want the image to be as high-quality as possible, so I can essentially just archive it safely and store it somewhere without wanting to re-scan the image, as well as be able to treat the scanned file in the same way I treat my digital photos. The way I treat my digital photos, of course, is by saving them all as Adobe Digital Negatives (DNG's), which I can play around with without degrading their quality ("lossless"), which not only includes changing colors, but changing exposure levels and performing lens adjustments after the fact. I know I may not be able to do quite as much modification as my digital stills, but if we spent so many decades making digital photography parallel film, than I should be able to make my film parallel my digital workflow.

I'm still only into the first hundred slides because the process is tedious and my system is buggy, so I have to take care of things one at a time. But I want to say right off the bat that Kodachrome deserves as much praise as it's ever been given- some of these slides are over 60 years old and the color retention is absolutely incredible.

Kids watching TV, May 1961. Kodachrome, unrestored

This picture of my aunt and uncles is over 50 years old, and the color representation looks flawless. And I doubt this slide was kept in any better care than the shot below, taken on Ektachrome.

Lunch on the mountain, circa 1956. Ektachrome, unrestored

The green layer of emulsion is almost completely disintegrated, leaving the red and blue layers behind (I thought blue would be the first to go because it's on the "weaker" end of the visual spectrum), to the point that it's almost beyond restoration.

Lunch on the mountain, circa 1956. Ektachrome, restored

This was a quick pass at just modifying the colors in the scanned sample, beyond this point I'd have to add color into the picture to bring it back to normal.

From what I see as far as the equipment goes, there's not much available that's affordable and easy. I'm using a flatbed scanner with a light adapter built in (a Epson Perfection 4490 that was previously my other grandfather's, no doubt top-of-the-line at the time he purchased it for the exact same endeavor). You could buy this unit for a couple of hundred bucks, but a dedicated film/slide scanner runs in the thousands. Fundamentally I'm not quite sure what would be the difference- controlled light blasts through the film onto the sensor. The difference with the flatbed is you've got a giant pane of glass that can't possibly be in good condition if you use it to regularly scan papers or solid objects- any scratch in the glass reveals itself in your scanned image. Additionally, placing a cardboard-bound slide introduces spacial distance between the film and the glass surface to be scanned, so there's doubt whether the scanner is properly "focused" on the slide. And there's only one light source that I can't figure out how to calibrate, nor do I even know if it's truly "white" light and I'm getting a good representation of all three color channels.

On the plus side, the scanner does include an infrared light in addition to the regular light. Infrared light completely passes through film emulsion, meaning if dust or specs are on the filmstrip, they will be "seen" by the infrared light, and the emulsion will pass through- this allows us to know the difference between grain or specs that are supposed to be a part of the image.

Now in terms of the actual files being created, I was disappointed to find that although I can directly scan straight into Photoshop, I'm not able to control the settings of the scan as much as I'd like- I'd have to bring it in as a jpeg, tiff, or pdf file. However, I'm not alone in this disappointment, and some people have created third-party software that allows you more control of your scanner. With Vuescan, I'm able to
1) Create a DNG file (technically a DNG wrapper to a TIFF file),
2) Utilize the infrared channel.
Additionally, Vuescan is able to do multiple scans of your pictures at varying exposures, so you'd be able to create an image with HDR-like range- change the exposure after the fact, or at least retain the image detail that's lost in the highlights or shadows. Unfortunately this feature doesn't come without a bug, which I'm not sure where the error lies, in that the multiple exposures aren't perfectly aligned, so the entire picture comes out blurry.

Girl on carnival horse, circa 1956. Kodachrome, unrestored

Researching the matter further, scanning via flatbed or dedicated film scanner is also not ideal. True experts perform a process called "wet-gate scanning," which is soaking the film in a chemical solution as the film is scanned. This utilizes light refraction to fill-in small scratches to the plastic, as well as makes the scan appear sharper and more vibrant. This is standard for medium-format photography and feature-film restoration, but no machine is available in the consumer or even pro-sumer level that does this. And it's not even possible for cardboard-bound slides- you'd have to remove the cardboard casing around each picture, and then after the scan you'd be left with an individual frame that you'd either have to re-case or store loosely in a slide holder.

