I edited this promo for The Marriage Ref a couple weeks ago. It was shot entirely on the Canon 5D Mark II. It was a really fun experience, and Mr. Seinfeld came in a couple times to work with us. It’s great to see something I edited released so quickly but the quality of the encoded video is pretty low. It’s my understanding that this full version of the story will not be shown on TV.
Add comment February 2nd, 2010 at 1:06 pm Filed under: Editing News Web Video
For years when people asked me if I had an iPhone my response was “No, I have a phone that makes phone calls.” Well today I have a phone that does all those things an iPhone does and it makes phone calls. I got myself a Nexus One.
The phone arrived yesterday, and due to some rather dispiriting conversations with T-Mobile customer support, I was unable to connect to the 3G network. You see, I was a VoiceStream Wireless customer from 2002. (Look it up kids, or ask your grandparents about it. They won’t remember it either.) My rate plan hasn’t existed since the days when MySpace was cool. And I obviously didn’t have a data plan. I once tried to use the web with my old phone-phone and it was unbearable. My first step was to call T-Mobile customer support before I purchased the phone in order to verify that I could switch to the lovely Even More Plus plan, which at $59.99 for 500 minutes, unlimited text and data, is a stone cold bargain. I was told in no uncertain terms that the only way the Nexus One will work is if I purchase the phone with the Even More plan, which at $79.99 and a 2-year contract is not a good deal. Even with the $250 subsidy for current T-Mobile customers, I come out behind over two years with that plan. I have the cash now. Why get stuck in a contract?
So I did my research online and it seemed pretty clear that I could use the Even More Plus plan with this phone if I paid full price. I just went ahead and ordered it, hoping for the best. That’s not something I usually do with $530 purchases, but I felt that I was in the right on this one.
The phone arrived yesterday and it is frakking beautiful. My life is already well-integrated with Google, and this takes it even further. All of my contacts are synced with my GMail contacts, and of course GMail works right out of the box. The few times I use a calendar I always use the Google Calendar, and guess what: Google Calendar is the default calendar on the phone.
I set all this up using my Wi-Fi network at home since I still didn’t have a cell data connection. I could make make calls right away, but still no 3G. So I contacted T-Mobile customer support again. And again I was told that I could only use the Nexus One with the Even More plan and that it would not connect to the network otherwise and would I like to sign a 2-year contract now? As if the phone can tell I’m paying $20/mo. more. I didn’t think I was going to get anywhere with this one, so I hung up and again I was left with a phone that makes phone calls and can get on the Internet only if someone forgets to password-protect their router.
I decided to just change the plan myself using T-Mobile’s website, but rate changes don’t go into effect until the next billing cycle, which for me is 2/14. Since I only had 14 days left to return the phone for a refund, I started to worry. Even though everyone on the Internet was telling me it would be fine, I still had to go through the wall of ignorance at T-Mobile in order to make it work. This morning I gave it another shot and was connected to my new favorite person: Shawn F, rep ID #13-20832. He confirmed that I had purchased the phone at full price without a rate plan or contract and as such I could use the phone with any damn plan I wanted. 15 minutes later I was on the 3G network.
The lesson here is that T-Mobile needs to educate their customer support. And don’t give up on your dreams, because they do come true.
For years it’s been people searching for pictures of Jennie. But today it’s me!
By the way, I’m thinking the next animation episode will be clothing optional.
2 comments January 12th, 2010 at 11:36 pm Filed under: News
It’s been over a year in the making, but Episode Two of my planned decade-spanning animated time travel web series “Time Travellin’” is finally finished. Take a look at “A Common Misconception”
I learned a lot about animation by doing this, and I’m hoping the next one comes a little quicker. But if I keep getting all this paid work, it’s going to take forever.
2 comments January 12th, 2010 at 11:29 am Filed under: Animation News Web Video
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.
Add comment December 20th, 2009 at 9:21 pm Filed under: News Web Video
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.
Add comment November 30th, 2009 at 11:44 am Filed under: Editing
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.
Add comment November 18th, 2009 at 7:35 pm Filed under: Web Video
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.
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!
Add comment November 1st, 2009 at 3:12 pm Filed under: News
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.
Add comment October 29th, 2009 at 5:27 pm Filed under: Editing Tech
Look, 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.
Add comment October 26th, 2009 at 11:14 am Filed under: News Tech
