I’ve been hard at work on my WordPress video plugin since I got back from editing Maron season 2 (premieres May 8 on IFC!) in LA a month ago. I finally tackled some things I had been putting off.
First and most important, I internationalized the plugin. When I first started cobbling this plugin together in late 2010 I had a very specific goal in mind, and that was to make it easier for me to post videos with thumbnails. I had a frequent need to show clients work-in-progress videos and I didn’t want to wait for Vimeo to transcode my perfectly good videos, so I used my existing WordPress plugin to share password-protected videos. It always annoyed me that I had to save a thumbnail file and upload it separately if I wanted to have an image show up in the video window so I thought I could save myself some time.
Of course it did not save me any time and since I’ve been working on productions with actual money lately I usually have an assistant who uploads videos to fancy services like DAX. So the plugin became a thing to improve just for the sake of improving it, which led to expanding its scope way beyond what I originally planned.
At this point the plugin has been downloaded over 164,000 times and we can assume that a number of those people are not native English speakers. Over the years I’ve seen those [code]__( ‘Some text’ )[/code] things in code examples but I never really understood what was going on with them. I had taken a look at the I18n for WordPress Developers page and it kind of baffled me. I had never used the sprintf function before and that seemed complicated. But it’s actually really simple, and when I finally sat down a couple weekends ago and went through the whole program to add those [code]__()[/code] things, it wasn’t so much hard as it was incredibly tedious.
But now it’s done, and if you’re interested in translating the plugin, please let me know. I already have Spanish, French, and Danish volunteers.
The other important and actually more tedious issue was adapting the plugin to multisite installations. I had never used WordPress Multisite and I assumed it would just take a little adjustment to fix the problems users had alerted me to. It was not little, and I wish I had never started working on it. If the plugin is network activated, all the individual sites encoding queues are visible on a network encoding queue, and you can set the major FFMPEG settings on a network level. You’re welcome multisiters.
There are a whole bunch of other things, including a re-written gallery pop-up system and the option to use JW Player. Check out the changelog for the full list. And if you have any questions, please create an issue on Github.
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Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man and The Pool (2023)November 21, 2023 - 4:40 pm
The Best Man: The Final Chapters (2022)December 19, 2022 - 11:26 am
16mm Student Film Remastering
/0 Comments/in Editing, News /by KyleWhile I was editing The Fall & Rise of Reggie Dinkins pilot (coming to NBC this year!) I spent a lot of time thinking and talking about fake documentaries and how they work. I was obsessed with them in college. I called them “fictumentaries” instead of mockumentaries because I thought “mocking” was a reductive way of thinking about the genre. Now I think “mock” is clearly referring to the other meaning of mock: not real or authentic. I even convinced Harvard to pay me a few grand to research the genre over the summer in preparation for my thesis film. Around the same time as Reggie Dinkins I listened to an episode of Hyperfixed about lost films, and it inspired me to do something about the 16mm fake documentary student films slowly turning to vinegar in my basement.
I checked in my crumbling box of film material that survived two apartment moves unopened. I had the original camera negatives for my thesis film, but I realized I left the negatives for my junior year film at Cinelab in Fall River, MA over 20 years ago. I emailed Cinelab and they still had everything in their vault! The boxes were sitting on top of an unlabeled can, and it took a while for Cinelab to verify that the can was unrelated to my film. (#1 lesson of film school: always label your film cans & tapes) So if anyone’s looking for “a single large roll of color reversal family films with boats in what looks like New England,” Cinelab has it.
Once I collected all my film materials, I brought them to PostWorks New York, where I’ve had the majority of my professional editing gigs. PostWorks scanned them in at 2K and I got to work. First, I was delighted to see that they scan all the way to the sprocket holes.
and in most cases the shot was matted in the camera so there wasn’t any picture there, but there were a handful of shots that were exposed all the way to the edge of the frame. I’m not sure why that happened. I can only assume it was operator error.
