I use my video camera a lot. I shoot video on vacation, and sporting events, and all sorts of other places, and editing it down for upload to Facebook or YouTube. Often I’ll put some music underneath it; it serves as the glue that connects things together. The process goes something like this:

1. Throw all clips that seem interesting onto the time line.
2. Put all the clips in some sort of order. Sometimes this is chronological, other times I’ll try and make something more cohesive.
3. Trim all the fat from each clip.
4. Now that I know roughly how long the video will be, find a song that’s around that length and fits the mood of the piece.
5. Throw the song into the time line, and futz with the video to make everything line up with the music.

It’s definitely not scientific, and it leads to some interesting choices at time. I was working on a video from a swim meet where I had edited 30 minutes of races down to around 6 minutes of video. I wanted some peppy music to go with, but there are very few six minute high energy songs in my collection. The song that does work: Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

The high energy parts are awesome, and the ballad parts go well with the beauty of swimming. Did not see that coming.

Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and often the context of the song is taken advantage of. For example songs can be used to evoke the memory of the era when they were popular. Buffalo Springfield’s For What It’s Worth has been used in movies from Panther to Forrest Gump to evoke the unrest of the late sixties and early seventies. However, the song was never about the chaos of the era, but instead about the closing of the Pandora’s Box club on Sunset Strip. It’s new context has made the song almost mythic, but it’s purely coincidence.

For filmmakers, it’s really easy to ride the coattails of a song’s context to improve the film. Romantic comedies can safely break out popular love songs, practically bashing the song’s context over the audience’s head in an attempt to create emotions.

More skillful filmmakers will play against the context, putting a song in a new light. Quentin Tarantino’s use of Blue Suede’s Hooked on a Feeling was just the beginning of masterful use of song, context, and cinema.

When I’m working, I try very hard to not choose a song ahead of time, because I like being surprised at how well music alters the work. Often I will specifically use songs by friend’s bands because I won’t have to worry about the context of the song altering my intent (or YouTube’s copyright detection). I’m often looking less at context and more at rhythm, feeling, and cohesiveness with the rest of the piece. What really surprises me is when including a song alters my context of it. The strongest example for me is Purple Balloon by The Roseline. It’s a song that I really love, and it’s wonderful to see the band play it live (they are a fantastic live act), but whenever I hear it I can only think of the two weeks I spent scanning photos for a video for my Grandfather’s funeral. My grandfather was a modest man, and I learned more about him in the two weeks after his death than I did in the 31 years prior. Like a song that reminds you of a breakup, I can’t listen to it anymore.

Talking Head’s Once in a Lifetime has been used to evoke the go-go eighties, but I associate it with Dallas in the early 2000’s, when I had their CD in my car. The only song I can think of that has no context would be Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’.

No matter what this song is played against, it will always be awesome.

Context is a powerful thing, and in many ways it’s something record companies fight to protect. Often a song’s context is based off the time it was popular, so it will be interesting to see what happens in the future. With the fall of radio, iTunes, Pandora, and everything else, is there really a way to connect a song to an era anymore? Do we even have a collective pop-culture consciousness?

In Taipei there was a coffee shop around the corner from the hotel I stayed in. I had shot some video the day before in Jioufen and had sat down to have morning coffee and look over the footage.

I took this photo because it struck me how amazing it was to be doing what I was doing.  When I was in high school video editing was done using tape to tape editing, where a computer controller would do a controlled record to copy a section of tape from one tape to another. If you wanted to inject something in the middle, you had to re-edit everything from that point forward (unless you had a system that supported edit lists, which cost tens of thousands of dollars). When I was in college, video editing involved using the Avid, a specially designed hardware board in a Mac that could handle non-linear editing (NLE). The system cost tens of thousands of dollars, and we only had two for the entire film program, so students were constantly competing for time and space on the Avid’s limited hard drives.