I did come across one process a lot of hobbyists have done to handle the bulk of limitations of scanning, and that's by creating a special casing in front of their DSLR camera lens to hold the slide or negative and take a digital still shot of the film. This way they'll have a camera raw file of the picture at a low file size (each of my scans are coming in at around 250MB a piece, as opposed to the 20MB my Canon Rebel T3i creates), and be able to go through pics much faster than the flatbed process (and much, much, MUCH cheaper).

As you can see, I'm not the only one with this problem, and the solution is a lot more complex, in my opinion, than what's being offered on the market. Truth be told, I haven't checked in with my local camera shop to see if they're offering solutions that affordably meet the challenges I'm facing. Maybe the tech is sure to evolve to this point, and there's simply been a lack of market demand. I'm sure this is going to turn around very quickly as most of the world will start finding themselves coming across this exact problem- billions of photographs that aren't as accessible or secure as the rest of our library. Especially as the last generation of film-shooters are going to leave behind lifetimes of memories for the next generation to sort through.

Gunning Grandpa, circa 1951. Kodachrome, unrestored

Buckshot Creative

2012-12-05T16:16:00.000-08:00

Finished off a new portfolio reel for what'll be the official title for the videos I produce ("Who shot that? Buck shot that.") This coming year should be fun.

Why do YouTube views freeze at 301?

2012-09-17T10:55:00.003-07:00

I've always wondered why this was the case.
Especially when you get really angry bosses yelling at you why their viral video isn't viral enough.

Waiting On Sound

2012-09-11T19:52:00.001-07:00

Once again, Stu Maschwitz wrote an excellent blog about something I'm sure is way more common than the industry would like to admit: production sound has not evolved the way motion picture has.

He argues that setting up his sound devices is still a mystery, and post-production fixing isn't any easier. He points out how the iPhone is a perfectly capable tool for assisting in sound production- every actor and crew member he knows has one, and its interface can so clearly tell you whether you've set things up right or not. I agree with everything he says, and it appears a lot of others agree in the comments.

Digital sound was ahead of digital picture by more than a decade in major motion pictures (by my calculation, Dick Tracy (1990) was the first film to have "a completely digital sound track," whereas Star Wars II: Attack Of The Clones (2002) was the first major motion picture released that tried to emulate regular film). And digital sound was adopted into theatres very quickly because, compared to picture, sound files are smaller file sizes, and difficult to discern in quality past a simple threshold (ie how many people can tell the difference between a 2MB compressed MP3 and a 20MB uncompressed WAV file?)

Jump forward a decade, when fewer movies are being captured on film in exchange for the newest flavor of digital cameras. DSLR's capable of capturing 1080p HD video enter the hands of the public by the millions; yes, they are very flawed, but compare the quality coming out of them and the quality coming out of the typical $2,000 camera 10 years ago, and there's no contest. Sound may have had its shit together, and was as good as how you treated it, but I'm surprised it's essentially the same.

When I was in school, High Dynamic Range Images were getting really popular and prevalent, even though I thought they looked like mud. However because microphones are traditionally mono, and you can cheaply purchase a cable splitter, I wondered if it would make sense to set one input to, say, -3dB and the other to -12dB and be able to combine them to make HDR Audio. This way a person's vocals would not peak if they were shouting, nor would we lose them if they spoke softly. I still don't know if this is possible, nor have I heard any system capable of working with files like this.

Stu mentions a few things he'd like to see, like a visual display of if the mic's been placed correctly. I've heard of "sweet spots" in rooms, where the shape and material of the room and placement of speakers render a single spot of perfect sound creation. JBL's MS-2 seems to do something like this to figure out how to best set its playback. And then there's noise-canceling headphones that play back sound waves that counter-balance what it hears outside. Can live mics do this? When we record "room tone," can the mics simply counter-balance this, so they'll only pick up our character's dialog? Or do this in post? Has Bluetooth evolved to be a viable mic? Can lav transmitters locally record and overwrite the distortions when we're having to deal with frequency static? When I have two interview subjects, mic'ed separately, can I tell one mic to cancel out the other so I don't get a soft echo from each person? The list goes on and on.

