Recently in Video Category

I've really been fortunate to live in and around very beautiful areas.  The South Bay area is quite lovely.  Last weekend was so typical:  gorgeous sunny weather on the coast.  Saturday featured a day trip to Palos Verdes and Rancho Palos Verdes, just south of Manhattan Beach.  Sunday featured a day trip north to Malibu.

So here are some photos (shot by the HU) and a brief video (shot by the iPhone 4 in HD!).  Clicking on any of the photos will open slightly larger versions of them. (Many monitors may be too small to seethe video in HD. Just scroll to the right. Mouse over the video and click on the "Play Full Screen Button," which looks like a tiny square on the extreme right above the word "Close." The button does not appear until you mouse over the video.)  Holding the iPhone steady in the wind is a huge challenge!

Enjoy!

I recently was at a conference for and by artists:  dancers, visual arts, musical arts, and educators.  Naturally, such an eclectic group is a tremendously fun energy.  One of the ladies shared an unusual web site, an interactive film based on the address at which you lived as a child, called, "The Wilderness Downtown."  She just sent me this link to the film generator.

You enter your address, and out pops a movie featuring an interactive experience with google maps for that address.  This isn't just unique.  It's totally awesome!

The music, "We Used to Wait" by Arcade Fire is also something worthy of your time.  Here are  the lyrics:

I used to write
I used to write letters
I used to sign my name

I used to sleep at night
Before the flashing lights settled deep in my brain

But by the time we met
By the time we met the times had already changed

So I never wrote a letter
I never took my true heart,
I never wrote it down

So when the lights cut out
was lost standing in the wilderness downtown

Now our lives are changing fast
Now our lives are changing fast
Hope that something pure can last
Hope that something pure can last

Now it seems strange
How we used to wait for letters to arrive
But what's stranger still
Is how something so small can keep you alive

We used to wait
We used to waste hours just walking around
We used to wait
All those wasted lives in the wilderness downtown

We used to wait
We used to wait
We used to wait
Sometimes it never came
We used to wait
Sometimes it never came
We used to wait
I'm still moving through the pain

I'm gonna write
A letter to my true love
I'm gonna sign my name

Like a patient on a table
I wanna walk again
Gonna move to the pain

Now our lives are changing fast
Now our lives are changing fast
Hope that something pure can last
Hope that something pure can last

We used to wait
We used to wait
We used to wait
Sometimes they never came
We used to wait
Sometimes they never came
We used to wait
I'm still moving through the pain
We used to wait
We used to wait
We used to wait

We used to wait for it
We used to wait for it
Now we're screaming "sing the chorus again!"

We used to wait for it.
We used to wait for it.
Now we're screaming "sing the chorus again!"

I used to wait for it
I used to wait for it
Hear my voice screaming "sing the chorus again!"

Wait for it!
Wait for it!
Wait for it!

You simply must experience it!

Related articles:

• Arcade Fire, Colin Stetson: Concert Review and Photos (beatcrave.com)
• Arcade Fire Interactive Video (jambase.com)
• The Wilderness Downtown: Chrome experiment by Chris Milk and Arcade Fire (boingboing.net)
• Arcade Fire at the KeyArena: Whoa (seattlest.com)
• The Wilderness Downtown (asourceofinspiration.com)

Now, if I could bottle this as an injection, I'd make a fortune.

In 4 seconds I go from wrinkled old spotted skin to something younger. The picture you see below is the finished product. When you play the 4 second video, it jumps to the real photo and morphs in 4 seconds to the new improved me. Then, when it stops playing, it jumps back to the real me.  Yikes!

I found this TEDtalk, on the Happy Planet Index, by Nick Marks, to be deeply inspiring and brilliantly on target.  It is absolutely worth 17 minutes of your time!  He talks about creating the world we all want to live in without costing the earth in the process.  He claims our current policy and cultural focus on productivity and materialism is flawed for measuring the well-being of a country and its people.

Nick sites these 5 things we should reflect on in our daily lives enrich our personal happiness without costing the earth.  His entire talk is fantastic and has significant implications far beyond saving the earth but could inform our policy on economics, education, health, etc.

1. Connect
2. Be Active
3. Take Notice
4. Keep Learning
5. Give

Related articles:

• TED Global 2010: Nic Marks and Happiness that Doesn't Cost the Earth (worldchanging.com)
• nic marks: the happy planet index (toomanytribbles.blogspot.com)
• The Happy Planet Index: Nic Marks on TED.com (ted.com)
• Building a Greener World through Marketplace Economics and Radical Transparency (worldchanging.com)

Amazingly, people were swimming in the Gulf before, during, and probably after this storm.  But maybe, it was ok.  I never went down to the water.  If any oil or dispersant were around, it wasn't visible from the hotel room balcony.  Sunday night, the last night of the visit, a big thunderstorm came from the north.  I shot this short video of the storm moving out to sea.

