Kyle Gilman’s Camera Noise Productions

It turns out I worked on 3 films that are premiering at Sundance this year. I knew that Blind Date and Choke would be there, but I just discovered today that Quid Pro Quo will be there too. I haven’t seen the final versions of Choke or Quid Pro Quo, but I’ve seen Blind Date quite a few times and it’s very good.

So far I don’t have anything lined up that would be eligible for Sundance ‘09, but the year is still young.

I upgraded my computer a couple weeks ago, swapping out the motherboard, CPU, and RAM, but leaving the hard drives and case alone. I thought it would be pretty simple. I knew Windows would work without a hitch, but I knew from the beginning that I’d have to reinstall the Mac OS because it had been patched to work on my old AMD processor. What I didn’t know was that the OSX-on-a-PC drive interface situation had flipped since the last time I installed OSX. With my nForce4 motherboard, it was a hassle to install onto SATA drives. With my ASUS P5K-E P35/ICH9R motherboard, OSX refused to even see my PATA/IDE drives. My DVD burner and my Mac hard drive were both IDE, so I was in trouble. I went through a lot of work, so I thought I’d document it all for anyone who’s dealing with the same problems. The geniuses over at the Insanelymac forums were a huge help. Here’s what I did:

1. Bought a new SATA hard drive. I can never get enough storage anyway.
2. Used VMware Workstation to format the disk to HFS+ and install the OS. I followed the instructions on this post, although I used the Kalyway 10.4.10 install disc because I need 10.4.10 in order to run FCP 6
3. Replaced AppleAHCIPort.kext with the one at this post
4. In the BIOS, switched SATA mode to AHCI (from IDE)
5. BOOTED UP OS X!!!!!!
6. Ran script to get onboard components (sound, ethernet, etc) working.
7. Switched SATA back to IDE mode in the BIOS and booted into Windows.
8. Followed these instructions to enable AHCI mode in Windows XP
9. Switched SATA to AHCI mode in the BIOS and booted into Windows.
10. Suddenly I had a nasty audio skipping problem. It was clearly related to AHCI mode. It turns out it was caused by an eSATA drive I had plugged in to the computer, but not powered on. My guess is because of the hot-swapping capabilities of AHCI, the system kept polling the drive trying to figure out what it was, while in IDE mode it doesn’t bother looking.

I’m sure I missed a few steps, but those are the ones that stick out in my memory. There might have been some extra fiddling with ATA-related kexts. I also continue to have a problem mounting the boot disk when I boot with cached kexts. I use the -f flag on the Darwin bootloader to get around that problem.

For me 2007 was the year of HD. I bought an HDTV, but more importantly, I edited a number of videos on my own computer in HD. It’s kind of old news for a lot of people, but it turns out DVCPro HD is a great format that you can play back from a regular old hard drive without any fancy RAIDs. In the past I’ve insisted on sticking with DV because I didn’t trust a regular old hard drive to reliably play back HD video. And at least on a feature film there’s always going to be an online assembly at the end anyway, so the advantages of working in HD are generally not as great as the hassles. One feature I worked on last year was edited with 14:1 compressed DV on a G4 Avid Meridien, so HD was beyond out of the question. It literally took an hour just to output one reel of the DV reference quicktimes for the sound editors. But despite the old-fashioned tech in the offline, we did the online in 4:4:4 1920×1080 at a post house, and it ended up looking terrific. I always say that in the end offline editing is just about generating a list of numbers for the online anyway.

But working in DVCPro HD has really opened my eyes. For one thing, it made my pretty nice 2-year-old AMD X2 3800 computer seem way too slow. Rendering times were unacceptably high. I’ve just upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4 GHz system with 4GB of DDR2 RAM and I’ve seen some real performance increases. Rendering titles is much improved, and realtime HD effects work really well. Of course, I’m still limited by slow hard disk speeds, but now I have 4 eSATA connections (2 built-in to the back of the motherboard and 2 from an SATA to eSATA bracket) which ensures that on the newer external drives I don’t have any Firewire interfaces slowing anything down.

