A second person in the past few weeks told me that hobbyist artistic videography is “meaningless”, and that has pissed the hell out of me. I will say this only once:

Videography done like on some of the videos below is art. Art is anything that can create or boost an emotion. And many of these videos do that. Not everyone’s videos are art, but there are some very capable amateur enthusiasts that know how to shoot, know how to edit and know what they want to present on screen (e.g. Charlie McCarthy, Remyyy). And this is NOT something that everyone can do. Absolutely not. It’s not as easy as it seems. It’s not as simple as taking a camera and pointing into random things. And editing at the end is an art in itself. I CHALLENGE you, the random reader of this blog, to take your camcorder and try to do something “beautiful & artistic” with it (expensive equipment is not required). Chances are, you will fail. It’s not as easy as it seems.

Beautiful imagery is not meaningless either. Cameras are not created just so we have a plot each and every time with a John Wayne style script. That’s just only one usage of cameras. Video cameras are nothing but “moving pictures”, and as beautiful still pictures are considered art, same for the moving ones.

If I haven’t convinced you yet, we will have to find an equivalent art to compare. And that’s the DEMOSCENE back in the ’90s. In fact, these two scenes are producing similarly-looking products. From wikipedia: “What began as a type of electronic graffiti on cracked software became an art form unto itself” and “the most experimental, unusual and controversial demos are often referred to as art demos or abstract demos.” As the demoscene developer has to be both an artist and a technical person at the same time, same for a videographer, he/she will have to master both. And some of these people out there, have done so. But they are VERY FEW who have done so successfully (no, I am not among them). Which is why videography is interesting, and why it’s true modern art: it’s challenging.

* I watched “El Mariachi” tonight. This is a 1992 Mexican movie that was shot for just $7000 and made it to the big screen with a 7.0 rating at IMDb. Another cheap movie is “Primer“, also shot for $7000, but in USA in 2004. I keep thinking that if the “Primer” creator had used a digital camcorder instead of 16mm (e.g. the Canon Optura Xi which was a pretty good model for the money at the time) he would have been able to make the movie for cheaper. If you are a video enthusiast you owe it to yourself to watch these two movies. They are the epitome of true indie film making and already legendary for that status. And of course, buy the “DV’s Rebel Guide” book. It’s the ultimate “that’s how you do it for dirt cheap” indie film book.

* Last night I watched the lighting tutorial DVD that came with the reflectors I bought two months ago. It was very interesting and simple, it really demystified lighting for me. I feel that I am ready to actually correctly use lights if I want to shoot a music video clip or short movie. Highly recommended to get these reflectors, if not for the included DVD too!

* I spent the day re-encoding some of my favorite Vimeo videos in a format that the PS3 can playback. I have a collection of about 85 videos so far. The PS3 is powerful and doesn’t sweat in HD playback, but its UI is not as good as AppleTV’s regarding media. Hopefully, Jobs will announce the AppleTV 2.0 on Tuesday, but I need it to not only be able to deliver 1080/30p, but also to playback WMV and DivX/XViD in order to be useful to me.

* I published a review of the Nokia N82. Expect next week a review of a 28″ PC 1920×1200 monitor too. I used it for editing my HD footage in 1:1 size, and I must say that for the first time I was able to see clearly how noisy the HV20 is — and the HDV-encoded artifacts too. In all truth told, if you want a “super clean” final cut, the HV20 is able to deliver a good 720p video, but at full 1080p it’s noisy and artifact-prone if you stick your nose to the monitor and you get careful on what you are looking at.

* Havoc Pennington left Red Hat. I don’t know where he’s going next, I wish him good luck, but I also feel sad because the last true leader on Gnome has left the house.

Chicken livers the way my mom makes them. I personally prefer chicken hearts (cooked the same way as below), but livers are nice too.