Unfortunately, the progress bar does not show while downloading this HD video. Be patient. It is working. If you have a slow connection to the internet, be very patient.

Yesterday I purchased a pair of Vibram FiveFingers, which are all the rage here in Los Angeles. As you can see, they fit like a glove, with each toe in a separate enclosure to enhance dexterity, stability, and balance.  They are made from kangaroo leather, which I didn't even know existed.  To check out these shoes, simply click on the image to the right.

Conrad the Kat was very jealous and then insisted on starring in an epic feature film in which he modeled his own stylish and fashionable footwear.  To watch Conrad the Kat's latest world debut, simply click on the image below.

Related articles:

• Vibram Fivefingers Review (socyberty.com)
• High Five to FiveFingers (ries.typepad.com)
• Barefoot Walking (fitfiend.com)

The fact that this can be done, in total, from storyboard (if they had chosen to) all the way to upload to YouTube, on a $299 device, the iPhone 4, that also happens to make phone calls, is astounding. When Apple makes this all possible on an iPhone Touch and the iPad, they will rock the education market! Be sure to watch it in full screen.

Philip Bloom showed a different cut of this short, Above Skywalker, in the Bonner Theater a couple of weeks ago. It looks magnificent on the large HD screen. I especially like the slider shot during the night time lapse about 30 seconds in (and at 4.20). The macro shots are nice too. Well... The whole thing is. Though I wish the slider shot on the floor of the porch hadn't hit the cutting room floor.

What he didn't tell us was that he shot this in 24p with the new 5dMkII Canon firmware upgrade,released today. The aspect ratio also makes this look really cinematic. I wonder if he used the same plugin he use in his post on How to export and upload 2:35 video to Vimeo.

Be sure to watch this full screen.

I love video. I love timelapse. I love tilt-shift. What could be better than putting them all together? Well, watching it in full screen. Check it out.

Related articles

• Hands-On With the Lensbaby Fisheye and Soft-Focus Optics (wired.com)

At the master class last Saturday, I saw many bright, creative people.  Jeremy Ian Thomas, the creative director at RawWorks, was among them.  He wrote, along with Robert Lehman, and shot this short, micro budget film ($3.00) that has a compelling message and is really well executed.

Vimeo Link and additional info at the RAWworks blog.

Very clever time-lapse shot in Tokyo. To see the video in full HD, check out this link. Or you can click below to watch a smaller version from YouTube. To learn more about how the video was shot, go to the Laughing Squid.

With a recent storm having come off the Pacific, coupled with the Chilean 8.8 earthquake and its ensuing tsunami warning, the Pacific Ocean here in the South Bay Area, has been the most active I've ever seen it.  In this short video I shot yesterday with my iPhone, the sandy beach, which typically begins out where you see the waves starting to break, is completely gone.  No one was in the water.  You could even see some of the currents zipping around as waves would head back out to sea crashing into the waves coming in from the sea.  It was a spectacular site!

Related articles

• BREAKING: Violent 8.8 quake hits Chile, sends tsunami towards Hawaii (crooksandliars.com)
• Chile Earthquake, Tsunami Warnings: Science of a Disaster (abcnews.go.com)

NPR, CPB, PBS:  all such powerful voices for deep, reflective, critical thinking in a time when we just tend to want some quick affirmation from those who support our current perspective on reality.  I've often, through the years, speculated that this is indeed the very reason these voices come under attack from political forces that feel challenged by dispassionate reason and reflection.

I've always had such great respect for Bill Moyers' work.  He asks deep and difficult questions in a quest for understanding and clarity rather than persuasion and opinion-making.  I stumbled upon, quite by accident, this Bill Moyers' Journla today:  an interview with Ted Olson and David Boies—unlikely legal partners joined to litigate against marriage inequality in California's ongoing battle with Proposition 8.

Having missed the broadcast (I was completely unaware of it.) I listened with interest as these three men had a provocative discussion of the case.  I was most curious how a brilliant, extremely conservative attorney and a brilliant extremely liberal attorney could in any way find common ground on this, of all, issues.  The conversation with Bill is fascinating and illuminating. In typical fashion, Bill asks some very demanding questions of these men.

This video and transcript, along with many other programs, can be found at PBS:  The Bill Moyers' Journal.

I just stumbled onto this new program, TuneUp, from TuneUpMedia.com. It's an iTunes plugin that has a number of really cool features:

• The program will analyze your iTunes library and report back all of the tracks that have incomplete information and create a "dirty" playlist.  Incomplete information might mean the track is missing any of the data listed in the graphic to the right.


