Possible Films Has a New Website

I’ve been working off-and-on with Hal Hartley since 2001 when he was my college thesis advisor. I’ve spent time as his teaching assistant, production manager, editor, and now we’ve built a new website for his company Possible Films. There have been several incarnations of the site over the years. In 2004–05 I packed envelopes with DVDs and CDs ordered through PayPal. For the past few years the site has been a very simple affair, with no direct sales. But now we’re doing something that represents a very interesting future for film distribution. We’re selling downloads of movies and soundtrack music straight from the website. We’re also premiering original content (again, video and audio) for free streaming. The really exciting goal is to premiere a feature film as a downloadable movie. There’s no DRM on anything, so our customers can watch the movies they buy in any way they want. I put a lot of work into this project over the past few months, and I’m really proud of both the look and the functionality of the site. Please, take a look at it, and if you like what you see, think about buying something.

A Deleted Shot from Camera Noise

I was cleaning out my closet yesterday and I found a VHS tape of the original 31-minute version of Camera Noise. It’s currently at a lean 29 minutes, and I was curious if there were any gems in there that I cut just to get the length down. It turns out I was definitely right to cut out everything I did, and of course the whole thing is almost unbearably long. But here’s a fun little bit from what’s still the best scene I ever shot.

Is Vuze No Longer Generating Revenue For Me?

I can’t imagine many people made money from the Vuze HD Network. But I happened to pull in some serious, much-appreciated cash from the fluke popularity of Two Night Stand last summer. I earned back production costs of the film in a single quarter. Vuze was one of the only user-generated content networks to do pre-rolls with payments that didn’t require clicking on the ads. But now with the latest release of the Vuze client, the HD Network has turned into a collection of RSS feeds for stuff like Rocketboom & the Onion News Network; content producers who don’t need any help getting hits. My videos still show up if you do a specific Google search, but I can’t see any way to just stumble across them while browsing, either in the client or on the web. And I no longer see any pre-roll advertisements. I used to see a few dozen seeds for Two Night Stand at any given time, but in the past week that’s dropped to 7. Vuze really seemed to be attempting to bring something worthwhile and legitimate with the Bittorrent platform, but I guess it didn’t work. It’s a sad end to a noble experiment.

A Strange Image in A Nightmare on Elm Street

In honor of Halloween, we had some friends over last night and we watched Young Frankenstein followed by A Nightmare on Elm Street. Halfway through Nightmare, we noticed an amazing poster on the wall behind the doctor at the sleep institute.

Nightmare on Elm St Cat Poster

 

Yes, that’s a giant cat riding a cable car in San Francisco. There was also a dogs playing poker tapestry in the basement where Mr. Krueger met his original end, but we didn’t get a picture of that one. Nice work, set dressers!

Editing Snapz Pro Source Files in FCP

At my current gig, I sometimes need to use videos generated by Snapz Pro. We recently ran into a problem where previously-working FCP timelines wouldn’t render and would generate the mysterious message “Codec not found. You may be using a compression type without the corresponding hardware card.” I had already found that capturing videos at 30fps in Snapz generally led to FCP reporting the frame rate as 10fps and resulting in generally unreliable editing. I could never be sure the in-point I chose in the viewer would actually be the in-point in the timeline. It’s important to run Snapz videos through Cinema Tools to conform them to 29.97 or whatever frame rate you’re working at. But the new problem seems to be related to resolution. With Snapz I invariably capture some bizarre resolution with the plan of re-framing it in FCP. These days there has to be a good reason for me to work in a codec other than ProRes, so I’ve been saving the Snapz videos as ProRes. Unfortunately, It seems that although Snapz can save the videos to ProRes, if it’s a weird enough resolution, FCP and Compressor  are unable to generate new video. Compressor says “Processing service request error: Codec not installed.” I didn’t have this problem in the summer, so I suspect it’s related to a QuickTime update. Between this summer and now, the computers we’re working with were upgraded to QuickTime 7.6.4. The solution I’ve settled on is saving the Snapz videos in the Animation codec. The Animation codec doesn’t seem to have any resolution restrictions, and it seems well suited to screen captures anyway.

