dispatches

A really fast video edit

I didn't convert to ProRes, I just imported my folder of clips from the day into Final Cut. I quickly reviewed what I had, I made some in-out points, and I threw it into a timeline. The one cheat was the sound. I was by a busy road with lots of conversation nearby, so I imported the footage from when I shot the snow geese last year, and used that sound instead.

Without the conversion the playback was choppy and needed rendering. Even then, Final Cut was unhappy, but I went directly to an Export-Quicktime Conversion to H.264, auto key frame and data rate, medium quality output, and I had a 720x404 file to upload. Fifteen minute edit, eight minute conversion. Upload and out of here.

A followup vid from Folklife

The Folkfloor from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Last spring I posted a pair of time lapse videos of the Folkfloor installation and deconstruction. My plan all along was to use this footage in a piece about the Folkfloor community, which is a small volunteer army that, for 22 years, has gathered to construct a temporary dance floor at the Northwest Folklife Festival. Here, finally, is the finished piece. 

Latest vid: "Why Therapy Works"

Here's the finished piece of Robin's talk last week. It's a great insight into the trajectory of successful trauma treatment.

The secret to great audio for video

Audio capture comparison from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Lately I've taken to capturing my audio for video on a separate device, and syncing it in Final Cut using Pluraleyes. Here is a great demonstration of the difference this makes. 

This is from a video that is going to go on Robin's new website, of her speaking about trauma therapy. In this case, I used a Zoom H4N to capture the sound. The unit has a pair of stereo microphones in it that are good, but you can also set it up in 4 channel mode and include two more inputs. I hooked in a wireless lav mic into that channel. A lav mic by itself can sound unnatural and remote, and it's useful to have another input to get room tone, which is what the stereo mikes gave me. The mix on the video is unaltered. It's exactly what the Zoom recorded. This is the same technique I used to record John and Paul's wedding, but there I used my wireless to transmit a signal from the soundboard.

In this case, the Sennheiser MKE-400 on the camera sounds dreadful. It's echoey, and there's a nasty light fixture buzz that I didn't notice until I started filming. One thing video will teach you is to pay attention to ambient sound, a skill I'm still developing. The Zoom just ignored that buzz. 

Now for quick, on-the-run video I've had good results from just the Sennheiser on the camera. You need to be close to your subject (5 feet or less), and really alert to room tone. In many situations juggling another device (if you work alone, like I generally do), is just too much. But when the situation is stable and you're planted in one spot, there's no substitute for the quality that a dedicated audio capture rig will give you. 

Latest wedding video

John & Paul's Wedding from Doug Plummer on Vimeo.

Here is last week's wedding video. They didn't want my full treatment, story-of-the-relationship video, just a document of the ceremony for their friends to see online. I captured audio with a Zoom H4N, which I can't recommend enough. The sound is so much cleaner than anything from the cameras and their external microphones (which was my fail-safe backup option). Using my wireless receiver, I captured a direct feed from the church's soundboard. I had the unit perched under the roses and I got good ambient sound from there, 

I used two cameras for this, setting up one to get an overall view, and manning the other with the longer lens. With the 12 minute limit on CF capture, I had to switch back and forth between the two bodies to not miss anything. Having separate audio capture made the post much smoother, and with Pluraleyes it's a cinch to sync it with the video streams.

The latest obsession

A little while ago Elly gave me her Yamaha electric keyboard. She might as well have given me a mainline supply of crack cocaine. 

I have completely succumbed to the spell of the piano. It is all I want to do. For two days I just played scales and swam in the different feelings that different keys gave me. I figured out the C-F-G chord thing that can go along with a whole lot of melodies. I found about a gazillion variations within Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I started cruising YouTube for tutorials, and fell under the spell of Bach. For the last week I've been learning to decode musical notation with the help of the Prelude in C Major. 

The last two days I've had piano lessons from two different teachers. Both are treating me a bit like a prodigy, which is fun for the self esteem. I have no business playing as well as I am after two weeks. But when it becomes necessary to perch a clock near the thing so I don't forget what part of the day I'm in, progress is going to happen in short order to anyone. 

