Kyle Gilman’s Camera Noise Productions

Every once in a while I go through the various unlabeled and ambiguously labeled DV tapes I’ve been collecting since college, mostly in the hope that I’ll find the long-lost rehearsal tape that I shot with Jennie Tarr before we started shooting Camera Noise. I remember it being quite good. But I also think I taped over it.

Luckily, I found this little gem. Uncle Gary Breaks The Burro is a 4-minute story that my uncle told me for a class called “Life Stories.” This was the warm-up for my later project The Life Story of Kyle Gilman as Told to Him by His Mother Mary.

Last week Jennie Tarr and I did a photo shoot with Jenny Woodward for what I hope will eventually be a very quick photo animation technique. Here’s a preview.

Film lists. Like film itself, they are on the way out. When we did Lake City we shot on super-16mm and transferred all of the negatives to HDCAM-SR with 10-bit log color. We edited with downconverted DVCAM tapes, then did an online using timecode. Since it was edited on an Avid, and I used ALEs from the lab to batch capture the DVCAMs, keycode was also tracked automatically. It was good to have around, in case for some reason we had to re-transfer something from s16, but in the end the HDCAM-SR tapes were our master tapes. And obviously if you originate in HD you don’t have any film to track. So believe it or not, in all the modestly budgeted films I’ve worked on, I’ve never had to deal with film lists before.

There are still some times when you need to track film. If you shoot 35mm, you might cut negative and make a print the old-fashioned way without a DI. In that case you’re going to be using keycode like crazy. You’ll probably conform a workprint before you cut your negatives too. Or if you shoot 35mm and do a DI, you’ll benefit from the increased resolution of 2K and 4K. At the moment it is not cost-effective to scan in all your dailies at 2K, and certainly not at 4K. So in that case your DI facility will have to scan the negatives from a film list that you generate.

But I’ve recently been working on a movie shot on s16 and transferred straight to DVCAM. It was then edited in FCP. I was not involved in the project until they brought me in at the hand-off to the sound editors when it became clear that there were problems. Final Cut Pro is a great piece of editing software, but it’s so flexible that if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing, you can get in trouble fast.

The first problem is working with film shot at 24 fps and telecined at 23.98, and trying to synchronize it with BWFs (Broadcast WAV files, which are WAV files with timecode) from a digital sound recorder. One way to avoid this hassle is to conform all the video to 24.0 fps using Cinema Tools. But it’s really best not to do that. Sound editors don’t like it, and you’ll have some trouble viewing on an external NTSC monitor or outputting to tape. It’s best to keep everything at “video speed.”

The Two Boots Pioneer Theater on Avenue A and 3rd St. in Manhattan is one hell of a cool theater. For 4 years, Ray Privett has been the man behind the curtain keeping it the weirdest and most experimental of New York’s first run-theaters. I first met Ray when he gave Richard Sylvarnes’s The Cloud of Unknowing a week-long run, guaranteeing a review in the New York Times. At the time I was the brand-new head of distribution at the brand-new company The Possible Films Collection. Only after weeks of emailing him did I learn that he was my friend Randy Bell’s new roommate. We went on to do a sold-out screening of Hal Hartley’s short films, where we sold a ton of DVDs, a two-week run of The Girl From Monday, and most importantly, an evening of my own short films called “Kyle Gilman: Some Success but Mostly Failure” which featured the world premiere of Two Night Stand. I’ve never screened my films together like that at any other time, and it was really gratifying to do it with such a surprising and appreciative audience.

And just to connect me to The Pioneer even closer, The First Sundays Comedy Film Festival moved there a few years ago. They were the first people in NYC to show any of my films. They even showed the Bad Webcam Sex video as part of The Pioneer’s online video series (after some other online video series decided they didn’t want to share their screening slot earlier in the week).

But after 4 years of a job that never seems to take a break, Ray is leaving The Pioneer. He will be missed. I hope he has a great time with his new projects, and I hope The Pioneer doesn’t suck without him.

Marshall Herskovitz, co-creater of the Internet series Quarterlife, has an article in Slate today about what he’s learned about the Internet by doing an online series. The main thing he seems to have absorbed is that a partially naked girl in the thumbnail is the only thing you need to get a lot of hits. It just highlights how ridiculous it is that YouTube gives only 3 options for a thumbnail. The thumbnail is the poster for your movie. It is essentially the entire advertising campaign. How hard would it be to give us the option of choosing any frame from the video as the thumbnail? It’s not 1995, we have this technology.

