My Cable Television Debut

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Current TV commissioned a video about my Truth @ 15 Frames Per Second series and I am happy to announce that it will premiere on Tuesday December 16, 2008 at 11pm on the Brand Spanking New Show (Edit: Turns out this was in the UK only). I know you’ve never heard of it. It’s a cable channel Al Gore co-founded in order to democratize television or something. I’ve watched it a bit, and they have some really great stuff. It’s like an all-year short documentary film festival. If you have cable or sattelite TV you probably get it. My new provider DirecTV has it on 366. Time Warner Cable is 103 in NYC and on various other channels in other cities. Dish is 196. Comcast is 107 in most cities. AT&T U-Verse is 189. Visit their website if you can’t find it on your local provider.

If you prefer to watch television on the Internet, you can watch the video here instead.

The Costs of Blu Ray

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I’ve had an HDTV for almost two years now, and I’ve generally been content with the quality of HD television broadcasts and anamorphic DVDs. But when I saw I could get a Panasonic BMP-BD35 Blu-Ray player for only $250, I got myself an early Christmas present.

panasonic-dmp-bd35
It arrived last night, and the first thing I tried was a blind A/B test of DVD playback. I hooked up the BD35 and my beloved Sony DVP-NS315 DVD player to the TV using component video cables. I saw almost no difference between them. The BD35 outputs 480p through component cables, and the 315 does 480i, but my Panasonic 9UK television does a great job removing 2:3 pulldown so the end result is basically the same.

It sounds like admitting I still watch VHS or something, but my TV is not even fully 720p. It’s 1024×720. I know, I know. It’s practically EDTV over here. It also doesn’t have an HDMI input, so I can’t test to see if the BD35’s upconverting is better than my television’s. I could get an HDMI input card, but on my Panasonic 9UK model plasma it can only do 1080i, not p, so I’m not that excited about spending over $100 to get something I can already do with component.

I don’t have any professionally produced Blu-Ray discs yet, so I tried burning my own. I don’t have a Blu-Ray burner or media, but I used Toast 9 to encode some of my own HD videos to AVCHD and burned it onto a DVD-R. It seems that most recently produced Blu-Ray players can read AVCHD encoded material from a DVD even though it’s not on a Blu-Ray disc. What I’ve seen so far is an increase in quality over SD DVD but I wouldn’t say it’s incredibly different. Of course there are a lot of variables in my experimentation so far. I don’t know anything about the relative quality of the Toast encoder. I do know it takes a long time to encode. It’s multi-threaded, so it’s pretty much maxing out all my cores, but it takes longer than almost any other kind of encoding I’ve done on this computer. My first tests were with DVCPRO HD 720p-originated footage, which at 960×720 is even lower resolution than my TV. Those didn’t show much difference from SD DVD at all. My 1920×1080 animated series (which originated as 12 megapixel stills) had a clearer increase in quality. The title graphics especially were much sharper. The US version I have will not play back video encoded at 1080p25, although I do get audio and a blank screen while it’s playing and a single tantalizing frame of video just as I hit stop.

Having a Blu-Ray player in my home got me excited about the possibility of producing Blu-Ray discs for films I work on. I looked into the manufacturing costs, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. It’s about $4/disc to manufacture a short run of 1000. It’s not DVD-cheap, but it’s pretty good. However, the dirty little secret of Blu-Ray manufacturing is the dreaded AACS. DVDs had a quaint DRM system called CSS. It is still in use, but it was permanently broken nine years ago, and is absolutely no impedement for anyone who wants to make copies of DVDs. It costs money to add CSS to DVDs, and pretty much every large distributor still uses it. But the great thing about DVD is that CSS was optional. If I want to do a 1000-disc run of my short film, I only have to pay the manufacturer their fee, which has been subject to intense downward pressure over the years as competitors lowered their prices. Right now I could do it for about $1000.

AACS is mandatory for Blu-Ray. It is expensive. And it is not subject to price competition. If I want to make 1000 Blu Ray copies of my HD short film, I can pay someone like Pacific Disk a $500 setup fee plus $3850 for the manufacturing. That’s a perfectly reasonable price, and over the next year it’s pretty much guaranteed to go down. But before Pacific Disk can make any copies for me, I have to get a license from AACS. It costs $3000 just to get myself registered with them. Then I have to pay 4 cents per disc plus a $1000 order fulfillment fee, so $1040. There also seems to be a $1300 charge for a content certificate. In all it could cost more to get the AACS that I don’t even want than to actually manufacture the discs. That price could go down, or it could go up. AACS is the only game in town, so they can do whatever they want.

