A dream about film

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2010-04-16T17:44:00.002+08:00

As the title.

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有意進一步閱讀更多者, 請造訪這裏

Please visit here.

6:32pm project

2006-10-10T14:43:00.000+08:00

It's the time I got connected with the world. From now on, I try to record the moment everyday. No matter where I am and what I do at the instant.

Microphone solution

2006-07-08T22:53:00.000+08:00

I found this site for professional microphone solutions. Note here for myself. We filmmakers always need to explore new things.(even though I am not sure that I can call myself a filmmaker)Audio, cinematography, Music, Act etc. Before, I know the area of sound record not much. Maybe I just can be an appreciatory man. But if I can understand more, I will have more possibility to try. Is that right? It's never too old to learn.
hehehehe...
3:1 rule
This rule deals with phasing problems when summing a number of microphones to mono. The rule states, that the mutual distance between numerous microphones should be 3 times the distance between sound source and microphone.
無意中看到一個專業麥克風網站, 這方面還有很多可以學習的, 把三一律解釋放進來, 做個引子.

2006 Cine Gear Expo

2006-06-21T19:25:00.000+08:00

As it said: where Hollywood's professionals meet.
Please check the site.
As the events listed:
Events coming soon Friday June 23rd and Saturday June 24th. Premiere Seminars will be held on June 23, 10 am to 6 pm and June 24, 10 am to 5 pm. Make sure and click on 2006 Premiere Seminars for more info. Premiere Seminars are free on a first come first serve basis. Master Class Seminars will be held June 25, 2006. Make sure and click on 2006 Master Master Class Seminars for more info.
The master class include: THE "NEW" SUPER 16, FEATURE FILM FINANCING & PRODUCTION, DIALOG ON DIGITAL WORKFLOW, LIGHTING WORKSHOP.
I am interested in Classic MAX 16 Camera.
Wish I will have one in the future.

Old time Pets

2006-05-21T23:26:00.000+08:00

Again, I used the Canon518 for those shots of some cute animals. After I have them developed, I just record the motion pictures with my DV and Agnus Super8 dual projector. Some special reconstructions of the film were made for an experiment about a feel of old fashion. Just take a look if you like or feel what you feel about the edition.
這些在台南拍的影像, 沒用專業機器過TC, 只是用投影機和DV拍成數位檔, 在編輯上做了點小實驗, 加了舊的情歌旋律, 應該有點意思, 可惜網路檔案經壓縮, 感覺差了些.

Super 8mm practice

2006-04-04T19:45:00.000+08:00

When I happened to see the super 8mm film look, I was attracted deeply by the tone of image. I take any chance to contact the field. Now I have super 8 cameras, a projector, and son on. In the future, I will use it for my creation beside 16mm amd 35mm film. Click the image to see the S8 something.
超8練習,舊時光的風貌,一個創作的老工具,新利用.

A keying tool : Ultra 2

2006-03-26T23:07:00.000+08:00

You all can see its power on the website here.
The following is excerpted from http://www.seriousmagic.com/.

"Revolutionary Keying Technology
Serious Magic's ULTRA 2 is a breakthrough that transforms keying into a practical daily production tool for all types of video professionals. ULTRA 2's drag-and-drop simplicity allows video editors to create highly realistic background composites that are convincing in every detail, even from marginal video sources.
ULTRA 2's Vector Keying™ technology blows away the primitive keyer built into your video editing software. Now shots that used to be impossible to key—uneven lighting, wrinkled backgrounds and frizzy hair—can be finished in minutes. ULTRA 2 will even preserve the shadows of your talent and achieve complex keys such as smoke, liquids and transparent objects with minimal effort. It's simply remarkable.
Virtual Set Technology
ULTRA 2 puts high-end virtual sets within reach. ULTRA 2's Master Sets Libraries (sold separately) go beyond typical static shots and include breathtaking flying camera shots, moving stages, boom and dolly moves. Sets include multiple B-source options and camera angles in tight, medium and wide views. These libraries, sold separately, can be used seamlessly in ULTRA 2. "

Now, because the great improve of digital technique, we can have more flexibility in our creation. Although the price $495.00 is cheaper then other solutions in keying, I can't afford now. Maybe I will purchase one later.

