Farewell, David Carradine

It's not your typical fan video. More like a meditation on mortality. I could try to explain, but does explaining really get you anywhere?





RIP, Kwai Chang Caine.

They Shoot Squid, Don't They?

Deep in the Connecticut woods, in a land filled with the great mystics and the casino aborigines, there lived that most controversial of groups, the fearless seal wranglers known as the Riders of the Purple Squid.

To this day, a controversy rages, at least in certain quarters, over whether their mode of transport was ethical, or as truly cruel and evil as some of the protesters claimed that it was.



One should always lie to children, it prepares them for life in general.



But one group came to dominate this debate. They started out calling themselves "People for the Ethical Treatment of Calimari" but soon changed their name when someone told them that Calimari only referred to the cooked version of their object of pity, the noble squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni). People who still refer to the group as "PETCa" do so at considerable risk to their lives and welfare. The preferred acronym is now PETSqi.

Cute video, evil child liar:

Options to convert SD/DV to H.264/AVC

This overview of editors and converters started out as a reply in the YouTube Help Forums. I've adapted it here to try to give an overview of some of the options, and the pros and cons, when it comes to looking at the many, many choices available for dealing with video, especially converting standard definition camcorder (or DV) video to the AVC/H.264-based formats that have become the preferred options for getting the best quality for the lowest bandwidth cost for streaming video sites, from YouTube to Vimeo and beyond.

One should also be aware that some sites (Funny or Die comes to mind as one example) still prefer not to support H.264 encoding, in part because of the challenges it presents to getting consistent performance for all sorts of video and film styles, H.264 works remarkably well and efficiently to get high quality and smaller file sizes, but it works best when the video image only changes infrequently.

For example, if you shoot from a tripod, and most of your video is a long cut of yourself talking, or of a peaceful landscape, H.264 can do amazing things.

If your video clip looks like a scene from Cloverfield, on the other hand, you may see some artifacts in your H.264 encoding that may drive you a little bit bonkers.

But since so much of the "approved" content on YouTube consists of "talking head" vlogs, H.264 seems like the no-brainer solution.

For those still waiting to switch, I also suspect they've concluded that Adobe Flash's recent addition of H.264 support in recent versions of the Flash Player are just not entirely ready for "prime time." (That topic is something I may get into in more detail in some future blog entry).

I come from a somewhat biased place, since most of my editing and rendering experience has been in Vegas Pro and started with its consumer-oriented, slightly crippled siblings.

For most SD camcorders, AVI has long been the standard container format saved by most capture utilities that transform your taped video to a form that can be edited digitally. Perhaps I'll dig into one of those files one day soon and describe what you may find inside.

There are some standalone packages, many of them open source, that are mostly useful because they convert one or more video container types to a range of other types. In some cases that may be everything you need.

Since Vegas (and most NLEs) have transcoding and rendering modules built into them, I haven't really explored these packages deeply enough to have a strong opinion of them. It's best to find someone with a lot of working knowledge of these converters, to get a sense of their pros and cons, and whether they are something you need.

A lot of other video editing packages can do this as well, and there are at least some open source programs that will also create H.264 video which tends to be a little more important than whether the container is MP4 or another type (MOV, AVI, even FLV) as long as it can hold an AVC/H.264 encoded video stream.

Your choice should be based on a combination of budget factors, as well as how deeply you expect to get into editing and production.

If your time is more scarce than money, one of the commercial packages may be simpler to learn (and have more resources for training... plus, Vegas, FinalCut, or at the really high, Hollywood and Vancouver high, ends, Avid, are all tools widely used in film and TV production, (though Vegas has found it's niche more in local news and maybe cable ad production than it has found acceptance in features and among film school grads). You may find that your learned skills are somewhat more marketable, if you can claim intimate knowledge of one, and better yet, all of these programs.

I wound up gravitating to Vegas mainly because I already had a few years experience working/messing with the consumer-oriented package that Sony bought and built into Vegas Pro, and until last year I was still using one of the somewhat crippled consumer versions, so the cost of upgrading was less than if I had been starting from scratch.

