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.

One of the crushing problems of independent film making is distribution. Unlike any of the production steps, distribution is in no way creative or fun. The best verb to describe it is “begging”. Basically you find people who control what people see and beg them to give you money for your piece of creativity. Then they say no, and you move to the next powerful person. To be fair, distributors have to only buy things they can sell. You think the quality of available entertainment is terrible? You should look at what they rejected.

When I first started playing with YouTube I realized that independent film making had finally found the 21st century distribution tool. Film makers could now go straight to the viewer and see what they thought. Sure it is unfiltered and ugly, but you only watch things you get forwarded to you as “the hilarious link”. Just as iTunes had re-invented the single, YouTube reinvented the short film.

Of course, there’s that whole “not making money” thing, which I admit is an issue. YouTube and other video sites allow you to be seen but not compensated. However as web hosting costs have come down dependence of film makers on services like YouTube have come down – now you can put video on your own websites and skip YouTube all together. With the ability to self host content, film makers have a whole new opportunity to create not films but rich media websites and make money at it. It took Joss Wheedon to figure out how!

http://www.drhorrible.com/

I know you probably have heard of Dr. Horrible by now and quite probably have already watched the first two episodes of “Xander as a Supervillian.” News about it has exploded across the internet due to Joss Whedon’s involvement and it’s already selling briskly on iTunes despite being able to be seen for free. Why do people love Whedon so much? Well, he writes characters they can relate to (nerds), characters they want to hang out with (pre-teen girls who can kick ass), and he communicates with his fans, regularly posting on message boards about what he is working on. He’s created a rapport with fans of his work, and they love him for it.

In some ways, Dr. Horrible represents a new film distribution approach – film makers as rock bands. Whedon is not just a person but a band, and people want to see his shows when he’s on tour. Likewise, new film makers need to not focus on trying to find distribution through regular channels, but build their own audience on the strength of their name and the quality of their work. Once they do that, they can skip the distributors and talk to their audience directly.

The tricky part of course is building up an audience in the first place. That is left as an exercise for the reader.

What other show can work in a discussion of the uncanny valley with such ease?

I recently upgraded to Visual Studio 2005 for something at work – I know, a bit behind the times. The project that this is for usually doesn’t use an installer, which means doing the “get the correct run-time” dance on Windows when actually letting people use it. I was talking about this with a co-worker, and his comment was “Man, it’s so great that you don’t have to deal with that on Linux. You can have multiple versions all in the lib directory and everything just works fine.”

I’ve been trying to figure out what rang false for me, and I finally realized that what I really struggle with isn’t Linux but using open source libraries outside of Linux. The Linux packaging systems are wonderful, but most of the software I write use open source packages on non-Linux platforms; specifically Mac OS X and Windows. There are package managers for these platforms, but they generally try to impose Linux-esque distribution rules onto non-Linux platforms. For example, Fink wants to put all libraries in /sw/lib on the Mac. That would fly in Linux, but the Mac has a beautiful Frameworks system that makes much more sense on that platform – who wants to put in their README “well, you’ll need to open terminal and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to use this, but that makes sense, right?” Just because the Mac is BSD underneath doesn’t mean you can treat the user like a BSD administrator. In the end, to get the control necessary not just good software but a good installation process, you must enter open source hell – building from source.

Having developed animation tools that currently depends on Cairo, Ruby, ffmpeg, mjpegtools, wxWidgets, and a few others, I will say it’s almost impossible to keep up to date. ffmpeg alone is a headache of epic proportion, with a million flags and dependencies. I tend to get something built and leave it alone, which works great until I get a new machine, get the libraries to build everything on, and find out that I’m completely out of date and have to upgrade my code, and then upgrade on all my other machines to suck in the latest changes from my new machine.

I aim to release my animation software, and I’d like it to run on platforms used by artists and stoners… and Linux too (Already runs on GTK thanks to wxWidgets). One of my aims to make that happen is to remove any dependency on tool-kits I don’t use, just for my own sanity. Yeah, Linux package management is great. Can you make the rest of the OS usable so I don’t need to support other platforms anymore?

My dad mentioned an IEEE Spectrum article about Dream Jobs he had read because one of them works where I do. I checked it out, and sure enough, I’ve done triathlon’s with him! Go David! Being highlighted in Spectrum gives you mad geek cred!