Notes from a gearhead

Video games are today bigger than the movie industry. For somebody like me, who saw the first video arcades being born, this is truly amazing. The memories of PacMan and Donkey Kong are not very distant and now we have a multi-billion industry providing forms of entertainment that we could not even imagine. When Deep Purple wrote “Highway Star” nobody could foresee that we would be playing it on our TVs with RockBand. And it’s a blast. It tickles me, as an old bandmember, that still today the question is: “… but can you play the Highway Star solo?”

In looking at the modern wave of video games it’s clear that a lot of well established cinematic techniques have found their way in the new medium. Look at the stunningly beautiful “Heavenly Sword” (PS3) to find sweeping vistas and skillful camera work that can compete with any Hollywood blockbuster.

One thing that impressed me about that game is the jump in acting quality of the characters. Acting performances in videogames are traditionally at the same level of pornos: lame. Even modern games like “Assassin’s Creed” stink when the synthetic actors are given screen time. Not so with Heavenly Sword. The fact that Andy Serkis (Gollum, King Kong) was the Dramatic Director for the game says a lot on the reasons why the acting is so much better. In fact when his character takes the screen there is an immediate shift in quality, it’s palpable.

Movies and games are destined to join forces and produce a new form of entertainment that is neither one or the other but a sum of both. For this to happen we need moviemakers who are gamers and understand the medium and the mind of the viewer/player and game developers who are willing to go further than providing the camera tools strictly necessary for the game play.

A good example is Assassin’s Creed, while the game bored the heck out of me, the camera tools are quite flexible and could be used to design cinematic sequences. What we need also is better collision detection. Again, A.C. is spectacular but the collision detection is as bad as the first Tomb Raider released in 1996. That is unacceptable from the viewer point of view. In the past we have seen games being converted to the big screen. In all but a few cases the idea didn’t pan out. Tomb Raider, the first one, was rather good but other examples like Doom or, God forbids, Super Mario, where big failures. I don’t think that that is the direction to go. Games have their own universe which not always translates well in the real world.

So, here is a question for you: how do you think that movies and games can merge and produce a new form of entertainment that will appeal to both gamers and non gamers alike?

Here is a little gem that I found at Prolost, how to make dolly shots withotu actually buying or renting a dolly. This is just very ingenious and can be adopted for so many situations, it looks really good and it’s completely free. Enjoy!

Video Cam Super Trick! - video powered by Metacafe

Forgive me for a little digression but I can’t believe the things that I read sometimes. I followed the Yahoo/Microsoft saga with fear and trepidation for the past few weeks. Fear that we would loose a vital and creative force in the industry. Fear and disbelief, when I read that the investors sided with Microsoft. Microsoft! The one company that keeps the computing industry backwards for at least 5 years, the one company that has never invented anything original, the one company in the technology field that consistently shows no ability to innovate or even write reliable copies of other people’s ideas. On the other hand you have Yahoo, the brainchild of two creative geniuses. Before Yahoo we had no search engines. Before Yahoo you had to bookmark all the sites on your own. Yahoo became the giant that it is because of sheer innovation. Microsoft, 1995, was blindsided by the Internet and Netscape and had to make a quick turn to support this “new thing” that everybody was talking about: the Web! Microsoft would be the death for Yahoo and Yahoo knows it and its leaders don’t want to see all that hard work and innovation going to waste. Apparently, like it happened before with the DotCom fiasco, Wall Street doesn’t have the slightest clue when it comes to dealing with technology and so they “penalized” Yahoo stock yesterday while they should have given the Internet giant a big reward for having avoided disaster. This is a lesson to keep always in mind. When it comes to high tech Wall Street could not buy a clue.

Sometimes you need to shoot with two or more cameras and that introduces the need to synchronize them. Some high-end cameras have genlock capability but what happens if you your cameras don’t have it or you work with a mix of different cameras? Slating is always a good idea but there is an easy way to have immediate synch in your NLE, this first tutorial shows you how.

