Update June 13th 2010: Original recipe blog post posted on Mar 28, 2007. My mom has informed me of the traditional method, so I’ve updated this blog post.

We are going to a BBQ party tonight and so that’s my contribution. They are an exceptionally good idea for buffet parties (guests can get some from a serving platter using toothpicks). My mother always makes some when we celebrate name days or birthdays.

Ingredients (for 2)
* 1/4 cup of bread crumbs or the white part of old white bread. For a Paleo version use almond flour.
* 250 gr ground beef
* 1 small onion
* 2 tbspoons fresh spearmint (important ingredient)
* 1 egg
* fresh (preferably Italian flatleaf) parsley
* 2 garlic cloves
* salt & pepper
* oregano
* olive oil
* canola or vegetable oil

Execution
1. Finely chop the parsley, spearmint, onion and garlic in very small pieces.
2. In a big bowl place the ground beef, the chopped ingredients above, salt, pepper, oregano, the egg, and 1 tbspoon olive oil. Then, add the bread crumbs on the mix. If you don’t have bread crumbs, you can use the white part of old bread after having wet it with some water.
3. Using your fists work the mix until it becomes one, and add bread crumbs as needed until the mix is not too loose or stiff, for 1-2 minutes (just like you would if you were making bread by hand). Using some clean wrap to protect it, put the mix to the refrigerator for an hour or so.
4. Later, move the mix on one of the sides of the bowl. Take small amounts of the mix and then using the palms of your hands, shape small balls. Place them on the other side of the bowl. Be patient, it can take a while.
5. In a large frying pan heat up some olive & canola oil. Meatballs need quite a bit of oil to get cooked through, so add up to half an inch of oil in the pan. When the oil is hot, place your meatballs in the pan, then reduce to medium fire, and cook them for about 8-10 minutes until brown. You will need to turn the meatballs 2-3 times during their cooking time, so they cook from all sides.
6. Remove the meatballs from heat (make sure you don’t take too much oil with it as you removing them from the pan). Serve hot with french fries. Alternatively, you can heat some pasta sauce in another pan and then put the meatballs in the sauce and cook together for 1-2 minutes. This variation can be served with either fries or pasta. Enjoy!

Note: For a more Italian taste, you can also try to add some basil in the mix.

For those who’ve read my blog all these years they know what a big supporter and fan of LOST I am. However, the ending was simply a big let down for me. I felt cheated. Scammed. Conned.

The writers chose a “character-based” solution for LOST, rather than a more sci-fi solution that would be full of answers about the island and the surrounding mythos.

Here’s my problem with their route: the people who were watching LOST for the characters (mostly comprised by the “faith” people), left LOST mid-3rd season. The majority of viewers who stayed strong fans — like myself — were the “science” people. We stayed with the show because we were expecting what we were promised, a “science-based solution” — according to the writers. As the show progressed and became full blown sci-fi, we expected answers for these unnatural mysteries, in a way that was compatible with that sci-fi aura.

Instead, we got what we got with BSG’s ending: religious bullshit. And no real answers for any of the major mysteries like time-travel, pregnancies, the “rules”, the cures, agelessness, Walt’s/kids’ specialness, island Egyptian pre-history, what the island was really made of, etc etc etc. I should have known that the 6th season was just a patch-up the writers put together when I saw the Black Rock — a ship made out of wood — destroying the statue — that’s made out of stone. Right at that moment it was obvious that the writers would just quickly patch up as much as they could all the huge mysteries they were opening the previous 5 years without any clear direction. And of course, at the end, they failed to patch-up most of these mysteries anyway.

No, I’m not asking to answer every single mystery. Neither it’s possible to please everyone. But there’s a huge gap between taking a risk, and fucking up everything that was built-up previously.

Back in the 1st season, the most character-based season of all, the No 1 most popular theory was that the island was a purgatory. The writers many times said in the past few years that it’s not a purgatory, and that the ultimate show answer would be science-based. Instead, at the very end we were introduced to the flash-sideways, which actually WAS a purgatory! What a whole lot of hogwash.

The way LOST should have ended was about revealing what the island really was. And the only solution that would made sense for all these open mysteries would be that the island was an alien spaceship. Not a traditional spaceship, but one that uses exotic matter to move through wormholes (in fact, many real scientists theorized that as the ending of LOST, saying that it’s the only theory that makes sense). Millions of years ago it encountered a mechanical problem, and stayed put on Earth. Corals grew around it, and created the actual island (which is how many Pacific islands are formed anyway). But the core of the island, stayed operational. And the “computer” operating at the center, was the one that gave the powers to Jacob, cured Locke etc.

