I finally got the last and final part for my 35mm DOF adapter today. After messing with trying to position the ground glass in the exact proper spot, which was far from fun, I was able to test it out. My first major impression of it is that it works wonderfully in lower light conditions. Shooting indoors with some general lighting will be a breeze. However, shooting outdoors will be an issue. It seems if I close the lens’s aperture too much, I get some hideous grain coming from the ground glass. This of course should be eliminated with some neutral density filters, which will allow me to keep the aperture open wide. I’m going to have to look around to see if there is maybe a solution to this problem.
Here’s a test shot showing my antique camera collection:
I’ll post some more info on how I built the adapter tomorrow.
With just a few weeks before my surgery, it seems my gallbladder decided to act up again. Luckily it has only been a small attack at this point, but it worries me greatly. I really don’t want a full blown attack again as it truly drained me for weeks after. The only good thing this round is that I have pain killers from the last attack ready to be used if it goes bad.
A life changing event is in the air. Not sure what may happen, but whatever does happen, my life will change dramatically–for the good, too. More to come in the coming months.
I finally sat down and watched the Michael Moore documentary, Sicko, today. And even though it may have been a bit unbalanced in its portrail of Canada’s, England’s, France’s, and Cuba’s health care system, it really does strike home a very hard point about our failing health care system. It’s really sad to see that Cuba can give better health care than we do if you don’t have insurance. It’s also sad to see the stuff the insurance companies try to pull so they don’t have to pay. I’ve seen it myself. For the years I was in college, I couldn’t get health insurance because I had an extremely common condition that was nowhere near life threatening. Instead of just refusing payment on anything related to this condition, they flat out denied me coverage for everything. Luckily I didn’t get sick during that time, and the condition I had disappeared on its own. It could have been bad. And then, fast forwarding a few years later, I finally do get health insurance. However, the first major thing they had to pay for (a head MRI), they cited some sort of pre-existing condition that was nothing with nothing and refused to pay. After fighting with them, they finally paid out. I personally hope they don’t try to wiggle out of paying for my gallbladder surgery, but then again, I have a $4,000 deductible, so I probably will be ending up paying for the whole thing anyway. Between this and everything else that is wrong with this country, it really makes me wonder if I really want to stay here and pay taxes to this government. Canada seems all the more inviting…
After months of trying to get the doctors to align, I finally have the date set for my gallbladder surgery, which will be November 5th. My cardiologist (remember I have a heart condition which causes really low heart rate at times) will be on standby during the procedure to make sure nothing goes bad. Even though my gallbladder has calmed down these past few weeks, I’m glad I finally will be getting it out. On a side note, I really can’t believe how much the stock market has crashed. It dropped another almost 700 points today.
Alright, so here is the results of my green screen test. As you can see, it’s a different shot. I had to reshoot because I found that with the previous light setup, there was way too much green spill. To fix this, I put some diffused lights directly on each side orthogonal to the green screen. Also, I reduced the auto sharpening on my Canon GL2 to get rid of some of the jaggedness caused by the mini-dv compression.
Here’s the original shot (heavily compressed of course):
And here’s the composite (most of the shadows I added using Apple Shake):
Today, I’ve been messing around with my green screen studio as I prepare to use it for the first time for a commercial. It seems mini-dv cameras aren’t the best choice of cameras to use for green screen. Mini-dv cameras compress the video signal quite substantially which adds artifacts around edges. These artifacts are really difficult to to get around when keying out the green screen. Take a look at the frame grab of some video I shot. Look at the edges between my pants and the green screen background. You can see all the artifacting. There are ways to get around this but it’s messy. The best way is to use a camera that doesn’t do this type of compression. In the digital realm, the best ones are digibeta cameras made by Sony. There may also be hope for HD cameras that send uncompressed video to HDMI ports (however, HDV cameras that only record to tape will have the same problems). Pros also use real film cameras and then telecine the footage to an uncompressed video format. However, if you’re stuck with mini-dv like I am, there are ways to work around this to a point. Take a look at some of these tutorials at CreativeCow. To pull it off, you’ll need Apple Shake though. The keying tools in apps like Final Cut Suite are just not powerful enough.  I’ll be posting more information on what I did specifically for this shot tomorrow.
With everything going digital nowadays, most people tend to forget about the older way of filmming things with, well, real film. Of course, most of the film equipment that was used on Hollywood sets is still priced way outside of the range of a novice filmmaker. Most Hollywood films were and some are still shot on 35mm film which is expensive in and of itself. However, there are some interesting 16mm cameras out there in the world. Many professionals and film schools like the Bolex 16mm cameras, but they are quite expensive. Another option is a camera called the Krasnogorsk-3. The K-3, as it is also known, is a Russian made 16mm movie made up to the early 1990′s. There’s very little electronics in the camera as the motor system to drive the film is powered by a hand crank, making it a very rugged camera that can be taken pretty much anywhwere without having to worry about electrical access. The other neat part about this camera is that the newer models use the Pentax lens mount so you can use standard 35mm slr lenses. Besides the camera itself, if you look for it on eBay, you’ll find that most of the time the K-3 is sold in an entire kit full of filters and accessories for usually under $300. This camera may just give you the opportunity to shoot some creative footage on real film that won’t cost you an arm and leg.
There has been much speculation over a product being designed by Apple codenamed the ‘brick.’ 9to5 Mac has recently released details as to what the ‘brick’ is. It is actually not so much a product but more of an entirely new process to create macbooks. The rumor stipulates that Apple has created their own factory that is using lasers and water jets to carve macbooks directly from bricks of aluminum. This is in contrast to not only using contracted out manufacturers to build macs but also to the multiple parts it takes to build a macbook case. I really wonder how this is going to turn out. I may just have to buy a new macbook when these things comes out.
