Movies
Oktapodi
2008-08-18
Pigeon Impossible
2008-07-19
Lucas Martell shows how he made Pigeon Impossible, an animated short. You can see the making of on YouTube, the blog, or the web site. The videos on YouTube are great, and show just how much work even a short feature takes.
Ballistic Jaw Propulsion Of Trap-Jaw Ants
2008-05-28
This has to be one of the oddest (and strangely mesmerizing) things on the net: ants flying through the air in extreme slow motion propelled by the rapid closing of their jaws. All set to a very peculiar sound track. The ant at the top of the image above is cart-wheeling its way over the other two.
Silicon Valley Cocoaheads April Meeting Now Available On Video
2008-05-12
Two videos and slides of the April Cocoaheads meeting is now available online. For details, see Scott Stevenson's blog entry. There's a total of some 750MB of material.
It featured Scott (seen above) on user interface design, and Joar (below) digging into the debugger.
I'm in the audience asking intelligent questions.
Shooting A Movie By Candlelight
2008-03-20
Fencepost: 1/1600s f/8.0 ISO400 150mm, -0.3ev, Canon 30D, Canon 70-200L IS f2.8
Stanley Kubrick shot the movie Barry Lyndon in 1975 using whatever light was available, often very little; candlelight even. He used a lens that was originally made for NASA that had an aperture of f/0.7.
Pixar - A Human History Of Computer Graphics
2008-03-02
From the Computer History Museum comes 101 minutes with some of the pioneers of computer graphics: Brad Bird, Writer/Director, The Incredibles, Pixar Animation Studios, Ed Catmull, Co-Founder and President, Pixar Animation Studios, Alvy Ray Smith, Co-Founder of four centers of computer graphics excellence (Altamira, Pixar, Lucasfilm, New York Tech) and a Microsoft Fellow, Andrew Stanton, Writer/ Director, Finding Nemo, Pixar Animation Studios , and Michael Rubin, Moderator, Author of Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution.
Catmull and Smith were two of the pioneers of computer graphics algorithms and hardware, inventing many of the fundamental techniques that are at the root of everything done today. Lots of discussion about computer animation as a medium, not an end in itself, and the importance of story over technology.
Flight of the Conchords
2008-02-25
Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie make up Fight of the Conchords, a kind of parody folk group from New Zealand. Click the image above to see them sing Business Time live on stage. "It's Wednesday, and Wednesday night is the night we make luuurve... Conditions are perfect; there's nothing on TV". They are clearly having a ton of fun.
I prefer their live performances over the music videos. Be sure to watch The Humans Are Dead, Jenny, Albi The Racist Dragon, Bowie Song, Something for the Ladies, Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, and Issues.
C4 Conference Video Posted
2008-02-07
Wolf Rentzsch has posted the first video from the C4 conference that took place in Chicago last year. It's entitled Indie Ethos, and talks about the place of independent Cocoa developers in the world.
Here is the complete list. One will be posted each week.
- Wolf Rentzsch: Indie Ethos
- Wil Shipley: Monster Marketing
- Daniel Jalkut: Application Acquisition
- Shawn Morel: Virtualization Vivisection
- Bob Ippolito: Exploring Erlang
- Adam Engst: Hacking The Press
- Tim Burks: RubyObjC & Nu
- Cabel Sasser: Coda Confidential
Update: Will Shipley's talk about hype is up now.
Still Life With Melting Chocolate Bunnies
2007-11-18
The Dutch are at it again. See chocolate bunnies melted in three different ways. Set to piano music of course. Needs Flash.
Welcome To Macintosh
2007-07-03
It's a documentary about the Mac, and it's coming. That's about all the web site will say about it. There are two teasers posted.
Black Sheep
2007-03-08
The movie Black Sheep looks like a cross between Tremors, Alien, Shaun Of The Dead, and A Close Shave. And since it's set in New Zealand, I'd expect Hobbits as well.