And maybe these tools do exist, but why aren't I seeing them at my pro video retailer? Stu's got a point. Sound doesn't seem to have been on the innovation highway imaging's been on for the past decade. Or at least it certainly isn't any easier to understand.

Graduating from Final Cut Pro to Adobe Premiere

2012-09-06T14:51:00.001-07:00

For a long while I've been meaning to write a longer post about my current video pipeline, mostly to communicate from others in the same situation. In particular I wanted to start with why I've been transitioning away fron Apple's Final Cut Pro and back into Adobe Premiere (where I first learned editing in high school), but a new program Adobe's launching called Adobe Anywhere made me particularly excited, as it directly addresses the pipeline I've been having to work with for the past two years.

Quick history, I learned video editing on Adobe Premiere in high school because I had a PC. Although it was able to edit well enough, the video card was terrible. So I finished a project and had to "print to tape," I'd be laying hands and praying that the card wouldn't drop frames on playback, screw up the whole export, and I'd have to start over. Before affordable DVD burning (and definitely before YouTube), working linearly was miserable*.

*(For those who care [and none of you should], my father had a Hi8 tape deck at his workplace that was literally like reel-to-reel editing, which I practiced a bit).

I took an Adobe After Effects class in community college a few years later, and loved the Socratic feeling that the more I learned about the capabilities of the program, the more I realized I was still just scratching the surface. I still think I only have a running knowledge, especially when I can see the source project file of some animations.

Mork from Phil Borst on Vimeo.

Later in college, we were trained on AVID, but because the Nitris and Symphony systems were so expensive, we had to reserve our time slots, and Final Cut Pro was available on all of the regular computers. When I graduated and starting working professionally, FCP was the choice because it was very affordable and available, and everyone else I worked with used FCP. Skip several years, several jobs and companies later, and my traditional pipeline is working with a team of two to seven photographers and editors, everyone on FCP, and all exporting out files for streaming (with the rare occasion of exporting to DVD). I don't think I've ever exported to tape outside of college, though I always entertained the thought when figuring out backup/archive solutions.

Now if the job wasn't an individual contracted project (in which case I was the sole photographer/editor/motion graphics designer), the work was done in-house, ie all editors sat next to each other in the same building. When my partner and I started Looking Glass Children's Videos, we a) didn't have the money to purchase and use editing equipment for staff, b) weren't even sure we'd ever want to have a central post studio. All of the editors I knew and hired had their own equipment they were happy to work with and wanted to edit from home, and especially with the nature of Looking Glass' videos, there was no need to produce from one location (I designed our pipeline specifically for photographers and editors to work from around the country, in case we wanted special videos we couldn't shoot in southern California).

Again, at the time, all of our editors used Final Cut Pro, so our pipeline was for me to source all footage (shot via DSLR's) to the editors via hard drives or FTP if there wasn't much footage, and when they completed a cut they'd email me the FCP project file (only a few MB's), which I'd be able to reconnect to the source ProRes files and apply final edits and color correction before exporting out to stream to our subscribers' iOS devices.

Unfortunately I big hiccup in the process was bringing FCP projects to After Effects for cleanup (mostly frame smoothing/warp stabilizing, but some basic effects were applied). I used Popcorn Island's free script to bring FCP timelines to AE without having to export out- this way I wasn't creating duplicate files, saving hard drive space and complication, and dealing with the source video files. It was especially difficult if I worked on the piece in AE and wanted to bring the cut back to FCP- it was impossible without manually re-editing the piece.

Last year, Apple released the long, long-awaited FCPX that promised a lot of updates editors were asking for. The program was not only re-coded to utilize the full power of modern Macs, but completely rewrote the fundamentals of how professional editors work. This was a very big deal to very few people, but of course adoption of FCPX to a wider audience was giant, so there's no looking back for Apple. I purchased and used it during Looking Glass days, but it was clear that this new version would be even worse for sharing projects to multiple editors and collaboratively editing, so I had to get a refund and continue with FCP7. A lot of pro editors started to turn back to Adobe Premiere, so over this last year, I've been doing the same.

