There were times where I got all depressed seeing some truly talented musicians never get much attention. These were the times that I felt that the “talent hunters” are just a myth. Well, it seems that they are not.

While browsing my local bands on myspace’s list, I stumbled upon “Project 13“, a teenage band a few miles away from my home. These high school kids know how to write fun music! I was floored by the commercial potential of their music. In all truth, the vocals are pretty bad, but that’s something that can be fixed to an acceptable degree with enough lessons. But, writing hook-y melodies that can be huge hits under the right circumstances, is not something that everyone can do.

So I checked their blog out, and on their latest entry they reveal that they got a “huge opportunity” that they can’t talk about. I am guessing that they got themselves a contract, possibly by a major. Very exciting for them.

Check the Crank 2 1080p trailer, from a major movie shot with an XH-A1 ($3500) and some HF10 cameras ($800). Discussion and more information on how the movie was shot exactly, here. No 35mm adapter crap were used, just the bare cameras with probably some ND filters and occasionally a wide-angle adapter.

Very exciting to see cheap cameras shooting big Hollywood movies. As I said in the past, digital 2k cinemas have a huge loss of quality when projected (my Kuro plasma TV has better quality than these new digital theaters, so we’ve stopped going to cinema and are using Netflix instead). Even an HV20 will be good enough in terms of pixel per pixel quality to shoot a full theatrical movie. Only things biting back are the lack of manual controls.

So many times I speak about the HV20/30’s video abilities, but its still imaging capabilities are possibly even better. The HV series are better digicams than any consumer snapshot digicam. You see, HV’s lens is a ‘faster’ one and of higher grade/sharper than the one used in most digicams, it has a huge aperture compared to most digicams’, plus its 10x zoom is equivalent to 16mm film in terms of background blur. In other words, the HV’s still imaging capabilities are somewhere in between a DSLR and a snapshot camera. The only thing missing is resolution (3.1 MP). The new Canon HF-S10/S100 camcorders ($1100) are over 8 MP, so if you are into a single device that does both photo+video well, these might be the models for you.

Here are some good HV20/30 pics. Click in to go and see their higher resolution version.

Click the link below to view more cool pics!
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Malbec’s ‘The Answering Machine’ EP’s are a series of 5 EPs being released over 5 months, the fifth one released today. They are free to download both in mp3, and WAV uncompressed high quality format.

Two of their three music videos so far were shot with an HV20. The following music video is my favorite of the three, it was the one shot with a Panasonic HVX200 instead.

I read today something that I have read elsewhere too: that Youtube burns lots more money than they make. I think it’s safe to assume that part of their problem is their massive bandwidth needs. Bandwidth doesn’t come for free, as I have said in many occasions.

It was always my opinion that youtube should not be auto-starting the videos when someone is hitting one of their video pages. I think that this can save them a good percentage of bandwidth per year. It’s many times I visit a youtube page just to read a comment or get a link out of the description and not watch the actual video.

And possibly they should start charging for HD embedding, like Vimeo does.

My God! You have to watch the following web series!

This is the first episode of the science fiction “condition:human” series, created with zero budget, using a consumer Canon HV30 camera, and a lot of green screen. This is the most involved and most important piece of work ever created with these HV cameras!

You can also download the MP4 file to watch locally, or on your HDTV via AppleTV/XBoX360/PS3, here.

Here’s what I don’t get.

Remember that douchebag who said that the Holocaust never happened? He was jailed for expressing his opinion — albeit an admittedly misguided and wrong opinion. He was jailed for disrespecting a powerful slice of the western society, for something that happened 70 years ago and doesn’t directly affect the everyday lives of their descendants today.

And then, there’s the Pope. Who went to Africa and told people to not use condoms! He also expressed his opinion that people should only have sex with their exclusive partners, and as such they don’t need condoms. Thing is, life ain’t like that, people have sex all the time — married or not. By instructing the much-struck by AIDS African people to not use condoms, he instigates a major violation of public health, given that the Pope is a person of authority and has millions of followers.

So the crazy guy who simply professed that a HISTORICAL event didn’t happen, but didn’t really hurt anyone (except possibly some feelings), gets jail time and death threats. The guy who puts the lives of millions in danger TODAY, gets to go about his business.

Sign o’ the times my friends, sign o’ the times.

Update: The Pope comes around about condoms and AIDS, 1.5 years later.

I can’t rave enough about the Longwave (that I mentioned before in my blog). This has to be the most underrated band on earth. I mean, they even scored a contract with a major early on, but somehow they never seemed to take off and they eventually lost the contract!

Anyways, have a look at the video of their second single from their new independent album — a great song, but not the best of the album (“Sirens of the deep sea” is my favorite, listen to it on the URL above):

* I have much trouble with our current health insurance. They won’t make it easy for anyone, but I won’t give up fighting for what’s right.

* So, Skype for the iPhone. Too bad that Apple doesn’t allow background applications. It makes IM and VoIP completely and utterly useless.

* And speaking of mobile apps. Why the heck 2/3s of all apps are games? Jeez!

* Looking at iTunes’ top-100 songs and alt.rock songs, it looks pretty evident that alt.rock is pretty dead. It seems that it’s high times were between 1990 and 2005. Since then many alt.rock radio stations have closed down (especially in NY), and the good songs are far and between. On iTunes’ top 100 alt.rock chart, 2/3s of the songs are all old! I still remember LIVE 105 back in 2002-3 playing back some really amazing new songs. These days most of the alt.rock hits are mostly rehashes of older styles. However, I also noticed something else. Looking at the iTunes’ most popular songs of today, most of these songs, even the hip-hop ones, have brushes of alt.rock in them! They are not straight pop anymore, they have something that feels “alternative” to them. So basically, it seems that alt.rock didn’t come to conquer as a genre all in itself, but to leave its unique fingerprint in the popular music of tomorrow.

* Best song in the new Franz Ferdinand album is “Send Him Away”. Really addictive guitar riff.

* [Rest of the post removed — I was being mean for no good reason. I should always have a good reason to be mean to others.]