finalcutprose

Comparison of Buffy original and widened HD looks.

Buffy’s HD Remaster Woes

finalcutprose, flicks, geek, rants / By

This post on Facebook shows in great detail the disappointing issues with the new HD remaster of Buffy the Vampire Slayer for Pivot TV, complete with side-by-side comparisons and video links. (All of the side-by-sides here on the blog are taken from that Facebook article. Thanks, mystery author!)

The questionable 16:9 cropping (or opening the frame up to see crew members and lighting rigs, as above) is bad enough, but the liberties they’re taking with Buffy’s HD color grades are ruining the aesthetic of the show.

Buffy has always been one of the darkest shows (in terms of luma levels) I’ve ever seen on TV. While I understand tiny tweaks to take advantage of the full color information and resolution of the new film scans (and the vast amount of information a Blu-ray can hold vs. the original Betacam master tapes1), brightening every dark scene makes it akin to going through a haunted house with the harsh fluorescents on overhead the entire time — It actually makes it feel more like a cheap soap opera. (And yes, at times Buffy is a soap opera, but at least it was a moody and atmospheric soap opera!)

The new effects aren’t terrible, and I can’t blame them for replacing those, assuming the effects were only ever finished at SD resolution to begin with — the same thing that had to happen for Star Trek: The Next Generation, when they remastered for HD. Kind of weird that the vampire dustings look more like smoke now, though:

I’m not usually one to complain, “you’re ruining it!,” even about a beloved film or series like this, but it’s terribly sad to see Buffy being treated like this for the HD remaster. I hope the producers take a hint from the TNG Blu-rays and reassess their decision not to remaster the show in the 4:3 ratio as Joss Whedon and his crews originally intended. That Facebook post seems to hope that this is a “rough draft,” and that these issues will be corrected for an assumed eventual Blu-ray release, but I fear once these episodes are done, no one’s going to spend the money or take the time to do them yet again. Still, since only seasons 1 and 2 seems to have been done so far, fingers still crossed for season 3 and beyond!

  1. I’d assume it was Betacam SP, given the time in which it was made. Later seasons might have been DigiBeta — or even from the start, if Fox was very forward-thinking. However, from personal experience with the formats, and seeing the very soft resolution on the DVDs, I’m going to assume BetaSP for now. ↩
trackFinger recording touch on an iPad

Screen Replacement for iOS and Beyond

finalcutprose, howto / By

I missed this massive post on Pro Video Coalition earlier this year, but it talks about a ton of techniques for screen replacement, including an iOS app called trackFinger that you can use to put a green- or bluescreen on your iPad or iPhone, and also have it track any touches on the screen for import into After Effects. With this, you can animate based on the touch motion, and composite the video into the greenscreen on the video.

I’ve tried it myself, it doesn’t really lend itself to doing demos of real iOS apps — it’s a little difficult to match up where the real tap targets are when you can’t see them. However, the color keys out just fine for compositing animated and futuristic interfaces for your next sci-fi short. Just be sure to turn the screen brightness down to match the lighting in your scene, because that greenscreen is going to spill like crazy on your talent’s hand if the brightness is up too high.

The PVC article goes into more depth on screen replacement techniques, many of which I use, and embeds several how-to videos on the subject. If you want to play around with Trackfinger, there’s also now a free “lite” version of the iOS app.

Xcoders Seattle: How to App Video

finalcutprose, geek, howto, Seattle / By

These are the “show notes” from my How to App Video talk at Seattle Xcoders, on May 21, 2014 at 7:00 pm.