Some of the biggest reasons for this I still love After Effects and Photoshop more than ever. Some of the other programs I've used and liked, like Lightroom for photos or Audition for sound editing, but having to give up AE and PS would be sad days for me. All of the major video editing programs are essentially the same in terms of workflow, it's just the details the differentiate them. Meaning it's not difficult to do some basic editing with Premiere (just as it wasn't difficult to learn and use AVID in school). So this was never a light-your-baby-on-fire debate: just as it takes two bottles of beer to enjoy the taste, it takes only a few weeks to get your stride with an editor.

A few things I'm still getting my head around, and I may or may not come around just through familiarity.

I still convert all DSLR footage to ProRes. Adobe Prelude is an interesting program, but it's still kinda awkward to me. I've heard from a few sources that it's best to convert the limited h.264 codec to something more robust, like ProRes or Cineon, and along with the naming convention I like to use, I don't mind converting. I also dabbled with the AVCHD codec, so making everything consistant with ProRes doesn't feel like a bad idea.
Color timing options are overwhelming. There's the filter options on the timeline, like 3-Wheel Color Corrector (which I'm not feeling is as powerful as FCP's), but then there's Red Giant's Colorista, which is difficult to import to After Effects (though Colorista runs in both), and in After Effects there's Color Finesse, which doesn't backtrack to Premiere.
Premiere's Title Window is balls. I can understand making something comprehensive, and I appreciate doing as much as it does in the timeline (instead of bringing it to AE just for some basic titles), but it really feels like trying to draw with your left hand, in terms of placement, layering, fonts and sizes, etc. Sometimes I really miss FCP bare-bones titler in just throwing in some placeholder titles, or just having to make single-word changes (that don't require duplicating and saving a separate asset).
Sound editing also has a learning curve, especially if you want to keep everything in the timeline, and especially with DSLR shooting. DSLR's allow 2 mic inputs on separate channels, but it's really difficult to mix those back to stereo, or move backward on timeline-based effects.
I love that most filters in AE work in Premiere, like throwing Red Giant's Denoiser and Unsharp Mask onto DSLR footage in Premiere and it works in AE. But I miss having a smoothcam filter to plug in directly on the timeline (just to smooth pans and dollys), and it'd be nice to have something like AE's wonderfully powerful Warp Stabilizer available (even if it were simplified).

Again, a lot of it just comes with getting used to the territory, but ultimately it'll be in the right direction. It's also really great to use if you do have a large group of remote editors, because licensing just one version of Premiere is much, much more affordable than purchasing the license for the Final Cut Suite. And again, with Adobe's new Adobe Anywhere, a lot of the problems or slowdowns I encountered before are gone.

Now I just need to start exploring the world of Ray Tracing in AE, and practice more with Mocha.

2012 mocha customer show reel from Imagineer Systems on Vimeo.

Sony FS700 Demo Reel

2012-08-31T17:31:00.000-07:00

Sony FS700 Demo Reel from Band Pro Film & Digital on Vimeo.

I need to get my hands on this camera.

Working At Square

2012-08-31T13:05:00.000-07:00

The graphics are absolutely solid in this video, but they so clearly showed restraint and let the spectacular camerawork tell the story more.

Not Time Wasted

2012-08-21T22:37:00.000-07:00

The gag reel for The Avengers DVD leaked this week, and one shot really pulled off an effect I couldn't get my head around.

In this slow-motion shot, Captain America and Thor retrieve their respective weapons. And although Chris Hemsworth is having trouble grasping the handle (the shot goes on to show Hemsworth bouncing Mjölnir between both hands), Chris Evans effortlessly slips the shield onto his right arm, pivots his torso while shifting the shield to his left, and throws a punch.

How did Evans handle the shield so perfectly?

Was it shot at him and he's just practiced for weeks? Seems like a quick way to break his fingers. Were there strings pulling from the other side? I can't imagine they'd digitally remove the wires for this outtake. Then I'm pointed to this shot (taken by a location bystander) from a different angle:

No shield. It's all CG.