Sundance film festival online

2006-03-02T18:13:00.000+08:00

Now we can watch 47 short film on line from Sundance film festival for free. The award of 2006 was announced, you can also check it out. For us and the spirit of independent production, I am glad to watch these creative shorts on line for free. Just click to watch them.
Here is some information about Sunsance film festival:
Sundance Film Festival is the premier showcase for American and international independent film. Held each January in and around Park City, Utah, the Festival is a core program of Sundance Institute, a nonprofit cultural organization founded by Robert Redford in 1981.Presenting 120 dramatic and documentary feature-length films in nine distinct categories, and 80 short films each year, the Sundance Film Festival has introduced American audiences to some of the most innovative films of the past two decades, including sex, lies, and videotape, Clerks, Smoke Signals, In the Bedroom, American Splendor, Napoleon Dynamite, Born into Brothels, and Me and You and Everyone We Know. Beyond the streets of Park City, the official Website of the Sundance Film Festival, www.sundance.org, shares the Festival experience with a global audience through the streaming of short films and filmmaker interviews, combined with current news and box office information.

就快點進去看那些短片吧...再遲就又要等明年看其他片了.

And From HD to Film

2006-02-03T17:37:00.000+08:00

Following the previous articles here, I put a little short video on the web.(you could click left icon to see). The full length video is here.
I think that the HD format will be the trend and go big, it's a digital world after all. But I don't believe the digital things totally. Because everyone has his own sense and felling about the images, and each kind of media has its advantages and limitations.
偶然在網路上看到一段HD跟FILM的比較影片, 在前兩文之後再放上來, 供比較, 每個人對於影像的感覺各異, 如同前文所述, 同樣是影片感, 有人覺得XLH1的雜訊較有底片粒子感, 同時則另有人覺得HVX200的雜訊才有影片感.
這裏是全片.
我覺得這也是廠商的宣傳影片, 每人好惡之間, 倒非要全然相信, 當參考可矣.

Z1,HVX200,XLH1,HD100 and 2 HD cameras

2006-02-03T14:56:00.000+08:00

四廠牌HDV的效能檢測(SONY,JVC,CANON,PANASONIC)
For us, I think its difficulte to gather these HDV camcorders side by side for the detail comparisons. Even they are so-called low cost HD cameras. I was so happy about reading the article from dv.com. I just wanna excerpt some results for my notations.
All tests were performed inerior, they didn't do something exterior, but I think it's still useful for cameramen who want to buy a HDV camcorder latterly.
You can see the original article here.
There are some test results here. (Please wait a while for download. It include pics and movies.All the content is from that article)

Those four HDV camcorders all using three 1/3" CCDs.

Canon XL H1 (http://www.canondv.com/), a 1080i-native HDV camcorder with interchangeable lenses, 1440x1080-pixel CCDs, and 24f and 30f modes in addition to 60i.
JVC GY-HD100U (http://pro.jvc.com/prof), a 720p-native HDV camcorder with interchangeable lenses, 1280x720-pixel CCDs, and 24p as well as 30p recording.
Panasonic AG-HVX200 (www.panasonic.com/business/provideo/home.asp, a fixed-lens DVCPROHD machine recording on P2 cards in either 720p or 1080i/p modes. It is said to use 1080p chips with an unspecified horizontal pixel count.
Sony HVR-Z1U (http://bssc.sel.sony.com/, a fixed-lens 1080i-native HDV camcorder using 960x1080-pixel chips.
The following HD cameras were tested together to check the HDV camcorders' relative qualities.
The 2/3" 3-CCD Panasonic HDC27F Varicam and the Sony HDW-F900/3 CineAlta. The Varicam has 1280x720p CCDs, while the CineAlta's chips are 1920x1080p-native. Both cameras had ENG-style HD zooms.