Probably The Hardest Obstacle Course You Will Ever See
2007-03-05
Makoto Nagano completes what must be the hardest obstacle course in the world. It's Japanese. About the only thing missing is sharks with frickin laser beams attached to their heads.
Canon S3 Widescreen Movie Editing With iMovie
2006-11-26
Having written an article on editing Canon S3 video with Final Cut Express, I thought I would see what iMovie can do with the footage. I don't need FCE for many quick movies, so iMovie is the weapon of choice.
I create an iMovie project and select DV Widescreen since I want a wide screen aspect ratio:
The raw footage from the S3 is 640x480 so it will not fit the aspect ratio of widescreen 640x360 and the result is black bars on each side:
I have to chop off the top and bottom 1/8 of the image before importing into iMovie. To do this I open it in Quicktime and export it using Apple Intermediate Codec (you probably need the Pro version to do this). The video settings are like this:
And the size settings are set to Custom with the width and height set so:
I elect to crop the top and bottom to maintain the aspect ratio of the source. The resulting movie is about 75% of the size of the on I started with -- about right considering that 1/4 of the area has been removed. This step is also a good opportunity to shorten the length of the clip by not exporting any footage at the beginning and end that will not be used.
Now importing the clip makes it fit the frame:
And it is ready for editing.
I create an iMovie project and select DV Widescreen since I want a wide screen aspect ratio:
The raw footage from the S3 is 640x480 so it will not fit the aspect ratio of widescreen 640x360 and the result is black bars on each side:
I have to chop off the top and bottom 1/8 of the image before importing into iMovie. To do this I open it in Quicktime and export it using Apple Intermediate Codec (you probably need the Pro version to do this). The video settings are like this:
And the size settings are set to Custom with the width and height set so:
I elect to crop the top and bottom to maintain the aspect ratio of the source. The resulting movie is about 75% of the size of the on I started with -- about right considering that 1/4 of the area has been removed. This step is also a good opportunity to shorten the length of the clip by not exporting any footage at the beginning and end that will not be used.
Now importing the clip makes it fit the frame:
And it is ready for editing.
Edit Canon S3 movies in Final Cut Express HD
2006-09-26
The Canon S3 IS shoots movies at 640x480 resolution, 30fps, so it is a contender for double duty as a video camera. My only problem up until now has been editing. But recently I figured out how to do it and get a HD 16:9 aspect ratio movie into iDVD.
I use Final Cut Express HD 3.0, but FCE has restrictions on the formats it will edit and I cannot just dial in the camera resolution. I normally shoot using anamorphic on a standard definition video camera, so the resolution of the frames is 720x480 but with a scale factor applied to stretch the horizontal. I looked briefly at converting my S3 footage to DV and dealing with all the anamorphic confusion, but that seemed like a lot of work. And anyway I really wanted to avoid DV and use HD if at all possible.
Here is how I did it.
Set the project up to be HDV-Apple Intermediate Codec 720p30 by pressing control-Q and selecting from the pop-up:
This gives a resolution of 1280x720 progressive (no interlacing). It is double the width of the S3 video, and less than double the height, so forcing the S3 video into this format will chop off the top and bottom 1/8 of each frame:
In S3 video coordinates it will look like this:
There is only enough information for 640x360, so that will make for a good Quicktime export size.
I do this simply by dragging and dropping the video into the browser, but File > Import > Fiiles (command I) will work too. The raw AVI files are recognized with no problem. Internally they are motion JPEG -- just a sequence of JPEG-compressed images.
I control-click in the browser and create a new sequence. This is an important step, because the sequence that was there already (Sequence1 normally) is in the previous format, the format that was set before I changed to 720p:
See that Anamorphic flag by Sequence1? My previous project was anamorphic HD. Right-click on a sequence and select Item Properties to check how it is set up. So I delete Sequence1, rename Sequence2 to Blog, and double click it to create a timeline window for it.