Since there’s no vertical space between frames like there usually is on 35mm film, 16mm film negatives are (or were) cut in an A/B roll checkerboard pattern. In the first frame above, you can see a little bit of black from the splice at the very top of the frame. There’s even more of the splice that would be visible on the bottom of the previous frame, but instead the negative cutters put in black leader on every cut and alternate shots on each roll so the majority of the splice is hidden in the black leader. When a print was made they would sync up the two rolls and only print the parts that had picture on them. In modern 2025 times, you run both negative rolls through the film scanner and manually edit them together. It looks like this:
That was the easy part. Then I had to color correct these ancient student films. Camera Noise was shot in 2001 on the worst, noisiest film stock around: 800T Kodak 7289. It was discontinued a few years after I shot it because it sucked. I don’t know if there was also damage from fading over the years, but the opening shots of Camera Noise had almost no blue information in them:
I’ve done enough color work in Resolve over the years to fake it, but this was tough. I had intentionally chosen to underexpose this terrible film stock to imitate other poorly-made student films I had suffered through, and now 25 years later I wanted to make it look a little better. Using the Lift/Gamma/Gain controls to adjust the color ended up making it feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. Then I found Darren Mostyn’s excellent tutorial on the RGB Mixer. Using his technique I was able to dial in the color and restore information into the blue channel before I added gain and gamma, and lowered the lift. I used the Lum vs Sat curve to desaturate the shadows a bit. And I added some noise reduction, high on the Chroma threshold, very low on Luma to preserve detail.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better than the old standard definition telecine I made from a 16mm release print, which was the only way to watch it for the past 20 years:
Here’s a little trailer I made to demonstrate the enhancement:
After Camera Noise, fixing up the sequel The Epic Tale of Kalesius and Clotho was easy. I shot it with the intention of doing the best job I could. I used much better stock, lit the scenes, and actually had someone else shoot it for me, so at the very least I didn’t have to turn on the camera and then run into position. The main challenge was the scene when my character goes to Jennie’s apartment to make a grand romantic gesture. It was extremely grainy. I think it might have been pushed a stop or two. Oddly enough, you can’t even see the sprocket holes in the full frame scan.
Once again, Resolve’s noise reduction tools came in handy with a big chroma threshold and low luma. I also had some trouble with the scene from Camera Noise that I showed in Kalesius and Clotho. In the old days I had to make a duplicate of the negative in order to use the clip in two different places. That led to some generation loss, which I tried reducing with sharpening and noise reduction until I finally realized I could use modern editing techniques to just cut in the original clip from Camera Noise.
There’s also a bunch of DV footage in Kalesius and Clotho that was transferred to 16mm using something like a kinescope. I don’t remember the exact technique, but I do remember that it was the cheapest possible method available and only DuArt was offering it at the time. I am pretty sure I still have the original DV tape, but I don’t have an easy way to capture DV tapes anymore, and I always preferred the weird look of the 16mm transfer so I kept it for this remaster.
I didn’t do anything to the audio because it was already digitally mastered even way back then. John Koczera, the staff tech guy in the film department rigged up a way to use a Steenbeck to trigger Pro Tools playback. It wasn’t perfect sync, so it would drift if you played it long enough, but it was good enough to do the sound editing and then bounce a final mix to disk. I don’t even know where the optical sound track is for Camera Noise, but there’s nothing worth saving in a 16mm optical sound track.
After all the remastering was finished, I had to do the thing I dreaded most in the whole process: actually watch these very personal, very embarrassing movies. I managed to get through them, but I had to watch a few scenes through my fingers because it was so awkward. I can say with the benefit of 20 years of professional editing experience that they are way too long, but also there a few good jokes that are built on solid editing.
And here are the final products! Enjoy?
A Decade of Editing
/0 Comments/in Editing /by KyleI have one day off with my son at school and how did I spend my morning? Editing! Here’s one second from the past decade of every season of TV, pilot, movie, commercial, or whatever that I can remember editing and have a copy of.
I think Marc Maron is in this the most, and I’ve definitely edited more of Marc than anyone else, but Robert Kelly is a close second. Really grateful to Jim Serpico for hiring me on so many of these projects.
You can catch cameos of me waving to the guy in the row boat, and the audio tape where I say “detriment to holding office,” which I believe is the only temp audio I’ve done that actually made it to air. Thanks to Bobcat Goldthwait for that sweet residual check.