Ingredients (for 2)
* 1 cup of chicken livers
* 1 cup of canned chunked tomatoes
* 1/3 cup green frozen peas
* white rice of your choice
* A bit of jalapeño pepper
* 1 shallot, diced
* 1 garlic clove, crashed
* 2 tbspoons olive oil
* 1 tbspoon butter
* salt & pepper

Execution
1. Put the livers in a drainer and run lots of cold water through them to make sure there is not much of their “bloody” juice left.
2. In a pan, add the oliver oil and shallot under high heat. When the shallot starts to get golden, add the livers and stir regularly.
3. Bring the chunked tomatoes into your cutting board and dice them smaller if they are too chunky. Dice the jalapeño in small pieces too.
4. When the livers start getting some brown color and most of their juice has evaporated, add the tomatoes and jalapeño pepper pieces. Also add the garlic clove and some salt and pepper. Stir occasionally.
5. After about 2-3 minutes, lower the heat to “low”, and add 2 cups of water. Cover the pan and let it cook for 30 to 40 minutes, or until the sauce is now thick.
6. Fifteen minutes before that happens, cook the rice as per package instructions. Also add in the pan with it the peas. After draining the peas and rice, bring them back to the pan and “butter” them. Serve both the rice and livers immediately.

If you are into punk rock, this band from Germany called dr. norton is pretty nice. They offer four of their songs for free download, one of which is their latest single, “Chalkmarks”. Video of the song below:

Introduction

It seems that a number of Vimeo.com users are confused about aspect ratios and how to eliminate jaggies, so I put together this tutorial for you. With this guide, you will be able to export a clip from any miniDV camera in DVD high quality, that will get the “HD treatment” on Vimeo, without your footage having to be HD. Here’s a sample of the quality you will get from your miniDV PAL/NTSC non-HD camera if you export the right way for Vimeo.

Please note however, that this “high quality” re-encoding for non-HD footage feature might disappear from Vimeo in the future (your existing videos should be unaffected if that’s the case though). [UPDATE: As of March 14 2008, this feature is removed by Vimeo — bummer] Regardless, that’s the correct way of exporting widescreen miniDV footage for the web/devices in full quality, so it’s good to know anyway.

Method

1. Make sure you set up your camera to shoot in widescreen. The “high quality” re-encoding at Vimeo is only possible for widescreen miniDV footage.

2. Import your footage to your PC with the video editor of your choice. You can now choose to either edit the footage, or just use a single unedited scene in which case go to step #3. If you choose to edit the footage first, make sure you export from your video editor in .avi DV widescreen interlaced mode, so quality loss remains minimal. Most video editors support exporting back to the same DV codec, and if not, use another intermediate lossless codec to export.

3. Download and install SUPER (it’s a bit difficult to spot the actual download link on this guy’s messy web page, but look around –alternative download server here). Once loaded, right click on the SUPER window and select “Output File Saving Management” and instruct the application to export to a folder that you can find back easily (e.g. your Desktop).

4. Then, make everything look *exactly* like this (make sure that NOTHING is selected in the “Aspect” radio boxes). Then, drag’n’drop the .avi file on SUPER and press “Encode”.

4a. *IF* your camera is a PAL 16:9 camera, you can try exporting in 1280×720 at around 5000 kbps bitrate instead of the 880×480, ~3000kbps suggestions above. But that’s only if you shot in widescreen PAL. Resizing to 720p an NTSC widescreen or a PAL/NTSC 4:3 signal is not a good idea.

5. That’s it, after a while (depending on the speed of your PC), you will have an .mp4 file, ready to be uploaded to Vimeo. When it’s up, it should have the “HD treatment” and look all fabulous.

Some important notes

* This kind of export will create DVD-quality files that are playable as-is on the XBoX360 and Sony PS3! It should be playable on the AppleTV too, but I don’t have one to test.

* If you are proficient in using your video editor’s exporting dialogs with similar settings we used here, then there’s no reason to use SUPER. However, most people can’t do that, which why I wrote this tutorial, using a single utility for all cases. If you feel adventurous though, or if you are using a Mac, you can follow my other, HD, tutorials here and follow them exactly, except for 2-3 changes you will have to do to reflect your non-HD source footage: 880×480 size instead of 1280×720, 3 mbps instead of 5mbps of bitrate, and the right frame rate each time (29.97 for NTSC, 25 for PAL).

* I suggested the same exporting resolution (880×480) for both PAL and NTSC miniDV footage. In reality, widescreen PAL can go up to 1048×576, but that’s quite some over-stretching over the original 720×576 recorded frame size and so a resize down to 880×480 can be beneficial in terms of quality (besides, you still get the “HD treatment”).