Naively inserting the clips into this new sequence gives a display like the one below. The viewer (100%) on the left shows the original clip, while the timeline (66%) on the right shows a small image against black:
That's because on the right the 640x480 image is centered on a 1280x720 frame. So I must double its size. I will do this before adding it to the sequence. So I remove the clip from the sequence and double click on the clip in the browser, click on the Motion tab top left, and change the scale to 200 by typing in the box.
Now clicking on the video tab and reinserting my clip in the sequence gives me this:
Now I am filling the HD frame and automatically cropping. The advantage of scaling the original clip as I decided to do is that I never have to do it again, however many times I use that clip. The disadvantage is that I can no longer see the whole original frame in the viewer (see on the left). The alternative is to scale the clips after they are inserted into the sequence.
The red line above the timeline tells me that I need to render that part of the sequence. That is a consequence of using an HD format: all media is converted to the Apple Intermediate format. Once rendered I can play it full speed.
Now all I need to do is to edit my movie as I normally would. In addition, because I have extra material above and below the final frame I can use the motion key framing to move the frame up and down if I need to adjust what is displayed in the available space.
To export to iDVD, nothing special is needed. Just use File > Export > Quicktime Movie and that will create a file that iDVD can import. It is quick too if you deselect Make Self-Contained Movie because it can just reference the Apple Intermediate movie. If I open that with Quicktime I see that it is 1280x720 as expected. Also it is much bigger than what I started with, since the material was scaled up by a factor of 2 and results in about 4 times the file size. This is the one disadvantage with this method. iDVD will squish the frames down to standard widescreen automatically and recognize it as 16:9.
To export to Quicktime, again nothing special is needed. 640x360 or smaller is the recommended size for the aspect ratio.
I don't have Final Cut Pro, but I would expect it to handle this in a more standard fashion. And since I have not upgraded to Final Cut Express 3.5 I cannot say how this would work in that. Once I get and Intel CPU I will upgrade and my workflow may change.
I use Final Cut Express HD 3.0, but FCE has restrictions on the formats it will edit and I cannot just dial in the camera resolution. I normally shoot using anamorphic on a standard definition video camera, so the resolution of the frames is 720x480 but with a scale factor applied to stretch the horizontal. I looked briefly at converting my S3 footage to DV and dealing with all the anamorphic confusion, but that seemed like a lot of work. And anyway I really wanted to avoid DV and use HD if at all possible.
Here is how I did it.
Create a New Final Cut Express Project
Set the project up to be HDV-Apple Intermediate Codec 720p30 by pressing control-Q and selecting from the pop-up:
This gives a resolution of 1280x720 progressive (no interlacing). It is double the width of the S3 video, and less than double the height, so forcing the S3 video into this format will chop off the top and bottom 1/8 of each frame:
In S3 video coordinates it will look like this:
There is only enough information for 640x360, so that will make for a good Quicktime export size.
Import S3 Video
I do this simply by dragging and dropping the video into the browser, but File > Import > Fiiles (command I) will work too. The raw AVI files are recognized with no problem. Internally they are motion JPEG -- just a sequence of JPEG-compressed images.
Create a new HD Sequence
I control-click in the browser and create a new sequence. This is an important step, because the sequence that was there already (Sequence1 normally) is in the previous format, the format that was set before I changed to 720p:
See that Anamorphic flag by Sequence1? My previous project was anamorphic HD. Right-click on a sequence and select Item Properties to check how it is set up. So I delete Sequence1, rename Sequence2 to Blog, and double click it to create a timeline window for it.
Double The Size of the Clips
Naively inserting the clips into this new sequence gives a display like the one below. The viewer (100%) on the left shows the original clip, while the timeline (66%) on the right shows a small image against black:
That's because on the right the 640x480 image is centered on a 1280x720 frame. So I must double its size. I will do this before adding it to the sequence. So I remove the clip from the sequence and double click on the clip in the browser, click on the Motion tab top left, and change the scale to 200 by typing in the box.
