* I received an mp3 player for review last week. It came loaded with a… chinese song and with the Downloader.Banload.GZH trojan. Apparently, the device had an autorun.inf file in there, and a usb2.0.exe file. The autorun.inf file was calling the execution of usb2.0.exe during the mounting of the player. So you end up getting the trojan without even having to execute the file yourself. The interesting thing is that the usb2.0.exe file was NOT visible by Windows Explorer, but it was visible under Mac OS X and Linux. Thankfully, my anti-virus seems to have caught the file and removed it, although this happened only the second time I mounted the device, so I wasn’t sure if I caught any spyware or not. I later ran the latest AVG anti-virus, Windows Defender and Ad-Aware, but none of the apps found anything suspicious on my system. I have emailed the sellers of the device and I expect them to remove the whole range of these devices from their shelves. If you have any of these devices (1, 2, 3, 4) you might be in danger (it doesn’t mean that all the batches have the trojan attached, but many might). Update: The shop says that they found no trojan on their side, so this might have been a false positive.

* Today we went for the second round of shopping for my brother in law’s wedding. JBQ got two beautiful suits, I got a nice business suit too among others. Oh, and two new bras…

* After shopping we went to eat out. We decided to go to Menlo Park’s “Chillies”. I started crying when we arrived, I couldn’t stop. Reason? The restaurant is just across where the Be, Inc. offices used to be (20 meters away, across the street). I only visited the Be offices 3 times I think in my life, but remembering the whole “hope” around BeOS at the time and the effort the community and engineers put back then, reduced me to tears. JBQ became annoyed which I interpreted it as “don’t remind me please, I am trying not to care, and I do a good job so far”.

In many ways, “Twin Peaks” is the daddy of “X-Files” and grand-daddy of “Lost”. I have finished watching the series, and so I can write a bit about it.

“Twin Peaks”, is a surreal thriller, serialized for the TV, by acclaimed writer and director David Lynch. The show is seemingly about the murder of teenager Laura Palmer, but eventually it becomes apparent that it’s about good and evil and the duality of everyone, wrapped in a paranormal way. In many ways, “Twin Peaks” is a lot like “Lost”: people who are not what they seem but are interconnected, deep mysteries, and paranormal elements that drive their fans into theory frenzy! “Twin Peaks” did it first: it put people into theory mode, it’s just that unfortunately for it, the Internet was not widespread at the time, and so much of the glory was lost in localized conversations (aka the “watercooler show“) rather than becoming an international phenomenon.

The first season was almost perfect. It was up to the point, interesting, haunting. I have nothing much more to say about the first season, it was that perfect.

I regard the second season being split into two phases: the Laura Palmer investigation, which is a continuation of the first season, and the aftermath after the killer is found. The first phase of the second season is not too bad, but it’s apparent that things started to get a bit haywire with the writers, David Lynch having very little involvement with the show, and ABC trying to drive the project. For example, the Harold Smith outdoors-phobic and Japanese investor subplots where useless and silly. But you haven’t seen silly yet. In the second phase, 90% of the plot is downright silly. From the pregnant Lucy and her two silly men, to James and rich lady subplot which had nothing to do with anything else, to James in general being portrayed like a man whore having the hots of four women in 15 days time while at the same time he’s supposed to be level-headed (remember, 1 episode is 1 day in the “Twin Peaks” world), to Josie becoming a maid (what the hell?), to Ben Horne becoming crazy and then sane again, to Leo getting controlled by a dog collar (!), to Nadine and mayor’s stupid subplots, to David Duchovny guest-starring and appearing in woman’s dresses. Twin Peaks had become a ridiculous show by that point.

I mean, the consensus is that “Twin Peaks” lost its audience because the killer was revealed, but the truth is, it’s lost its audience because the show lost the plot entirely, all by itself. I could barely sit through and watch the second season’s second phase. I would pause it every 10 minutes and go eat something, or check out my email, or go pee. I just couldn’t sit through an entire episode anymore. The only good episodes in the second season were the two final ones, and guess why: because David Lynch came back for these last two episodes, trying to fix the freaking mess the ABC writers left him with. But it was too late.

The truth is this: “Twin Peaks” should not have had more than 16-18 episodes. It should have ended when the murderer is revealed, and should have replaced some early unneeded subplots with some of the (rarely good) points found in the second phase, like the Lodges, Cooper getting possessed by BOB after Laura’s murderer dies, the army’s involvement & Major Biggs etc. And after the series’ run, the three movies should have been created, just like Lynch wanted it. Only one movie was shot at the end, because by that time, the peaksmania had died down, exactly because of that disastrous second phase, and so the movie didn’t do well in the box office. Maybe these movies should have been tele-movies.

In conclusion, “Twin Peaks” failed because no one could take the step “Lost” writers took with ABC in February 2007: to give an end to the series and not let it go on and on forever like that. If Lynch was to strike such a deal with ABC before he started shooting, then “Twin Peaks” could have become the ultimate series today (both TV and cinema). It’s a shame really.