For a long time I actually used Nero a lot for editing. I haven't used Nero for editing or rendering lately, so I don't know whether it has H.264 support, and if it does, just how strong that support is.

But I will say that for a long time I found Nero to be more robust and flexible than Vegas, but not nearly as adept at the (non-gimmick) creative controls that Vegas offers in abundance, and I'm not speaking of gimmicky special effects that scream "amateur" -- but the really powerful ones, like color grading and heavy duty audio editing, some of which are available in limited ways in the consumer versions, but are only fully enabled in the Pro package.

Here are some links that may get you started looking at some of the open source alternatives that have some kind of H.264 (or X.264, an open source equivalent) support:

A Listing of current Final Cut "equivalents" -- An open source fanboy introduction to and listing of all the open source NLEs that penguins love to dream about.


Blender - for the exceptionally brave It's extremely powerful, and that's the problem. But it is open source and has a dedicated user community. But the learning curve is widely recognized as very steep, in part because Blender is also a full featured CGI rendering package that, at least in theory, could be used for theatrical release production -- as long as you have a render farm handy.

I found these (and other) links by searching the terms: "open source" NLE video -- the search gave over 8,000 other hits.

I'd encourage anyone still reading this post to do as much homework as you have time for -- especially and talking to, and lurking in forums where users of the packages you're considering are most actively congregating.

The real investment here is the time you'll spend learning to edit and deal with video in all its forms -- the time (and I mean lots of it) is the real cost, compared to that, the base cost of your chosen NLE pales by comparison. In fact, I'll lay odds that within a year or two you'll have accumulated a raft of programs to assist you in production, and most can be mixed and matched, within reason. Photoshop, Painter, GIMP, and many specialized texture creating tools, for instance, may come in handy, especially if you are an admirer of Robert Rodriguez and his 5-minute Film Schools.

Likewise for audio production tools. If you're a solo artist, especially, you'll very likely wind up with more tools than have time to learn well. Which is where collaboration comes in, if you can work it out. Even with the power that computers provide in making production something one person can do alone, real talent in all areas of production is rare, and your work can be much better if you can put together a team of friends or co-workers who each have mad skills in a particular area of production work.

All programs ( of any kind, but especially NLEs) have their quirks, which you'll usually find discussed in the online forums dedicated to each package, as well as in those dedicated to to video and audio production in general.

I hope you've found this a useful starting point for investigating basic editing (and file conversion) for streaming video. Please add comments and questions, so I can do better next time... or suggest a specific area to focus on.

Is the HQ35 Mystery Solved?

[This post is under review: Expect revisions soon (or not). Specifically, I spotted some issues in my test video that have me questioning some assumptions I've made so far. More detail will be added, once I've sorted out just how significant the effect of these discoveries may be on the issue at hand, getting smooth, high frame rate playback under HQ35 encoding and the related issue of getting the HQ35 encoding at all.

At this point, getting HQ35 has become such a rarity that I've backed off on seeking an answer to a question that has almost become moot.]

Sadly it's going to be a little hard to tell since so far, uploading test videos comparable to the ones in the previous demo of this problem will not seem to render to HQ35. However, without the alternating squares in each pair of frames, there still seems to have been significant progress, in this video.



and in this one:



The first video was rendered in Sony Vegas Pro 8.0c. Full specs are provided in the description section of the video's YouTube page.

I need to confirm just how the second video was rendered. I suspect it was done in Final Cut Pro, probably as a Quicktime container using H.264 video and AAC audio.

The key either way is to boost the number of reference frames or (in Quicktime) keyframes. Onno (maker of the animation) says that he increased the keyframes to 1 keyframe per frame... in other words, each frame is also a keyframe. I hope he will see fit to share more detailed rendering specs and settings that I can download and implement. This was discussed in some detail in a recent thread in YouTube's recently renovated Help Center.

A render of my adapted test video, with the alternating blocks appears below the fold.