Sensitivity:

Surprisingly, the 1/3" cameras were very close to the 2/3" cameras. If all else were equal, the smaller chips should yield lower sensitivity. But the 1/3" cameras were all visually noisier than the 2/3" cameras; they've picked up sensitivity at the expense of noise. The Z1, the slowest of the bunch, had the cleanest, lowest-noise picture.
The HVX200's strong showing--it was the most sensitive of the group.

Resolution:
Please check the zip file.
Of the 1/3" cameras, the 1440-pixel, 1080i Canon XL H1 was the clear winner in horizontal resolution. The 1280x720p JVC HD100 closely followed the Canon and the Varicam with almost 700 TVl/ph and 700 lines vertically. The Sony Z1and Panasonic HVX200 brought up the rear. The JVC showed the most pleasing rolloff in high frequencies of any of the 1/3" cameras; it had less visibly distracting aliasing than its stable mates, and less than the Varicam.

Image rendering......
Please check the zip file.
The Z1 : both its cinegamma settings depressed midtones too much for our tastes.
The CineAlta and Varicam took top honors overall; they had better resolution, lower noise, wider latitude, and more subtle highlight handling than all the 1/3" contenders--but their lead over the "toy cameras" was much less pronounced than anyone expected. The Varicam in particular yielded gorgeous images, and those who expressed a preference agreed that if they could take home one camera from the test, based on that one scene, it would be the Varicam.

The HVX200 was not the resolution winner, but it did a very good job on skin tones, handling highlights cleanly.

While the Canon was slightly crisper, the JVC rendered a more naturalistic, more alias-free image while yielding only a little ground in terms of raw resolution . Its image detail clearly topped that of the Z1 and HVX200. The JVC also seemed to handle highlights more gently than the other cameras.
There was little of the hue shift that characterizes overexposed skin on so many cameras; the HD100 "looked more like film" in this test than the other 1/3" cameras did.
If a winner were to be picked on how well a camera did on the tests as compared to its expected showing, the HD100 would be that winner.

Conclusion:
None stood out as being clearly superior all around. When you consider that none of these 1/3" cameras comes anywhere close to half the price of their 2/3" brethren, you'll see that "half HD" isn't bad for the money.

要拿這四台一起來檢測, 雖都屬低價HD產品, 但也沒有那麼簡單. 剛好讓我在DV.COM看到這篇檢測文章, 細讀後留下可以看看的重點, 以供自己學習之用.

在sensitivity上, HVX200最優, 快而且雜訊少, 但綜合而言,四機之間差距很小.
在resolution上, 1080群, CANON勝出, 720群, HD100勝出. 在測試影片中, 在這下載看. 個人覺得Z1跟HVX真的有點落後了. 但HD100表現不錯, 只遜於CANON和Varicam.
影像渲染上, Z1的cinagamma會把細節弄得較糟, HD100對高亮度的成像細節最佳, 總合來說, 最漂亮的是Varicam.
有意思的是, HVX200雖然resolution不是最好, 但強光下的膚色處理最佳. 只不過有點偏綠, 必須要後期調色.
最讓人驚奇的是HD100, 它的雜訊最多, 但在高亮度下呈像最佳, 在膚色表現上, 測試者均認為它是最有影片感的一台.

結論, 沒有任何一台能特別勝出, 好消息是, 這些HDV都可說是物有所值, 買了都應該不會後悔.

A documentary film: Native Taiwanese Song

2006-02-02T11:18:00.000+08:00

This documentary film of mine was shot by using Sony HDV Z1J. Here I just put a little snatch on the web. When the light was sufficient, a slight out focus made a film-like picture. To sum up, the HDV camera is good and I think it is a very good solution for a documentary film even a feature.

放上先前用Z1拍攝的記錄片片段, 內容是講述台灣泰雅族的古調, Z1的表現在光充足時相當好. 我想它會是未來記錄片甚至劇情片的趨勢.

