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.

ratios and reminiscing

so the other night mike and i finally made the decision to edit the film in 2.35:1. now, i admit that, technically, i don't know much about the ratio and all, but mike and i sat and watched a lot of our footage in 2.35:1 ratio vs 16:9 and we got really excited. *i* got really excited. seeing the things we shot that way, it really gave everything a whole new feeling, made it look like a movie. we got a little lost just watching some of the footage. i really miss the road... i think we all do. mike and i are really excited to start editing.


A Random Collection of Shots from Footage I've Been Logging from mike ambs on Vimeo.

actually mike has been so obsessed lately with importing and tagging and watching all of the footage.. that it's pretty much been all i can do to remind him we need to get the next episode out. admittedly, the last episode was so emotionally draining for both of us... that we sort of, unofficially, took some time off. a break from each other and the '64 days' episodes. but i want you all to know i've been trying my best to get us working on the next episode again. we have an outline and some notes, but we still need to finish writing it. i'm really looking forward to watching it, it should be a lot of fun. we'll be picking up where we left off with larry saying goodbye to jay, then we'll be getting to know the crew a little better. anyway... if you're interested and you wanna see the next episode sometime soon, please help me and start bugging mike :) it's gotta work sometime :P

don't get me wrong though, i completely understand his desire to get started with the film editing process, especially after seeing how great some of the footage turned out.

and now, seeing as how we've hit the year mark, there has been a lot of reminiscing going on lately.

larry sent me a letter sharing a lot of his feelings about his trip, how it changed him and what his life has been like since. i forwarded it to mike and the three of us have kinda been sharing some thoughts back and forth. i think i'll leave you, now, with some of that.


first, mike's response to larry's letter:

The part where you say "a strange feeling of longing has filled my heart"... seemed very fitting - my days on the road remind me of a lost love... but... a true love, something that both seems to fuel and eat away at your insides... something that can never really be replaced. Maybe not even by another trip... the first one is always special... it's always a place inside you that you can never really go back to - you can't wake up for the first time twice... I'm rambling, not even sure if this makes sense. But - this was great. I just wanted to say that.

-mike

next, larry's reply:

(june 8th) Hey mike, Thanks man, I'm glad it made sense.

You feel it. I feel the same way man, like a lost love. It feels so weird all the time, and you can never fully capture it again. It's just fading memories that hurt and make you smile at the same time.

A year ago from this time now we we're eating at the bistro in Winthrop, I was eating that roasted half chicken and drinking a glass of Pinot Noir. And Aaron our waiter told me I could stay at his house with his wife Lyndsey. Today's also the day I left Jay. All my pictures from this day I accidentally deleted the next day taking pictures inside that abandoned house. I still remember almost every day, and can focus on so many moments and reconstruct them in my head...

(june 5th) I can't begin to describe how today feels. It's greater than my birthday, Christmas, and any other important day combined. I consider it my real birthday. My introduction to the rest of my life. June 5 is the day that Jay and I left home and flew to Seattle to start our cross country ride.

365 days ago from this moment, I was lying in my bed at my parents house, too nervous to sleep, too dumb struck to believe that I was about to attempt to ride across North America on a bicycle. I knew it was going to be a great adventure, but I didn't know that it would shape my life and create it's purpose.

This was the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. I can't even begin to describe how much it's changed my life.

Larry

and finally, my reply to larry:

i can't believe it's been a year. it kind of haunts me. it's crazy to think about that night in winthrop. i never would've remembered when that was.. everything seems to blend together for me. but when you bring it up.. it all comes flooding back, so clearly. i remember seeing you ride into town.. and going to that little store on the corner. i remember searching for any place still serving dinner, i remember the bus of high school kids riding around, i remember thinking about you.. and wondering how you must be feeling.. i remember thinking you were amazing... and a total beast for biking the way you did that day.. over those passes... low on food.. after leaving jay.

that day was amazing.. and that dinner was the best way to celebrate, even though we knew we couldn't afford it. it was worth it. that memory is totally worth it. i can close my eyes and picture us all at the table.. especially you. you fucking blew me away that day.

thanks for reminding me. i wish i were there now. i wish i had taken a picture of aaron... i wish i had footage of you staying with him and his wife. i wish we hadn't missed a lot of things.

i miss being on an adventure. i miss not knowing what tomorrow will bring. i miss that excitement. that freedom. each day now.. i think about this time last year.. it's impossible not to.

i'm so glad that you and mike are mending your relationship.

mander

Post Production - Week 28

Post Production - Week 28 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

Well... that's it... I just finished capturing the *last* tape for Pedal. Whew. I should do something to celebrate... :P

you can never be too safe

I mentioned in my last vlog update that my main external hard-drive for Pedal's footage had, out of nowhere, died, thanks to something power related. I've tried everything I could think of to bring it back to life, but with no luck - the replacement showed up in the mail today from Western Digital, which means I have to box up the old drive and spend $20 mailing it back to the factory.

Thanks to Lan's insistence in having *everything* backed up, I had a mirrored drive that used to reconnected all of the missing media in Final Cut. But the drive failure still gave me a big scare - the last few days of having no "back up" drive was nerve racking. And I don't know what I would do with myself if I lost the last six months worth of work. I'm spending tonight re-mirroring the new drive with Desmond (the old backup; now the main drive).

So I decided to take things to the next level: off site backups. I can't afford a 3rd drive at the moment to ship to a safe place in case of the worst, so I searched for online solutions and found something that I wish I had known about back in December; when I first started importing and logging footage.