Simpsons Editing GIFs
/2 Comments/in News /by KyleFrinkiac is an amazing resource that combines transcripts of every episode of The Simpsons with screengrabs and lets you make animated GIFs out of them. Here’s a collection of editing and filmmaking related Simpsons GIFs. I could make these all day.
I say this one a lot when a show is too long.
In college I used to claim whoever used the most star wipes would get the highest grade.
When I’m waiting for notes.
Trying to get the right sound effect.
Of course “Radioactive Man” offers endless material about making movies.
When you can’t make a joke work.
Free Countdown Academy Leader
/8 Comments/in Editing, News, Tech /by KyleI don’t know if this is still a problem that needs solving, but I always had trouble finding free countdown leader. Years ago I made this 1080p 23.98 ProRes Proxy QuickTime countdown by modifying the project that came with FCP 7. Feel free to download and use in your own projects. Click on the overlay pop-out icon to get the download link.
New Short Film “Strange Past”
/0 Comments/in News /by KyleThis is my new film Strange Past!
A couple years ago my wife Maggie Lehrman was on a writing retreat and emailed me this screenplay she had written for me to direct. I loved it, but it has a very important scene involving a boat on the Gowanus Canal, one of the most polluted waterways in the United States. When I write for myself I always imagine how hard it would be to shoot, and I would never write that scene. But it was way too cool to cut out. Thanks to my old friend/sailor Randy Bell and Owen Foote from the Gowanus Dredgers canoe club, we got a boat on that canal and it looks amazing.
These days I am very happy editing funny TV shows and not directing movies. I assembled a whole new team in front of and behind the camera because I wanted a totally new challenge. I brought in Laura Elizabeth Wood to help me produce, recent AFI grad Stefan Weinberger on camera, and longtime Hal Hartley co-conspirator Richard Sylvarnes handled production design.
The actors are a bunch of pros. I first saw Lauren Lim Jackson in a play with Maggie in college and she is frequently a dancer on Broadway. Jill Durso was my student when I was a teaching assistant. She’s an Emmy-winning producer and has recently started acting. Dan Cozzens had a large role in the start of my relationship with Maggie and acts in all kinds of experimental theater. Will Reynolds went to high school with Maggie and has been in a number of high profile off-Broadway shows. Joel Perez is a friend of a friend who was a very welcome addition to our group, and can now be seen in Fun Home on Broadway. Kyle Gilman is usually an editor, but I thought it would be easy to act again since the role of Jack is mostly just standing and watching. Since I’d be doing that behind the camera anyway, I assumed I could just stand in front of the camera and it would work just as well. Let me write this down here to remind myself. It’s not possible to watch yourself act. Unless you have a lot of extra time in the schedule for playback, you really need to cast someone else, because the directing suffers.
I had to edit Maron season 2 and Ned Rifle before I could really take the time to edit Strange Past. I think it was a big help because it allowed me to get enough distance from the material. I was a different person when I directed the film. After almost a year I was able to see the things that worked rather than thinking it was all garbage.
Finally, I got my childhood friend Adam Schoenberg to write the original music for the film. Adam is one of the biggest young American composers for orchestras, and I am lucky that he is branching out into film music. You can hear one of the beautiful songs he composed for the film on Soundcloud
Strange Past premiered at the Monadnock International Film Festival in April 2015 and I had a fantastic time there. I got tired of waiting for the rest of the festival process so I’m posting the film online for everyone to see. Festivals are fine, but I really just want people to see the film. I hope you enjoy it.
Noindex Password-protected WordPress Posts
/1 Comment/in Tech, WordPress /by KyleThis plugin does one thing and one thing only. It adds the text [code]<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>[/code] to the header of any password-protected post. Google and all other respectable search engines will leave your password-protected pages out of their search results. I don’t know why this isn’t standard practice and it’s possible somebody else has included this in another plugin, but I haven’t been able to find it.
Get it now from the WordPress plugin database.
WordPress Plugin v4.3
/2 Comments/in Web Video, WordPress /by KyleI’ve been hard at work on my WordPress video plugin since I got back from editing Maron season 2 (premieres May 8 on IFC!) in LA a month ago. I finally tackled some things I had been putting off.