Sony HDV Z1 : Microbudget? HDV to 35mm Film?

2006-02-01T01:11:00.000+08:00

Just read the article written by John Jackson from DV.com.
(HDV to Film: A Real-World Test)
Couple months ago, I just finished a documentary film by using this camera. I am satisfied with its setting and shooting quality. But I didn’t take the possibility of “HDV blowup to film” into consideration. In fact, I like the grain quality of film than video things. So the article of John impressed me, and the result of his practice did too. I put some clip of my documentary film here. You can see its “film-like” atmosphere.
John has described many important and basic points for attention. I rewrite here for keeping in my memory.

Video has a straight gamma curve. Film stocks often have a gamma curve shaped like a shallow S. Inexpensive cameras with "cine" gamma adjustments usually simulate this by tipping the straight video gamma.

Reducing the artificial sharpening (technically known as aperture correction) tones down harsh edges and avoids compression artifacts.

The clipping in HDV is really nasty, even worse than in DV. So an essential rule for shooting in HDV is don't overexpose! It's much better to be a stop under rather than a stop over while shooting. If necessary, you can stretch the contrast back out in post.

The slightly soft focus no matter what we used will be closer to film-like image.

Because HDV's MPEG-2 compression retains only one frame (the I-frame) every half-second or so and interpolates the others, native HDV editing must cope with a major challenge: Even a simple cut, unless executed at an existing I-frame, causes massive recompression and artifacting in the subsequent frames. I chose the CineForm codec, which is wavelet based and doesn't interpolate frames, to avoid this problem and gain some elbow room for the intense process of compositing and color-correcting.

Basic editing equipments: Windows XP CPU with a 3.2 GHz Intel Prescott HT processor, 2 GB of memory, and dual-200 GB SATA drives set up in a RAID-0 configuration for video storage.

Deinterlacing and conversion: 50i mode to 25p and 25p to 24p. 50i is better than 60i and true 24p mode in the situation.

Use smart" deinterlace in After Effects, which involves identifying those areas of a picture that have motion between the fields and those that don't, and selectively applying field blending only to the areas that have interfield motion. Another good option for smart deinterlacing is DV Filmmaker from DV Film in Austin, TX (www.dvfilm.com).
(Other deinterlace method in some low end Software half-down quality of AVI files. One is field duplication, the other is field blending. All the vertical resolution is instantly halved.)

……agreed that the blowup from Heavy Light looked very much like a blowup from 16 mm.

One of the very interesting discoveries I made was that the MPEG-2 artifacting in most scenes seemed very similar to film grain- very different from the obvious mosquito noise artifacting of DCT compression in DV footage.

Bonus: the smart deinterlacing method
Method 1: In the File menu, select Interpret Footage, and in the resulting dialog box, select the proper field order.. In the case of HDV footage, choose Upper Field First in the Separate Fields pulldown menu. Then check the Motion Detect box immediately below the Separate Fields pulldown, and click OK. Then, from the Effect menu, choose Video and apply the Reduce Interlace Flicker filter to the entire program. Set the Softness slider to 0.7-0.9. Do not exceed 1.0.

Method 2: In the Interpret Footage dialog, set Separate Fields to Off. The Motion Detect box will be disabled. Then, apply the Video/Reduce Interlace Flicker filter to the entire program. Set the Softness slider to 0.7-0.9. Do not exceed 1.0.

從HDV轉光學, 真的可以嗎?
John Jackson 在 DV.com寫了他的實驗, 跟我數月前用z1拍記錄片時的感覺很像(近日放上片段供參考), 但他更進一步地解釋跟測試, 看了轉35mm的結果, 據說是跟16mm轉35mm有得拼, 那真是太好了……這邊可以省下太多底片錢了.