Basically in order to make Blu-Ray disc manufacturing economical you have to do huge runs. And that requires huge marketing budgets in order to get people to buy the huge number of discs filling up your warehouses. For now it looks like Blu-Ray will be dominated by the big studios who just happen to run AACS.

Switched to DirecTV

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When I moved into my apartment 4 1/2 years ago, I had Time Warner Cable and their Roadrunner Internet. The Internet connection was extremely unreliable and after about 6 months we switched to Verizon DSL, which has been rock solid with the exception of a few days with a router failure down the street somewhere, or something like that. It was fixed fairly quickly. The Time Warner SD video signal was also slightly unreliable. I got some digital breakup every once in a while, and on demand type interactive things never worked.

Things got really bad when I got my HDTV almost two years ago. We didn’t have any HD broadcast channels for the first several weeks, and it turned out the wiring on the way into our house was done really badly. We eventually got TWC to send a really great contractor to run a new wire from the tap, which resides in the back yard of our neighbors two doors down.

My girlfriend calls it the Time Warner Rat King. Read more →

YouTube Goes Wide!

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I remember when all my YouTube videos were encoded 4 frames out of sync. Times sure have changed. The YouTube video player is now widescreen, which is great because it really lets you get the full resolution of your widescreen videos, but it’s not so kind to older videos that haven’t been encoded in “high quality”, like the copy of Two Night Stand I uploaded in 2006. Embed codes still default to 4:3, but you can customize the size to whatever you want. Unfortunately the thumbnail seems to be letterboxed, so in a 16:9 player it ends up window-boxed.

Update Dec 6: Things have changed even more. Embed codes are now widescreen, and thumbnails are no longer windowboxed. Even better: 720p!!!!! If you’ve uploaded a 720p or higher video, add &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 to the end of the param value and embed src urls in the embed code and you can actually embed 720p YouTube videos on your website. To view 720p videos on YouTube, add &fmt=22 to the end of the url.

YouTube Partner Update

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Three weeks in to my tenure as a YouTube “partner” displaying ads on my YouTube videos, I’m getting some reporting on Adsense. I’m averaging 1200 views, 10 clicks, and $2 per day. That’s significantly more than I’m earning with my website-based ads. I did finally add the Bad Webcam Sex video to the mix, so I’m sure that’s helping, although I think Two Night Stand is pulling in the most traffic right now.

Unfortunately, the ads that show up for Two Night Stand tend to be for bedroom night stands, which isn’t exactly relevant, but someone’s clicking on some of these ads.

Don’t Write Off Avid

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Over the past couple months I’ve had a wonderful opportunity to check out two cutting-edge tapeless workflows, both of which seemed at first glance to be difficult to work with in Avid. First was the Arri D-21 with an S.two digital magazine. Before I had a chance to look at it I was actually told that it would not work with Avid. I was pretty sure there’s always a way to make anything work, so I went in and looked at it firsthand.

S.two’s system records to a heavy-duty hard drive array that can then be plugged into a fancy dock that processes the video and allows you to ingest into your computer via HD-SDI in real time. Essentially it turns a tapeless workflow into a tape workflow. You get deck control and everything. The one advantage FCP has over Avid in this workflow is that the mag automatically generates a FCP XML file that allows easy batch digitizing. What you get with Avid is more work for the Assistant Editor because you have to enter the start and stop times and names and whatnot manually. Why they didn’t use the cross-platform ALE format, I don’t know, but it’s really not a big issue. It’s just like working with tapes.

With the RED workflow there’s absolutely nothing anywhere close to “realtime” processing. What you get with RED is a lot of waiting. It’s like processing 35mm film. It takes time. For some projects this isn’t really a big deal, for others it is. RED and FCP have been like two peas in a pod from the beginning, but Avid is getting things worked out nicely. The disadvantage Avid has at the moment is that it doesn’t read metadata from QuickTime files. If you were to import any QT file into Avid, its timecode would always start at 01:00:00:00. But the new REDRushes, which comes with REDAlert can create an ALE for easy batch importing.

The situation as I see it right now with all these crazy workflows being introduced, is that all you’re still doing as an offline editor is generating a list of numbers for the conform. In most cases, Avid and FCP are equally good at doing that. And if you feel more free and comfortable to create and actually edit in Avid, you should be working in Avid, no matter what anyone says about how well FCP handles newer tapeless workflows. Of course, that’s assuming you have someone in the production—such as myself—who actually understands what’s going on under the hood.

