I revisited my “Garden Spinners” (was: “Kites”) video this afternoon, making at least 8 changes to the video. It is much more faithful to the beat now, and a bit more interesting too. Additionally, I upgraded the bitrate to 6 mbps VBR (original version was 5 mbps VBR), so if you had downloaded the previous version, please re-download the new one — it’s better.

I got some pretty positive feedback about this particular video, so I am interested to know if people prefer it over my jellyfish video. The jellyfish video is one of most “liked” HV20 videos on Vimeo ever, so I wonder which one is better.

I was never a big fan of Christina Aguilera. Her music work was “ok”, but all that high pitch “ooaaaah, aaaaah, ooooooh, yeaaah yeaaaaah” shit in her older songs were pissing me off. This is one of the reasons why I don’t like R&B/soul music, it’s like the artists try to show off their vocal abilities rather than singing the damn lyrics. It turns me off immediately.

But her new song, “Keeps Gettin’ Better“, is actually, better. It has an electronic style music, but with a mix of alternative rock style singing melody, and a bit of Rihanna in it. I like it, a lot.

The problem is the “Heroes” creator, Tim Kring, himself.

Kring said no final ending for Heroes has been conceived, noting, “We didn’t have an island to get off of.” On top of that, Kring noted that “My original idea was more of an anthological vibe to it, where you regenerate the characters.“

The way I read the above, and the rest of the things he said in that interview, is like this: “I have no master plan. I just put together a convoluted, written-on-the-go story, and I cross fingers that people will buy into it. You see, the Marvel movies were all over the Box Office, so I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could strap together some super hero stories to make a quick buck? So I did. I made a quick buck, and it was fun while it lasted”.

And then, he also says that serialization on modern TV is a bad idea. Maybe it is, but then again, where would serialization be possible then? The movies, where it’s impossible by definition? What he fails to understand is not that serialization is not wanted by viewers, but that viewership naturally decreases on series after 3 years, because older viewers get bored, and new viewers don’t understand the whole back-story to get hooked. Which is why having a clock, a master plan, a premeditated story that makes sense, and a series that doesn’t last more than 3-4 years, is important. But nooooo… Tim preferred the quick buck rather than creating an artistic masterpiece (like “Lost”), or enjoy the kind of money that does come with it in the longer run (e.g. “Firefly” made more money after its demise).

The trailer for the new Star Trek movie is out, and it’s looking good. The forums are full of comments and the old hard core trekies absolutely hate it, but then again, we are talking about old people who will die soon (hehe…), and so it is of the outmost importance for the future of the franchise, that Star Trek gets revitalized, modernized, and finds a newer audience.

Before I saw some pictures a few weeks ago, and the trailer today, I had a problem with the Spock portrayal. I just didn’t believe that there was any actor out there that could have Nimoy’s eerie look and mannerisms. And if the actor would have decided to go his way and redo Spock’s character from scratch, that would have been a huge disappointment for me — given that Spock was the first love of my life, at age 5, a character that has inspired me, and steered a lot of my personality’s evolution.

But Zachary Quinto just looks amazing as Spock. I dare to say that this is the only actor from the bunch that actually tried to recreate Spock’s character as closely as possible, while the rest all look like a bunch of new kids on the block. Interestingly, I never particularly liked Quinto’s character on “Heroes”, the villain Sylar, but there are a couple of scenes in the ST trailer that show what a great actor he is. I had trouble thinking that this was not Nimoy. He seems to have put a lot of effort in recreating Nimoy’s body movements when in action, which is what makes him believable.

So overall, I am excited about the new Star Trek movie, and my only real concern is about the new franchise to not lose the “soul” of Star Trek. And that soul is just that: social commentary. Hopefully, JJ Abrams — who I don’t particularly trust — won’t turn Star Trek into a shallow action packed flick as this would be a lose-lose situation eventually.

Even more interestingly, this movie will be the first space-based science fiction movie in theaters, in two years. The longest, I believe, we ever had to wait for a space movie in cinemas. Makes you wonder.

The second video from our weekend trip, a relaxing nature video. HD version, comments and download here.

We visited Santa Rosa and Bodega Bay this weekend, and so here’s one of the two videos I shot. HD version, comments and download here. The second video will come later today.

RED announced the specs for their 2009/2010 products: ranging from a fixed-lens 3k Scarlet at around $3000, to a 9k system that can shoot in stereoscopic 3D mode (two connected cameras at once, next to each other), to a crazy 28k (261 mega pixel) sensor ($55,000 just for the main unit). How big is a 28k image you ask? Here’s a comparison to a 1080p HD image. These are amazing specs of course, and the prices are extremely low for what these products will be able to do. There’s no question about that.

Here are my two problems though.