Today I found someone who I want to work with for awhile. He is of the firehose mode of information transfer, my favorite type. Right away he was challenging me to come up with minor diminished chords on command, and correcting my hand and seat position. I knew that I needed some outside influence before I acquired a host of unconscious bad habits, which may be one reason the fiddle never took. I learned the notes by mimicking my favorite fiddle recordings, with no attention to technique.  By the time I got some professional attention I had ways of holding the bow that I was never able to overcome, and I never mastered proper intonation. This was shortly before I met Robin, and she was not keen on sharing a house with a beginning, out of tune fiddler. I made my choice. 

This instrument I can plug headphones into if necessary, though I'm already starting to rearrange the living room in my mind to accommodate an upright. At today's lesson I couldn't believe the difference the weight of a real piano key made, and the subtlety it imparted. 

If only there wasn't this pesky business that I'm supposed to run. 

Pre and post processing

 

unprocessed 

 

default settings 

final (larger on Daily Photo)

 There are two decision trees I navigated to arrive at this image—one on the ground, and one in front of my computer.

Anytime I wake up to fog I head to the Montlake Fill, the birding mecca a mile down the hill. I have met dejected photographers there on foggy mornings, with fast 500mm bird photography lenses who would wish the weather were otherwise. With a wide to mid tele zoom, I'm happy to work the sere winter landscape, which only looks better the more dreary it is.

I had been working my usual obsessions—the tangled trees, the bare twigs against still water, the glistening spiderwebs among the alder catkins. I turned and saw a group of runners approaching, and I had about 3 seconds to consider if I was in the right place. I composed from where I was standing, and waited for them to enter the frame. I followed them around the circling path for the next minute and got another dozen frames off, but none of those compare with the first shot in the series. Often the initial reaction is the truest, as it acts before the thinking mind has a chance to mess up the process.

As anyone who has worked in a digital workflow for more than a week knows, the RAW image right out of the camera is the worst your image will ever look. Every image needs a modicum of tweaking. I have a set of default settings that everything gets, and I refine from there.

Image 1 is the right out of the box shot. Image 2 is with my defaults, 5400 color temp, -.55 exposure, up a little on the black and contrast. Image 3 shows what you can do with adjustment brushes.

I wanted the overall look to be coolish, but that mushed down the color of the ground vegetation, so I ramped up the yellow on just that piece of the frame. I didn't like how dense the nearby copse of trees looked, so a second adjustment lowered the contrast on most of the rest of the image. Then I zoomed in and painted a mask on just the runners. I lightly upped the contrast, saturation and sharpness on them.

Nothing happened on Photoshop subsequent to these adjustments. These were quick and modest processing tweaks that brought out the potential in what was already present. I consider them akin to dodging and burning in the darkroom—a straight print off a negative is often the worst your image will ever look.

 

 foreground adjustment

background adjustment

runners adjustment  

  

How to protect against hard drive failure

You need to think of hard drives as lightbulbs. They burn out. 

The always useful David Alison informed me of a S.M.A.R.T. monitoring app for my drives, Smart Utility. It may have just protected me from a serious hard drive failure. 

I have 12 hard drives connected to my MacPro. Most are 1 or 1.5tb drives, and I'm gradually upgrading them all to 2 terabyte drives. I use a fabulous product made by MacGurus called a Burly Box, each of which hold 4 drives via just one eSata  connection. A Sonnet card manages the array.

SMART status is a way that your hard drive monitors the state of its own health. It doesn't catch everything that can go wrong with a drive, but it keeps track of anomalous behavior that suggests something is about to go awry. However, there are various ways to interpret that data. 

There's a free, always-on app called SMART Reporter that perches in your menu bar and has one color signal for your entire array. If it's other than green, you have something seriously wrong. 

Smart Utility is a $25 app, but it monitors the drives with much more granularity. Too much, perhaps—it identified three of my drives as “Failing,” because the temp reading had exceeded the parameter at some point in the past. The app has the option to turn off monitoring of this particular setting. If this seems brash, Google's research suggests that temperature is not a significant factor in hard drive failures. Bad sectors, however, are indicative of a drive about to flame out.

One drive did show up as having bad sectors, and Smart Utility flagged it as “Failing.” Smart Reporter saw nothing wrong, probably because the drive wasn't sick enough yet. 

I'm getting a warranty replacement for the year-old drive from Seagate. All before I lost anything.