Ten years later I’m shooting video with a $150 camera that has higher quality than anything I’ve ever shot on and has 2 hours of storage on a 4 gig card at 60 FPS. My editing setup is an MacBook, a 500 gigabyte external hard drive, and iMovie, a setup so portable I can bring it with me 8000 miles from home and still comfortably edit. I can upload my video to YouTube or Facebook and have more people see my work than any of my previous videos combined.

These kids today have no idea what they missed out on.

It’s been a over a year since the Federal switch to HDTV, yet I didn’t buy an adapter or a new TV. For the past two years I’ve been using Hulu and Netflix instant streaming to watch the shows I like when I have time, and don’t have 100 channels competing for my attention. That been said I’d been saving money for a while to do a home entertainment upgrade for a while, and had decided to buy the toys through a company discount. When I went to find the link off the corporate intranet, I saw there was a message that if I bought today not only could I get a speaker bar for half off, I could get a Blu-Ray player that also played Netflix instant streams. Netflix instant streams on TV! ZOMG!

The Blu-Ray player and speaker bar came first. Not having a HDTV to hook them up to, I hooked them up to my standard definition TV and put in the only Blu-Ray movie I had. While I had to admit the speaker bar sounded amazing, Blu-Ray gives no advantage on a standard television (Imagine that). This is where I also realized that the Blue-Ray’s Netflix support was dependent on getting an Ethernet cable to it. My cable modem and router are all upstairs, so I moved all the equipment downstairs so I could hook the router directly to my Blue-Ray player. No luck; the downstairs cable outlet apparently doesn’t have data.

What Nick Has	What Nick Doesn’t Have
Okay Picture Great Sound	Netflix Instant Streaming

The TV was supposed to ship two weeks later, but instead it shipped early and was supposed to arrive the while I was in DC. I had it held at the Fed Ex office, but this meant I had to pick up in Kansas City, and my Mini just wasn’t up for the job. Thankfully a friend agreed to help, but I ended up sitting in the back seat holding the TV up for the entire 30 minute trip.

I got it home, but only had composite cables which would not do. Another trip to Best Buy, and now I had the necessary HDMI and optical cables. I also bought an Apple Airport Express to use as a Wifi to Ethernet bridge to the Blu-Ray player. I hooked the HDMI and optical cables up, and am blown away by the picture and sound. Unfortunately setting up the Airport Express does not go as well. Unlike the ease of configuration of most Apple products, the Airport Express is positively stone age. It has one amber light that blinks at you when something goes wrong, and usually the only solution is to stick a paper clip into it’s reset button.

What Nick Has	What Nick Doesn’t Have
Great Picture Great Sound Stream iTunes to new speakers Share a hard drive	Netflix Instant Streaming

Later I found out why my Wifi bridge wasn’t working. Wifi to Ethernet bridging involves creating a WDS network, which my 802.11g router doesn’t support. At this point I had been throwing money at Best Buy, so why not a little more. I decided to replace my 802.11g router with an Apple 802.11n Airport Extreme Base Station. My (arguable) logic was that if I wanted to stream movies, I should upgrade my Wifi network to something fast. The Airport Base Station also adds support for connecting to a USB printer over your network, something I’ve needed for a while. (Ironically, I needed to download a software update to my laptop to configure the router, but couldn’t connect to the internet because my router wasn’t configured. Progress!)

What Nick Has	What Nick Doesn’t Have
Great Picture Great Sound Incredibly fast network Stream iTunes to new speakers Share a hard drive Share printer	Netflix Instant Streaming

After more configuration, the router and the Airport Express start talking to one another. I finally had an Ethernet line that went to the Blue-Ray player. I hooked it up, and then went through the menus looking for the Netflix support – wait, where was the Netflix support? I looked online for the latest manual to my Blue-Ray player and found the following.

What. The. Fuck.

