Built to taste and looks like a supporting character in Transformers 2.

They found some fonts that survived the 90’s and make a really long web page that breaks down the release. Check it out, but get your scrolling fingers ready. 

Here’s the skinny. Instead of releasing a brand new body design with a range of sensors. The Scarlet range represents resolutions from 3K to 6K at many frame rates. The Epic range starts at a base of 5K and scales to 28K resolution, at which point your vision becomes a multi-colored slit scan and you evolve into a space fetus.

Starting in 2009 you’ll be able to build a camera around the sensor and brain of your choosing. If your sensor craps out or if 3K goes the way of MiniDV,  you simply swap out your brain and keep the lenses, viewfinder, drives, I/O, etc. that you’ve already invested in.

Note that I’m saying camera, not video camera. Because these sensors produce moving images and still shots from 4.9 megapixels all the way up to the 261 megapixel Epic. All it requires is a shift in your shooting rig to adapt the sensor.

By the time Paris Hilton knows what this is, you'll have 100 shots of her dog's Louis Vuitton accessories.

The Epic 28K is based on a preexisting panoramic format but RED has still managed to to squeeze 25fps out of that monster. Stu Maschwitz has posted a reference graphic comparing the 28K pano frame to 1080 HD. It makes 2K look like a 1996 Quicktime running in your AOL browser.

For the Double Dare bonus round, they’ve even designed a 3D capture rig. It’s at the bottom of their mega-page, revealed in dramatic fashion. There’s no concrete information on it, but here’s the obligatory camera porn:

Come with me if you want to live.

The Weak Spot: Rolling Shutter

RED’s weakness is the CMOS sensor. These sensors use a rolling shutter which produce strange artifacts if the camera is moving faster than the exposure time. Here is a great explanation and some video examples of what this looks like in practice. Supposedly, the RED team is hard at work solving this problem.

Shutter problems aside, what RED has done is revolutionary. Even if these cameras aren’t the cat’s pajamas, it will have an Apple-like effect on the image-making industry. Their competitors will now be pressured to produce cheap, configurable boxes that capture still and moving images and won’t waste away into obsolescence in two years. They are doing for professional filmmaking what DV did for home movies and YouTube.

During pre-production our team was working out the logistics of a bedroom set. We had grabbed some space in an old hangar that was repurposed for production. Luckily, we rented the spot from a wonderfully talented art director, Johnny Mayne. While Johnny has produced things as elaborate as national football halftime shows, he hails from theater, and gave us the bright idea of making the set walls out of cloth.

A treasure that saved an incredible amount of time and money.

After sampling some of the props out of his closet, we chose a couple of pieces of fabric he personally made. These were huge swaths of 10 foot wide canvas that were faux-textured to feel distressed, organic and a little grimy. We quickly built a simple wooden frame, reinforced with only a few movable studs and tie downs looped through the girders on the ceiling. The result was a dream come true.

Much cheaper than a full frame.

When lit from the front, the cloth walls are opaque and appear solid. When lit from behind, the diffused light is downright dreamy. This allowed us to create the look of a window with only a few pieces of black card, gaffer’s tape and a couple of drapes.

We didn't backlight any scenes, but the effect was eerie.

The absolute best part of this setup was shooting through the walls. Instead of tearing down an entire section of wall and planning our shoot around the labor, we simply clipped the cloth to the top of the frame and forged ahead with our next setup. This simple freedom to shoot in a chronology of our choosing was a huge boon.

Logistics weren't a necessary consideration for our DP.

The result continues to amaze me, and I whole-heartedly recommend looking into the approach. It was a breeze compared to grabbing drywall and wood and tacking a fake set together. Many thanks to Johnny Mayne for delivering this great tool and to our DP, Paul Nordin at El Mundo Bueno Studios, for brilliantly pushing the set to the limits.

Yes, that window is completely fake.

You’ll find the first three here:

Dubstep Bass Patch
Prolific Electro Breakbeat Drum Kit
Dirty Synth

You can find the original posts and more of his music on the VTG Music website.