First and most important, I internationalized the plugin. When I first started cobbling this plugin together in late 2010 I had a very specific goal in mind, and that was to make it easier for me to post videos with thumbnails. I had a frequent need to show clients work-in-progress videos and I didn’t want to wait for Vimeo to transcode my perfectly good videos, so I used my existing WordPress plugin to share password-protected videos. It always annoyed me that I had to save a thumbnail file and upload it separately if I wanted to have an image show up in the video window so I thought I could save myself some time.
Of course it did not save me any time and since I’ve been working on productions with actual money lately I usually have an assistant who uploads videos to fancy services like DAX. So the plugin became a thing to improve just for the sake of improving it, which led to expanding its scope way beyond what I originally planned.
At this point the plugin has been downloaded over 164,000 times and we can assume that a number of those people are not native English speakers. Over the years I’ve seen those [code]__( ‘Some text’ )[/code] things in code examples but I never really understood what was going on with them. I had taken a look at the I18n for WordPress Developers page and it kind of baffled me. I had never used the sprintf function before and that seemed complicated. But it’s actually really simple, and when I finally sat down a couple weekends ago and went through the whole program to add those [code]__()[/code] things, it wasn’t so much hard as it was incredibly tedious.
But now it’s done, and if you’re interested in translating the plugin, please let me know. I already have Spanish, French, and Danish volunteers.
The other important and actually more tedious issue was adapting the plugin to multisite installations. I had never used WordPress Multisite and I assumed it would just take a little adjustment to fix the problems users had alerted me to. It was not little, and I wish I had never started working on it. If the plugin is network activated, all the individual sites encoding queues are visible on a network encoding queue, and you can set the major FFMPEG settings on a network level. You’re welcome multisiters.
There are a whole bunch of other things, including a re-written gallery pop-up system and the option to use JW Player. Check out the changelog for the full list. And if you have any questions, please create an issue on Github.
Kickstarter for Henry Fool Part 3: Ned Rifle
/0 Comments/in News /by KyleTwo years ago Hal Hartley successfully raised completion funds for his film Meanwhile through Kickstarter and now he’s trying to finance a whole film. It’s called Ned Rifle and it’s the third and final film in the Henry Fool trilogy. The script is awesome, and the idea of making three films over nearly 20 years with the same group of characters and actors is wonderful.
Part 2 of the Henry Fool series, Fay Grim, was the first feature film I worked on in the post production department. I was Hal’s assistant editor for Fay Grim and if we raise the necessary funds I will be the editor for Ned Rifle. Here’s a fun video in which I recount some details of the previous films’ plot along with the rest of the crew and the actors who will reprise their roles from the first two films.
Really Cool New Feature in My WordPress Video Plugin
/0 Comments/in News, Tech, WordPress /by KyleI’ve always been annoyed that my WordPress “Video Embed & Thumbnail Generator” plugin required FFMPEG to make thumbnails. Most people are on shared hosting and aren’t allowed to install software like that on their servers. And even if they are allowed, configuring and installing it is a pretty substantial hassle.
I started my most recent coding burst with the inspiration that I could show the video in a little player in the browser and use it to find the exact timecode a user wants to generate a thumbnail. I planned to send that number to FFMPEG in order to get the image, but when I saw the video in the browser it looked exactly like a thumbnail. I wondered why I couldn’t just grab the image that the browser had gone through all the trouble of decoding already. It turned out I could do exactly that, and it was surprisingly simple.
So as of version 4.2, you don’t need any special software on your server if you want to turn a frame of video into an image. There are some limitations though. Your server needs to have either ImageMagick or GD. Most servers have one of these enabled, so that shouldn’t be a problem. Your browser also has to provide native support for your video format. Plugins will not work. That means this doesn’t support FLVs, WMVs, AVIs, or MKVs. Browsers have built-in support for H.264 MP4s, WEBM, or OGV. There is a helpful chart on Wikipedia that details the array of browser support for these formats. The short version is if you use H.264 MP4 videos in Chrome then you should be fine.
I also moved my development onto Github, which I am loving. It’s much easier to keep track of everything, and it allows for savvy users to offer their own code to merge into the plugin. If you’re having any trouble with the new release, please post it in the issues section.