So from my understanding, that means they had to

1) motion track Captain's body to know where and when his arms are flailing

2) manually animate in the shield (especially if he's moving the shield from one arm to another), because it's not an apendage to just replace (like an artificial arm)

3) texture, light and render the shield

4) rotoscope around Captain and Thor's body, for when they're overlapping the shield.

It's hard to believe a team of VFX artists spent billing hours and equipment pulling off this shot for a gag reel on a DVD, but then again Avengers is one of the highest grossing movies of all time.

YouTube DJ, revisited

2012-07-11T14:00:00.000-07:00

YouTube's new Dashboard is pretty cool, but I noticed this new feature of playlists being able to have an end time (playlists and video URL's have always been able to have a custom start time).

This is really interesting to me, because now more than ever users are able to make a complete reference shows. I described this a few years ago as an opportunity for music DJ's- video yourself talking to the camera as an intro to the set, and then playlist the songs in the order you want them.

An even better example is shows like Tosh.0 or Web Soup, where you have a host intro for a few seconds, cut to a few seconds of a clip, and cut back to the host for jokes.

The only downside is you have to depend on the account holders to not take down the videos or place them behind a YouTube Rental paywall.

Google Earth in 3D

2012-06-06T14:36:00.002-07:00

I'm not saying I predicted this, but I am very glad it's been made.

Salvation Mountain, Summer 2011

2012-03-31T13:35:00.001-07:00

10 months ago I went to Salvation Mountain near the Salton Sea with a group of friends for the weekend. I was still kinda new with my Canon T3i and Glidecam dolly, so this was really just a chance to play around with the camera. I quickly edited the footage, but wasn't really satisfied with how it came out (overexposed and undersaturated), and the final shot was way too jerky to use, but this was before I got my hands on After Effects 5.5 with the Warp Stabilizer.

I got busy with other videos, so I never came back to finish this video off. The Fox Is Black recently posted a video about the Salton Sea, which reminded me of this video and that it was sitting idle in my computer for the better part of a year, so I finished it off and posted it. By this point, the dolly moves are really tiresome, but again, it was an opportunity to play with the equipment (I just wish the video would come out as saturated and clean as the photos).

My Digital Shoebox, Pt. 1: Photos

2012-03-27T16:59:00.000-07:00

Self Portrait (unedited), 300D shot #26, 7 January 2005

Not to start this post with the typical "I haven't updated this in a long time...," but I haven't updated this in a long time. I basically treated this like a Tumblr (before finally creating a Tumblr [and one I would actually stick with]), which I knew wasn't ideal for the blogging format, but I didn't care. Really, I most often used this to test out technical stuff, so there's a shitton of private posts I'll have to clean out later.

But I've been thinking that I want to return back to updating this to do more as what Stu Maschwitz likes to do with his ProLost, which is basically to think aloud and share ideas with his followers. This blog, of course, has no followers, but I still need to maintain my Googlejuice somehow.

I purchased my Mac Pro tower around 18 months ago, and with it I wanted to clean up and organize my digital archive of everything- every photo I've taken and every video project I've worked on. I installed a 6TB RAID 0 into the tower (3 of the 4 HDD bays with 2TB drives), which seemed plentiful at the time, but is now nearly at capacity in just this last year working on Looking Glass Children's Videos (a good 3.5TB, or 73% of the RAID's use). Early on, I imported all of the files on the several external hard drives I had amassed for the better part of the last decade (an easy feat, considering most of the drives were 160GB or less), so at least I was confident I wouldn't lose any data due to the drives hardware expiring. But now comes the difficult and long process of making sense of everything.

Again, I'm just going to use this to put up my thoughts on what I've done so far, but I'll start this off with what I've done to my photo collection, as that area's mostly finished with the first step of updating and organizing, and I have yet to figure out where to go from here (in terms of how I want to re-consume the photos in the future).

