Digital Juice has some very good tutorials on its site about how to shoot and edit properly. There are a number of new things I learned by watching their videos, and the most recent one is “record 1 minute of ambient noise before you start shooting in a location”. Their video tutorials are highly recommended, and they offer MP4 downloadable versions too. To save you time, out of about 200 videos, I have put together for you the most practical & important ones — in my opinion.

UPDATE: Videos moved here. My links below don’t work anymore, you will have to search for these videos manually.

Lighting Setup

– Lighting tips, also available in text form.
– Lighting Backgrounds
– Shadow lighting

Audio Recording

– Sound Advice
– Getting rid of the 60Hz hum
– Preventing Plosives

Video Shooting

– Creative Camerawork
– DoF & focusing
– Framing
– White Balance
– Shooting interviews
– The warehouse
– Shooting to edit
– Steady shooting
– Green screen shooting

Video Editing

– Continuity cutting
– Color correction
– On transitions
– The Cut
– Deleting scenes
– Time effects
– Compositing intro
– Compositing, Advanced
– Green screen editing

Audio Editing

– How to select music score
– Cleaning up audio
– Fixing bad audio
– Dubbing bad audio
– Audio effects

JBQ bought for us, and we received today, a king sized bed with a good quality foam mattress. There are two questions in my mind that I will direct to my husband, JBQ:

1. Does a new bed is supposed to signal for more sex, or less of it? From one side it sounds like you subconsciously want to suggest more sex, but on the other hand, king size means that you will be further away from me at night. I am confused. Or does that mean indeed more sex, followed by immediate sleep and snoring on your part on the far side of the bed, free from my quest for a hug?

2. Can I try the wine glass trick with our expensive brand new foam mattress? Please… pretty please???

This article at the Macleans magazine angers me. Apparently, TV execs want to move away from serialization and back to episodic TV, like in the ’80s and most of the ’90s. They have literally instructed their writers to move back to episodic TV.

The reason for this is because of the natural viewer attrition serialized shows get over time, and subsequent falling ratings. Unfortunately, as the article correctly states, the shows that have the most cultural impact are the serialized ones, not the episodic ones. Especially sci-fi mystery shows like Twin Peaks, Lost, the X-Files alien mythology arc, and BSG. Cult shows will never go away. CSI and “The Mentalist” will though.

Sure, not everyone wants a mind fuck every week, but there are some geeks like me who do. So why can’t we have that, especially when there’s space for both kinds on TV? After Lost is done in May 2010, there will be nothing as compelling on TV anymore for people like me. I keep praying that Lost’s writers, Damon and Carlton (aka Daltron), have something like this in store for us. A step beyond Lost, I am hoping for another mystery scifi series, or a grand story about the whole Marvel universe (not just a single super hero or team).

The article in question was linked by some Lost news sites and the discussion goes around these lines: people who can’t deal with shows like Lost are just dumb. Or just old and tired. Lost is an interactive game where your mind has to work at 100% to get what the hell is going on. I say that let these people have their own shitty, brainless, TV shows, but throw a bone for us who try to use our brains a bit more, too.

My JBQ agrees that Lost is the only show that elevates TV into “true art”. It’s a kind of storytelling that can’t be done with any other medium. He also notes that the kind of people who watch serialized shows are easier to target with ads. Which is why Lost and its 12 million viewers, being the most pirated TV show ever, and offering the full HD episodes for free on their site, makes more money for ABC than CSI:Miami’s 17 million (aged) viewers do for CBS. And will continue to make a truckload of money for ABC long after Lost is all done in 2010. Because it’s a cult show, and cult shows never die.

Removing serialized TV is a mistake in many levels. If the TV execs don’t understand that, then they are very short sighted and only care for their current job rather than their company’s future.

The iPhone is indeed the most successful phone or PDA model ever, it seems. Apple now has 16.6% of the worldwide smartphone market, and almost 10,000 apps in their AppStore. That market share chart is very old (pre-iPhone 3G), and I expect that the iPhone by now has well over 25% of the smartphone market.