Streaming Netflix on my Blu Ray?

netflix_ps3_1Look, I’m just going to admit this. I don’t use my Blu Ray player very often. Most titles that are available on Blu Ray are large, new releases, and if I wanted to see them I saw them in the theater. I watch a ton of HD TV on my DVR. The indie films that frankly I hardly ever see in theaters anymore (sorry, business I work in, but my TV is awesome and your theaters are a pain in the ass) are almost exclusively available on DVD. I pay the extra money for Netflix to send me Blu Rays, but I only have a handful of Blu Rays in my queue.

But like a lot of Netflix subscribers, I’m getting more and more accustomed to the instant gratification of “Watch Instantly.” The selection is growing, and it’s a wonderful rogues gallery of films nobody wanted enough to tie up with restrictive licenses. We even get movies that have been out of print for years. Hal Hartley’s Trust is only available in the U.S. through Watch Instantly. Unfortunately I don’t have an XBOX 360 or a Roku, but I do have an Internet-enabled TV, and of course the “let’s hope someone comes up with some interesting way to use this” feature BD-Live on my Blu Ray player. So far both the TV and Blu Ray player haven’t gotten much use from their Internet connections. I’ve been hooking up my Macbook Pro to my TV via DVI-HDMI cable and an optical audio cable, but that requires all kinds of plugging and unplugging and doesn’t allow HD streaming through Watch Instantly. Both my TV and Blu Ray player are Panasonic, and neither of them has partnered with Netflix to allow streaming on their devices. And I don’t want to buy another device right now.

Today I learned that Netflix will be sending out special discs to PS3 owners that will enable them to use Watch Instantly through BD Live. Now the obvious question here is: why not my Blu Ray player too? What does that supercomputer PS3 have that my Blu Ray player doesn’t? Well, obviously the large hard drive and massive processing capabilities, but neither of those seem particularly necessary. I have a small amount of storage space available for BD Live material, and my Blu Ray player can obviously handle the processing necessary to play back HD video. Is there a technical limitation here, or is it a business limitation?

Previously Netflix had an exclusive relationship with XBOX 360, so opening it up to the PS3 is a big step. But opening it up to every Blu Ray player would be huge. It would paradoxically create a larger market for Blu Ray players while simultaneously reducing the market for the overpriced discs. Anything that makes it easier to get movies in the hands of consumers (for a fair price) is a good thing.

Alternate Fay Grim Titles

I was looking for a particular Hal Hartley clip on YouTube and I came across an interesting video.

I vaguely remember this happening while we were working on Fay Grim. A bunch of CalArts students made their own titles for the movie as an exercise. I don’t think I ever saw any of them. In this one (heavily influenced by the opening titles for Seven) I somehow end up credited as the editor and Carlos Brooks as writer/director, although Carlos directed Quid Pro Quo, another HDNet Films movie I made the credits for.

Another Kind of 3D

Jacoby-Kyle2

I still haven’t shot a roll of 16mm on my Bolex Stereo system, but halfway through the (excellent) Toy Story 3D double feature yesterday I realized that I could retrofit my animation project for 3D. I spent today rendering left and right eye versions of the episode that I made almost a year ago. Unfortunately there’s no good way to distribute 3D video online, so we’re stuck with the old anaglyph nightmare. Back when I bought my linear-polarizing glasses for the Bolex Stereo system, I was sent a pair of Dr. Jacoby-style Red/Blue glasses by accident, which has come in handy today. If you happen to have some red/blue glasses, check out Time Travellin’ Episode 1: Robot Overlords (3D version) on YouTube. I recommend using the “Red/Cyan Glasses: Optimized (Dubois)” setting rather than the full color version. It makes things a little easier on the eyes.

Jennie3D

Cloud Backups

So it appears that T-Mobile has lost all the Sidekick personal data stored on Microsoft/Danger servers. This is bad news for the Cloud. I always assume that my data is safer in the hands of professionals. But apparently the Sidekick data wasn’t backed up? It got me a little nervous about the status of my 5 years of Gmail data, which I’ve always been content to leave up on the massive Google server system. I imagined my Gmail data existing in multiple locations in massive data centers all over the world, and it could never be lost. But I’m in a backing up mood anyway, so last night I used Gmail Backup to download all my messages.

I was watching SNL (typical of this season so far, it was almost entirely bad) so I wanted to stay in the living room. But I wanted to download the data to the desktop computer in my office. I decided to use the Screen Sharing built in to OS X. I logged in to my desktop computer using my laptop. Everything worked perfectly right out of the gate. Nice work Apple!