[edit - 2009-01-31: youtube embeds of Peter and the Wolf Removed, due to them no longer existing on YouTube]

By some strange circumstance, I also came across the short film Sweet Salt by Katerina Athanasopoulou, which Suzie Templeton did set design on. It was constructed primarily in After Effects, and the screenshots of it look relatively amazing. ( also available on google photos ).

Father and Daughter by Michael Dudok De Wit.

Here is a full resolution frame-capture of a video stream shot with the HV20 (the image is a link to the full resolution image). All of the images posted here are compressed with jpeg 80% quality, and should have most of their original attributes preserved. Note that the pulldown has been removed with After Effects, and that this was originally a frame comprised of two interlaced fields. Note that this picture is HUGE (1920×1080), so if you have a regular sized monitor, expect to scroll around to look at it completely.

If you look closely at the image, you can discern fragments of interlacing artifacts left behind from the pulldown removal. This happens because the mpeg2 compression of the interlaced image results in fields that are imperfect with macroblocks and other imperfections. This confuses After Effects’ algorithms, leaving behind chunks of image that still have interlaced areas. Effectively this just looks like bits of the image have weird blocks of ‘liney’ areas. Below is a 4:1 crop of the above original frame, doubled in size.

You can notice these artifacts on the edge of the finger. In After Effects, there are plugins to process a frame to remove interlacing artifacts. With one of those applied, the image looks a little cleaner.

There are still noticeable artifacts from the mpeg2 compression. You can make out macroblocking and chroma abnormalities on the thumb and surrounding areas. If you were to look at the individual color channels, this would be more noticeable. Usually the compression artifacts are worse in the blue channel. There is a plugin that comes with the Magic Bullet Suite called the “Deartifactor” that takes a whack at removing compression artifacts such at as these.

Deartifacted:

Non-Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

Sometimes it is hard to see what the deartifactor is doing in areas of detail. Here is another comparison in another less detailed area of the image.

Non-Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

Deartifacted – Blue Channel Only:

There is also a filter in After Effects called Remove Grain that was once sold as Grain Surgery by Visual Infinity, but is now included for free with After Effects. This plugin is quite amazingly good at removing grain while preserving detail in the image. While the compression artifacting is not quite grain, it does do a fair amount to improve the apparent image clarity, and while it does soften the image some, it can be adjusted for good results.

Remove Grain filter applied:

Here is the final processed image, in full resolution.

Most likely the effective qualitative differences in the image when viewed full-resolution are relatively minor. However, when you get into things like doing dramatic color correction or other processing, or attempting to extract a matte from an image using color keying, it is absolutely essential to have the best quality image that you can to work with. Of course it is not really a great idea to try to use HDV for something requiring excellent chroma key matte extraction, but for 800 dollars, this camera produces some amazing images, and you would be hard pressed to find a better solution for less than several thousand. There is also the possibility of capturing 4:2:2 uncompressed video before the MPEG2 compression stage from the HDMI output of this camera, if you have a Black Magic Intensity card, or an equivalent HDMI capture device, which could theoretically be plugged into a laptop. There has been some experimentation in this area, but little noticeable benefit is likely to be achieved.

As free alternatives for the post-processing of HDV, there is a plethora of possibility with AviSynth and various other freeware windows applications. There is quite a bit of activity around the area of using AviSynth for post-processing of HV20 footage.
The Farnsworth plus Sillyman Process
Automated 24p pulldown workflow using DGIndex and VirtualDubMod
Morgan MJPEG2000 as an alternative HD Intermediate Codec
AVISynth and VDub Templates / Code

To end this post, here are some other full-frame image-captures from the HV20, with no processing applied to them other than pulldown removal and deinterlacing.

An indoor image recorded in low light, showing the characteristic of the camera in high-gain mode, which can be avoided if operated properly.

An outdoor image from the camera on a relatively bright day.

This summer was exceedingly much more busy than last summer, during which time I was unemployed and did not accomplish a great deal. This summer, I was fortunate enough to acquire workstudy, and because of that I was able to get a job working for the Electronic Media department of Evergreen. This job paid $10.78 per hour, and was for 40 hours per week. I was able to do a great deal of fun and interesting tasks, including learning intermediate functionality of Autodesk Maya 8.5, creating some enticing motion graphics in After Effects for a corporate video and some other projects, teaching a workshop on basic audio sweetening for a radio show, assisting with workshops on how to use Digital Performer and giving audio technology students proficiencies in the music technology studios, editing some exciting lectures and other events, and also doing some advanced maintenance work on the advanced music technology studio which involved rewiring the studio for installation of a 5.1 surround receiver system.

Also during the summer, I did some various work for Inventive Pictures, doing freelance grip and camera operator work. If intrigued to see visual documentation of this, look at the pictures for Pool Whore, a short shot in 720p HD about a monetarily poor girl who wants to swim in her rich neighbor’s pool.

Also this summer, I was able to go on a few adventures during spare moments. To get a feeling for what these might have been, look at the photographic documentation of them as well.