This way, the usage of the Dharma plots would actually be useful to the overall plot: it would show WHY the island needed to be protected from humans. Humans who would want to understand and use the island’s powers for their own selfish needs. Instead, even the Dharma episodes (5th season), were full of character crap (no, really, I don’t care who Kate will choose), instead of actually showing what Dharma was working on, which were their motives and how all that was tying to the overall plot (ultimately, the protection of the island from the different forces).

Instead, the way LOST finished, which was all about character resolution rather than the island, everything that happened on the island makes it feel IRRELEVANT. Dharma is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, and the island itself is irrelevant too — since there are many other realities in the afterlife — as insinuated by the show. Everything that happened on the island for 6 seasons were just “stuff that happened”. We were fed time and again about how important the island is. In fact, it’s not. As also insinuated in the show, places like the island are to be found at many places on Earth. And put the afterlives on top of that, and there you go: the island is pretty much irrelevant, if only semi-special.

I don’t want to keep this opinion single-sided, so I’m linking to two reviews of the ending. One that seeks for answers and some scientific basis to the show, and one that’s taking the writer’s side (written by one of the ex-writers of LOST, apparently).

Finally, I want to say that having seen what the writers cooked up with LOST at the end, it was obvious that they were going blindly with the plot. They did not have a firm direction. Sure, they were better prepared than in other shows, but still not as good as such a show requires them to be. It’s true that more shows, and even book series, don’t have a known ending from the beginning, and most stuff are made-up as they go. But it is my opinion that shows like LOST do require a very clear vision from the very beginning, even on an episode by episode basis. It’s one of the things I liked with FlashForward, where its writers had pre-drafted all 3 seasons the show was supposed to last — even if FlashForward ended up being implemented in a way that was inferior to LOST.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that it can be done better. The fact that there was a huge uproar online about the lackster LOST ending, it shows that maybe in 5 or 10 or 15 years from now, a young writer somewhere will pen “a better LOST“. Just like LOST was a better show than Twin Peaks, its grand-daddy, I hope that someone will create a better such show during my lifetime. A show that’s as deep, as exciting, as geeky, as well-shot as LOST, but with a grand plan from the beginning that doesn’t CHEAT on its viewers at the very end.

UPDATE: A different, simpler way to convert to Matrox’s AVI.

UPDATE 2: Make sure you don’t have both Matrox AVI and a Cineform decoder installed on the same PC, at the same time. When you do that, you’ll get red/black frames and crashes with recent Vegas versions. So only have installed one or the other, depending on your project.

I’ve been suggesting either Cineform or Avid DNxHD to transcode into for your dSLR/AVCHD slow footage, but Matrox just released this bug-fixed version of their intermediate codec, that is pretty good too. It’s free, and faster than DNxHD, but not as fast as the $100 Cineform. DNxHD works on a Mac too though. So if you’re PC-only, and you have no money for Cineform, this might be your best option.

1. Install the Matrox codecs from here.

2. Install the latest 32bit Avisynth from here.

3. Install the latest DirectShowSource plugin, by manually placing it on Avisynth’s “plugins” folder (usually C:\Program Files\Avisynth 2.5\plugins\, or Program Files (x86)).

4. Install the latest full version of AC3Filter.

5. Install the MatroskaSplitter (aka Haali Media Splitter).

6. Install the 32bit version of VirtualDub. Do not use the 64bit version.

7. Install the latest ffdshow-tryouts version. Make sure that avisynth and virtualdub plugins are checked, and h.264 decoding is enabled too (it will ask you all that during installation). If you already have CoreAVC installed, you might either want to skip this step, or you can still install it (if you can’t get sound to work) but disable h.264 decoding.

8. Open Notepad and copy/paste the following in it:

@echo off
cls
set root=C:\Users\Eugenia\VideoFootageFolder
set input=%root%
for %%I in ("*.MOV") do @echo DirectShowSource("%input%\%%~nI.MOV") >> "%%~nI.avs"

In the code above, you will have to edit it, and change the video footage folder name, so it points to your own folder with footage. Also, I’d suggest that your folder path has no spaces, and no non-english characters. If your camera does not record in MOV format, change the two instances of the word MOV, with the suffix of your format (e.g. M2TS, MTS, MP4). Save that script file with the name of avs.bat on the same folder as your footage.

9. Open an MS-DOS Command Prompt, and navigate to your footage folder (it obviously requires that you know how to navigate folders using the command prompt, it’s basic MS-DOS usage). Once there, run the script by simply invoking its name: avs.bat

10. For every .mov file in your footage folder, an equivalent .avs file is now created. E.g. 001.MOV now has a very small 001.AVS companion file. Creation of these .avs files will be almost instantaneous.