This applications point is very important too. 10,000 apps in just 6 months in unprecedented. Think that it took Windows Mobile 6 years to get to 20,000 apps, and PalmOS about 7 years for 30,000 apps. And if you want to laugh a bit, think that it took Nokia 3 years for its S60 3rd Edition platform to get… 600 apps. Remember, S60 phones are actually very popular, but there are not many apps for them! And the reason why 3rd Edition S60 has such a low number of apps available is because, as I have said many times in this blog, Nokia broke binary compatibility with S60 2nd Edition (that already had 2,000 apps at the time). Binary compatibility is very important and Nokia is paying for it for these stupid decisions that continues to make. They seem to never learn, and this is why they will go bye-bye eventually from this market. Their new touchscreen platform is a bit of a joke too, as I blogged in the past.

Google’s Android has quite a few apps too, possibly in the hundreds by now, and it’s already deemed successful. But this fragmented “app market” that doesn’t have a single store, is a terrible idea in my book. Personally, while I like the idea behind Android very much, I don’t like the Android UI and the current HTC phone at all. The funny thing is that our landlord’s office manager couldn’t wait for the G1 to come out, only to sell it a few days after he got it. He also hated the UI, and he couldn’t deal with the shitty HTC phone design (he couldn’t type correctly because of the oversized right side). He got a Blackberry right after that, he sold it within 3 days, and he’s back on the iPhone. The iPhone offers the best user experience hands down indeed.

The only thing bugging me is the kind of apps that Apple doesn’t offer us in the iPhone and third parties can’t fill in these blanks. And because of the various SDK limitations, the iPhone apps are mostly games and other useless crap.

If you read any serious analysis of “Lost” around, you will find it getting compared to “Twin Peaks” all the time. The two shows are of course very similar in many ways, but we didn’t have official confirmation about “Lost” being artistically the natural continuation of “Twin Peaks”, until now. Damon Lindelof, one of the two geniuses behind “Lost”, said recently:

“The show that REALLY affected me, however, was TWIN PEAKS, which I’d watch every week with my dad. He’d tape the show on his VCR (remember those?) and we’d watch the episode AGAIN right after it aired in our quest to pull every last clue out of the show. The idea of a TV Show being a mystery and a game that spawned hundreds of theories obviously was a major precedent (that’s a fancy way of saying we ripped it off) for LOST.”

I am very happy how Damon has evolved the whole idea behind “Twin Peaks” (my review) to something so much better, like “Lost” is. Here’s hope that someone in the future will evolve “Lost” itself to a step beyond it too.

In the same interview, the two writers also say that they won’t be revisiting Libby’s story (to the dismay of many fans online), and that seasons 1 and 2 won’t get released in Blu-Ray individually — which of course pisses me off, as I would need to buy a final boxset to get these two seasons in BD, even if I would already own all the seasons by then. Very unfair for us loyal customers.

Elsewhere, the first sneak peek of Lost’s new episode in January was released too. Not a major spoiler, don’t worry.

MGMT is the new band that I love. They are playing “psychedelic electro-alternative rock”. And they are successful in the alternative rock scene in the last few months. If you like the “Muse” or maybe even the “New Order”, you will love the MGMT too. Listen to their song “Kids” below (video is unofficial, does not depict the actual band).

Interestingly, my favorite song of the band is not a single (yet). It’s called “Of Moons, Birds & Monsters”, listen to it below. Psychedelic to the max!

And if you happen to like the MGMT, you might just like the 3OH!3 too, another duet, who play “electronic rapcore” music. That’s rap that has rock & electronic elements. The music video of their most known song is here, although this specific song is more pop than rapcore (compared to the rest of their songs).

For those who would like to embark into filmmaking territories, I would suggest you take a look at the “Pi” movie by Darren Aronofsky (trailer). The movie has a film school cutting and camera movement style, it was cheap ass, and yet, it has a very high rating on IMDb, because it has a great story. This movie is the definition of story telling.

Pi was shot in Super16 ten years ago, it has virtually no shallow DOF, it is extremely grainy, it’s black & white, and it generally looks like ass on first look. But the story takes you away and all that weird look add to the weird world the hero lives in.

