Recently in Raves Category

Be sure to check out the blog post about the movie. It includes more information about the picture and several fantastic stills.

And so much a wedding symbolizes. So many questions it tends to raise: What is love? What is faith? It was our hope to explore these themes in a far more dramatically engaging way than we felt possible in a traditional documentary... Perhaps there is more within this story then meets the eye."

Yesterday was an interesting day for me—most days are, actually. But the planets seemed to be especially aligned, or maybe yesterday was a "rip, a hole in the time/space continuum" that "take us thru the event horizon." *

1. I got an email invitation to connect with another Tim Tyson on a social network site. What was particularly interesting is that I've been receiving emails for over a year, maybe two, intended for this guy. Apparently our email addresses at a particular email service provider are very similar, and people would type his incorrectly. Since we both have the same name, it's understandable.

At first I thought these were all some sort of junk mail. But they followed a pattern. Apparently he is a well respected videographer who travels the world filming special projects. Nice. (Maybe he's really me in another life?--hence my quotation above)

I'm not really sure how he figured out who I am or why he asked me to join his social network, but when I checked out his social network site (which talked about what he does for a living) along with his email address (which is almost identical to mine), I realized the connection. (You realize, of course, that this could only happen in a digital world with palm-sized, time-warping transporter devices, right?)

Even more amazingly, the "other" Tim Tyson recently finished projects with the British Council about Global Schools Partnerships. Amazingly, the last year I was a school principal, the Director of Bilateral Programmes from the British Council came to visit my school. She was interested in setting up partnerships between the UK and my school. And now the other Tim Tyson is shooting video about these projects?! What are the odds, I ask—even demand?!

The multi-year-long bizarre mystery of the Tim Tyson emails has been solved! But I save the best for last...

2. Imagine getting an unexpected email from a former student who writes this sentence: "I have come to realize that doing what is comfortable or popular tends to be far less rewarding than doing what is right." Now, this young man is only 18! He apparently has become somewhat of an activist for issues related to respect and social justice "for historically marginalized groups." His efforts have earned him national recognition, honors, and some significant opportunities.

My first encounter with younger students who felt a moral imperative to act on issues of social justice came during the Ronald Reagan years. (To cut big government spending, Reagan eliminated funding for homeless shelters thereby forcing the homeless to literally live on the streets.) Shortly thereafter, one of my 8th grade students first saw homeless people in downtown Atlanta. He was from an affluent home and had no idea such a thing could exist in our country. He was outraged, and, as an 8th grader, on his own, took it upon himself to launch a letter-writing campaign to the Georgia governor to have the issue addressed.

I've known many such young people since then—all with an inner calling directing their efforts to make the world a better place. I celebrate all of these young people who, at a very early age, feel compelled to act for positive change.

Their lives color the world with hope.

* Yes, I stole that line from a tweet by Miles Kahn, a producer for The Daily Show. That's actually part of what he said about tonight's show. I laughed out loud when I read his tweet.

I love video. I love timelapse. I love tilt-shift. What could be better than putting them all together? Well, watching it in full screen. Check it out.

Related articles

• Hands-On With the Lensbaby Fisheye and Soft-Focus Optics (wired.com)

Philip Bloom mentioned, in his master class yesterday, a file utility I had not heard of before, one that seems brilliant to me:  ShotPut Pro.  This program will copy your media files from their source (camera card) to up to 3 locations simultaneously.  Brilliant!

I think that always having an untouched copy of your original media files and a working copy of them is always a bright idea.  This practice not only gives you the option of having an emergency backup of your files in case of drive failure or theft, but provides you with some measure of future-proofing your media files for later use—perhaps in projects using CODECs we don't even have today.

I also use BackBlaze to automatically and continuously sync all of my data off site.  The three important parts of that last sentence are:  off site, continuously, and above all:  automatically!  BackBlaze is a steal of a deal at only $50 per machine per year for unlimited storage!  I just do my work using my machines, and BackBlaze is always keeping my offsite backup up to date.

If you were doing professional projects, where setting up the shoot required a significant investment or was time sensitive (can't be easily repeated, for example), using locally redundant copies of the original media and off site backups is essential!

Neil Smith, at hdiRAWworks, arranged for Philip Bloom to conduct a Canon HD-DSLR masterclass yesterday here in LA. This was the first time I've ever attended such a thing, and I rather enjoyed it and learned a lot too. The little tidbits you pick up are also interesting: like why the Canon 5Dmkii will only shoot video for 12 minutes. I always thought it was just a storage capacity issue. No. (We live in such a weird world.)