How to install and use:

1. - Download: VTG Dance Floor Game Arp
2. - Unzip and double click to install into Ableton Live
3. - Layer with super distorted Arp synth sounds.

And here’s a sample of “Dance Floor Game” and this preset…

This is a syndicated article. View the post in the original context.

If you don’t listen to WNYC’s Radiolab, you’re missing out. It’s seriously one of the best podcasts/radio shows I’ve ever listened to. It’s a show that delves into science using artful audio production techniques to sweeten the listeners’ experience. Recently the show’s hosts, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, gave a talk explaining the creative choices they make producing one of their segments. Listen to the episode here.

As a video editor, half of what you do is edit audio. The creative choices that you make on picture and sound are mostly subtle things that an audience doesn’t consciously perceive. While it’s hard to explain this in a concise way, Jad and Robert make a great attempt in the Hippo Dance episode. They do so by answering questions like “how much should you embroider?” and “how stupid do you want to be?” Their points are reinforced by playing back a piece of raw tape and comparing it to the polished result filled with filters, reverb, and additional audio production. It’s a beautiful piece about fireflies, one in which their production style really shines through.

Everything they do on the show serves to aurally extend analogies and metaphors established in their storytelling. It’s quite a wonderful show and this particular episode does a great job at explaining a very subtle art. If you don’t subscribe to the podcast, you should do so now.

Edit 10/28/2008: The list of short solutions now have links to relevant Apple support documents for those doing this for the first time.

You’re busy cutting away in Final Cut. Your project is almost done, you tweak your last color wheel and edit your last title–BAM!–”Operation Not Allowed” pops up on your screen.

The first sign of the project apocalypse.

This is followed by an “Error: Out of Memory” pop up and sometimes, if you’re especially unlucky, the display will be unavailable and your project will be rendered essentially useless.

The last thing you want to see.

One of the most frustrating screens in FCP.

I started running into this problem on Final Cut version 5.1.4 on OSX 10.4.11 after moving my project and media files from a OfflineRT working project into a full resolution NTSC DV project for finishing. I haven’t been able to test this in version 6 or on Leopard.

Your sequence is now corrupt. If you hit save now, the next time you open your project, you will be back at the same place. You can’t work without these errors popping up, and it may seem that all is lost. I’ve scoured the web and found several users who have run into this problem for one reason or another (DV Creators, LA Final Cut Pro Users Group, Creative Cow). Popular wisdom states that it may be a non-standard image in your timeline, a corrupt render file, or some other gremlin lurking in your timeline. Some solutions:

• If you have images in your timeline, convert them to PNG files.
• If you have audio in a lossy format (AAC, MP3) convert to a lossless format (WAV, AIFF).
• Trash Final Cut Pro’s preference file. The article is for Final Cut Pro 4.5, but is relevant to Final Cut Studio and Studio 2.
• Repair disk permissions.
• Open a recently Auto-Saved project.
• Blow away your render files and re-render everything in your timeline.

That didn’t work for me. How do you fix this? By finding the cause of the corruption. Even though Final Cut Pro may throw up an error every time you perform an action in your corrupted sequence, I have still managed to work in the project. Here’s the goal: get out of your corrupted sequence and get your clips into a fresh one.

Rebuilding the Sequence

In your corrupted sequence, clear your Ins and Outs and make a note of your track assignment. Create a fresh sequence with the same settings and the same number of tracks. Next, close down the corrupted sequence. This should temporarily stop the error messages while you are working. In your new sequence, lock every track except for one. I would start with video on V1 and progress from there. Drag the corrupt sequence into the V1 track while holding down the Command key in order to drop the clips directly in the sequence.

If you don't hold down the Command key, the entire messed up sequence will be nested into V1.

If you do this and don’t get any errors, that track is probably fine. Save a new version of your project! Lock V1 and unlock the next track. Continue dropping in tracks and saving until the Operation Not Allowed and Out of Memory errors get thrown again. You’ve found where your problematic media lives, but don’t save the project!