My photos, 7 January 2012, c/o Disk Inventory X

Unfortunately, I didn't log a lot of info before starting. This photo was taken in January 2012, so I was already halfway through the process, and I didn't write down the raw numbers of photos before starting, nor can I now compare the size on disc before and after.

To start things off, I got my first digital camera, a Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel, in January 2005. My friend had one, and I didn't know much about what to look for in a Digital SLR, so I figured that'd be a good starting point (when I did a study abroad in Italy in the summer of 2004, I knew that would be the last major photo event for me that would be done on film). For the first year, I only took maximum-resolution JPEG's, because I didn't understand the pipeline yet for taking raw (how I'd be able to enjoy and share them). I took about 2,200 pictures this way, sometimes taking a shot or two in raw, but it wasn't until I was in a college and had access to powerful Mac towers that I'd be able to really play with the Adobe Camera Raw Editor and know what I was doing (or at least know how to convert them to JPEG's to share).

Deuce (unedited), 450D shot #1, 14 January 2009

From then on (February 2006) I took photos exclusively in raw. My archiving system back then was to shoot and dump all photos into a folder on an external drive until the folder reached 4.3GB, which I'd then burn to DVD and backup and create a new folder. This was a wise choice, because it easily organized the photos over time, and was a pretty simple ladder system for backup. When I graduated from college and got a full-time job, I had the opportunity to go to Washington DC for the 2008 Presidential inauguration. I figured that would be a perfect time to upgrade the camera body (for which I had only the two kit lenses), and picked the Canon 450D Digital Rebel XSi. I debated for some time to pick the Canon 40D for its larger sensor, but the price difference over the XSi let me easily afford a 50mm 1.4f lens.

I continued this same pattern of shooting and archiving, again, shooting exclusively in raw, until I purchased an intervalometer which allowed me to do timelapse videos (and because I'd be shooting hundreds of photos at a time, I'd shoot in hi-res JPEG's).

Then the video DSLR's started coming out. I borrowed a friend's Canon 550D Rebel T2i for a trip to Austin, and though I loved being able to shoot photos and videos easily, I thought I should wait out until a really great DSLR from Canon gets released (the 550D was still using the exact same sensor as my 450D). I took nearly 17,000 photos with that camera, before finally getting the Canon 600D Rebel T3i in March 2011 (while again on vacation in Austin).

Zach (edited), 600D shot #1, 19 March 2011

And this is the camera I still use today. So far, I've taken 5,600 photos in the year that I've had it, but that number really doesn't capture the amount that I've used the camera. I started producing Looking Glass Children's videos in May, and launched the product in September, and my 600D has been the go-to camera for 90% of those shoots (on a few of the videos, we used a Canon 60D, 7D, 5Dmii, and Panasonic G2). The 600D is one of the cheapest video DSLR's you can buy, and I think I've gotten more than my money's worth out of it. I can't recommend it enough.

So now we get back to storing. By this point in time, I've had a lot of experience shooting digitally, know how to build a good digital pipeline, and now have some 33,000 photos to take care of.

Convert all photos to the same format

For many, many years, I kept all the photos in the same raw file format they were taken in, wanting to keep raw photos raw. Any time I played around with a photo, it was exported to JPEG, but the raw file remained. And this is where it can get really tricky, because when you start thinking how things will work 10, 20, 50 years from now, it's debatable if I'd be able to open those raw files at will. I believe because JPEG is such a standard format that JPEG files will still be openable 50 years from now, but that probably won't be the case for the 300D raw .CR2 files.

Several years back, the This Week In Media podcast covered a lot of these issues, and talked about the flaws in JPEG's, so I considered converting everything to HDPhoto spec they described (originally Windows Media Photos, now JPEG XR), but this isn't a raw format, just a better JPEG. When I pointed my photographer friend Ian Adams Alexander about this episode, he said he had just finished converting all of his photos to Adobe DNG, which started me thinking that should be the format of choice. Later listening to an episode of This Week In Photography, where Adobe Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty goes into detail about the format, I figured that'd be the safest bet for long-term file use. Not only are there very few other standard raw file formats to compete with, I only use Adobe Photoshop to play with photos, and every other photo editor (if I decide to ever use it) utilizes DNG's.