Since I had already done all this work to run Ethernet to my TV, I decided to see what else I could do. As it turns out the TV also an Ethernet port, which gives you the ability to download software updates and browse the web. When I say “browse the web”, I mean “look at the three pages the manufacturer gives me access to using a convoluted interface.” It also gives me access to the weather, which might be useful if my TV wasn’t against a window. I then hooked my Linux box through HDMI to my TV, only to discover that Netflix instant streaming doesn’t support Linux. I also don’t want to think of all the extra money I spent that I shouldn’t have.

So our final scorecard is

What Nick Has	What Nick Doesn’t Have
Great Picture Great Sound Incredibly fast network Stream iTunes to new speakers Share a hard drive Share printer Check the weather Browse 3 dumb web pages Check the weather Subversion server Apache server	Netflix Instant Streaming

Technology: 1. Nick: 0

While I wouldn’t go so far to say I have a Walter Mitty complex, I do have a tendency to romanticize my life. Maybe I’m just a software monkey, but being a software monkey isn’t so far from the action and adventure on TV, right? This idea has crept into my statuses lately. A few days back I posted on Twitter:

Putting error reports together to find the root problem is makes me feel like I’m in a CSI episode with much worse lighting.

And then yesterday I posted as my Google status:

Do you remember that TV show about the software team lead who played by his own rulebook but always got the project in on time? Thank god that never show never existed.

That status in particular was picked up by my friends Matt and Dave, who sent quotes from said fictional show:

• You’re off this case! I don’t want you messing around with the search module again! From now on you’re on UI duty, do you hear me?!
• Look out, that JIRA is rigged to explode! Looks like somebody’s trying to send us a message…
• I hear he’s a bad mother…shut your mouth!
• It all makes sense… this thing goes all the way to the top. Of the stack.
• You only forgot one thing… that document was preapproved!  (kaboom)
• You may escape this time Diego, but the bug will be fixed! You hear me?
• My extreme programming partner was killed just two days before his release party. Now I’ve sworn revenge on the ones who axed his feature.
• You can’t lock the semaphore there man!!! Are you crazy?? You’re going to get us all killed!! Don’t you care about the schedule???
• I’m about to decrease your priority… permanently.
• You may think I’m not going to merge in these 50 files a week before mass production. You should ask yourself: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?

Maybe my life is more exciting than I think.

Conversation my brother and I had this afternoon over twitter:

nicreationsOMG! Google is going to fuse the browser and the OS together! That’s so… Windows 98?

ChrisKral@nicreations I with you there. Didn’t uSoft get in some legal trouble for doing exactly that?

nicreations@ChrisKral Yes, but this is Google! We all love Google (Just like we all loved uSoft in 1985 when IBM was the bad guy).

ChrisKral@nicreations In 1985, I was 10 years old. I was too busy playing on the C64 to care one way or the other about either uSoft or IBM.

nicreations@ChrisKral He who forgets computer history is destine to repeat it. Too bad computer history is made by 20 year-olds.

ChrisKral@nicreations True, and it looks like it is repeating.

The problem with writing your own animation software is that you have to maintain it.

The software I’m currently using is actually my second generation of animation software. The first generation was written in college for The Emperor’s New Clothes, which was done on a student research grant (let this be a lesson for you kids – you can get money for your films if you call it research!). On that project I was the writer, director, producer, and lead software engineer, so thank god Marshall did the hard animation or the whole thing would have been trash. The quality of code was pretty good for a college student (read: pretty terrible overall), but I learned some good lessons:

1. Debugging on set sucks
2. C++ is like concrete in that the code seems completely malleable when you first write it and slowly settles until the mere idea of refactoring base classes is exhausting.
3. With C++ you spend 10% of your time designing your GUI and 90% finding out why clicking a button is de-referencing a bad memory pointer.
4. If you put too much of your business logic in the GUI you will never be able to reuse it.

Things that make me happy: Frontalot on Pandora!

Things that make me sad: Pandora crashing as I upload this because Flash on Linux sux.

Heather Grimsley made a delicious Tux cake for some of my co-workers today. She really nailed the likeness! If you also take Sean’s companion cube cake into account, you can see a pattern of geekery at corporate HQ.