As I have said many times in the past, the HV20/30 are the best consumer cameras in terms of picture quality. Various high-end AVCHD models (HF100, SR11/SR12, SD9) tried to compete this year with the HV series, but they were still lacking that bit of extra quality that you can squeeze out of the HV20/30.

Well, that’s all the past now.

Canon has just announced in Japan two new models, the HF11 and the HG11, which can record in 24mbps AVC, which is the highest bitrate that the AVCHD standard is asking for (higher bitrate is used by some prosumer camcorders, but that’s not part of the official standard).

With the HF11 and HG11 recording at full 1920×1080@24mbps MPEG4-AVC, the HV20/30 with its 1440×1080@25mbps MPEG-2 has no chance in hell to keep the reigns any longer.

Today the tape died, as far as I am concerned, with this fall of the HV20/30.

The HF11 is largely the same camera model as the HF10, but the HG11 was completely reworked compared to the HG10. It has a brand new body, better lens, better usability, 120 GB drive with ability to also record in SD card, 12x zoom instead of 10x. I would have considered the HG11 if it wasn’t for the stupidity of Canon of going down to 37mm filter thread, and not staying with HG10’s 43mm. I have a gazillion accessories for the HV20 that would have work with any 43mm camera. Step-down rings are not good in my case as large and heavy lenses and adapters would break the step-down ring and the camera’s filter thread if I was to mount them in the HG11. It sucks to be stuck in something as trivial as a filter thread.

I am trying to clean up the office so I have 4 machines to give away (I won’t bother trying to sell them): an AthlonXP 1.6 ghz, a Duron 1.3ghz, a dual Celeron 533 mhz, and a Pegasos 1. From all these machines, only the Duron works properly and the Pegasos only when used with Morphos 1.4 and not with 2.0. I installed Ubuntu on the Duron and it’s ready to go, while the Pegasos could actually land me at least $100 if I could install morphos 2.0 (the CRT monitor goes out of sync when loading the installer CD). The AthlonXP and the dual Celeron are completely dead, they don’t start at all. It still is weird to see a machine go completely dead while it was working the last time I used it (granted, about 2 years ago).

Update: Today is not my day. One of my PDAs died too (well, just the battery, still works when plugged in).

Just a clarification for those who don’t recognize the drummer of my latest music video, Dolorata‘s “You’ve Gotta Want It“. Dawn Richardson used to be the drummer of “4 Non Blondes”, a band that had a big hit back in early ’90s with the song “What’s up“.

* I watched the indie film “First Snow” tonight (trailer) and it is one of the best movies I have seen lately. It has a rather low rating on IMDb, in my opinion it’s vastly underrated. The movie is the epitome of “character development”. First time director Mark Fergus does an excellent job, and cinematography is great too. No wonder it’s a good movie, as Fergus also co-wrote “Children of Men” and “Iron Man”. Great talent and one writer/director to watch for.

* I managed to upgrade my iPhone to 2.0 firmware and unlock it last night. This wasn’t easy. I had to try 2-3 times to get it in to the right “restore” mode.

* This article says that Indie music is dead. It reminded me what the older people tell to younger ones: “in our generation, we did things better”. The article is just wrong in so many ways that is not even funny.

* Google’s Jeremy Allison blogged about LinuxHater (thanks for the link Dimitar). He gives a lot of good points, but he ends up saying that the problem with FOSS is “just a few bugs”, while the problem really is leadership, culture, and project management.

* This is why I am an atheist. Because cults, mysticism, dogmas and all that shit, don’t make any sense whatsoever.

* Larry King has hosted UFO-related shows many times, and the most recent one was a few days ago. I feel that he is a believer even if he will never admit it publicly.

My second music video:

For the last two months I’ve been in correspondence with Chandra from Nepal. Chandra has a band, and he had just bought the HV30, so we exchanged a few emails about how to shoot a slowed-down music video etc. His very first video, is now ready to be seen. For a first video, it’s a really good effort and the song is nice too! HD version here.

A new series on my blog, an extreme color grading example each week.

Original picture by M_Eriksson, licensed under the CC-BY.


After extreme color grading

I wrote in a hurry two months ago about how I shot my first music video, but having already shot my second one, I have done some adjustments into my workflow, which I will share with you below. As I have explained in the past, nearly all the professional music videos are slowed-down, even when they don’t look like they are. And of course you don’t need lots of money to shoot a music video, you can do it on a budget.

1. Acquire the audio CD of the song you want to shoot a video for. Compressed audio formats like MP3, OGG, and AAC won’t work correctly, you will end up with an A/V sync issue eventually, so get the original audio CD. Load the CD into iTunes. Go to “Edit”, “Preferences”, and change the importing format to WAVE like this:

Then, rip the CD with these settings via iTunes. The ripping will create a .wav file on your iTunes library folder, usually somewhere around here: C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\ for Windows, or somewhere on your ~/Music/ folder if you are on a Mac.