Monetized HD Video Online

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I just finished Time Travellin’ Episode One: “Robot Overlords”, my first new movie in a very long time. It’s also my first HD movie. I’ve edited a lot of stuff in HD over the past year or two, but nothing of my own. For the past few days I’ve been spreading the movie around the multitude of online video sites. My favorite is still Vimeo, because they have the best picture quality. But thanks to the limited amount of movement in each frame, this photo animation technique lends itself extremely well to video compression, so it looks pretty good even on YouTube (in “high quality” mode). But Vimeo doesn’t have any revenue sharing options. Call me crazy, but I’d like to make some money on my films. Vuze worked very well for me with Two Night Stand, but that was a kind of lucky fluke that I don’t plan on repeating. Of course I still uploaded it there, but the problem with Vuze is that it’s not something you can just embed in your website. You can embed a teaser clip, but in order to see the whole thing you have to download it in the Vuze client.

To download the full version visit vuze.com

Obviously the reason they can afford to host HD video is that they’re using the Bittorrent network to share the bandwidth load. If Vuze switched to a web-based video distribution system they’d lose a lot of money on bandwidth costs and might not be so eager to share revenue with content creators.

I made a stand-alone website for this photoanimation technique and I had to choose one site to embed the videos with. I started with Revver, because I’ve earned about $120 from them in the past, and they have pretty good video quality. But all of that money came in a long time ago, and I’m not sure the drop-off has anything to do with the amount of traffic I’m getting. I feel like the quality of the advertising has changed, and fewer people are interested in clicking on the ads they’re showing.

I had a little experience with blip.tv before, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it. I uploaded the new movie there, and I was really impressed. There are a lot of advertising options, the video quality is very good, and there are many, many customization options. I still don’t quite understand everything I can do, but I’m learning. There seems to be an option to upload your own encoded flash video, which I tried, but it wouldn’t load. I’m going to look into that more. But it also seems that they’re not resizing videos when they do the encode. I uploaded a 1280×720 H.264 QuickTime file and the flash file is still 1280×720. The bitrate is variable and hovers around 700 kb/s which seems good enough. I haven’t had enough traffic on blip to get any money yet, so I’ll report back on how that goes.

In other money-making news, I finally applied to be a YouTube “partner” so I could get ads shown next to my YouTube videos. I’m still getting 1,000 daily views on Two Night Stand there, so I’m hoping that brings in a little cash. I won’t get any reports from them for 60 days though, so it’s a mystery what kind of money that will bring in. I hadn’t applied before because they ask you how many videos you plan to post in the next month and I figured I wouldn’t qualify because I didn’t upload frequently enough. But I went for it, and they very quickly appoved the application. I’d say anyone holding off on applying should do it ASAP. What I love so far is the ability they give to brand your channel and video. I added logos for my main channel, and the 15framespersecond channel The scariest thing so far: you have to individually submit each video to turn on revenue sharing, and if it isn’t approved it will be removed from YouTube. I’ve enabled ads on all my videos except the 2.5-million-view Bad Webcam Sex video. I’m afraid they’ll think it’s dirty, even though it is very, very not dirty. The “high quality” YouTube videos are actually pretty good now, and it’s a long way from the old days when everything was blurry and four frames out of sync. And you can’t beat those traffic numbers. A few million views is nothing on YouTube, which is crazy.

HVX-200 SD 24p on P2 Cards — No Reverse Telecine?

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A couple weeks ago I was working on a job that was shot on P2 cards with the HVX-200. The cameras were recording 24p SD. I logged and transferred and got 29.97 NTSC DV clips, as expected. When I tried to do a reverse telecine, I got nothing. If I selected a clip then clicked on “Tools/Cinema Tools Reverse Telecine” it opened Cinema Tools but the clip was not processed. If I opened the clip in Cinema Tools, the option to do a reverse telecine was grayed out. When I stepped through the clips they were clearly 24p video with 2:3 pulldown. If I ran them through Compressor and used reverse telecine to deinterlace in the frame control tools, I got what I was after, but that seems like it would be unnecessary.

We worked everything out by shooting 24pa, but I’m still not sure why I can’t do a reverse telecine in Cinema Tools on 24p footage shot on P2 cards. I did a test and set the HVX-200 to record 24p (not 24pa) onto DV tape. I captured it as DV-NTSC, and I had no trouble doing a reverse telecine in Cinema Tools. The situation seems to be confined to 24p material shot on P2 cards. What is it about 24p footage shot on P2 cards as opposed to DV tapes that makes reverse telecine difficult?