I contacted and interviewed the ‘Rantings of Eva‘, more precisely their guitarist Dusty Watts. An excerpt: “The record business is a complete and total nightmare these days. The dark ages for labels if you will. […] Those guys are losing money and are seemingly pretty freaked out by it.” Check the interview here.

Update: Another local group to “Rantings of Eva”, who have performed together, the Novah, has put up all their songs for free download. Get them from their “media/audio” section.

I visited the Drist on Saturday during recording, and shot another video of the band. This time the fourth member of the band was present too, Shauncho, so we got to shoot an interview. As a bonus, the band sent me samples of two songs from their upcoming album, which are heard on the video.

I am looking for feedback again, like I did for the first interview video I shot and edited two months ago. I think I did much better this time (ignoring the wind sound on the microphone during the interview, couldn’t do much about it with that cheap mic).

I am a romantic person. I believe in one, true love. However, while now I have found just that, there was a time when I thought I did, but I wasn’t really. Here’s the story:

The time was 1991. The place was Corfu, Greece, I was 18, and I was studying there to become a nurse (which was something I didn’t want to do, but my mother forced me to). One Friday night, while out on a club with some fellow nurses, I was introduced to Costas. That was the first and last time I felt this: an electric current went through my whole body when I first laid eyes on him. I am not shitting you. It was really like an electric current, for a few seconds my brain stopped working.

I fell for him really hard. But here’s the kicker: he didn’t give a shit about me. He in fact made fun of me. But life is fair some times: he was in love with the ex-girlfriend of Teo, my friend’s current boyfriend. See how it goes? I liked Costas, he liked Maria, Maria liked Teo, Teo liked Soula. So the only people who did want and had each other were Soula and Teo. But even that ‘love’ didn’t last long for them anyway. I felt that we were all cursed. Nobody was happy.

Point is, love is not the same as infatuation or passion. And when you are 18 years old, you can’t make assessments (like I did) that a person is the “one”. When you are infatuated, you can’t think straight. A few months later I hated being in Corfu so much, partly because of him and partly because of the shitty nursing thing, that I got engaged to the first person who asked to marry me back home (he wasn’t my boyfriend, he just wanted to marry before his dad dies from cancer — go figure).

Needless to say, I fell from one pit hole to another. We moved to Germany, where I was forced to work as a cleaner. 10 months later our engagement broke up (thank his family for that), my own family was in pieces because of that too (old-fashioned father you see), and I was struggling to put myself and my life together. At the end, I found the one (my JBQ), but it was not for another 10 years, and not without going some seriously rough times: I was abroad (in UK), I was broke, and I was all alone. But that’s another story, for another time.

This is my own personal list, shown in preference order, of the best bands out there that are still awaiting to get a good contract. I only include bands that are independent, and have fewer than 50,000 “friends” on their myspace page (if that’s an indication of anything). “Band of Horses” would have been in this list too if their just-last-night appearance on Letterman’s show didn’t skyrocket them on myspace/iTunes. They are stars already with their recent second album. I don’t think that their label, SubPop (49% owned by Warner), has seen such a big hit since the days they signed Nirvana.

1. Drist
Of course, I love the Drist. They truly rock. Tyson’s lovely lyrics and Brian’s amazing music just make me wanna move my head up and down all day. I love most of their songs, but possibly my favorites are their “Stripped” cover and “Surfacing”. Its melody hits a nerve with me. Drist became known after two of their songs were included in the “Guitar Hero” video game and since then their albums sell well via CDBaby too (both albums are on the top-15 of their “hard rock” category for years now). The band has shared with me some samples of their new album, and they sound just amazing!

1b. Dolorata
All-women hard rock band, “The Keys” is one of the coolest songs ever.

2. Rantings of Eva
Aaaah… “Bright Side”. What a killer song that is? It sends shivers up and down my spine, as the lyrics mention. These guys can have a huge future if they get a good contract. Kinda like Coldplay. Their new album will be out soon.

3. Midlake
The most well-known band in this list. This is my favorite kind of music: soothing alt.rock, just like Fleetwood Mac. “Roscoe” and “Head Home” are their best songs.

4. Red Letter Agent
I found out about these guys by following a link from “Rantings of Eva’s” myspace page. They sound pretty similar (separated at birth?), and they are just as good. I am looking forward to listen to more of their work. I think their best so far is “A World Awake”.

