Tea Leaves

iStopMotion is a wonderfully simple little Mac app that helps you make stop-motion movies. I made the below movie with a tethered Canon Rebel XT, because I’m an abject, hopeless wanker. An easier (and probably more correct) way to do it, however, is probably to use the program’s excellent support for the iSight camera.

OK, OK. As you can see, I’m not Martin Scorsese. I’m probably not even Ed Wood. But I still had fun.

I wonder how much work it would be to redo Spartacus with Fisher-Price figurines. The hard part will probably be getting the lead character’s shirt off.

Jonathan writes:

My brother has uttered his semi-annual wish that someone would just tell him what DV camera to buy.

My reply is: I live to serve

People use their DV cameras for producing different types of work. Since I don’t know what, exactly, your brother is interested in doing, I’m going to construct an ideal consumer and write my advice to him. My ideal consumer wants a DV camera because he wants to produce some body of work. He wants to produce finished product (by which I mean, not just take a bunch of raw footage of his cats and then occasionally watch an hour of it, unedited). He wants that product to have some level of professionalism, although he is not a professional. In other words, he’d like to produce something that a complete stranger might look at and say “hey, this was pretty nicely done,” although not necessarily at the level of something one might make part of a portfolio for getting a job (hopefully, a person who is aiming to make their living as a videographer doesn’t need my advice on equipment).
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I have a problem that I can replicate reliably. If I capture in OfflineRT mode in Final Cut Pro I can generally only capture about 30 seconds of video before I drop a frame.

This has led to me spending hours debugging my camera, film, and every element in my chain other than my computer before reaching the sad conclusion: there’s nothing wrong with my equipment per se. The 867 Mhz Powerbook G4 with 640 Mb of memory is just too slow to capture more than about 30 seconds of OfflineRT video (30 seconds, incidentally, sounding suspiciously like “the amount of time it takes some internal buffer to fill up before it has to page to disk.”) My working theory is it’s not a problem during the ‘true’ capture — after all, I’m able to capture full rate DV just fine — but the extra CPU time spent compressing the frames into photo JPEG is just a tiny bit slower than needed, resulting in hosage.

So, not particularly wanting to buy a new laptop, I arrived at a workaround: turn off “abort capture on dropped frame”. I leave the warnings on, just on principle. I turn the abort back on when I capture at full res.

I know, I know, I’m playing with fire. But what else can I do? I’m addicted to OfflineRT editing. It’s a sickness.

I’ve found precious little information on the net about OfflineRT, and of course nothing useful from Apple about system requirements. So let me turn the question around: is anyone else out there using OfflineRT on a laptop? What model laptop are you using? Do you experience dropped frames?

The walnut cake movie is the first movie I’ve made in a while. It was made without any planning or forethought. Every time I make a movie, I screw it up in new and interesting ways. Here’s what I learned from my screwups this time:
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I do all of my work on my laptop. I have an external drive for large projects, but the desire to keep everything on the laptop means that I really only want to spend internal hard drive space on the essentials.

I love LiveType, but I only use it once in a blue moon, generally when finishing a project up. Unfortunately, Apple’s dopey installation program requires that LiveType (like all the Pro apps) be installed completely on the internal drive. Here’s how to route around their bogosity.
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So, you made a half hour film. At DV resolutions that takes up about 5 gigabytes of storage. How are you going to back it up?

Well, yes, you can print to tape. I do that too. Print to tape, keep the tape forever, yes, that’s a good idea and all but it seems so…low tech. Where’s the excitement? Where’s the danger?

Press to DVD, you say? Excellent idea — just write a DVD-R with the raw DV data, and — oh, wait. This file is bigger than we can fit on a single DVD. Well, that’s OK, we can use Stuffit or some other tool (live dangerously — use dd!) to split it into manageable chunks. Of course, if one of those DVDs suffers a media failure, you’re screwed. And writing multiple copies of multiple DVDs can be such a drag.

Here’s what I do, for when I’m feeling really paranoid:

Take your 5 gigabyte movie and split it into 100 or 200 megabyte chunks. Take the chunks and feed them into MacPAR deluxe or its Windows equivalent. Generate about 30 to 50 parity files; for each parity file you generate you’ll be able to tolerate a media error in one of your data files. At your leisure, write the data files and parity files to a few DVDs. Most of the media failures I’ve encountered on DVD-Rs tend to affect individual files rather than the whole disk, so I think it’s a reasonable strategy to just split the data and parity files over two discs. If and when you encounter media failures, you just use MacPAR to reconstruct the lost data from parity.

If you want to be super-paranoid, you can even sprinkle the parity files among any other DVD-Rs you’re writing at the time (I find that I always have some headroom when writing data DVDs).

Voilà! You have a redundant array of inexpensive DVD-Rs. You are now cyber. Congratulations!

Filmmaking is a creative process. One of the exciting things about editing on a computer rather than with traditional video or film editing machines is that we are free to try new techniques in a comparatively risk-free way. Because of this freedom, I personally found it a bit jarring that Final Cut tries, in subtle ways, to channel the user into doing what I considered to be annoying bookkeeping when capturing video from tape. Specifically, Final Cut tries to encourage you to log your clips rather than just capturing them.

It took me a month and a large project to be come face to face with the problems that you invite when you don’t log your clips. Now, I understand why the authors of Final Cut push us this way, and I’m a believer. Except for the most trivial of projects, always log your clips. Let’s have a brief discussion of what it means to log clips, what the process is for doing it, and most importantly, why you should log clips.
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Last night I finished my first large project, a 25 minute oral history documentary about my grandmother. I’ve been working on it, on and off, for about six months. When I started, I didn’t know anything, really, about video production, and now, through the arduous process of making tons of mistakes, I probably still don’t know enough to claim to be skilled. However, I am very good at screwing things up. So I do at least have some information to share with you, which is “Here’s what I learned by screwing up.”

The most important thing I learned is: in a video project, what you hear is more important than what you see.
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While trying to figure out what the hell, exactly, the lyrics to Aimee Mann’s superb song Red Vines mean, a friend pointed me to the wonderful animated video (Quicktime). The video was done by artist Evan Mather. I was interested in his work and enjoyed it. His animation workflow involves Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, and Final Cut Pro. I especially liked his short film Icarus of Pittsburgh, but perhaps that’s just location-based snobbery.

As is typical in these matters, I’m the last person in the world to know about Mather’s work.

One of the most misunderstood features in Final Cut Pro — other than all of them — is “offline” mode. This is probably because the word “offline” is overloaded in the program’s GUI. The most common usage is simply that the media is offline, but you can still edit the project.

However, there is another, more useful definition of “offline” in FCP4, sometimes referred to as “Offline RT”: editing in a resolution lower than that which you eventually intend to deliver. It’s not obvious how to do this, or even that it’s possible at all, without a little investigative work. But once you figure it out, it opens up the possibility of a much quicker workflow.
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Now that I actually have my official copy of Final Cut Pro, and its voluminous, ox-stunning manuals, I want to learn how to use the tool better than I have. I find myself wanting to jot down notes all over the place on things I should try, or things that work great (or don’t). I’m setting up this blog as a repository for those notes.
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