Since writing my earlier review of the Aiptek A-HD+ I have gone south of the Equator with it and back, and overall I would say it is a great camera for the money. From the large quantity of videos recently posted you can probably tell I was rarely without it the two weeks I was in Ecuador. The small size allowed me to carry it in the the pocket of my cargo pants, and I with only two four gigabyte SD cards it was able to hold four hours of 720p video. Not bad for a $150 camera!

The biggest issue I had with the camera was a lockup bug. I never identified what triggered it, but it manifested itself by the software never starting up when the LCD was opened. Instead the LCD backlight would come on but the screen remained black. When this happens the device will not suspend and will drain the battery if left unattended. The only way I could find to fix the camera when it entered this mode was to pull the battery – thankfully years of using Windows taught me to fix everything with a reboot. I had to leave the camera at home charging at crucial times twice because of this issue.

The first camcorder I ever used was a two piece system – a tube camera tethered to one half of the home VCR that strapped around the shoulder – so it was a joy to have such a light camera even if it felt like it was made by Fisher Price. Because there is no image stabilization mode the camera will pick up any hand jitter, and a number of my first shots were unusable because you could see every step I took on screen. I had to practice walking in order to pull off any sort of motion shot.

I was surprised how functional the digital zoom was. I’m used to digital zoom turning the image into a mess of blurry pixels, but the A-HD+ digital zoom looked very good at all but the most zoomed in levels. The zoom itself is incredibly choppy and looks terrible in playback. In editing I tried to cut any camera zooms from the final product, but when you’re shooting documentary style sometimes you can’t help it.

In outdoor light the camera image looks fantastic, but the image blows out easily.  The auto exposure swings wildly and can quickly take most of your subject to black based on how much sky is in the image, especially if you are shooting darker cityscapes against a bright sky. I found myself wishing I had some sort of exposure lock and back light compensation functionality, especially when shooting my Abuelita’s birthday at a church where most of the speakers had a giant window behind them.

In lower light you will need to turn on “night mode”, which slows down the exposure rate in order to get brighter images. It works, but the resulting images look both choppy and blotchy. I had to shoot my grandmother’s birthday party in night mode, and the results look like I downloaded it from youtube.

In reviews I read online people complained about the audio quality, but the quality never bothered me. Because the mic is on top it does pick up the camera operator better than the subject, which is bad when the operator has a hideous giggle.  I do wish it supported connecting a directional mic of some sort.

A four gigabyte SD card could hold 2 hours of 720p video, but the battery would probably die in about 45 minutes. Just a few sustained recordings of a couple of minutes could take it’s tole on the battery. I tended to shoot in ten to thirty second clips, and leave the camera in suspend in my pocket between shots. If you’ want to record continuously I’d recommend switching to CIF video, which could fit 11 hours of video at 320×240 @ 30 fps and burns a bit less battery.

It was nice that the camera was also an 8 megapixel camera too, complete with flash. I rarely had the correct white balance settings ready, as the camera would forget what you last set it to every time it went into suspend mode. Low light images seemed to either be blown out by the flash or blurry because the camera was compensating for the flash being turned off.

The lens has a macro mode, but the switch to enable it needs some sort of lock. Pulling the camera out of  my pocket was enough to flip the switch. A number of times I started filming and only when I zoomed in did I realize the camera was in macro mode, and other times I never realized it until I got home.

All that said, I bought the camera to record vacation videos and it did a fantastic job. Despite my complaints, it is a great camera to have when you have to be both a cinematographer and a participant in the activities. I still say if control over image quality is the highest concern than this camera is probably not what you’re looking for, but for general purpose video you can’t beat the price.

Back when I was a lad, I made productions at our local cable access channel and worked for our school district’s cable channel. This invariably meant that I was the go-to 15 year old for knowledge about video cameras. This was somewhat annoying as I was also the go-to 15 year old for knowledge about computers too. Basically I was a walking AV-pedia, which was never good for scoring popularity points with the ladies.