Now clicking on the video tab and reinserting my clip in the sequence gives me this:
Now I am filling the HD frame and automatically cropping. The advantage of scaling the original clip as I decided to do is that I never have to do it again, however many times I use that clip. The disadvantage is that I can no longer see the whole original frame in the viewer (see on the left). The alternative is to scale the clips after they are inserted into the sequence.
The red line above the timeline tells me that I need to render that part of the sequence. That is a consequence of using an HD format: all media is converted to the Apple Intermediate format. Once rendered I can play it full speed.
Make A Movie
Now all I need to do is to edit my movie as I normally would. In addition, because I have extra material above and below the final frame I can use the motion key framing to move the frame up and down if I need to adjust what is displayed in the available space.
To export to iDVD, nothing special is needed. Just use File > Export > Quicktime Movie and that will create a file that iDVD can import. It is quick too if you deselect Make Self-Contained Movie because it can just reference the Apple Intermediate movie. If I open that with Quicktime I see that it is 1280x720 as expected. Also it is much bigger than what I started with, since the material was scaled up by a factor of 2 and results in about 4 times the file size. This is the one disadvantage with this method. iDVD will squish the frames down to standard widescreen automatically and recognize it as 16:9.
To export to Quicktime, again nothing special is needed. 640x360 or smaller is the recommended size for the aspect ratio.
Alternative Methods
I don't have Final Cut Pro, but I would expect it to handle this in a more standard fashion. And since I have not upgraded to Final Cut Express 3.5 I cannot say how this would work in that. Once I get and Intel CPU I will upgrade and my workflow may change.
The Yip Yip Martians Discover a Phone
2006-09-13
Devil Ducky has a video of the Yip Yip Martians from Sesame Street finding a phone and trying to communicate with it.
Forty-Seven Minutes with Rowan Atkinson
2006-08-15
Posted on PistolWimp, 47 minutes of Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) from 1992 as the devil, a headmaster, and others. Classic material from that era.
Microsoft Feels Your Pain
2006-07-27
Aperture Viewer Tricks
2006-07-26
Can your viewer do this?
The movie above shows nine images in the Aperture viewer chasing around in a square. I'll show you how it is done.
In the thumbnail viewer (grid) make sure you have at least twenty images. Make the viewer visible and set the viewer into Multi mode (option U). Scroll to the top of the thumbnails and mentally label the first nine images from 1 to 9.
Click on the first image (number 1), then command click on eight more in the order 2 3 8 9 4 7 6 5. Once you have done that you will have nine images in the viewer.
Now hit command right-arrow a few times. Images appear in the middle and disappear on the left! Command left-arrow will do the opposite. Command arrow is the Slide function. By clicking on the images in that special order you defined how they slide on the screen.
Here are some things you can do with four images (click image to download movie):
To slide two images up together, click in the order 1 2 3 4 and hit command-right twice in quick succession. To do a double down, the order is 4 3 2 1 and command-right twice. A double left is 1 3 2 4, and a double right is 4 2 3 1. So expressed in shorthand this is:
1 2 3 4 RR slides up
4 3 2 1 RR slides down
1 3 2 4 RR slides left
4 2 3 1 RR slides right
You can make four images rotate too. Try these. This time they use a single command-right key:
1 4 2 3 R clockwise, enter top right
3 2 4 1 R clockwise, enter bottom left
2 3 1 4 R counter, enter bottom right
4 3 1 2 R clockwise enter top left
This next one I call "the rocket" (click image to download movie):
Notice that you have to use seven images for this one.