All of the DVCPro HD projects I’ve worked on have been short, and came from P2 cards; my new favorite things. If there’s one thing that annoys me the most about editing, it’s real-time capture. It’s too slow!!! P2 cards copy faster than real-time, and generally have to be loaded onto hard drives during production, so in many cases I get a hard drive all ready to edit without having to load anything into the computer. This is the way of the future. In FCP there’s still some futzing around with conversion from the MXF format on the P2 cards to QT files, which seems like something that won’t last long. Avid loads MXFs without any conversion, which I find very cool.

We edited Blind Date using XDCAM. In this case it was PAL DV saved as MXF files to XDCAM discs, which are basically Blu-Ray discs in a cartridge. All I did was copy the files from the discs to a hard drive and we were ready to go. It was at least twice as fast as real-time capture, possibly faster. My favorite part was syncing up the 3-camera shoot. Everything had the same timecode, so it was a snap to group every bin using AutoSync.

The big new thing that I haven’t tried yet is Apple’s ProRes codec. I’ve done a little bit of testing and it seems to work really well and really fast, but I haven’t done any serious editing with it. It looks like I’ll have a chance in April when I’ll be editing HD video for an opera in Amsterdam with Hal Hartley. Everything will be shot in HDCAM and we’re going to capture straight to ProRes HQ and edit with that throughout the process. At the end it all needs to be converted to MPEG-2 for the playback hardware installed in the theater, so ProRes seems ideal. I will of course post more as I learn more.

Even though it’s New Year’s Day, it’s still 2 For Tuesday. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk. I hate about 25% of classic rock songs and when I listen to the radio in the shower I only have time for 2 or 3 songs. So if Rush comes on 104.3 on Tuesday morning they lose a listener for 8 minutes. But this morning I got two great Zeppelin songs off the back wall, so it was cool.

Happy New Year to my half-dozen readers.

I lost my domain name, kylegilman.com a little more than 2 years ago. I had a registrar who didn’t automatically renew after the first year, and I forgot to do the manual payment. So it went into the redemption period, a murky backwater of domain names where you can pay exorbitant amounts of money to “manually” renew the domain name you paid $5 for originally. I decided to let it expire because as far as I could tell it was of no interest to anyone else in the world. There are at least 2 other Kyle Gilmans out there, but they seem to be youngins without an active, commercial Internet presence. So I didn’t expect any trouble.

But it turns out there are unscrupulous people out there who figure an easy way to make a buck is to snap up any expiring domain names they can get their hands on in the hope that a couple of them will be worth a lot of money to someone. One of these Internet parasites registered my domain before I could get at it, probably using some form of domain “backorder” which automatically registers the domain as soon as it becomes available. So I contacted the fellow and offered $25, which I considered the approximate worth of my domain to me. I was originally told that the minimum bid was $99 which I understandably laughed at. He eventually came down to $40, but by this time I had already registered kylegilman.net and only wanted to make sure he lost money on the deal. I figured even $40 could net him a couple bucks so I decided to wait it out another year. That year came and went and the domain got renewed.

Finally this year I noticed the domain was expiring. So I quickly headed over to godaddy.com and placed a $18.99 backorder on kylegilman.com, assuming that nobody would bother registering it again, and that I was safe anyway because I had a backorder.

But no. Godaddy failed me. Someone else grabbed it before me. There’s something like a 3 hour window when domains are deleted and there’s really no way to know which domain stealing service is going to get it first. So I will wait another year and see what happens then. Some day it will be mine again.

Weird update:Yesterday I got an email from Godaddy telling me kylegilman.com had been transferred to Godaddy. I thought that was a strange coincidence but figured this domain pirate probably uses some other service to steal the domains then transfers them to Godaddy to hang onto/sell them. This morning I did a whois search to find out who the bastard was, and was surprised to find the following entry:

Registrant:
Kyle Gilman
684 DeGraw St #2
Brooklyn, NY 11217
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: KYLEGILMAN.COM
Created on: 05-Dec-07
Expires on: 05-Dec-08
Last Updated on: 06-Dec-07

The bastard is me! Now if you go to kylegilman.com it redirects to kylegilman.net, just like cameranoiseproductions.com, fictumentary.com, and twonightstand.com. Our long national nightmare is over!