I was working on a movie in Avid Xpress Pro (on Windows XP) recently and I figured it was time to finally get some equipment so I (and a client) could watch the video on an external monitor. A DV deck is the usual way. You hook up the deck to the computer via firewire, the deck translates the DV to analog, you hook your TV into the deck and you’ve got NTSC video. Trouble is, I have very little use for a deck. Most projects I edit these days come to me already on a hard drive. DV tape is obviously on its way out, and spending $2000 on a deck I won’t be using much longer seems a little silly.

I was hoping to get an Intensity Pro. I didn’t need to capture or output any tapes, so that seemed ideal since it could also handle HD. But then I remembered that Avid doesn’t play well with others. Avid only works with Avid DNA products like the Mojo. The Mojo is essentially a glorified digital/analog converter that also adds 2:3 pulldown to 24p video in realtime and retails for $1700. It’s worth noting that Final Cut Pro adds 2:3 pulldown for free.

I considered a D/A converter, but they all run around $200 and don’t have any tape decks, in case I do need to capture a tape here and there. Eventually I decided that a cheap camcorder was my best option. First I got a $160 Canon camcorder. With Avid Xpress Pro I was getting a 16 frame delay and often drifting out of sync, which I assumed was because it was a cheap piece of crap. I returned it and got a $190 Sony DCR-HC28 since I’ve had such good experiences with Sony decks. I still get the 16 frame delay with the Sony camcorder, but I don’t have the drifting problem. I was working on a different project in Final Cut Pro, so I booted up the Mac OS to see what the delay would be. Turns out it’s only 2 frames, which is what I usually expect from FCP with a firewire deck. That really surprised me since it’s the same computer. From what I’ve read in online forums, the 16 frame delay is standard for Avid without a DNA like the Mojo. I’ve turned on desktop play delay, which keeps the video in sync, but it makes editing a bit more difficult.

I don’t have any plans to start shooting home movies, so I can’t say anything about the image quality of the camera. I can only assume it’s horrible.

Well, it’s official, HD DVD is dead. Now you can finally get a high definition DVD player without worrying it’s going to turn into a Betamax. I’ve looked at the options available and it seems pretty obvious that much like my first DVD player, the best value comes from the Playstation. Way back in 2001 I bought a Playstation 2 because I wanted to watch DVDs on TV instead of on my computer. And also because I like to play the occasional video game. It turns out the Playstation 2 was a pretty bad DVD player, but it served its purpose for a couple years until I got a very nice standalone DVD player. The PS2 spent a few years in the closet until it was resurrected for Guitar Hero.

Now, all the Blu-Ray players available retail for $300-400. A Playstation 3 can be had for as little as $400. So for a few extra bucks you get a really fancy computer along with the ability to play high definition DVDs. I think it’s going to be a while before I pony up that cash. I’m still really happy with the quality of anamorphic DVDs on my plasma. It might have to wait until after I get a 1080p display. I’d love to get Rock Band though.

Other pieces of equipment in line ahead of the PS3:

• A new graphics card. Leaning towards an nVidia 8600. My 6600 is getting pretty long in the tooth.
• A spiffy HTPC case for the guts of my old computer. I’m planning to hook up my computer to the plasma TV in the living room so we can check IMDb without leaving the couch. We’ll even be able to do picture-in-picture. Also, we can watch videos downloaded from the Internet.
• A Blackmagic Intensity Pro. For only $350 you get HD out of your computer, and realtime downconversion to SD.
• A new HD TV. Probably a 42″ plasma for the living room, so I can use the year-old 37″ as a client monitor in my office. I’m hoping Panasonic puts out some smaller 1080p displays soon.

In the past I’ve surveyed the many issues of editing 24p video in a 60i world. A recent comment on that page reminded me that there’s another option that I hadn’t discussed.

Shoot 24p. It looks great. Once you’ve shot it in 24p, you’re never going to lose the “filmic” quality of the motion that you get from shooting progressive frames. Because you can only get interlaced video on a DV tape, what’s on your tape is now interlaced, but it’s interlaced in the same way that The Matrix is interlaced when it’s shown on standard definition TV. It still looks like The Matrix, it doesn’t look like the 11 o’clock news just because it’s interlaced.