* For those who are confused why we don’t export at 720×480 (NTSC) or 720×576 (PAL), it’s because in order to get widescreen in these resolutions, you have to set the “16:9 flag” in the internal format of these videos. Problem is, Vimeo and many other players usually don’t respect these flags, and so your videos come out as 4:3. In order to go around this limitation, we export in aspect ratio 1.0000 (instead of 1.2121 for NTSC and 1.4568 for PAL), and so the 880×480 resolution is based on that aspect ratio. It’s ok if you don’t understand what I am talking about here, just trust the results.

* If you do not own a widescreen DV camera, in order to export with the right 4:3 aspect ratio you need to do the following: export at 768×576 for PAL, or at 656×480 for NTSC (at 2000+ mbps instead of 3024 shown in the SUPER screenshot). You won’t get the HD treatment at these 4:3 resolutions, but these are the right aspect ratio 1.000 resolutions you should be exporting for web usage from 4:3 miniDV.

I’ve written about it before, but jeez. People just never learn. KDE is going to release KDE 4.0, a major version, on a Friday. I’ve seen XFce getting released on Saturdays too. That’s when the traffic on the net is the lowest, and guarantees that fewer people will learn about these releases. Gnome usually releases major versions on a Wed or Thu, but KDE really needs to get a clue about PR, along with usability and aesthetics (it’s still not as visually polished as it should be, and Qt is as guilty as KDE itself for this — bad widget spacing).

Update: Oh, God, it looks like crap. How is it possible to not be able to get it right after all these years? It just doesn’t look modern, it doesn’t have the attention to detail and targeted design that OSX has (and to some degree, Gnome too). And no, it ain’t just a theme issue. It’s a design and Qt issue too. I can find 100 things wrong on each screenshot I see. I don’t need to use this thing before I have an opinion about it. Aesthetics put me off immediately after looking at these pictures.

I created a new HD channel over at Vimeo, holding some of my favorite clips in it so far:

In the meantime, I discovered Remyyy, possibly the best video artist enthusiast in the whole Vimeo world:

Update: I just finished IM’ing with him, I think his future shorts will be filmed in widescreen and will have the “HD” treatment on Vimeo. Can’t wait!

I wrote in the past that the new X-Files movie will fail. I still think it will. Slashdot put a poll up, and as much as unscientific this poll is, it actually reflects well what people want to see in the movie, and that’s not a “monster of the week” movie (the people who voted “canceled” are simply indifferent as they are obviously not fans).

The latest rumor is that the new movie is a prequel, taking place between seasons 8 and 9. But I don’t think that this will save the movie (plus Duchovny looks old now). I only hope that the movie won’t do as bad as I think it will, and FOX will give the go ahead for a third and final X-Files movie to bring closure to the colonization alien arc for good.

As you might know JBQ and I are in the market for a new 1080p 52″+ TV loaded with at least 4 HDMI 1.3a ports, to replace our old component-only Sharp 1080i/540p 55″ HDTV (2001 model). However, we can’t find exactly what we want. JBQ wants a deep-black “fast” Plasma, and I want 120Hz and, especially, 24p support. I can find both the features I want only from Sony’s new LCD line up (nobody else seems to support 24p specifically), and JBQ can only find what he needs (mostly) from Pioneer. Why the hell hasn’t Pioneer (or *any* other Plasma manufacturer for that matter) come out with 72Hz support for proper 24p?

I guess we will have to wait 2-3 years before we both agree on the TV we want to buy.

Update: It seems we found the almost-perfect model: the 50″ Pioneer Kuro PDP-5010FD. It supports 72Hz for proper 24p, although it’s not as big as we wanted it, it doesn’t have enough saturation/color settings as in their “Elite” line, and it doesn’t have Sharp’s “smart stretch” algorithm (useful for 4:3 optimization on a widescreen). However, it fits perfectly in our living room setup, and I think that this is the model we will go with eventually. Any TV article you read it says that Pioneer has the best plasmas today (if not best TVs in general). B&H sells it for $3500.

Oh, I almost forgot: it runs Linux.

Install their flash plugin addon at ABC.com and watch all 3 seasons of “Lost” in HD. Quality is great and with the new version of Flash that has some optimizations it plays without skipping frames at full 720p on my P4 3 Ghz. Now there’s no excuse to not watch “Lost”, as long as you live in USA (episodes only stream for US IP addresses).