Philip showed several of his shorts, which, of course, are amazing. I've embedded a few of them here at tt.us from time to time. While they look great on the computer screen, they were stunning on the big screen with the HD projector.

He spoke of many things related to his craft, but I suppose I learned the most from his talk about setup, actually using the DSLR for video. I've never bothered with custom camera settings before but have already imported the superflat settings he recommended and am eager to try the workflow: shooting with the increased dynamic range, though visually initially less "interesting," and then grading the footage in post. It makes sense as I do the equivalent process with still photography all the time. We just can't get raw data out of the 5D. Philip says: "Yet..." (See Luka Crnkovic-Dodig's post: How to increase the Canon 7D/5D dynamic range, which includes this link to the superflat settings file, among others.)

In my own casual exploration through this space, I've ended up with a lot of the same software and equipment, and now have a better understanding of implementation and process for video and timelapse using my 5Dmkii. It's now time to play, play, play!  I'm also eager to explore timelapse.

Aside from being brilliant at what he does, Philip is very personable and has a great sense of humor. He also comes across as completely genuine and open about what he recommends and why. If you ever have the opportunity to attend one of his masterclasses, jump at it! I'm glad I stepped outside of my comfort zone.

Related articles:



• Canon Rebel T2i DSLR: 18MP and Legit 1080p Video for $899 [Digital Cameras] (gizmodo.com)
• Canon EOS 7D digital SLR (go.theregister.com)
• Canon's EOS 1D Mark V DSLR defying death, launching tomorrow? (engadget.com)
• The First Clips Shot on the Canon T2i Look As Good as the 7D [Photography] (gizmodo.com)
• Gorgeous (timtyson.us)

The Unhappy Hipsters just slay me!

Related articles

• Unhappy Hipsters (socialhallucinations.com)


• Interview with the Unhappy Hipster (trueslant.com)


• Unhappy Hipsters' parody Web site is a hit (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Jacob Bijani, Tumblr’s Creative Director, said “I always have to stop and think when setting a border radius in CSS, so I built a tool for it.” And so, Border-Radius.com was born. Easy, intuitive, interactive, practical, and gorgeously designed.

Beautiful!  But I would fall to my death!

Source:  FFFFound

Very clever time-lapse shot in Tokyo. To see the video in full HD, check out this link. Or you can click below to watch a smaller version from YouTube. To learn more about how the video was shot, go to the Laughing Squid.

Yes, I've ranted about my AppleTVs world without end!  Well, apparently, one of them was just completely messed up:  the hardware was bad.  Naturally, it wasn't under warranty.  (I think Apple only has a 90 day warranty unless you spend the extra money on AppleCare.  I always do for computers but hadn't for the AppleTV.)

So, I bought a new AppleTV.  My god!  The thing actually works!  After having been plagued with sooo many issues for sooo long with the other device, I was fully expecting this one not to function properly either.  But it works well!  And I purchased AppleCare for this one.

The only thing that greatly annoys me with the AppleTV:  the largest hard drive you can get is 160GB.  That's ridiculous.  I frankly don't give a rip what Apple thinks, Tim thinks he should be able to store his entire media library on the AppleTV hard drive and not have to clutter up the home LAN with streaming audio/video!  This would also give me another backup for the media files!

I do love being able to stream nearly 10,000 photos and music on the large flat panel TV downstairs for parties—like the one held here at the house last Saturday night.  (BTW:  Bristol Farms does a great job catering!!)  My photos just look awesome on the big screen, if I say so myself!  :)

I've made myself stop wearing a watch.  My iPhone has a clock on it that auto syncs to the network.  And, as I travel so much, that comes in handy.  My iPhone is always showing the timezone in which I currently am located, unlike my watch which requires a manual change.  I've gotten comfy going without the watch.

But this watch, with tiny lasers to indicate the hour and minute hand, would be enough to make me start wearing one again!

NPR, CPB, PBS:  all such powerful voices for deep, reflective, critical thinking in a time when we just tend to want some quick affirmation from those who support our current perspective on reality.  I've often, through the years, speculated that this is indeed the very reason these voices come under attack from political forces that feel challenged by dispassionate reason and reflection.

I've always had such great respect for Bill Moyers' work.  He asks deep and difficult questions in a quest for understanding and clarity rather than persuasion and opinion-making.  I stumbled upon, quite by accident, this Bill Moyers' Journla today:  an interview with Ted Olson and David Boies—unlikely legal partners joined to litigate against marriage inequality in California's ongoing battle with Proposition 8.

Having missed the broadcast (I was completely unaware of it.) I listened with interest as these three men had a provocative discussion of the case.  I was most curious how a brilliant, extremely conservative attorney and a brilliant extremely liberal attorney could in any way find common ground on this, of all, issues.  The conversation with Bill is fascinating and illuminating. In typical fashion, Bill asks some very demanding questions of these men.

