February » 2011 » Brainsplinter Productions

HDMI field recorder for less than $1k?

It has been a long time coming, but there is finally an HDMI field recorder available for less than a thousand dollars. It's called the Atomos Ninja. A couple years ago I tried to build a computer with a Black Magic Intensity HDMI capture card. I say "try" because the computer never came together the way I wanted. At first there was a slim form factor case that was a flimsy piece of junk so I moved to a chunkier case which somewhat defeated the purpose of a portable video capture system. Then I realized that the 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad was actually slower at rendering video than my 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo. Really? What a disappointment. Add to that the fact that the data rate from the Intensity card is such that a normal SATA2 drive can't handle the throughput. So a RAID0 is necessary to deal with real-time recording.

Why would I want to record the HDMI signal from my Canon 7D instead of just recording to the Compact Flash card? That's a long and boring (to most) story about highly compressed video files that throw away part of the color information for the images. HDMI is uncompressed with more color information. It sounds like an obvious choice, right? Unfortunately there is more to the story. When the Canon 7D is recording the HDMI output isn't full 1920×1080 (1620×910) and over the image is the red "recording" dot. The other image information, timers, and focus point indicators can be turned off, but not that red dot. HDMI is also interlaced instead of the progressive images that anyone in their right minds would want. There is a Swedish company called Syndicate which makes a software tool for capturing the 7D HDMI output, removing the red dot, stripping the 24p frames out of the 60i HDMI stream, and upscaling the less than full HD image to full HD. They want 200 Euros for it, too. For now I'm sticking with the native files from the 7D. Even with all of the shortcomings of the h.264 codec and 4:2:0 color sampling I still like images it produces for the price. I look forward to the day when the new cameras get rid of the rolling shutter problem.

DualEyes – purchased

DualEyes: It's a product with an awful name, but I look forward to the time it will save me. Ever since I got my Canon 7D I have been recording "dual system sound" where sound is recorded on-camera and externally with a Rode NTG-3 shotgun mic connected to a digital recorder. Why record the sound twice? The 7D's tiny built-in microphone is saddled with really bad (that's bad "bad", not good "bad") Automatic Gain Control (AGC). That means that when nobody is speaking the gain is turned up really high because the camera is trying to capture very quiet sounds like whispering or puppies snoring. The problem is when someone speaks after a period of silence the gain is turned up really high, then it quickly turns down so that it is appropriate for the dialog, then cranks up really high when (s)he stops talking. The silence between bits of dialog have a high "noise floor" and makes it sound like a home movie. Nothing professional about that. Recording the dialog on an external digital recorder is preferable because the gain can be set for a particular scene. The sound recordist gets a feel for how loud the scene is going to be and adjusts the gain on the microphone manually.

This is all fine and dandy until it is time to edit the footage. For every video clip there is now another sound clip that must be manually lined up with it in the video editing software. If it isn't lined up then the spoken words don't match the moving lips and that's even less professional than sound with AGC. So I have spent hours lining up audio clips with corresponding video clips. Hours of my life wasted in this non-creative grunt work process. That is now behind me. DualEyes (again, AWFUL name) will take those video clips and external audio files and line them up for me. Select the files, click the button, have a nice cup of tea, and revel in the fact that the grunt work is being done by the computer instead of me.

Garden State Film Festival

More good news. Our film The Great Heist has been selected to screen at the 9th annual Garden State Film Festival in Asbury Park, New Jersey between March 31-April 3rd, 2011. The exact schedule of films will be posted later in the month. We are very excited to be part of the event this year. And there is the huge bonus of being able to drive to the festival since it's in our state.

We’re in!

There’s excitement in the air. Mofilm.com sent the acceptance email today. “Congratulations- your video has been shortlisted and we would now like to put your submission forward for the final stages of judging.” It was a little bit more roundabout way of saying it, but I am very fond of our work being “shortlisted.” That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Onward and upward!

MOFILM here we come

The final cut of our AT&T Rethink Possible commercial was finished on Sunday afternoon and uploaded to the mofilm.com site that evening. We are now in the running for some prize money and a trip to Barcelona. We are trying to avoid nail biting, but we think we have a pretty strong entry which was made even better by the original music score from Peter Avelar. Thanks, Peter! Let the waiting… continue!