Be warned, though, that at least at the time this was uploaded, it only received the HQ18 encoding. I suspect this may be because, to defeat frame droppage in HQ35, videos have to meet a certain standard of "compressibility," so as to avoid presenting them at such a high bit rate that they become too difficult, time consuming, (and costly) to stream effectively, particularly for those of us with slower connections.

So here's the one with the bouncing boxes:



Enjoy! And please leave comments if you find that this information is not helping to eliminate stutter and lost frames in your HQ35 videos. This is a very new development and I'm far from confident that this is a definitive answer.

James Benning and Direct Cinema

(adapted from a posting on vimeo, in the group The Pictures Don't Move)

I want to profile an interesting independent filmmaker here, James Benning. I first heard about Benning from a vimeo user, Made for Full Screen. Benning fascinates me first of all for at least one of his films that I haven't seen, but that I wish I could find and view, in part because it happens to tie into my own family history, and I'd really rather talk about it from a base of experience, rather than what I infer from what I can find to read about his approach.

The film I'm thinking of is Deseret (1995), reviewed at the link.



While I don't want to make too much of it without seeing it, there seems to be a difference between Benning's practice and what used to be said about Direct Cinema or Cinéma vérité, often characterizes as filmmaking that consisted of plopping down a camera on a tripod and recording directly whatever happened in front of the lens.

While there's an element of that in what Benning is doing, there's also far more. What I have managed to see, mostly in the form of low-quality YouTube excerpts, since Benning's work has not been released on VHS or DVD, but has been broadcast on, for instance, German television. Most of his films seem to run between 90 and 100 minutes. They consist largely of long static shots that apparently illustrate particular lines of text, or audio readings of particular lines or statements.

The divergence is even greater with his Utopia, excerpts of which are found on the Yoob, and are reviewed here where parts of the soundtrack from another documentary are set against his static shots of mostly Southwestern U.S. landscapes and "townscapes."

The shooting style is similar, but there is editing going on here, editing that seems to imply some meaning, some guidance or direction of the viewer, at least in terms of selecting statements to illustrate, and choosing the order in which they are presented. I'm reminded of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's landmark film Un chien andalou, or at least the received wisdom I was given as to what it was "about." The irresistable human impulse to find patterns in chaos, to make sense of the random and the senseless.

I really want to see both films in their entirety, in part because it seems refreshing compared to the commercially-dictated sort of editing one might see if the same subject were shot for, say, a History Channel or Discovery Channel "documentary," where topics are discussed, dumbed-down, and manipulated, all to apparently conform to the convention of commercial "breaks."

I don't know about anyone else, but I know I find that particular structure fairly annoying, especially when it comes to my attention (and it usually seems to after 10 minutes or so).

Anyway, as I've said elsewhere, I'm looking forward to any dialogue to be sparked by the films/videos presented here (The Pictures Don't Move). On a number of different levels.

I think I need to go out and shoot something. I said that almost a week ago and yet I am almost paralyzed about doing this, and have instead spent a week looking for every possible distraction from creating anything or recording anything, up until, at least, putting together my first rough, shared cut of Ockham's Razor.

This is a test, a really stupid test

All of me that I'm ready to share. Okay, maybe not all. But all my Yooby Yoobness. Okay, maybe not all. How about the most recent 49 public videos I've uploaded to this channel?



This might be a better example, from a channel with very few videos:



This one doubles for the moment as a demo of database latency (see video below). I just deleted one of the videos from the channel in the second viewer, but for at least awhile this player (the one directly above this paragraph) is likely to show 5 rather than 4 videos.

As an added bonus, here's more than you ever wanted to know about database latency, or at least YouTube's take on it from almost a year ago:



Don't bother with the jump.

I told you not to bother. But I'm embedding something here anyway, just to assure myself that it will embed.

Ockham's Razor

William of Ockham was a Franciscan. Okay, so he was excommunicated for opposing the authority of the Pope. But he did invent this nifty device that we continue to use to this day.



Here's some links you might want to read:

William of Ockham was, like, the John Wayne of late medieval philosophers.

There's a video surprise after the jump.