A couple of days ago I went to see one of my favorite bands, The California Guitar Trio (CGT). CGT is a unique band, 3 ex-disciples of Robert Fripp, using custom-made acoustic guitars tuned using the famed Fripp tuning. CGT plays a wide variety of songs, from original pieces that use a multi-layered approach to melody and rhythm, to covers of Beethoven’s 5th, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody to a wonderful rendition of Pink Floyd’s Echoes. It’s nearly impossible to describe their music and definitely beyond the skills of this humble blogger. But that’s not what I wanted to talked about in this post. I witnessed the wave of change in the music industry during that CGT concert. During the break I approached the table where the band was selling their CDs and merchandise and I was offered to buy that night’s concert on CD. That’s right, the concert that I was actually listening to. The band sells the CD sleeve. 10 minutes after the concert is finished they “dump” the digital stream that they recorded from the sound board and use a multi-disc replication tower to create 10 CDs at the time. In a matter of minutes, while we were talking with the band members, my CD was ready. I love this! Here I am holding a one-of-a-kind recording and the money that I paid for it goes 100% to the band, to the artists who actually make the music that I enjoyed. It’s a wonderful business model that is showing how off-the-shelf technology is liberating the artists and giving them the opportunity to self-publish and being free of the schemes created by the recording labels that most of the times give the artist a pittance from the exorbitant cost of a CD. And while CGT is not in conflict with their label, Discipline Global Mobile, another of Robert Fripp offsprings, this model is a wonderful occasion for artists worldwide to profit from their work and give something unique to their fans.

Motion Graphis is After Effects and two of the masters of AE are John Dickinson and Alan Shisko and both John and Alan are the authors of two training DVDs that I found extremely useful and inspirational.

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Well, with Tax time upon us and a bunch of other deadlines tying me up I slowed down the posting here but I’ll resume soon. I’m preparing a quick tutorial about multi-camera synchronization that will be available in a few days and more video tutorials are on the way. I will not be at NAB this year, too many prior commitments in the same period. For those of you who will go, have fun and take many pictures of the new gear.

I’ve been hearing a lot recently, thanks to the fine folks at Creative Cow, about AE and HDV footage. Here is an explanation from Dave LaRonde, frequent contributor of the Creative Cow forums:

Dave’s Stock Answer #1 For Current Footage Woes:

If your footage is any kind of the following — Native HDV, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, which contain complete frame information, and they toss out the duplicated frame information on the following frames.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of woes.

Personally I had very few issues with HDV or XDCAM footage so I didn’t have the need to convert my footage prior of import but if you find yourself wondering what the hell is happening when applying some transformations, then Dave’ explanation sheds some light. My favorite codec for footage interchange is BitJazz’s SheerVideo. It has total fidelity to the original footage, it’s lossless, takes less than half the size of uncompressed and you can use it for roundtripping without loosing a single bit of your original footage.

So, I talked about writing a program to convert Final Cut projects into Premiere projects. While the final program will be more or less accessible for anyone I have a sort of preview and this is only for the geeks among you. If you’re not technically expert, and I mean at the programming level, you are more then encouraged to keep reading this but I just wanted to warn you, it’s gonna start sounding like a gibberish very soon

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Quick announcement to let you know that Lightroom 2.0 beta is out and it’s delicious. Version 2.0 adds the long-awaited dual monitor support and adds the ability to do non-destructive photo retouches right inside Lightroom. The retouches don’t rely on plugins, are completely undoable at any time, unlike Aperture. Lightroom remains very fast and responsive. On my MacBookPro it still run circles around Aperture, even with dual monitor support. Unfortunately the beta doesn’t allow the use of Lightroom 1.x catalogs yet but it’s pretty straightforward to import photos in the new application. In case you didn’t catch the link before, click here to download the new public beta. This are very exciting times for photographers!