don't panic

The last seven days have flown by, sorry it's been quiet on the site, but thanks to all of you who've been leaving such great comments lately. I feel like the discussions on post have picked up dramatically since swapping out Blogger's default comments with Disqus', anything that helps this site be more interactive always makes me smile.

I've been keeping busy with some website stuff to go along with a big announcement Amanda and I plan on making soon regarding the actual film. Don't worry, it's good news, not bad news, I wouldn't tease you like that with bad news, that would just be mean. We still have a few weeks though, we'd like to finish logging all the footage first, don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves.

I've been feeling sorta-kinda overwhelmed lately, I think sometimes I have trouble putting things in the right order so they are more approachable - more baby-step'ish. With only Amanda and I doing the majority of the work, it's hard to keep all the aspects of the project moving at a decent pace. Sometimes we get caught up on one thing and let others linger. I knew that importing the last tape from the film would be a big step, and I knew it would bring on all kinds of pressures with it. Pressures to finish logging as soon as possible, pressures to begin editing the film, pressures to get a lot more on paper regarding the narrative.


My typewriter right now is surrounded by stacks of notes and half-finished thoughts written on everything from colored construction paper to taco-bell napkins. Plus there's the pressure of putting out another episode before we really go anywhere with the film, it's been three months since episode 8, and people are starting to ask questions. Plus I have responsibilities outside of Pedal.

I guess I'm not saying all this because I need babying, I just need to write it out, and acknowledge that we have a sizable hill ahead of us, and that I need to focus. It's been hard scheduling meetings with Amanda lately, my schedule has been a bit all over the place, I'm sure I'll feel better once the two of us sit down and make sense of what's been keeping me up at night.

Until that happens, I just need to look down at my feet... like Bob says, "baby steps, baby steps". If I look up at the big picture, I'll realize I've bitten off far more than I could chew a long, long time ago. To be honest, this is my favorite part of filmmaking: the anxiety, the doubt, the nagging voice in your head that says "you're gonna fuck this whole thing up"... this comes and goes in waves that last weeks, and each time it subsides, I feel clearer and that much closer to the goal. Deep breaths.

I Have a Tech Related Query

As many of you know, I've been logging (tagging) footage like there's no tomorrow since importing the last tape from our 64 days on the road. One of the things that was always in the back of my mind while filming, specifically while filming Larry bicycling, or point-of-view shots (while moving), was framing the shot and moving the camera in a way that could later be smoothed out in post. Luckily, one of Final Cut Pro's newest features is SmoothCam, which pulls from Shake's motion-tracking and stabilizing technology. In casual-speak: it's the best filter ever.


... from mike ambs on Vimeo. The above is a short video I threw together of Mike Hedge and I on our way to SXSW - most of it is walking shots with the SmoothCam filter applied, just to give you an example of what I'm talking about.


Where was I...

But, the time it takes Final Cut to analyze a clip is amazingly long. For example, I had a 3 minute long video clip I wanted to smooth out the other day, it took FCP over two hours to do it's thing. True, I had several other big apps open, and was busy flying through footage with Quicklook, but, it wouldn't have been much different considering that. What I'm getting at is: so far - and I still have almost 900 video clips left to log - I have about 360 flips tagged with "moving shot". And in the next few days, I plan on dragging all those files (plus whatever else gets tagged with that by the time I'm done) into Final Cut and dropping SmoothCam on *all* the clips at once.

Assuming my MacBook Pro doesn't blow up in my face, it's going to take weeks for it to analyze all several hundred files: which range from 30 seconds to 45 minutes in length. The filter is smart enough to share Final Cut's resources, and I'm still able to edit while it works in the background. But even so, weeks and weeks of constant SmoothCam analyses is going to take it's toll on my laptop's memory.

A few months ago, I bought iFreeMemory, which has helped avoid many restarts to speed up my computer after doing too many things at once. But the app doesn't have an auto-pilot mode, I have to manually click it, and hit "optimize" every time I want to dump the lagged memory and speed things up again.

So, after all this rambling, my question is: does anyone know, or have any ideas, on how I can set up my computer to every hour, or two hours, refresh it's memory all on it's own? Either with iFreeMemory or another app? Basically I plan on leaving Final Cut open the next 5 months no matter what I'm doing and I'd like to be sure my computer is working as fast as it can, and not getting bogged down with time.


On a side note: I *do* plan on running through the "moving shot" videos and weeding out the ones I know I'll never use. Sadly though, you can't *really* tell how well the SmoothCam is going to work until after it's done analyzing, so I'll still have to run the filter on most of them.

On another side note: I realize for longer video files, it's recommended to re-export just the section you want to use, and *then* run SmoothCam on that new clip. But 99% of the time, if I have a 45 minutes long clip, it's all one big long continuous shot of Larry bicycling that we took with the 25 foot crane on the top of the van moving along at 20 miles an hour... so... it's very hard for me to pick what works best until I see it smoothed out :P

End of side notes. Thanks for your help!

We Heart You Too

For the last few years, whenever I would find that someone had written a post about Pedal, or helped spread the way in any way possible over the interwebs, I would always bookmark them under "link love" with Del.icio.us. But it wasn't / isn't a very interactive or exciting way to keep track of people who are awesome.

So, I thought maybe it would be better to create a Tumblr account used just for that: re-blogging people who show Pedal some love. Okay, that is all.