1. I am what the author and video professional Stu “ProLost” Maschwitz refers to as a “DV Rebel” on his book of the same name. DV Rebels are basically amateur videography artists, that take cinematography more seriously than normal camcorder owners. DV Rebels try to make the best with what they’ve got even if they only use dirt cheap hardware. In essence, is a lot like how computer geeks like to play with Linux, tweak it like there’s no tomorrow, and enjoy the challenges. The 3k fixed-lens RED Scarlet, possibly the cheapest RED of the bunch, will still cost over $3000 after you add an LCD monitor to it, the special kind of CF cards it requires, battery etc. I am sure that quality will be good, but if Canon comes up with a next-generation 1080p “geek” AVCHD camera for under $2000, similar to what I describe here (e.g. all features the HV30 has, plus gain/AV/TV full manual control, true 24p, DigicDV-4 half-inch sensor, 43mm filter size, fast lens up to 8x or 10x zoom, full 1080p at 24mbps, proper focus ring), I would go for that instead of a Scarlet. Simply because, it would be enough for my needs, and a good bump over the HV20/30 legacy. The RED will definitely change professional cinema as we know it, but I don’t think it will grab all the lower-end artist attention. I have a feeling that wedding professionals won’t care much about it either. In other words, Canon will continue to exist and sell well, but it will feel the heat and hopefully will upgrade their specs for a new market class that it’s between consumer and prosumer. That’s what I am waiting this January from Canon.

2. RED is a hardware company. And as with all hardware companies, their software sucks. RED has been under heavy criticism about their buggy software, and how they sell hardware where the firmware is barely stable. The early bird users end up losing their feathers and becoming guinea pigs, while some basic functions for professionals are missing. Their computer tools are not great either, and only few editors support their files (meaning that you might need to additionally buy the $1000 Cineform Neo4k to get your footage on your editor). Adding to the injury, if you complain about these problems, you end up getting banned from their online forum.

The only way I am getting the cheap Scarlet is if the complete package (with LCD, battery, CF card) costs up to $3000, if it has the ability to shoot 1080p in non-windowed mode (I don’t care about its 3k resolution at this point as I don’t own a super-computer to process it), and if the PC tools (compared to their Mac tools) are sane enough to let me process the raw image and export in an AVI lossless codec via DirectShow (so I can edit in Vegas). There are a lot of “if”s there, so there’s a better chance that Canon will release a hybrid consumer/prosumer “geek” (“DV Rebel”) camera that does everything I need in a more convenient fashion than RED can.

Discussion here.

As sketched:

As colorized with GIMP:

As traced and colorized with Illustrator and Photoshop CS4:

I didn’t use any advanced tools to get this result with Illustrator/Photoshop, but compared to Inkscape/Gimp it was more intuitive. Photoshop’s truly magical magic wand worked better too. With Gimp I even had trouble setting a transparent background layer, I had to google it to find out where to get the option.

Update: The best I could do with Ginp/Inkscape using the exact same tools as in PS/Ai (not the same colors). I couldn’t get these apps to give me a solid, artistic bitmap tracing like Illustrator did (note: the “photocopy” plugin was ran before the tracing in both cases):

If you ever visit Seattle, make sure you visit the SciFi Museum and their airplane/space museum close to Boeing’s factory. So, here are a few interesting tidbits from our vacation in Seattle:

– A lot of people with iPhones in the Seattle airport. iPhone here, iPhone there. But wait! Here’s a person with just a RaZR. Oh, what is he doing? Ah, he’s taking his iPod out of his pocket!

– Virgin America, the airliner we flew with, runs a touchscreen, flash-based system in their per-seat screens. It’s based on a Red Hat Linux 2004 release, it has 256 MB RAM, and it uses a flash-based filesystem. They also use Google Maps for their geo-tracking. Looked impressive and worked well. They even offered video podcasts of Diggnation for viewing. Only thing missing was internet access.

– While in the museum of music in Seattle, we used an interactive key-learning system that tried to teach you how to play a “hook”. I sucked at it, and started playing random keys, and voila! A blue screen of death! It apparently ran Windows.

The same museum ran an automated version of the open source audio editor Audacity too (in the same hall as the interactive demo one).

Geeks.com, sent us the Kodak M883 for a review. It also happened that this weekend we spent it in the beautiful Seattle, visiting museums and friends. What a better way to test these items but by taking them with me to see how they perform and survive the trip!

* Kodak EasyShare M883 8MP 3x Optical/5x Digital Zoom HD Camera
The M883 is a low cost/range 8 MP digicam from Kodak, currently selling below $100. It has a flash, 3x optical zoom, digital image stabilization, video recording capability at VGA resolution and 30fps, a microphone, and a nice, spacious 3″ screen. The camera is physically pretty thin, and stylish.Exactly because the camera is a cheaper one, it has fewer buttons than the $200/$250 range Kodak digicams, but this actually works to its advantage. Switching between video, auto and scene mode is very organic, and the joystick carries through actions like “flash on/off”, focusing, and screen information. Through the main menu you can choose between focusing options, a choice of 4 white balance presets, SDHC formatting, image and video resolution. The main problems with the product is extreme purple fringing, a very mushy look at the upper right side of the image, and complete inability to do macro in any way that’s useful. Adding to that, it takes up to 4-5 seconds to save a JPEG image, which is a rather slow performance. Nevertheless, the “you get what you pay for” doctrine applies here, and the M883 is better than most cameras in that price class. But don’t expect miracles.