Man oh man do I love new toys. Yesterday I picked up the Behringer Podcastudio Firewire (note the German-style compound word). Now, let me be clear. I have no interest in podcasting. I tried listening to podcasts back when they were all the rage and I didn’t see the appeal. I prefer to read stuff while listening to music. The Podcastudio is just a nice, ridiculously cheap way to start a home recording studio. It comes with a microphone, an adorable little mixer and a firewire interface that brings audio into the computer via a higher quality method than the line level input on my sound card. I’m starting production soon on an animated web series and I need a nice, simple way to record the voices without spending too much money. This is a lot better than my original, misguided plan to use $15 teleconferencing headsets and Skype. I spent a few days researching the available low-end pro audio equipment and I kept coming back to the various components of the Podcastudio. At first I thought I’d just try one or two of them, but the bundle was too good a deal.

My favorite thing so far is the mixer. It has two microphone inputs and two stereo line-level inputs along with tape in and out. It has just slightly more than I need in a mixer at this point. I’m planning to record two voices simultaneously so the inputs are perfect. My main disappointment is the 3-foot XLR cable for the microphone. I want to get that thing as far away from my computer as possible so I’m going to pick up some longer cables, and of course an additional microphone.

So far I’ve only done a little bit of testing but the sound quality is pretty good. There’s a small, but distinct amount of high-frequency noise coming from the mic pre-amps on the mixing board. The microphone seems acceptable without being overwhelmingly great or anything. I’ll probably pick up another one. The headphones are below average, with a tinny, echoey sound, but I appreciate the circumaural design. They will be acceptable for voice monitoring but they’re definitely the weak link in the system.

The big computer news this week is the release of Apple’s “Leopard” operating system. So every tech journalist is dutifully stacking it up against the underwhelming release of Windows Vista earlier this year. But at this point does the OS really mean anything to anyone? Having spent a year with a computer running both Windows XP and Tiger I can say for certain that the features of the OS make no difference to me. They both are no more or less than a way to run applications. They both run them with a minimum of fuss. The user interfaces to me are essentially interchangeable. One has a dock, one has a taskbar. On my Windows keyboard, one uses the Ctrl button for most keyboard commands, the other uses the Alt key. All the other differences make no difference to my productivity or happiness. I run Tiger for Final Cut Studio, and XP for everything else. And lately the majority of my days are spent using Firefox, which is the same in every operating system.

Don’t get me wrong. In the past, operating systems have made huge differences in my productivity. Does anyone remember how horrendous the Mac OS was right before OS X? It might have been groundbreaking in 1984, but compared to Windows 98 it was junk. Windows 98 was not so hot itself. Windows XP was a real step forward in stability, if nothing else. But what is Vista going to get me that XP doesn’t do for me now? I installed the 64-bit version of XP when I first bought this 64-bit computer, but it was too much hassle to track down new 64-bit drivers for everything, and Avid Xpress Pro didn’t run on it, which was the real deal breaker. So I’m still running the 32-bit version and it’s just great. Vista sounds like just another hassle for no apparent benefit. Leopard probably wouldn’t be a hassle, but I don’t think it’s going to wow me once I’m forced to upgrade when Apple decides that FCP can’t run in Tiger anymore.

I was briefly excited today because Google Adsense announced a YouTube component. But it wasn’t available until a few hours ago so the anticipation made me think it would be better than it is. It turns out you can only get content from chosen “partners” just like on regular YouTube. So it’s just another way for those same people who already get money from YouTube to get money from other websites. Of course, if my visitors click on the ads I get a cut now too, so that’s nice, but I’d like to generate revenue from my own content, not from lonelygirl15’s. Revver has been doing this for a long time and I’ve made some good money from them so far, but my viewers on YouTube dwarf the Revver viewers. We’re talking over 2 million views. My content is legit, and Revver has no trouble verifying that. Why can’t YouTube start allowing any clearly legitimate content be monetized? If they can put ads on more video pages they will earn more money. It’s that simple. Anyway, here’s what the new YouTube/AdSense player looks like. Have fun watching other people’s videos.

So far all the ads are “Gilman” based with no other context. Way to go guys!