Slides, AV Script Format, and Videos

  • My Xcoders talk was recorded and now available on (and embedded above)!
  • My Slide Deck — not sure how helpful this is without the talk, but there it is. These are actually the slides from the previous presentation of this talk at Renaissance 2014, but very little has changed, aside from MouseTools, and including both Mac and iOS instead of just iOS.
  • AV Format Markdown CSS (on GitHub) to use in BBEdit, Marked, and Ulysses
  • If you’re printing out the script from BBEdit, and want the shading to print behind the video side of the script, check out the instructions in this post.
  • At the moment, BBEdit doesn’t obey the CSS page break styles when printing, to avoid weird widow/orphan issues. It seems it’s an Apple Web View bug, and they are working on a solution for that.
  • Final OmniOutliner View Settings “Support Short” video from The Omni Group
  • Final video from MartianCraft
  • Final spec spot, and a on how we did some of the special effects.

Tools

More Bits

Renaissance 2014 — How to App Video

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These are the “show notes” from my half of the Master Video talk at Renaissance 2014, on January 21, 2014 at 10:30 am.

Slides, AV Script Format, and Videos

Tools

More Bits

Vertical Horizon

finalcutprose, rants / By

Ever since the iPhone first started shooting video, people have decried the use of the vertical orientation. Why would you do that? It looks so horrible! It’s unnatural! Hang on a moment while I pass judgement on you.

Stop it.

Let’s take a look at the history of film aspect ratios for a moment. Sure, the first film format was 4:3, just like our old TV sets — slightly wider than it is tall. In fact, TV cribbed the 4:3 ratio from film, and it wasn’t until TV started sucking away some of the film audience that the movies started to get wider and wider and wider.

The point being, aspect ratio is an artistic choice, and mostly a gimmick to get people back in theaters. None of those aspect ratios are “right” — not even 16:9, which was a compromise between many ratios for an acceptable film “fit” when TV stole widescreen back for itself (and pushed the movies into another 3D frenzy, which is a rant for another day). Even 9:16 (the iPhone’s vertical video ratio) is just another choice in a long line of choices.

And why shouldn’t you shoot video vertically? Apple’s own ads show people chatting on FaceTime with the camera held vertically. Our faces our vertical. There are tall buildings, and kids coming down playground slides. I argue that, sometimes, it’s a really good fit.

Most of the arguments against vertical video seem to boil down to one of two things. One is some pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo about how our eyes are set horizontally in our heads, so our natural field of vision is wider than it is tall, and we should obey that restraint. (Yes, art is all about obeying natural restraints, and conforming to convention.) The other is an argument that the way that we share video now, via YouTube and AirPlay-ing to our AppleTVs, demands that wide ratio to fit the screen. This latter theory has some merit, but I would argue that the video sharing sites should accommodate multiple aspect ratios in the way they present the videos, instead of letterboxing things inside a widescreen frame. (At least Vimeo and Flickr seem to handle this properly.)

That leads us to Horizon, a new app that uses the accelerometer in the phone to detect the angle of the phone while it’s shooting video, and automatically crop the video to a level 16:9 horizontal image.

This is super clever, and certainly fills a need — sometimes you do want perfectly level horizontal video, damn the resolution (the crop in vertical mode has only 32% of the resolution of the full image). Probably most people just want a video that looks nice when they play it on their TV, or share it on YouTube. This will do that, and quite nicely.

The more interesting thing to me, is how it enables a unique interface for the zoom function on the phone. Now you can use the angle of the phone to control the crop, instead of clumsily sliding your finger on the screen while you’re trying to hold the phone still.

It’s all about using the camera in creative and unique ways — There is no one “right” way to shoot video. Just a plethora of interesting decisions.

Motion Tracking for Screen Replacement

finalcutprose, geek, howto / By

is a great introduction to tracking screen replacements. Imagineer Systems makes Mocha, a planar tracker that will allow you to get excellent tracks of a flat (or flat-ish) surface, often without tracking markers. A lite version, Mocha AE comes bundled with After Effects.

Obviously, this isn’t a complete solution for iOS developers looking to demo their apps with live hand-held iPhone and iPad shots, but it’s an important piece of the puzzle. Imagineer has that shows more of what goes into a screen replacement on a touch screen. Even though it demonstrates the final compositing steps with an outdated version of Final Cut Pro, it gives you a good idea of the steps that go into this kind of shot.