1 4 5 7 R Rocket to top right
1 7 5 2 R Rocket to top left
It works with six images too, but this is different. Depending on the shape of the viewer six images can be arranged in either two rows or two columns. Here is a six image rotate for two rows (click image to download movie):
For two columns, these patterns work:
1 2 3 4 5 6 RR Double slide up
1 4 3 6 5 2 R Kisses, new middle right
The last one I call "kisses" because all the images kiss in the middle. With two rows you can do these:
1 3 5 2 4 6 RR Double slide left
1 3 5 4 6 2 R Kisses, new bottom middle
1 2 3 6 5 4 R Counter clockwise, bottom left
And here are some tricks with nine images. First a kiss (click image to download movie):
1 2 3 8 9 4 7 6 5 R Rotate counterclockwise new in the middle
1 3 5 8 9 7 6 4 2 R Kiss
The last one, another rocket, needs more than 18 images to work (click image to download movie):
1 4 8 5 9 12 16 13 18 R Rocket to top right
Now it's your turn.
The movie above shows nine images in the Aperture viewer chasing around in a square. I'll show you how it is done.
In the thumbnail viewer (grid) make sure you have at least twenty images. Make the viewer visible and set the viewer into Multi mode (option U). Scroll to the top of the thumbnails and mentally label the first nine images from 1 to 9.
Click on the first image (number 1), then command click on eight more in the order 2 3 8 9 4 7 6 5. Once you have done that you will have nine images in the viewer.
Now hit command right-arrow a few times. Images appear in the middle and disappear on the left! Command left-arrow will do the opposite. Command arrow is the Slide function. By clicking on the images in that special order you defined how they slide on the screen.
Here are some things you can do with four images (click image to download movie):
To slide two images up together, click in the order 1 2 3 4 and hit command-right twice in quick succession. To do a double down, the order is 4 3 2 1 and command-right twice. A double left is 1 3 2 4, and a double right is 4 2 3 1. So expressed in shorthand this is:
1 2 3 4 RR slides up
4 3 2 1 RR slides down
1 3 2 4 RR slides left
4 2 3 1 RR slides right
You can make four images rotate too. Try these. This time they use a single command-right key:
1 4 2 3 R clockwise, enter top right
3 2 4 1 R clockwise, enter bottom left
2 3 1 4 R counter, enter bottom right
4 3 1 2 R clockwise enter top left
This next one I call "the rocket" (click image to download movie):
Notice that you have to use seven images for this one.
1 4 5 7 R Rocket to top right
1 7 5 2 R Rocket to top left
It works with six images too, but this is different. Depending on the shape of the viewer six images can be arranged in either two rows or two columns. Here is a six image rotate for two rows (click image to download movie):
For two columns, these patterns work:
1 2 3 4 5 6 RR Double slide up
1 4 3 6 5 2 R Kisses, new middle right
The last one I call "kisses" because all the images kiss in the middle. With two rows you can do these:
1 3 5 2 4 6 RR Double slide left
1 3 5 4 6 2 R Kisses, new bottom middle
1 2 3 6 5 4 R Counter clockwise, bottom left
And here are some tricks with nine images. First a kiss (click image to download movie):
1 2 3 8 9 4 7 6 5 R Rotate counterclockwise new in the middle
1 3 5 8 9 7 6 4 2 R Kiss
The last one, another rocket, needs more than 18 images to work (click image to download movie):
1 4 8 5 9 12 16 13 18 R Rocket to top right
Now it's your turn.
Ant Stuck On A Sticky Plant
2006-07-17
I shot a movie of an ant stuck on a sticky plant with my Canon S3 IS today (10MB 30fps H.264 Quicktime, 45s). Click to play in a new window:
To get the magnification I used an old 50 mm SLR lens mounted backwards. I used Quicktime to reduce the size and recode from AVI to H.264.
The plant that it is on has blue flowers and sticky parts that break off easily:
What type of plant is this? [Update: A reader tells me it is Cape Plumbago (Plumbago capensis)]
To get the magnification I used an old 50 mm SLR lens mounted backwards. I used Quicktime to reduce the size and recode from AVI to H.264.
The plant that it is on has blue flowers and sticky parts that break off easily:
What type of plant is this? [Update: A reader tells me it is Cape Plumbago (Plumbago capensis)]
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