I should have done this earlier, but here’s my distribution package for the FCP cue sheet generating script I wrote for Fay Grim. This script generates the old-timey audio cue sheets that were necessary in the old days when people mixed on dubbers and dinosaurs ruled the earth. They do not generate the music cue sheets which are often required delivery items in distribution contracts. You should really just suck it up and do that manually. If you’re working in Pro Tools and have the ability to export text versions of sessions (usually requires something like the DV Toolkit) then you should try Agent Orange.

These are the instructions (which are also included in the zip file)

1. Upload the contents of the Zip file to an empty directory on a server where you can run PHP. Most web hosts allow you to run PHP. Give it a shot.
2. In FCP export an XML file of the sequence you want to generate a cue sheet for.
3. Upload the XML file to the same directory you uploaded the script to.
4. In Safari (Firefox and IE don’t work) enter the url of the directory where you uploaded the script plus the text “?file=filename.xml” where filename.xml is the filename of the XML file you uploaded. For example: http://www.15framespersecond.com/cue_sheet/?file=Reel 5.xml will generate a cue sheet for Reel 5.xml
5. Adjust the options to fit your needs, then print.
6. If you’ve uploaded more than one XML file you can select them from the dropdown list at the top of the screen.

I only made the script for my own purposes and I hope some other people get some use out of it. I do not have the time or the interest to provide tech support so the script is provided “as is.” Feel free to modify the source code as you fit.

There is a lot of hearsay, rumor, and innuendo floating around about working with Panasonic’s fancy HVX-200 camera. I have fairly limited experience with it, but I thought I’d throw in my impressions of the best workflow options.

Shoot 720pn on the biggest P2 cards you can afford. Considering the astronomical cost of P2 media, we’re back in the old days where storage space is a limiting factor. Now, the sensor on the camera is 960×540, and it uses fancy methods to squeeze some extra resolution to get to 960×720 (the actual resolution of the 720pn footage). If you go up to 1080p24, tests have shown you do get a slightly better picture, but at the expense of halving the amount of footage you can fit on a P2 card. You’re already getting something really good at 720pn and unless you’re a fanatic about resolution you might not even see the difference. Shooting at 1080p24 also means the files on tape have 3:2 pulldown added in, which is just taking up space and you’ll have to remove the pulldown before you start editing.

Have a laptop on set with a PC card slot. There are a lot of products out there that will read P2 cards or hook up directly to your camera via firewire but I find them dodgy. I don’t like extra steps. The old PowerBooks (before Intel) had PC card slots, as do most PC laptops, although many of them don’t have firewire ports. (UPDATE: You can get a “Duel Systems” (sic) adapter to plug the cards into a MacBook Pro) Hook up a firewire drive to your laptop and you’ve got yourself a perfect transfer station. You might need some drivers, which you can get from Panasonic. Just pop the full P2 card out of the camera, put it in the card slot on the computer, then copy it to a clearly labeled folder on the firewire drive. Come up with your own folder system, but keep it clear and consistent like you would with camera rolls or tapes. Then erase the entire contents of the P2 card and put it back in the camera. You should have at least 2 cards so you can keep shooting while you copy. (Another update: According to Shane Ross, you can’t just delete the cards anymore, you have to use a P2 card formatter, which you can get from Panasonic.)

You need an extra crew member. Unfortunately you’re going to need someone who only pays attention to media management on set. Trying to split up the job can lead to lost footage, which is bad. The best person to have on set is an assistant editor or the editor. That way things can be organized exactly how they want it. If the post-production staff can’t do it, you’ll need an additional person who knows computers.

Make a backup. Look, hard drives crash all the time. And they’re really, really cheap. Buy an extra one and backup as often as possible.

Edit with new versions of FCP or Avid. P2 is bleeding-edge stuff. Don’t waste your time trying to make it work with FCP 3. It just doesn’t work. And I’m sure those upstarts like Premiere Pro and Vegas are just fine, but why are you making everything so difficult? Avid has the advantage of working natively with MXF so you don’t do any transcoding, but because there’s no tape name associated with the files there’s a lot of worry about what happens when things go offline. I haven’t had enough experience working with P2 in Avid to dismiss any of those fears, so proceed with caution.