It's a service called Mozy, and for home users, they offer *unlimited* backup space for a little less than $5 a month (no, they didn't pay me to write that). For me this is great - I have 2Tbs (and growing) of footage, and although it's going to take a month to backup over the internet, it's worth it for me, especially considering I'll be editing for the next year at least.

Mozy works like Time Machine, it uses Spotlight to track changes to made to files and updates those changes in the background, I barely ever know it's doing anything (and don't worry, it will warn you if it's not).


So, hopefully several weeks from now, when I'm busy editing the feature length film, I'll have the comfort of knowing I have 2 hard copies of my footage at hand - if one drive fails, I wouldn't have any downtime: I can reconnect the media to the backup and keep on editing. And more importantly, I'll have the comfort of knowing that my MacBook Pro and all of the footage is safely sitting on a server somewhere far away from my apartment. Knock on wood.

So, that's it, I just thought I'd share how I'm keeping things safe - hopefully safe enough - during post-production.

Post Production - Week 27

post production - week 27 from mike ambs on Vimeo.

fun with aspect ratios

I meant to post this clip from Vimeo a few days ago on the blog, to get people's opinion on the final film's aspect ratio (I'd definitely watch the below clip in HD), but I got caught up with importing problems. Mo' footage, mo' problems... uhh, I'm a dork.


I had posted a question in Pedal's "All Things Geekery" forum (and Twitter'd about it) about 16:9 to 2.35:1 advice, and Karen & Jay chipped in with some how-to's.


Based on their replies; I did a quick test the other day by simply going into my timeline settings, clicking 'anamorphic' for my HDV 1080i50 footage, and then stretched the clips 134% to fill the frame.

After doing this though - I wondered if I should be scaling down my frame size in the timeline? Is it not ideal to stretch my footage out to 134%, as opposed to make the timeline's frame size closer to 100% width?

I love the way the clips look cropped though - I like having more control of what part of the image I use. I'm leaning toward editing the film in this aspect. But still open to pro's and con's. Ben left this great comment below;


I hadn't thought about how exactly some of the interview footage would frame in 2.35:1 - I've been doing some test with interview footage in FCP, and so far 90% of it works great, I'll try to post some of that footage also in the next few days. But Ben is right; it does seem to be a matter of *where* I imagine it playing. On a computer screen - I could go either way, in a theater and I'm very much in love with the wide-wide frame of 2.35:1. Decisions, decisions. What do you think?

post production week 26

Post Production - Week 26 from amanda walker on Vimeo.

almost there...

My goal of writing twice a week, and doing one video update a week hasn't been too impressive the last month, sorry for that. I'll get on myself about that more.

But that's not to say that we haven't been busy working on things - at the moment I'm importing reel 068, which is lots of shots from Niagara Falls. I have 50.6 GBs left on my drives (both 'Hugo' and 'Desmond', since they are mirrored). After that I'll have to dump the last of the footage onto 'Locke', which I'm supposed to be selling on Amazon, so I can replace it with a MyBook 1Tb (hopefully two eventually).


But it looks like I have about 12 tapes left from the z1u, a dozen from the hc1, and there's one last tape from the fx1 that's still in Belgium with the crew. After all that is imported, I'll get the 16mm transfered to HD - Amanda is close to finished logging all the mp4 footage. I'd say we are about a month away from editing the feature film (fingers crossed)... I suppose Amanda and I need to talk more about when exactly we plan on announcing the actual film's title.

Well - I know this was a fairly short and pointless update, but I felt guilty not checking in tonight. Let us know what you *would* like to hear from us. Are you curious to see something specific about post-production? Do you have a technical question? A personal question? We'd love to know how to make the blog more interesting and relevant to our kick-ass readers. Goodnight.

this time last year

I'm signed up for a service called Photojojo's Time Capsule, twice a month it goes back into my flickr archives and pulls 3 or 4 of the most "interesting" pictures from a year ago, and emails them to me. It's such a simple idea, but I really love getting the emails - I guess it's just crazy to me how fast time can go by, and how many memories come with a handful of old photos.

Last night I slept terribly, this weekend I came down with a pretty kick-ass body cold, and I spent all day in bed yesterday, so when it came time to sleep... I couldn't. Anyways, I rolled over this morning to see that I had a new email from Photojojo, and realized that today was June 1st, and this time last year, things were very, very different for me.

Amanda and I had finally met the crew, who had just flown from Belgium to LA to be part of this film. The five of us were driving north to Washington, where we would meet Larry and Jay at the Seattle Airport.

For those of you who haven't yet watched Episode Six, it deals with this time last year for us, and what it meant... Sometimes it still doesn't seem real to me, sometimes these memories seem like someone else's. I think the long term effects of those 64 days have yet to fully sink in for all of us.


But, aside from the nostalgia, seeing that it was the 1st already was a bit disappointing for me - today was Amanda and I's goal of having all footage imported, tagged, and ready to edit in Final Cut... and it's not there yet. A lot of it was money problems, having to wait to get another drive to import the last of the tapes and the 16mm film. So we'll see how quickly the last of the footage gets imported, it's down to just a small pile sitting on my work desk, all the tapes are labeled and ready to be filed away. I'm anxious. I've been waiting for almost 5 years to edit this film. I can't say that I'm not terrified also... we have a lot of footage to work with... but is it the right footage, did I do what I needed to do during the trip? Was I focused? Lots of little things to needlessly worry about :P

Okay - I'm going to get back to importing more footage and crawl into bed with some chicken noodle soup.