Of course times change. Since most of my video work now involves making a monkey move one frame at a time I haven’t really needed a consumer video camera in a while, and my knowledge has gotten pretty rusty. So it was quite a shock when my sister called me asking about what video camera I would recommend for video taping the birth of her first child.

Cathy: “We’re thinking about maybe going with a hard drive one. We don’t think we need to pay for HD”
Me: “Wait – they put hard drives in video cameras now?”

Eight years from film school and I have to talk to the blue shirts. Tragic if you think about it.

This Friday I am leaving for Ecuador – two weeks of not posting! All my fan will be pissed! – and I want to bring some sort of image capture device down with me. I really don’t have a consumer camera of any sort as I don’t take that many personal pictures, and the ones I do I usually just take with my cell phone. Ecuador has a pretty high crime rate, and I don’t want to take anything too valuable or with personal information, so I started looking for some sort of low cost camera that I could bring with me. And thats when I discovered the wonderful new world of HD SD card recording. The idea that you could buy a HD camera for less than $200 was startling, and honestly made me a bit skeptical. Is it a real camera or a crazy toy like the PLX-2000? How could you buy $200 HD camera when most name brands are twice that? The price point and the form factor were right, so I decided to take the plunge.

(Click for sample 1080p output)

I bought the Aiptek A-HD+. It is a 1080p HD camera, and with a 4 GB card you get about 60 minutes of 1080p video. It is fully automatic, and most of the options are easily accessible. It’s a one chip sensor, and if you actually look at the 1080p image on an HDTV, the image will be grainy in anything but perfect conditions. If you are shooting for DVD or web video like me, the down converted image looks rather sharp unless you’re in video’s traditionally nemesis – low light. The brightness to contrast ratio is not spectacular so if you’re shooting outdoors you can easily have dark shadows or blown out skies. In retrospect, I wish I had spent the extra $20 for a camera with optical zoom; the A-HD+ is digital zoom only. One thing worth mentioning is that you can also record in 720p at 60 FPS – an overcranked video camera!

It’s a small form factor (about Zune sized) camcorder. I know cameras have gotten small since tube cameras, but this thing could pass for a cell phone when it’s closed. The industrial design is well done but the materials chosen leave something to be desired; It definitely feels cheap, which isn’t reassuring. The flip side is that the camera is very lightweight and could fit into a jacket pocket. Leave the camera bag at home!

I knew going in that sound was not the forte of the A-HD+ and after purchasing one I now know why: they put the microphone above the lens looking up. This seems like a poor choice, as it’s an cheap omni-directional mic and all the audio sounds mungy. Even worse is that you can’t plug in an external mic to go along with capturing. I don’t mind this as most environments I will be shooting in the image will be far more important than the audio, but still, ew.

I shot a test video around the Kansas river. All of the video is saved as Quicktime files. To import the footage I just plugged it into the USB port of my Mac, loaded up iMovie, and imported the footage. If you’re using a PC Quicktime may not be your format of choice, but for a Mac user it couldn’t be easier. (Note – video below has been down-converted to 320×240)

Would I use this camera professionally? The lens is fixed in wide angle and the audio is terrible, which are serious negatives. Because of the one-sized lens and the auto adjusting aperture I can’t use it for animation. However, I can see some projects where I would break this bad boy out. At $200 this thing is basically disposable, which makes it a great stunt camera. Mount it to a car and speed along or drop it off a building; as long as the SD card survives you’ve got what you wanted. Also, for documentaries of a large event you could buy a couple of these and send camera people into a crowd. They are so small they don’t draw much attention, making more natural film making possible. Finally, I could see wonderful things happening with 10 of these cameras, a Mac, and a elementary school class. It’s like a junior filmmakers dream.So if you want this to capture your precious memories or your first child, you may want to spring the extra cash for a higher end camera. I on the other hand want a HD camera I can take places where the camera may be in peril – swim meets, triathlons, vacations, etc – and for that this camera delivers.