Now shut down Final Cut and reopen the project. This will restore it to the state you were in right before you found the error. You’re going to cut the same track back into your project, except this time you will do it on a track with the visibility turned off. This avoids making Final Cut do a redraw to update the Canvas and sidesteps the memory error. You’re so close to your error, you can just about smell it.

There's the bugger.

Create a new video track with it’s visibility toggled on. One by one, drag the clips from the problem track up to the new track. If you don’t get an error after each move, save! When you do come across the Out of Memory error, you’ve found your culprit.

What a pain in the ass.

In my case, it was a couple of nested sequences with Boris’s Title 3D generator effect cut into them. To fix it, I exported the animated sequences out as QuickTime movies and the static titles as still images, reimported the media, and cut in the friendlier footage.

Once you’ve fixed your errors, delete your now empty video track, reconstruct the rest of the tracks, and get back to work. I also recommend deleting the corrupted sequence and saving your project anew.

Here are some of my favorites:

He was recently featured on a fairly weak “10 Questons” post at OMG Posters! It doesn’t shed too much light on his personality as an artist, but his work speaks for itself.

You can view more at his site, kinseyvisual.com or if you’re loaded purchase a print at the gallery he runs, BLK/MRKT.

Since hurricanes Katrina and Rita, hurricane trackers have become much more than a news item. For most people in the southeastern part of the U.S., they’re very much tools of survival, often being updated faster than a news report can be delivered.

So why is it that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the first resource for tracking these beasts, gives us such limited tools to display hurricane data? The first glance of hurricane data is not very informative, arguably only displaying the impending path of the storm. Further details require digging through a cramped key, and the cartoonish nature of the illustration provides little context to the viewer.

What hurricanes looked like 100 years ago.

This is simply providing the bear minimum of information. To get any deeper you have to load separate maps from their site, erasing most of the context they could provide next to each other or if they were presented as layers.

The NOAA parties like it's 1999.

Luckily, we have other options. Enter stormpulse.com. While the website itself looks like a Frontpage template, the hurricane tracker is there, front and center in all of it’s satellite photo glory.

Now that's information.

The full browser view is the way to go. It allows you to display an incredible amount of contextualized information: forecast models, clouds, historical track, etc.

Pretty scary picture.

The Flash interface is draggable and zoomable, allowing you to see multiple storms at once. I often find myself using my scroll wheel, Google Maps style, trying to zoom in because the interface is so intuitive. The legend is collapsable, getting out of the way when you need it to. All things considered, this web app becomes more than a pretty interface. It’s a tool that puts the NOAA’s site to shame.

The solution? Hex Color Picker from Waffle Software. Check it out:

You can pick your friends, your nose and any element on screen.

The fine people over at Waffle have written a hex plug in for OS X’s color picker. This means you can fine-tune a RGB, HSB or even Crayon (WTF?) value and find out it’s hex value in one click. Another huge advantage of using the Mac’s built-in color picker is sampling from any on-screen element. The Potatochop is confined to only grabbing pixels loaded inside of it’s run-time work area.

Sweet hexadecimal bliss! In addition to being free, the code is open source under the BSD license.

Ableton Live and Modul8.

My visual art skills aren’t my strongest suit, so any help I can get
finding good looking color combinations for use in my own visual art
and UI design. One of the things I have always admired about the works of Jared Tarbell are his color palettes. His works have always had a kind of natural quality to their coloring, which is even more pronounced because they are algorithmic art. (His work “Substrate” is shown below.) I can’t remember the source, but I read once that he draws his palette from landscape and other nature pictures.

Substrate

However, that isn’t as easy as it might seem…a seemingly color limited picture can contain so many colors that you might as well just choose them on your own. But, I recently found ColourLovers, a site where users list color pallettes, some derived from photos. Here is an example palette from the salt evaporation ponds in south San Francisco. A great resource for the more audio minded among us.

Drawing from a list like this is a quick way to make a more coherent and professional looking UI that doesn’t look like all of the other widgets out there.

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