5. The Coral Sea
I love this kind of music. Soothing music that is. “In This Moment’s Time” and “Ancient Modern People” are their best songs although “Look at Her Face” is popular too. A new album arrives this coming spring (they said)…

6. Faunts
More soothing alt.rock music. Very atmospheric music, it just carries me away, to another place. All their three best songs are given for free by either their site or their label’s site. “Memories of places we’ve never been” is possibly their best. They have a new EP coming out, their label emailed me the other day.

7. Cold Hot Crash
From the Bay Area, great rock music, the local radio plays them quite a bit. My favorite song of their is “They Keep Calling”, although “Dividing Up Circles” is their most well known song.

8. Asobi Seksu
I absolutely love their psychedelic pop-rock sound. The singer’s voice is amazing too. “Thursday” and “Sooner” are their best songs. Many of their songs can be found for a free, legal, download at their site, their label’s site and eMusic.

9. RadioFix
Good hard rock. If you like a mix of classic, alternative and a pinch of country rock, this is for you. “Dogs of Night” is their best song.

10. Nemesea
Evanescence-like music. Most of the songs on their album are good.

11. Wiretree
Indie Pop at its best. Each one of the album‘s songs are catchy.

12. The A-Sides
Another good group. Best song is “Sidewalk Chalk” in my opinion.

13. Starlight Mints
A group that plays more than one kinds of music. Their best is “Inside of Me” and you can download it legally from their label’s site.

14. We Shot the Moon
From the ashes of “Waking Ashland”, just a few months ago, the “We Shot The Moon” were born. I mostly like “The Water’s Edge” song. They are very new, but they are coming to iTunes in a few days (they said).

15. Black Days Down
Hard rock. Sounds a bit like Nickelback. But just better. Hehehe…

16. The West Exit
If you like a mix of Jamiroquai & Sade-like music, this one is for you. Very good music, great talent. Not the kind of music for everyone, but definitely one of the best groups in that musical area. All their songs are free either via their site or Magnatune.

17. Angie Mattson
Kinda like Fiona Apple, but more approachable. Writes her own music, performs it, and she looks stunning too.

And finally, all six bands from this label. They seem to be having signed up the best of the best — and it’s possibly not a coincidence, as while they classify themselves as indie, they are owned by EMI. Many of these small supposedly indie labels are actually owned by the majors, who wait to see which bands have what it takes before they sign them on with a big contract (kinda like sports teams have sub-teams with younger athletes that they then promote to the pro club)! Anyways, it’s too bad that the best band at this label was recently robbed: “in Orlando FL, On Oct 7th, between 11 and 12pm, the Edison Glass van was broken into. They broke through the window and stole all the money we made for the tour, laptops, i-pods, GPS, bags and other personal items. The total loss EG took is estimated $8,000.” Let me just say this: never leave money in the car.

Hey, this is so cool and I just found out about it by following links. This short film was created for the “48 hour film contest” and written by Baron and Ficus, of Be, Inc. fame. They used to work for Be, Inc. on the Be operating system together with my JBQ, then at Danger (of Sidekick cellphone fame), then I think Ficus moved to Google. Both are very creative individuals, and I love their songs from the time they were in this indie rock band together, the “Cotton Squares” (download their songs here). The whole band was comprised by ex-Be engineers (including kernel engineer Travis, who later went on to Danger, Apple, Palm, Sega and he even wrote his own OS, NewOS).

If you ever used BeOS and you opened a terminal to do an “ls -l”, you would see that the “owner” of the files is not you, but a user called “baron”. That’s the same Baron I am talking about here. BeOS was a single-user somewhat-Posix-compliant OS so the engineers could play funny pranks like that. 😉

Among newbie videographers it’s a difficult concept to understand the difference between video formats that are meant for “editing work” (intermediate), and for formats that are meant for “sharing and viewing” (delivery). So, here’s a quick rundown.

There are times where you need to do things like the following:
* Transfer your already edited footage from one application to another.
* Transfer your already edited footage from one video project to another.
* Insert an originally 50i/60i footage to a 24p timeline.
* Time-stretch your footage more than 4x (at least on Vegas you need to export and re-import to stretch another 4x).
* You shot your video in uncompressed format and you need to make the file sizes smaller.
* You need a format that’s more suitable for editing.
* Archive your edited footage.