This video and transcript, along with many other programs, can be found at PBS:  The Bill Moyers' Journal.

I just stumbled onto this new program, TuneUp, from TuneUpMedia.com. It's an iTunes plugin that has a number of really cool features:

• The program will analyze your iTunes library and report back all of the tracks that have incomplete information and create a "dirty" playlist.  Incomplete information might mean the track is missing any of the data listed in the graphic to the right.


• Drag any of the "dirty" tracks into TuneUp.  TuneUp then analyzes the sound footprint of the track to determine what the track actually is and offers to retrieve all of the missing meta data for the track.  In other words, you could have a track in your iTunes library called "Track 09."  TuneUp would figure out what the track name, artist, album, genre, year, cover art, and actual track number on the album are and populate all of that data, replacing the "Track 09" with the real info!  That's rather remarkable!  But there's more...


• TuneUp will follow what you're listening to, offer videos of the track in a sidebar (just click to play the videos right there in the sidebar), a bio of the artists, tell you about the upcoming concerts for that artist in your area, even let you purchase the tickets, share related items about the artist from ebay, let you tweet what you're listening to.


• Other features too...

I was having a perfectly good morning being all productive and everything. Then I headed on over to my RSS feed reader to catch up on "stuff." I hadn't cruised the feeds for a couple of days, so things were out of control—thousands of feed posts were lurking there demanding to be read.

I started with my personal reads and came across a video link from Ellison's blog to a short Valentine's film by some guy named zefrank. It was crazy funny! I laughed out loud. Who ever this Ze guy is, his sense of humor really resonates with me.

I wish he hosted his short videos on a traditional site that allowed you to embed them. I'd share some with you from time to time because, well... now I've subscribed to yet another feed! But, since he doesn't, check them out at the links.

I also liked several others, like this one. Now an hour of laughter has passed, and I'm blaming Elisson!

As I've said before, I just can't get enough of Philip Bloom's work. He even shares the link to the original HD file he shot (750MB) so you can compare that to the final edit—which, of course, is gorgeous.

I took the Canon out on the streets in the evening to test out it’s low light ability and to show this footage to the attendees on each day. I shot entirely handheld using just the Zacuto Z-finder optical viewfinder which gave me much needed stability and the ability to easily focus. I didn’t take the full gunstock rig out as I wanted to be really inconspicuous. I looked like I was just taking photos.

Using just one Zeiss 50mm f1.4 Nikon lens with a Canon Eos to Nikon adaptor for £20 off of ebay I managed to get some lovely shots. As 5dmk2 users out will testify shooting with this camera is hard due to the lack of manual controls, but having the nikon lens helped and I did the usual tricks to lock down the ISO. Generally keeping it no higher than 1250, occasionally 1600 but never higher as the noise levels would be unacceptable.

This was all shot 30p. Everything was converted to XDCAM EX 30p in Mpeg Streamclip to make editing easy. The first three shots use FCP smoothcam to give a slightly surreal look to them the rest is all handheld raw. As I said no grading. So I did the entire edit in 30p, exported as a complete movie, brought it into compressor. Converted to ProRes 422 25p at best settings and it looked great. Not just that but the music stayed the same speed and pitch. So easy!"

[Source: “Sofia’s People” Low light short on Canon 5d mk2 in 25p | Philip Bloom.]

Source: Cool Hunting

Obama is just so smart! Even numerous conservatives admit he didn't just take the Republicans to task, he decimated them!

How many times have I cursed the Caps Lock key. I've wished I could pluck if from my keyboard more than once.

Well... turns out, you can with a simple keyboard preference change!

Go to System Preferences and select Keyboard. In this window, click on Modifier Keys...

Now click next to "Caps Lock" and select "No Action". Easy!

I follow @PhilipBloom on Twitter. He does such amazing work. He has been in Dubai for the past several days shooting this video, Sky. This short timelapse beautifully captures the radiance of the city. And the music, Xibalba by Clint Mansell, is perfect for it.

I appreciate Philip's willingness to share how he does this with HD-DSLRs. It's so helpful to those of us who love to dabble. You can read about the process at his blog, here.

Be sure to watch this in full screen mode. It's beautiful.

He also has a uStream account and broadcast live from his iPhone today. I haven't tried that yet, but it's on my list!

Image via CrunchBase

Here's a great shortcut for downloading YouTube videos when using the Safari browser.