把他文章中的重點, 跟自己知道的結合羅列於下, 以便參考:

在這個價位的HDV, 含CANON HL X1, JVC GY-HD100U及SONY Z1等機器, 在gamma的調整上, 並不是真的呈S曲線, 而是把原本video的gamma直接強化及銳化, 還是直線, 所以在拍攝時, 一定不能曝光過度, 寧可低半檔或一檔, 到後製再調色及光.

在拍攝時, 一點點的柔焦可以加強底片感.

由於真正記錄訊息的是I-frame, 所以在後製時, 適當的解碼器很重要, PC上可用AspectHD, Mac上可用LumiereHD. 如果用原始檔或其他不好的解碼器, 可能在時間及影像出現誤差及失真.
綜合說來, HDV是低預算劇情片很好的製作方式, 後期調光好的話, 真的可以跟16mm比拼的.

An idea about a documentary film project

2006-01-23T00:24:00.000+08:00

Pursuing material possessions and the desire for being rich are not just an idea that comes out from a single individual mind. They are the values created by the whole society.
Taiwan, whose official name is the Republic of China, once was ironically described as the Republic of Casino. I believe everyone has heard of some story about someone indulged in gambling, lose all the savings and usually got into huge debt. Gambling (on games or lottery) cost them not only money, but also their reputation, their family, even their lives. They may be including one of your friends, your relatives, or your loved ones.
Perhaps people may say it was caused by personal greediness. But think it again, the greediness and material needs are induced by group values. It is because the society values money and material assets, then the people worship wealth and get snobbish.

It is because people consider being rich is the most important thing, and then the needs for material comforts soar.

I want to make a documentary with this view point, go visit some people having suffered the above experiences, and observe the society along with them.

一個記錄片的想法

物質需求及貪欲, 通常不是單一個體的意志而已.

彩券正當化了以前的六合彩,大家樂, 但我相信每個人都曾聽過一些足以警惕自己的故事, 像是: 誰的朋友因沉迷六合彩欠下賭債, 鋌而走險. 或者, 誰的親人因大家樂弄得家破人亡之類的事.

我們可以將它定位為個人的貪欲作祟, 然而, 我們也能這樣思考那樣的貪欲和物質需求, 來自於集體價值作祟, 因為社會重利, 所以人們功利, 因為大家都往錢看, 所以物質需求大熾, 不可自拔.

是不是應該說, 這個社會價值病了?

我想, 從這個角度, 去做個記錄片, 訪尋一些有切身之痛的人, 和他們一起觀察這社會.

System requirements (APPro 2.0)

2006-01-21T12:57:00.000+08:00

.......

Intel® Pentium® 4 1.4GHz processor for DV (Pentium 4 3.4GHz processor for HDV; dual Intel Xeon™ 2.8GHz processors for HD; SSE2-enabled processor required for AMD systems)
Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional or Home Edition with Service Pack 2
512MB of RAM for DV; 2GB of RAM for HDV and HD
4GB of available hard-disk space for installation
Dedicated 7,200RPM hard drive for DV and HDV editing; striped disk array storage (RAID 0) for HD

.........

See this, the users like us may upgrade our PC first.

But I also think the old saying: the drama needs only one transition effect...dissolve...

What is the point that we always improve our vision quality than the story?

Haha..

Adobe is now shipping Premiere Pro 2.0

2006-01-20T13:05:00.000+08:00

.....Adobe expanded its format support, added convenience features such as a new way of reviewing segments and included specialized new capabilities such as multicam support. It also sports a new native HDV implementation....

......the user interface is improved....

.....rearrangement of the various effects , filters, and transitions within Premiere Pro.....

......added the ability to see the two shots' time code superimposed over the two frames.....

.....now you can select to display either time code, or for filmsters, go with feet and frames for either 16mm or 35mm film......

.....to handle 24p footage without even breathing hard. Those who are doing digital intermediate and film work will also appreciate Premiere Pro's new capability of sending 32-bit film-out....

all those are excerpted from the above link.

Check it out or Go to the www.adobe.com

For us, it's a good news cuz we have a new powerful and economic tools now....