Update: Aronofsky’s new movie, “The Wrestler” that comes out in a few days (trailer), was also shot in 16mm and has no shallow DOF to speak of either.

* I never watch music award shows, this last Sunday was a first with the AMA awards. Watching Coldplay performing live was a proof that Chris Martin can’t sing. He was only a tiny bit better than in the SNL show a month ago that I blogged about. As bad was the Jonas Brothers’ singer too. Everyone else excelled in vocal performance that night, and I was positively surprised by Miley Cyrus.

* Our webmaster on this server, Adam, blogged about economist Peter Schiff who has been predicting the house bubble, oil prices, economy crash since the beginning of the decade. Watch the video on Adam’s page about how everyone laughs, live on TV, at Mr Schiff predictions — it’s so pathetic. I guess he laughed last. On a recent interview with him, he predicts very dire stuff, like this recession will be much worse than the 1930’s Great Depression, as the crime will rise a lot and there will be civil unrest. He predicts that the rest of the developed world won’t be in the same situation, only USA will pay the price of its own “consume a lot, and don’t produce enough” philosophy. You can read more of Schiff’s articles here. He made me think twice that bailing out failing businesses was the way to go.

* Handbrake 0.9.3 was released yesterday and it now allows for single file transcoding instead of just DVD ripping. It’s also available for Linux now, not just Mac/Win. I put up a tutorial on how to use it to export in 720p HD. Change the resolution to 640×360 and bitrate to 1500 if your camera is a widescreen miniDV instead.

* YouTube supports HD now. Sure, you did see the widescreen new page format, but that’s not what I am talking about. YouTube re-encodes videos 4 times: 192×144 3GP for cellphones, 320×240 FLV (this is what it loads by default), 480×270 h.264 (“high quality”), and 1280×720 h.264 (loads only if you append the &fmt=22 code at the end of the URL of a video that was originally a 720p uploaded video). My Android video was uploaded in 720/30p, so when you click on this specific URL you can view it in HD. I believe that YouTube’s h.264-based HD re-encoding is better than Vimeo’s, not only because of the video quality, but because they support 30 fps (Vimeo only goes up to 24), and also it seems that Adobe’s h.264 decoder is faster than its FLV HD one. However, I expect Vimeo to follow suit in terms of h.264/fps, so I am staying with them rather than moving my videos to Youtube’s ugly user base who know only how to discredit you and spam your comment section to hell.

* Speaking of YouTube, I watched a bit of the first YouTube Live show the other day: Katy Perry can barely sing. From all the Youtube internet personalities, Mr Safety, Smosh and Sxephil are my favorites. Smosh’s latest video is really funny.

* [BSG SPOILERS]: SyFyPortal says that one of these five people will be the last Cylon. Given that the… Xena Cylon said that “the last Cylon is not among you”, we can easily take out 3 people out of the list. It will be between Ellen Tigh and Cally Tyroll. And if Cally is indeed the last Cylon, I will do a big fat “I told you so, twice“, blog post. 😉

A short video about boats, shot for the purposes of my upcoming Kodak Z1012 IS digital camera review. It was shot within half an hour with this HD-capable digital camera at San Mateo’s marina (Coyote Point) yesterday.

Most scenes are over-exposed as the camera has no exposure control in its video mode. The video is color graded. HD version, comments and download here.

Update: And a pseudo-HDR image I shot and tone-mapped yesterday with the same camera:

I blogged about Christina Aguilera’s new song earlier today. As I said there, the song is very nice, maybe the best ever from Christina.

The official music video for it is pretty good too. It was directed by Peter Berg, the same director who did the movie “Hancock”.

In the meantime, Christina signed an exclusive contract with the Target superstores, and Target did a 30 second commercial for it, featuring Christina and her new song.

Here’s the trouble: the commercial is about 10 times better than the official video, and everyone who has seen both says so. If something like this was the official video, it would have kicked so much ass.

I am not sure how the director will take all this though. It can be a blow to him and his morale.