11. Open VirtualDub (it’s important you follow the follow the steps in the order presented, or you might hit a bitrate-related bug). Select File, Queue Batch Operation, Batch Wizard. Click the litte […] button, and select your footage folder, then click OK. Then, drag-n-drop in that Batch Wizard dialog all the created .avs files (make sure to only drag the .avs files, not the .mov ones). Click Filter Output Names, and type: “avs” (without the quotes) for the “Search for:” input box, and “avi” (without the quotes) on the “Replace with:” box. click Ok. Then click Add to Queue, and then select: Re-Save as AVI. Then, click OK.

12. Click Video, Full Processing Mode.

13. Click Video again, then Compression. From the long list, scroll down, and select the “Matrox MPEG-2 I-Frame HD” codec. Click Configure. In it, select the data rate you want (I’d suggest about 150 MB/sec), and the right frame rate (same frame rate you shot your footage at). Click OK, and OK again.

14. Click File, Job Control. All the .avs files you drag-n-dropped on step #10 will be listed there. Click “Start” to start encoding them. This will take a while.

15. When everything is done, close down VirtualDub, and load on your Vegas/Premiere/MovieMakerHD video editor the newly created .avi files (not the MOV or the AVS files, but the AVI ones). Edit as usual.

Note 1: If you shot some 720/60p or 1080/30p and you want to slow-motion that to 23.976 fps (e.g. music videos do that a lot), then you can do that during this transcoding (no need to do it through your video editor later). Select “Direct Stream Copy” instead of “Full Processing Mode” on step #12. And then click Video again, Frame Rate, and change the frame rate to 23.976 fps (type it). If you shot in 720/50p, type 25.00 in there instead. If you don’t care about the audio (since it won’t sound properly when the video is slowed-down) you can disable its transcoding by clicking in the main menu: Audio, No Audio. Then, continue with step 13 and beyond.

Note 2: Also, if you’re working with AVCHD or HDV footage instead of progressive dSLR footage, VirtualDub can de-interlace for you, or even remove pulldown, during this transcoding process. You just need to load the right internal filters: If you only want to deinterlace 50i/60i footage, just click Video, Filters, De-interlace, Add, and select “interpolate, yadif” from the list. The continue with step #13. If you want to remove pulldown instead (e.g. for PF24 footage), you can modify the MS-DOS script file above to also add TIVTC commands in the generated avisynth .avs scripts.

Note 3: If Vegas thinks that your progressive footage is interlaced, then use this trick to make it think otherwise.

This blog is closed, and so is my twitter account (my facebook is never updated anyway, it got fed by my twitter). I’m done with it. At least for now. Take care.

To help you find faster what you need, here are the most popular articles on this blog:
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– Butter-smooth slow motion
– Sony Vegas hints and tips
– Proxy Editing with Sony Vegas
– Sony Vegas project properties setup
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– The elusive “film look”
– Filmmaking tutorials
– New Video Hobby? A Guide from Start to Finish
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Without a doubt, FlashForward (FF) is heading for cancellation this year, gathering fewer than 6.5 million viewers per episode (a show of that class needs at least 10 mil just to stay afloat). And it’s a damn shame, since the writers said that they need at least 3 seasons to tell their story.

So why did it fail?

An editor at AirLockAlpha, one of the sci-fi news sites I read daily, wrote that it’s probably LOST’s fault. The kind of expectations created by LOST over the years for that type of a show has lead to FF’s demise, since FF is more traditionally constructed.

Personally, I don’t agree with this assessment. Instead, I put the blame on the show’s creative team. From the writers, to the directors, to the film editor, and who ever picks these non-fitting music tracks sometimes.

A few months ago I was discussing this with my husband and I mentioned that the FF implementation sucks, that the people behind it are simply not as talented as LOST’s team. He replied, “naaah… they probably just don’t have LOST’s budget“. However, as the series progressed, we both saw small tidbits in the put-together aspect of the show that rubbed us the wrong way: the interleaving of scenes not following a chronological order that makes sense, the constant flashforwards that we’ve seen a thousand times already (which makes us feel that their editor thinks viewers have Alzheimer’s), to unfitting music tracks on quite a few episodes, to the unrealistic reactions of people to things happening or about to happen, to logic errors, to the unexciting pacing of it all. Personally, I don’t care about any of the characters on that show (except maybe a bit for Lloyd, since it seems to be the only person that has a conscious on that show). And really, how many times do I need to see & hear the opening intro about how people blacked out for 2:17 minutes? If potential new viewers don’t already know that from other sources, then they would never give a chance to the show anyway.