This process took months (in particular to be sure all files converted and I wasn't accidentally tossing anything out). I used Adobe DNG Converter on default settings.

My photos, 27 March 2012

Create a standard naming convention

This became a noticeable issue quickly when you take more than 10,000 photos and Canon's naming system only gives you 4 digits. For a while, I was manually adding two extra digits to the list of files, but that got confusing really quickly and wasn't going to work. It became a big issue when I started using the T3i for video, because even though the camera shoots MOV files, the naming continues for every shutter release (meaning the card will read:

IMG_2614

IMG_2615

MVI_2616

MVI_2617

IMG_2618

With the amount of video footage I shot this last year, I would easily go through 10,000 shutter releases within 3-4 months. So how should I name files?

yyyymmdd_camerabody_filename

Now, any time I take a photo and dump the card's contents into my computer, I update the info above in Adobe DNG Converter and the program names the files as it converts them to DNG's. The camera body part may be excessive, but I figured this would be a safeguard in case I use multiple types of cameras, continue using old camera bodies after I upgrade, or just generally want to easily focus down on a certain group of photos (all of which have happened).

Backup

Bubbles (edited), 450D, 29 August 2010

I'm falling behind on this one. Right now, every digital photo I've taken is on my Mac Pro RAID 0 drive. RAID 0 means 3 physical hard drives read as 1 giant drive on the computer. Nothing is duplicated, nothing is redundant. If the computer is damaged by fire, all of those files are lost. If one of those discs on one of those hard drives fails, the whole system fails. Why did I do it this way? Because hard drives are still pretty robust these days (compared to 10 years ago), so the likelihood of one platter failing in the drive after a year, instead of immediately when I first got the drive, is low. The raid is more likely to run into trouble if tower itself is in physical trouble, so having duplicate drives in the same physical location doesn't feel as practical to me.

Fortunately, all of the photos represent only 370GB, so I can easily back them up to an external 1TB drive. Another benefit to DNG is that they're on average 20% smaller in file size, which adds up for 33K photos. I couldn't find a general photo database program that I liked (more on that later), so I'd have to backup the files manually. I found arRsync just a few months ago, and liked how clean and simple it backs up folders to an external drive, and only adds what needs to be updated (most applications completely rewrite everything, which to me risks losing files). So everything is at least duplicated to an external drive, but it's only one drive, and it sits right next to the computer. Ideally I'd store this drive in a different room, or even a different building (eventually I'll store this at my folks' home in a different city).

I should backup to DVD discs, and burn new discs every 5 years. This worked for me very well for the last 5 years, but it's now more questionable if we'll have disc readers 5 years from now.

Mentor (edited), 300D, 27 July 2008

I also should back them up to the cloud, but 370GB stored in the cloud is a TREMENDOUS amount of money, so that'll probably become a consideration when price goes down, which will probably be around 5 years. I've considered printing out every picture to hi-res JPEG's and automatically backing them up to Flickr privately, so at least I have something in the cloud for only $40/year, but each cloud-based service is less likely to be around for 5 years, so there's not a whole lot of practicality (it sounds like Flickr is being adopted into OS Mountain Lion, so they may stick around longer than I would have thought).

Enjoy the library

This last point is elusive because I don't really know what I want. I just know I don't want any photo archive program that's out there now.

iPhoto does not handle large libraries of photos well, duplicates and erases photos automatically (which is easy to accidentally lose photos and have a mess of duplicates in the same folder), creates multiple-size copies (wasting space on the drive and complicates things), and I don't like the interface.

Picasa has a terrible interface because it shows you every single media file on your computer- software logos and slices, videos, application files, etc. It's date organization is messy, and the way it backs up to its cloud service is expensive.

I'm using Adobe Bridge now. It definitely has kinks when it comes to going through the library, but I feel like this will probably be the most useful, because I only intend to use Photoshop (and one day Lightroom) for photos. I played with Lightroom a little, and I know it's good for large libraries, so I'll have to get into it to see if it'll make sense to me.