2. Install Audacity 1.3x from here. Load Audacity, and then open into that audio editor the .wav file that was ripped earlier via iTunes. Click “Effects” and select “Change speed”. Make the audio’s speed 25% faster like this:

[Update: Changing the tempo instead of the speed also works, and it’s preferable, because the pitch is preserved. Just tweak the “tempo” plugin by 25%.]

Then, save the audio back as wave (.wav) with a different file name via Audacity.

3. Go back to iTunes. Load the sped up version of the song created by Audacity above to iTunes by adding it to the iTunes music library. Place an empty writable CD-R on your optical drive. Place the sped up song on the “Burn” playlist of iTunes. Burn the song as an audio CD twice. Keep one copy, and give one copy to the band to rehearse the speed up version a few days before the actual shooting.

4. When the shooting day arrives, use a portable audio CD player to get the singer to lipsync, or if you are shooting in the band’s rehearsal space, use their audio CD player which is possibly hooked into big speakers. Shoot your video with that sped up audio. If you are using a Canon camera, use “Cinemode” and “neutral color” to make the video look as desaturated as possible (the duller it looks, the better it color grades in post processing). Do a lot of takes. Shoot in 1080/50i if you use a PAL camera, or in 1080/60i or PF30 if you use an NTSC camera. I suggest that you don’t shoot in 24p, because by the moment you slow-down the video on step #6, you will need all the frames you can get to make it look smooth. Don’t worry, it won’t look like home video because of the slow-down involved. 1080/60i or PF30 are the best ways to shoot (compared to PAL modes or 24p) because the kind of slow down we do here is perfect mathematically: 60i/2=30/25%=24p. What this formula means is this: “After you de-interlace a 60i stream, you get 30p. Because we make that 30p stream 25% slower on step #6, we get a true 24p frame rate across time”. And that’s the frame rate we export at the end of step #8. If you are concerned about 60i having too high of a shutter speed, consider using PF30 (found on all new Canon HD cameras), which is as good as 60i in terms of the “mathematics” involved, but it uses lower shutter speeds. I would be using PF30 for my music video projects if my HV20 supported that. In fact, I hereby declare the Canon HV30 the best consumer HD camera right now to shoot music videos, because of its PF30 shooting mode and overall quality.

5. When the shooting is all done and you are ready to start editing, load the footage on your video editor. I will use Sony Vegas for my tutorial here, but Premiere and FCE/FCP are equally capable. Copy away to the video’s project folder, and place in the audio track, the originally ripped .wav file (not the sped up one, but the normal one you ripped on step #1). On Vegas, it’s very important to have the right project settings before you start editing. Click “File”, then “Project Properties”, and a new dialog will pop up. In there, click the right outmost icon called “Match Media”, the one that looks like a yellow folder. From there, select one of the files you will be editing with, and click “open”. Make sure “none/progressive” is always selected in the “field order” option, and for quality select “Best”. If you shot interlaced (e.g. in 50i or 60i), make sure that for the “de-interlacing method” you select “interpolate”. For NTSC 60i HDV for example, it would look like this (you can safely ignore additional settings not shown in my screenshot but found on Vegas Pro instead of Platinum).

6. Then, place a take of your footage (hint: dragging a clip from the project media tab to the timeline with the right mouse click rather than the left, allows you to place in the track the video across the timeline without its accompanied audio). Right click on the clip event in the timeline, click “properties”, check “disable resample”, and change the “playback rate” to 0.800. This change has effectively made the video slower now, which will sync perfectly to the non-sped up song. Now, left-click on the right side of the video take and drag it to the right to make the video longer. Stop when a little arrow appears, as in the picture below. We need to do that extra step because when we changed the playback speed to the slower 0.800x, Vegas doesn’t automatically resize the video in the timeline to fit the whole take.

7. Add more of your takes on different video tracks and adjust them as in step #6. Then, try to sync up the audio and video on each of these takes. It will take some practice, but it’s possible. On Vegas, if you select a clip in the timeline and then you keep the ALT key pressed while also pressing the numbers 1 or 3 in the enabled numerical keypad, it will move that clip frame by frame left or right in the timeline, so that can help you be more accurate with the audio syncing. You can even “lock” a clip in the timeline so you don’t move it accidentally while editing. Then, edit away. Be aggressive with cutting scenes, as rock videos require quick change of shots. Slow-down even more some shots that don’t require syncing. Color grade aggressively too at the very end.

8. Export in 24p (that is, 23.976 frame rate), progressive field order. I suggest h.264 at 12 mbps for video codec, and AAC 160 kbps for audio, with the MP4 container at 1280×720 resolution for HD, or at 874×480 if you shot in widescreen miniDV SD. This exporting also makes the video compatible with AppleTV, Vimeo, XBoX360 and PS3, so it would be easier to enjoy it in on an HDTV.

[9. OPTIONAL, for PAL users only]. If you need to export in 25p for PAL countries instead, you export your 24p video in step 8 using an intermediate lossless codec (e.g. Lagarith, Huffyuv, Cineform, DNxHD etc), and then you re-time it to 25p this way. Yes, this means that even if you live in a PAL country, you need an NTSC camera to follow this way of shooting music videos.

Now, go help your favorite local rock band!