So the problem with FF is rather obvious: it is not as polished as it should have been — at all levels. From the boring and often convoluted writing, to contrived acting, to editing. FlashForward was a great idea that was implemented badly. There is nothing more into it. The professionals involved with the show are simply not as good as it is required for the “epic” show that it should have been.

I only hope that ABC completely reboots the show in 5-10 years or so, and gives it to the proper team that has the ability to hold that weight on their shoulders. Big projects require big talent. You can’t just offload a big idea to an inexperienced or mediocre team. It won’t work, no matter how much money you pour into it.

The Canadian-born Melissa Auf der Maur is the ex-bassist of The Hole, and Smashing Pumpkins. Today, her second solo album “Out of Our Minds” was released, which was a major positive surprise to me. While her first album was good, it was “just rock”. This new one is more experimental, less generic. One of the best releases this Spring for me. Amazon sells it for $8. Check out her music video for the lead single:

Update: Video updated (2-3 scenes are different, different color grading on the solo performance).

Official music video for Scraping for Change‘s “Shadows” track, from their “Breaking the Silence” EP. Download the video here.

This was my first project where there was a budget, since we clocked 4 hours of studio time (plus 3 hours of more shooting the day before for the storyline part).

Three different color grading styles were used in the video (modified bleach bypass for the solo performance, Hollywood teal for the storyline, modified pastel style for the band performance).

Shot with a Canon 5D Mark II, at 30p (slow-motioned to 24p, story part) and 24p (performances). Lenses used: Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM, Canon EF 35mm f/2, Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM, Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 Fisheye, Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM.

Update: Lots of pictures from the shoot.

What a beautiful device Sprint announced today: the HTC EVO running Android 2.1. It comes with a 4.3″ screen, front facing camera, 720p video recording, HDMI-out, among other stuff. A very modern device for sure.

However, there are TWO things that bother me, things that are inter-related, in this otherwise perfect device.

1. Only 1 GB of internal memory.

2. What about a 2-year support of major new Android version upgrades (instead of just bug fixes on the existing version)?

See, if Sprint/HTC don’t want to give me a guarantee of 2 years of major Android version upgrades, this is a deal breaker for me. I will not touch a smartphone that stays behind in software. These are not the days of the “feature phones” where “what you bought, is what you get”. I need to be able to stay current with OS versions, so I can run the latest third party apps.

And let’s say that HTC/Sprint will offer me that 2 year major software support.

How in the God’s name are they going to successfully upgrade the ever-growing Android package with only 1 GB of internal memory? After 2 years of usage, that memory will be almost full (even if there’s an 8 GB microSD coming with the device, the internal memory is still going to be full of crap in there in most common scenarios). Can Sprint/HTC assure me that there’s at least *another* *hidden* partition of 512 MB or 1 GB where it can download its latest special Android version, unzip, and install?

Because honestly, I don’t see this happening! I find it HIGHLY unlikely that on a phone that only shows to the user 1 GB of internal memory, to have another hidden 1 GB partition “for major upgrades”. Super, fucking, unlikely. Android grows fast!

And besides, 1 GB of internal memory for user usage? What is this? 2005? My music is already 55 GB, and I can’t fit it in any microSD card. And having two microSD cards is out of the question. And let’s not forget that this phone shoots 720p video, which requires more bitrate, and therefore higher file-sizes. Sprint should have gone with 64 GB of internal memory, even at the expense of making the device a bit thicker.

God fucking damn it. A near-perfect device, ruined by fucking stupidity of short-sightness.

Up to a year ago I thought, like most people, that I knew what “good” music is. A year later, my music listening habits have changed dramatically towards more experimental, so I’m not sure if what I knew back then is correct anymore. See, how is it possible to like a number of bands, and consider their genres the best, and a year later find them lame and “not fresh” anymore?

What all this means is that different people, with different life experiences, or the same people at different times in their life, they prefer different audio stimulation. And that’s only normal. I now know that reviewing an album can never be objective. It’s 100% a personal experience, and it’s different for everyone. Bands that make no sense to me, might make to someone else, and vice versa.

MGMT put up their new album for free streaming today, and most people don’t like it. I too find it too experimental, having lost its melodies and hooks that the previous album had. So MGMT say that they don’t want to be a mainstream pop band, so they put out this difficult-to-stomach album.

However, what’s “good” anymore? It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

Shot the first part of a new music video today, for Scraping For Change (preview the track “Shadows“). JBQ slept in the car the whole time, he was exhausted because of his work during the week. Here’s a small teaser picture, directly out of the camera (used a flatter version of the “Neutral” picture style, not as flat as my “ExtraFlat” style):

Ok, I’ll admit, that’s handpicked. Possibly the best shot in the whole shoot today. 😉