• Drag any of the "dirty" tracks into TuneUp.  TuneUp then analyzes the sound footprint of the track to determine what the track actually is and offers to retrieve all of the missing meta data for the track.  In other words, you could have a track in your iTunes library called "Track 09."  TuneUp would figure out what the track name, artist, album, genre, year, cover art, and actual track number on the album are and populate all of that data, replacing the "Track 09" with the real info!  That's rather remarkable!  But there's more...


• TuneUp will follow what you're listening to, offer videos of the track in a sidebar (just click to play the videos right there in the sidebar), a bio of the artists, tell you about the upcoming concerts for that artist in your area, even let you purchase the tickets, share related items about the artist from ebay, let you tweet what you're listening to.


• Other features too...

Today Apple sold its 10,000,000,000th (that's billionth) song at the iTunes Store—all in less than 7 years. The music industry can gripe all it wants, but Apple has made them a lot of money they would otherwise have lost to file sharing!

Today's Business Insider has this headline: Blockbuster Collapses: Shutting Down 500 Stores In Desperate Bid To Save $200 Million. I'm actually shocked they survived as long as they did. They ended last year almost $1,000,000,000 in debt.

By closing 500 of their weakest stores, they hope to reduce operating expenses by $200 million. They are also exploring other ways to increase liquidity and find new emerging distribution channels.

Let me offer them a touch of advice. Liquidate now and save everyone the misery to come.

I was having a perfectly good morning being all productive and everything. Then I headed on over to my RSS feed reader to catch up on "stuff." I hadn't cruised the feeds for a couple of days, so things were out of control—thousands of feed posts were lurking there demanding to be read.

I started with my personal reads and came across a video link from Ellison's blog to a short Valentine's film by some guy named zefrank. It was crazy funny! I laughed out loud. Who ever this Ze guy is, his sense of humor really resonates with me.

I wish he hosted his short videos on a traditional site that allowed you to embed them. I'd share some with you from time to time because, well... now I've subscribed to yet another feed! But, since he doesn't, check them out at the links.

I also liked several others, like this one. Now an hour of laughter has passed, and I'm blaming Elisson!

As I've said before, I just can't get enough of Philip Bloom's work. He even shares the link to the original HD file he shot (750MB) so you can compare that to the final edit—which, of course, is gorgeous.

I took the Canon out on the streets in the evening to test out it’s low light ability and to show this footage to the attendees on each day. I shot entirely handheld using just the Zacuto Z-finder optical viewfinder which gave me much needed stability and the ability to easily focus. I didn’t take the full gunstock rig out as I wanted to be really inconspicuous. I looked like I was just taking photos.

Using just one Zeiss 50mm f1.4 Nikon lens with a Canon Eos to Nikon adaptor for £20 off of ebay I managed to get some lovely shots. As 5dmk2 users out will testify shooting with this camera is hard due to the lack of manual controls, but having the nikon lens helped and I did the usual tricks to lock down the ISO. Generally keeping it no higher than 1250, occasionally 1600 but never higher as the noise levels would be unacceptable.

This was all shot 30p. Everything was converted to XDCAM EX 30p in Mpeg Streamclip to make editing easy. The first three shots use FCP smoothcam to give a slightly surreal look to them the rest is all handheld raw. As I said no grading. So I did the entire edit in 30p, exported as a complete movie, brought it into compressor. Converted to ProRes 422 25p at best settings and it looked great. Not just that but the music stayed the same speed and pitch. So easy!"

[Source: “Sofia’s People” Low light short on Canon 5d mk2 in 25p | Philip Bloom.]

I follow @PhilipBloom on Twitter. He does such amazing work. He has been in Dubai for the past several days shooting this video, Sky. This short timelapse beautifully captures the radiance of the city. And the music, Xibalba by Clint Mansell, is perfect for it.

I appreciate Philip's willingness to share how he does this with HD-DSLRs. It's so helpful to those of us who love to dabble. You can read about the process at his blog, here.

Be sure to watch this in full screen mode. It's beautiful.

He also has a uStream account and broadcast live from his iPhone today. I haven't tried that yet, but it's on my list!

Image via CrunchBase

Here's a great shortcut for downloading YouTube videos when using the Safari browser.

1. Go to the YouTube page with the video on it.  
2. [Command] + [Option] + [A] to bring up the Activity window in Safari.  
3. Under the Address Column find the YouTube page.  
4. Under that column, look for the largest file size, which will be the video file itself.  
5. Double click it to download it.  Done.

Government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations. Today the Supreme Court (5-4) just handed the Republicans (and a lot of Democrats too) a huge bonus: unfettered access to corporate funding, effectively making a broken political system completely unaccountable the to will of the people.