1. Go to the YouTube page with the video on it.  
2. [Command] + [Option] + [A] to bring up the Activity window in Safari.  
3. Under the Address Column find the YouTube page.  
4. Under that column, look for the largest file size, which will be the video file itself.  
5. Double click it to download it.  Done.

I love stumbling upon a cool technology trick.

Working out compression settings for video distribution is part art, part science, and a whole lot of witchcraft. Compression is just often difficult and can be very frustrating.

Well, tonight I learned that if you take a movie file that has already been compressed (select one, of course, that looks really good because it was well compressed) and drop it into the "Custom" folder under the "Settings" tab in Compressor 3.5 (part of Final Cut Pro Studio), Compressor will think about that file for a second (depending on the speed of your machine) and then create a custom preset of the compression settings used to create that finished project! And the description tag becomes the name of the movie project you dropped into Compressor.

Sweet!

Compressor reads the metadata from the file and figures out how the file was compressed and then returns those settings as a preset you can use for your own project compression. Now, even with good compression settings, if you have poor quality source video, you will get poor results. But the problem is often the opposite way around: you have a great project and can't get the compression output to serve a good finished product.

And here's another little tidbit: if you take a Compressor Droplet (a little preset "stand alone application"), right click on it, select "show package contents," open the "Settings" folder and drop the .setting file onto the "Custom" folder under the "Settings" tab in Compressor 3.5, Compressor will again create a custom preset of the compression settings used in the droplet.

Why would you ever want to do the later? You can't get to the setting details of a droplet any other way. So if you want to tweak them but don't have the original settings saved as a preset in Compressor, this lets you get to those settings as well as save the settings as a preset in Compressor if you choose. It's just one of those things you will never need until you do--and then you will be pulling your hair out trying to figure out how to do this. :o)

Thanks to Brian Gary and the helpful folks at rippletraining, just a few miles from my home, for these two helpful tips.

This is dubbed as the team's first step in its mobile platform development.

On Tuesday, the President's technology team released its first iPhone application, appropriately dubbed The White House. The app features blogs, video, photos, newsroom briefs, and the ability to watch live broadcasts over 3G or Wi-Fi."

[Source: The White House releases news, streaming app | Software | iPhone Central | Macworld.]

I've been trying to do a better job managing my weight. The clothes are starting to get uncomfortably tight, and I'm too cheap to buy any more--especially at a larger size.

I started shortly after the new year. My goal: lose two pounds a week until I reach my target. I input everything I eat and when I exercise into Lose It!, a free app, for the iPhone, I'm using to manage my goal. I'm now in week three, and for the past two weeks I've been on target. Now that gets me excited to stick with it!

Building projection can be fun and entertaining, but the people at NuFormer Digital Media, a Netherlands company, are taking this to a whole new level with amazing 3D building projections. Check it out.

The walls (facade or sides) of any building can be used. The projection is a digital re-creation of the architecture of a building. Architectural features of buildings are often used to fantastic effect. Due to the impressive size of the projection a spectacular visual experience is guaranteed. There are no size limits whatsoever."

[Source: Projections on Buildings - Impressive.]

Two hysterical important press releases from the Borowitz Report:

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report) - One day after announcing that she would be a commentator on the Fox News Channel, the network revealed that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's appearances would be simulcast in English.

"We are delighted that Gov. Palin will, for the first time, be understandable to the English-speaking audience," said Fox News chief Roger Ailes. "This should create a whole new fan base for her."

Gov. Palin praised the decision, adding, "I know many Americans will be interested in understanding what I have to say and I will also too."

In a related story, Fox said it had "no interest" in hiring funnyman Conan O'Brien, explaining, "Sarah Palin takes care of our comedy needs.""

And also:

THE BOROWITZ REPORT - Just hours after saying that God was punishing Haiti for making a "pact with the Devil," televangelist Pat Robertson retracted the statement, telling TV viewers, "Haiti? I thought they said 'Hades.'"

Rev. Robertson said that he had heard the report of the earthquake on the radio and had misinterpreted its location: "For the life of me, I thought God was punishing Hades, which does in fact have a pact with the Devil."

Apologizing for his "goof," the televangelist told his TV audience, "Golly - people must've thought I was being an insensitive asshole.""

[Source: Fox: Palin's Appearances to be Simulcast in English - Borowitz Report.]

I wonder why I so like CGI and composited video? Maybe because it asks one of those fundamental questions, "Is it real?"

This is a cool example of compositing using green screen.

Welcome to the new world of digital filmmaking. Give this one a minute to get going.

Thanks Nats and Gary for sending this one along. Have a great link to share with us? (I know you do!) Write us at mail at openculture dot com."

[Source: Is Anything Real? | Open Culture.]