I've never used Apple Aperture, but a lot of professionals aren't crazy about it, and I use Photoshop and After Effects more than ever, so I want to stick with that pipeline as much as possible. Another surprising benefit is the AppleTV accepts DNG files for its screensaver, so whenever our TV is idle, all of my photos play on the big screen.

Dragon Kite (edited), 600D, 9 October 2011

There are 1001 photo sites online now, only some of them wanting to address the problems I've had, but nothing's really impressed me much in the last few years that would make me rethink using Bridge. In the last 3 years, I dropped Flickr for 500Px and Facebook, but I'm also finding I'm not as compelled as I used to be to share all of my photos with the world. The truth is, the more I shoot and play with photography, the more I realize there's a lot more I need to learn and practice.

In future posts, I'll go into how I developed video pipelines for my own projects, and pipelines for working with teams of editors (often remotely), as well as my thoughts back on photography and scanning all of my film-based work (which I'm still researching).

The Conundrum of Preserving Digital Films

2012-03-24T11:32:00.000-07:00

Observations On Film Art has done a phenomenal 5-part series on the transition of film to digital. Pix and Pixels focuses specifically on preservation (a topic I'm enormously fascinated with), and is my favorite part of the series.

The Science and Technology Council of the Academy recently published its second comprehensive study of “the digital dilemma” and were surprised that most of the filmmakers they interviewed were unaware of how perishable their work was. Says Milt Shefter, an author of the report:
They were concentrating on the benefits of the digital workflow, but weren’t thinking about what happens to their [digital] masters. They’re structured to make their movie, get it in front of an audience, and then move onto the next one.

I asked Chris Horak of UCLA to imagine a scenario in which a future cache of digital movies has been discovered in an obscure place, permafrost or no permafrost. He answered:
If I found a reel of 35mm film in 500 years and didn’t know what it was, I could probably without too much trouble figure out a way to reverse engineer a projector. In any case, I can always look at the individual frames, even without a projector, and see what is there.
If I find a cache of Blu-rays and DCPs in 500 years, what do I have? Plastic waste. How do you reverse-engineer those media? Impossible. Without an understanding of the software and the hardware, you have zip. No way to look at it, no way to know even if it has any information on it.

It’s hard to get your mind around the scale of the problem. Here is Ken Weissman of the Library of Congress:
Speaking very broadly, with 4K scans of color films you wind up in the neighborhood of 128 MB per frame. . . . Figure that a typical motion picture has about 160,000 frames, and you wind up with around 24 TB per film. And that’s just the raw data. Now you process it to do things like removing dust, tears, and other digital restoration work. Each of those develops additional data streams and data files. We’ve decided, based upon our previous experience, that it is best to save the initial scans as well as the final processed files for the long term. Now we are up to 48 TB per film. In our nitrate collection alone, we have well over 30,000 titles. 48 TB x 30,000 = 1,440,000 TB or 1.44 EB (exabytes) of data.
Weissman adds with a trace of grim humor: “And of course you want to have a backup copy.”

Motion Graphics Portfolio Reel 2012

2012-03-14T02:44:00.000-07:00

My updated, and very short, motion graphics reel. I haven't done much variety of work in the last two years, and hardly any in the last year (shooting and editing almost exclusively), but this was fun to quickly compile together. I've been wanting to do this for well over a year now (my 2010 reel was feeling a bit dated). I forgot almost half of the projects as I was going through my library because most were done over night shifts. Now I'll start working on a camera reel, which will be much more exciting.

Every Child Is An Artist

2011-10-15T14:00:00.000-07:00

Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up.

-lolzombie

The Mystery of Breakfast

2011-08-11T22:54:00.000-07:00

married to the sea

I will say to my wife these words.

I've wanted to do this for 7 years.

2011-08-07T15:48:00.000-07:00

Zombie Vs. Baby

2011-08-01T08:26:00.000-07:00

the color of buck

2011-07-25T10:36:00.000-07:00

via the color of.

Imma kick this mountain in the balls

2011-07-24T10:03:00.000-07:00

Mt. Olomana, Oahu HI

who's with me?