The legacy of George W. Bush lives on to feast on the soul of democracy for profit.

At least Larry Lessig has a more reasoned view. Me, I'm just disgusted.

Building projection can be fun and entertaining, but the people at NuFormer Digital Media, a Netherlands company, are taking this to a whole new level with amazing 3D building projections. Check it out.

The walls (facade or sides) of any building can be used. The projection is a digital re-creation of the architecture of a building. Architectural features of buildings are often used to fantastic effect. Due to the impressive size of the projection a spectacular visual experience is guaranteed. There are no size limits whatsoever."

[Source: Projections on Buildings - Impressive.]

The Haitian Ambassador, obviously deeply offended by the incredulous, outrageous, and unspeakably insensitive remarks of Pat Robertson, feels immediately compelled to respond to Robertson's offensive comments.

At the end of the ambassador's remarks, Rachel Maddow states that if she could apologize for the "odious" remarks made by Pat Robertson, she would. She expresses that Robertson's despicable remarks do not represent the broad wishes of the American people.

Pat Robertson should hang his head in shame, but his press release did nothing of the kind.

I wasn't pleased with the video play button I created and used as an overlay on videos that would open in the shadowbox. My mother asked me why I had a weird finger on some of my pictures. I had no idea what she was talking about. Then, it dawned on me... So, I made a new one.

The new one takes inspiration from the (universal?) YouTube play button, is more "sculpted," has "instructions" on it, and hopefully draws a bit more attention to itself and its function without being too "in your face."

I like new one so much better and hope you do too!

BTW: clicking on the above images does nothing. :o)

We all know Sarah is now an employee of Rupert Murdoch. What we didn't know, until the book and the recent 60 Minutes episode, was the astounding level of her lack of qualification for being being a heartbeat away from the presidency. But that didn't matter to her at all, because "It was God's will" for her to be the Vice President, she said.

This interview is as enlightening as it is frightening. It's worth the attention of the nation.

Well, hopefully she will continue to show how lackluster she is as she stars on FOX not-News. Maybe she will go rogue. But probably, she will just quit--you know, like she did as governor of Alaska.

I wonder why I so like CGI and composited video? Maybe because it asks one of those fundamental questions, "Is it real?"

This is a cool example of compositing using green screen.

Welcome to the new world of digital filmmaking. Give this one a minute to get going.

Thanks Nats and Gary for sending this one along. Have a great link to share with us? (I know you do!) Write us at mail at openculture dot com."

[Source: Is Anything Real? | Open Culture.]

This causes me grave concerns! Once again I ask, "How much of our privacy and freedom are we willing to surrender?!"

I've kept asking where the ridiculous amount of money I pay in taxes is going. And then we can't balance local, state, and federal budgets?! Is it because those agencies are spending vast sums of money on tools such as these that are never approved by the voters. In fact, it is obvious from this newscast that the police department never wanted voters to know anything about this!

How can this be happening? Government is increasingly becoming less accountable to the people it is to serve.

The answer is: not really. Amazing!

I especially like how he shows us how much compositing goes into each CGI. And the natural movement of the leaves, the water, the clouds... Beautifully done. The photographer even looks real.

This tutorial needs a slightly faster pace, but Helen does a great job answering some questions I've grappled with in frustration concerning changing the crop orientation while using a fixed aspect ratio in Lightroom. I could never figure it out. It's so easy when you know the magic trick!

I've got to get to this place while I live out here! While many people are going in and out of the park, this video really puts things in perspective: people look like insects (especially the rock climbers near 2:45) scurrying about in the grand scheme of this untamable place. And I love the music Steven Bumgardner chose: Peter Gabriel's "The Feeling Begins" on Passion. Click below to watch.

Yosemite is bigger than Rhode Island at almost 800,000 acres, but it receives about 3.5 million visitors each year, and most of them spend time in Yosemite Valley. This project was shot back in 2005 after purchasing a Sony Z1U. This was my first HD project (ok, fine, HDV) and I spent about a week in Yosemite during the busy month of July. The footage was all shot in real time, and then sped up in post.

I chose busy places during busy days to show the effects of this mass of humanity. I could have just as easily pointed my camera in another direction and shown nothing but plants, animals and wilderness. Yosemite is popular, but it's also still a relatively wild place.

I’ve lived and worked in National Parks for almost 20 years, and as much as I love landscape photography, I also like looking at the human footprint and the human experience in our national parks. Some of this footage helped me get my current job in 2006, as a videoographer for the National Park Service and the photographer/editor/producer of the web video series "Yosemite Nature Notes" nps.gov/yose/naturenotes"

[Source: People in Yosemite: A TimeLapse Study on Vimeo.]