Editing in 24p can be tough. If you don’t really understand what you’re doing you can end up causing a lot of unnecessary trouble. So you can edit in regular old 29.97 NTSC. You probably won’t see the difference. The one time I see a problem with footage that was shot 24p but edited at 29.97 is playing on my HDTV. My TV is a progressive scan monitor. It automatically detects 3:2 pulldown and removes it from the video, which results in a nice progressive picture. This works best when the video has a continuous pulldown cadence. A film that is telecined has pulldown added in the same cadence throughout, so once the TV picks up the cadence, its work is done. The same is true for videos shot and edited in 24p. However, a video shot at 24p and edited at 29.97 has a pretty good chance (80% I think) of changing its cadence on every cut. So after every cut I see a few frames of interlaced video before the TV figures out the new cadence.

The good news is, nobody else notices this.

My advice is, if you’re going crazy trying to figure out how to edit 24p video, do yourself a favor and skip it. NTSC 29.97 works just fine.

Like many other people, I saw Cloverfield last weekend. And I got really queasy. The handheld video was unbearably shaky. The movie was pretty good, even if it required a lot of suspension of disbelief. It’s funny how we’ll accept that a giant monster from the sea would attack NYC with no provocation, but not that a human can walk from Spring St to 59th St in 15 minutes.

But what really made me think was this motion-sickness thing. I saw The Blair Witch Project when it came out, and I didn’t have any trouble with the shaky-cam. I didn’t like the movie, but that was because it was awful. Am I more susceptible to motion sickness now that I’m older? Why is that? Google hasn’t been much help. Apparently motion sickness peaks when you’re around 10. But I read books in the car all the time when I was young.

My big question was, in a film designed for sensory assault, is it OK to induce nausea in the audience in addition to the usual increased heart rate? I’m going to have to say no. A movie can be a lot of things, but vomit comet should not be one of them. It’s definitely possible to shoot a film from a first-person perspective without tossing the camera around. Just watch any Ross McElwee movie. Of course, Ross never has to deal with giant sea-creatures in his movies (except in the upcoming “Gojira’s March”) so he tends to have a pretty steady hand, but the point is, shakiness is not required for a sense of immediacy and reality.

Here’s my dream script for the beginning of a first-person horror movie:

INT. AN AWESOME SOHO LOFT PARTY

A scary noise is heard outside.

General Pandemonium.

                   RANDOM PARTYGOER #1
      Oh shit, we have to get out of here!

                   JOSH (to the camera)
      Come on Bobby, there's an army of 50-foot
      vampires attacking the city!

                   BOBBY (from behind the camera)
      Hold on, let me get my Steadicam harness!

The camera becomes noticeably smooth and steady.

                   BOBBY
      Ok, let's run!

The camera glides out the door.

Last June I noticed a trend caused by the arbitrarily assigned thumbnails on my Truth @ 15fps YouTube videos. Videos with Jennie thumbnails got almost 7 times more views than videos with Kyle thumbnails.

Now that we’re allowed to choose from 3 options for thumbnails, I’ve switched all the Truth @ 15fps videos to Jennie thumbnails (with the exception of the first one which Jennie’s not in) which has raised the average of those videos to 5,765. Although the other ones still lead with an average of 29,700, the difference is closer to 5 times as much now. Since last June, the Bad Webcam Sex video views have doubled to over 2 million.

What’s interesting me today though, is my film Two Night Stand, which at 18 minutes is a tough sell for YouTube. They don’t even let people upload videos longer than 10 minutes anymore. I managed to get a director account before they imposed that limitation though, so I got grandfathered in. Here are my thumbnail options:

When I uploaded it in July 2006, the only option was the middle one. I switched it to the left-hand one a few months ago, and hits have gone up considerably since then. People commenting who have actually watched it all the way through are way up too, which is the most important thing to me. As of today, the video is at 97,506 views, which is way more than even Getting Laid Tonight, which is both short and has a suggestive title. The main difference I see between the two thumbnails is that rather than just a shirtless Chris in the original one, you get an indication that there may be a naked lady under those sheets in the left-hand option. It’s a lesson for the kids out there.