For those who would like to embark into filmmaking territories, I would suggest you take a look at the “Pi” movie by Darren Aronofsky (trailer). The movie has a film school cutting and camera movement style, it was cheap ass, and yet, it has a very high rating on IMDb, because it has a great story. This movie is the definition of story telling.

Pi was shot in Super16 ten years ago, it has virtually no shallow DOF, it is extremely grainy, it’s black & white, and it generally looks like ass on first look. But the story takes you away and all that weird look add to the weird world the hero lives in.

Update: Aronofsky’s new movie, “The Wrestler” that comes out in a few days (trailer), was also shot in 16mm and has no shallow DOF to speak of either.

A short video about boats, shot for the purposes of my upcoming Kodak Z1012 IS digital camera review. It was shot within half an hour with this HD-capable digital camera at San Mateo’s marina (Coyote Point) yesterday.

Most scenes are over-exposed as the camera has no exposure control in its video mode. The video is color graded. HD version, comments and download here.

Update: And a pseudo-HDR image I shot and tone-mapped yesterday with the same camera:

I blogged about Christina Aguilera’s new song earlier today. As I said there, the song is very nice, maybe the best ever from Christina.

The official music video for it is pretty good too. It was directed by Peter Berg, the same director who did the movie “Hancock”.

In the meantime, Christina signed an exclusive contract with the Target superstores, and Target did a 30 second commercial for it, featuring Christina and her new song.

Here’s the trouble: the commercial is about 10 times better than the official video, and everyone who has seen both says so. If something like this was the official video, it would have kicked so much ass.

I am not sure how the director will take all this though. It can be a blow to him and his morale.

I revisited my “Garden Spinners” (was: “Kites”) video this afternoon, making at least 8 changes to the video. It is much more faithful to the beat now, and a bit more interesting too. Additionally, I upgraded the bitrate to 6 mbps VBR (original version was 5 mbps VBR), so if you had downloaded the previous version, please re-download the new one — it’s better.

I got some pretty positive feedback about this particular video, so I am interested to know if people prefer it over my jellyfish video. The jellyfish video is one of most “liked” HV20 videos on Vimeo ever, so I wonder which one is better.

The second video from our weekend trip, a relaxing nature video. HD version, comments and download here.

We visited Santa Rosa and Bodega Bay this weekend, and so here’s one of the two videos I shot. HD version, comments and download here. The second video will come later today.

RED announced the specs for their 2009/2010 products: ranging from a fixed-lens 3k Scarlet at around $3000, to a 9k system that can shoot in stereoscopic 3D mode (two connected cameras at once, next to each other), to a crazy 28k (261 mega pixel) sensor ($55,000 just for the main unit). How big is a 28k image you ask? Here’s a comparison to a 1080p HD image. These are amazing specs of course, and the prices are extremely low for what these products will be able to do. There’s no question about that.

Here are my two problems though.

1. I am what the author and video professional Stu “ProLost” Maschwitz refers to as a “DV Rebel” on his book of the same name. DV Rebels are basically amateur videography artists, that take cinematography more seriously than normal camcorder owners. DV Rebels try to make the best with what they’ve got even if they only use dirt cheap hardware. In essence, is a lot like how computer geeks like to play with Linux, tweak it like there’s no tomorrow, and enjoy the challenges. The 3k fixed-lens RED Scarlet, possibly the cheapest RED of the bunch, will still cost over $3000 after you add an LCD monitor to it, the special kind of CF cards it requires, battery etc. I am sure that quality will be good, but if Canon comes up with a next-generation 1080p “geek” AVCHD camera for under $2000, similar to what I describe here (e.g. all features the HV30 has, plus gain/AV/TV full manual control, true 24p, DigicDV-4 half-inch sensor, 43mm filter size, fast lens up to 8x or 10x zoom, full 1080p at 24mbps, proper focus ring), I would go for that instead of a Scarlet. Simply because, it would be enough for my needs, and a good bump over the HV20/30 legacy. The RED will definitely change professional cinema as we know it, but I don’t think it will grab all the lower-end artist attention. I have a feeling that wedding professionals won’t care much about it either. In other words, Canon will continue to exist and sell well, but it will feel the heat and hopefully will upgrade their specs for a new market class that it’s between consumer and prosumer. That’s what I am waiting this January from Canon.

2. RED is a hardware company. And as with all hardware companies, their software sucks. RED has been under heavy criticism about their buggy software, and how they sell hardware where the firmware is barely stable. The early bird users end up losing their feathers and becoming guinea pigs, while some basic functions for professionals are missing. Their computer tools are not great either, and only few editors support their files (meaning that you might need to additionally buy the $1000 Cineform Neo4k to get your footage on your editor). Adding to the injury, if you complain about these problems, you end up getting banned from their online forum.

The only way I am getting the cheap Scarlet is if the complete package (with LCD, battery, CF card) costs up to $3000, if it has the ability to shoot 1080p in non-windowed mode (I don’t care about its 3k resolution at this point as I don’t own a super-computer to process it), and if the PC tools (compared to their Mac tools) are sane enough to let me process the raw image and export in an AVI lossless codec via DirectShow (so I can edit in Vegas). There are a lot of “if”s there, so there’s a better chance that Canon will release a hybrid consumer/prosumer “geek” (“DV Rebel”) camera that does everything I need in a more convenient fashion than RED can.

Discussion here.

Another DVXUser competition, Twilightfest, opened its doors for viewing and voting (free registration required). Because Comcast now has bandwidth consumption restrictions I will not be able to watch all films, so I limited my viewing to films shot with the HV20 (4), RED (3), AVCHD HF100 (1), and HPX-170 (1) cameras.

From these four HV20 films I watched, the “Calls From The Führerbunker” was probably the best. It had good direction and cinematography, beating out the rest of the HV20 films that actually used 35mm adapters. The also HV20-based “Mr. I” film was not too bad either, but it was strangely under exposed (it felt underexposed rather than “dark”, which I am sure it was the intention of the cinematographer). I was indifferent about the third HV20 film, dubbed “The Box“, while the fourth one, “Pain Container“, I didn’t like.

The HF100 film “Benjamin Merrymeadows and the Curse of the Four-Holed Button” was amateurish and silly, while “Broadcast“, shot with a RED One camera, was the best of the three RED-based films in the competition. Finally, I watched the “Cold Calls by John Whalen” (shot with the HPX-170) because it had so many comments in the forum. And indeed, it was amazingly good. This film was the only one that I wanted to have more of, and wasn’t feeling ready in clicking “fast forward” on the media player. That was amazingly well done and clever. Most of the films in the competition used the Panasonic DVX and HVX cameras, as usual, but as I said, I didn’t watch any of these, so some gems might be among them.

I tried to emulate the look of Metallica’s new music video. Most red colors stay viewable, but everything else pretty much crushes to yellow (except the sky which is more or less blue depending on the shot). These videos are very low contrast, so it’s very difficult to get them right with digital camcorders. You would need a RED or a film camera to get this look right.

Before

After

I’ve used Magic Bullet’s ‘Curahee’ template but with lowered contrast, color corrector had a gamma of 1500 with the midtones and high tones leaning towards yellow. Finally, an unsharpen mask of 0.200 with a radius of 0.100.