For these usages, you need a “lossless” codec format that doesn’t lose quality during the export. Such codecs are: Cineform, Lagarith, Huffyuv, Intel Cinepack, Apple Intermediate Format, plain uncompressed and lots more. Please note that lossless codecs create huge files. For example, a 15 second HD footage will yield a 300 MB file, and although this sounds too much and it’s slow to decode, it is nothing compared to 3 GBs that the “uncompressed” codec will yield for the same HD footage. The slowness and huge files pay you back with no loss of quality. I would suggest you go with Cineform if your NLE has import/export support for it (Vegas ships with a “medium quality” licensed copy of Cineform), or the open source Lagarith codec (to configure Lagarith to create smaller files you will need to follow steps 9 to 11). If you are exporting to something like FFmpeg, Mencoder or Avidemux2, you will need to use Huffyuv (follow steps 2 and 3 to configure it to create smaller files before its first usage).

The final part you will need to understand is that most of these lossless codecs are saved as “avi” or “mov”. These filetypes are not codec formats, but container formats. They are simply file formats that “hosts” inside them different kinds of codecs. This is why it’s possible to have DivX .avi files, and Cineform or Lagarith .avi files and yet, the same media player that can play one .avi format can’t necessarily play another. Just by looking at the file name you can’t tell which format “lives” inside that .avi or .mov file. You will have to use applications that can read these formats and tell you what’s saved inside. Same goes for .mp4, .mkv, .ogg and other container formats. Apple is saving their Intermediate Format lossless codec files in .mov, but so it does for all the other kinds of codec formats, so you will need to open Quicktime’s “inspector” window to find out how these files were encoded. Other container formats are the open source implementations of .mkv Matroska files and the .ogg files (which can host both Vorbis audio and Theora video — Vorbis is the audio codec, Theora is the video codec, and OGG is the container format that can host them both).

Regarding “end user” viewing formats (also known as “delivery formats”), these are, but not limited to, codecs like h.264, DivX/XViD, WMV, plain mpeg-4, mpeg2, mpeg, Theora, 3GP/h.263, FLV and many more. These are all “lossy” codecs and are meant for distribution and user viewing only. They compress very well (e.g. the 300 MB file we talked about earlier can be compressed down to 10 MBs with one of these babies), but being lossy it means that the quality is not as good as the original footage. This is ok though, as most people don’t notice much, and having small filesizes helps with the delivery and easier playback aspects.

The rule of thumb is that you can export in lossless formats as many times as it is required to do your job, but only export to a lossy “delivery” format ONCE. This way, you minimize the loss of quality on the final render — the one that’s meant to reach your viewership.

My personal preferences that are the best bets for compatibility, are: Lagarith for intermediate format usages between Windows applications, Huffyuv for intermediate format usages when I need to export to Linux-oriented apps, the (unfortunately) lossy .m2t mpeg2 format if I need to export for Mac video applications, and h.264/AAC (inside the .mp4 container) for user distribution on the internet and video playback devices. Of course, if you have the cash, you can buy the full Cineform suite that will allow you to use their “best quality setting” for their codec on both PCs and Macs (not Linux though). However, if you only work with a single operating system, then there are free solutions that perform as well.

Why the hell this product makes the rounds on Engadget? All I am saying is that this one does the same thing and it’s 4 times cheaper. What’s the big deal that this particular product deserved a front-page on Engadget and the other one didn’t?

On the prompt of KDEnLive enthusiast Lucio Correa, I had a look at the usability of KDEnLive — the only serious OSS Linux video editing app today (Cinelerra is still an unusable joke for me, sorry). I have used KDEnLive very cursory, so giving real feedback about the usability, will take a long time. But their exporting dialog is the one that mostly caught my attention for being so inflexible and useless for my needs. So, I redesigned that before anything else.

And when you click custom, the window expands:

Of course this second dialog looks busy — audio should be in its own tab if the developers don’t want the window to get longer. However, I mostly wanted to show which features I need to be there, easily accessible, rather than the actual widget arrangement.

I left out the “render selected zone, from time __ to time __”, because this is a feature that should not be part of the standard exporting dialog, but instead a right-click option on a selection in the timeline that automatically fills up the right timecode values and loads the exporting dialog.

Ok. This is just not possible. Just listen to the “Bright Side” on the group’s myspace page and tell me if this is not a freaking killer song. How is it possible that the “Rantings of Eva” are still without a contract? The world is just not a fair place.