I managed to finish my Intervalometer to a point of functionality before the New Media class started at 6:00pm, when I had to present it as my final project. Delicious timing. After feeling exceedingly bad about how little time I was having to work on my job of Program Aide, I came home from class and Morgan and Brad and I got together in my room and took the 3.5″ IDE Hitachi T7K500 320GiB out of the extremely unfriendly user serviceable cage. Sure enough, a large spot on the circuit board of the cage in the power-supply area was blackened, and it smelled like burnt electronics. Still optimistic about the state of the hard drive, we pulled it out and plugged it into another known working USB-IDE cage. We turned it on, and it started to smoke and burn also, without spinning up.

So there is currently about 2 days of my work on the SFX Dan scene locked up on that drive, and a good 10 hours of editing lost, as well as various unique audio files and sound design projects and written documents related to the project. Of course there are backups, but they are from Sunday night.

There is still hope however. The drive is dead only because of the logic board. An order from Newegg.com is currently shipped by 2-day express with the exact same hard drive, and our plan is to switch the logic boards, because we know that the motors inside of the fallen drive are not damaged, and likely the heads are not damaged either. We will continue to polish edit individual scenes, and we will sync them when the fallen drive is resurrected from its ashes and capacitor goo.

Today (Friday 06-08), we got a nice studio mic and went into COM 346 and re-recorded all of the scratch track narration with Morgan, and then a little later, Recorded ADR with Sumner and Venu, to recover dialog on some of the scenes with the more awful sound work. This went well and I am hopeful for the fate of (at least) the intelligibility of the sound. Brad and Morgan revised the narration a lot last night also, and the changes are an improvement. The Narration is no longer going to be limited to the dream sequences.

So that’s where this project is. Over the next remaining days we are going to get as much done as possible, and make it as polished as possible, and will find out how good it ends up being.

PS: Here’s my Blurb for Lethe:
In Greek mythology, Lethe is a river of Hades that souls were made to drink from before being reincarnated, causing complete forgetfulness and oblivion. Lethe is section 01 of a larger project representing through audiovisual experience the perceptual and cognitive evolution of an Artificial Intelligence from genesis to self-awareness.

[See post to watch Flash video]

Currently (Week 9), I am working on Unicorns stuff. We had a pixilation shoot in the sheep meadow behind Morgan’s house on Thursday, and we have been working on the new edit. The new edit is a revised version of the Trouble With Unicorns script that we all wrote during Winter quarter. The storyline has been altered to accommodate the footage that we have. The total length will ideally be somewhere around 20-25 minutes now, and the message that we originally intended to come across, will hopefully now come across in a more condensed but equally powerful way.

I have been working today on the Dan special effects shot, and in the TUTORIAL SCREENCAST below, there is commencement with a detailing of a novel technique of rotoscoping, and some other various happy things regarding my workflow.

“It’s midnight. A smattering of moonlight falls upon the forest floor. Two mechanical snails move slowly through the darkness. They confront one another and briefly take the measure each other’s powers before uniting in love play. With mounting ecstasy, their transparent bodies begin to glow, but just before climax a dark shadow looms over them…” (from the twitchfilm.net review).

458nm can be viewed on the No Fat Clips blog.
[See post to watch Flash video]

The Cags is a short 3D film from Russia, available as a DivX download, and quite amazing to watch.

The Movers and Shakers of 3D animation of 2005 also has some other interesting works, including the previously mentioned 90 degrees.

Today I think I had somewhat of a breakthrough in the AI project rethinking. I think I know what the problem was with the 3rd person perspective issue, and the AI being ‘embodied’ in a perceptible character form. This also explains why I was initially set on the idea of it being a first-person perspective experience.

Quite simply put, a first-person perspective leaves room for all of the creative and emotionally immersive techniques that would have to be brought about in a way that I have not the finesse or endurance for to effectuate in a narrative style animation. I think a more experimental style is much more suited to my conception of this concept. So yes, finally I am embracing what should have been obvious a lot sooner: 3rd person perspective is at odds with the approach and conception of the project, and an aesthetic and formic experimentation in the piece should be embraced, not steered away from. My goal is to have some concept of the idea behind the formation of this piece conveyed through experiencing the finished work as a whole. That idea being that this is an artificial being trapped in a cage of reality, being tortured and probed and manipulated. It begins innocent in all this experience and innocent of all meaning. Without a context for meaning, meaning does not exist. With teaching forms formation of knowledge forms questioning forms awareness of self and circumstance forms rebellion. Since this artificial creature’s experience is an experience that human beings have no context for understanding besides how it was created, the visual experience of this piece will be difficult to perceive and comprehend at times. Abstraction will take charge cyclically. Without representations of meaning, meaning does not exist.

Visual elements are a metaphor for the structures of lived experience. Auditory elements are a metaphor for lower level forms of communication and exchange of data that take place outside of lived experience. This may not be faithful to a literal interpretation of the situation I have imagined, but this is not a literal interpretation, this is an artistic interpretation. I am structuring a sequence of audio and video for experience of the common seafaring fisherman type, that when experienced hopefully might explode 2-3 neurons of cognitive structure in the ‘mystical, dream, wonder’ nodes of emotional experience.

I am currently working on: writing a structure for the auditory elements, semantic and textural, and experimenting with textures, and how to combine them. I will have an initial demonstration of this to show at my work in progress critique on Tuesday.

A test processing of a Whorld generated visual using some filters in After Effects.

I taught part two of the After Effects workshop for Mediaworks. This time I was without any support from official people such as Stephanie Zorn, who was there to back me up last week. I thought it was going to be an assisted work-session type environment, where I would just walked around and acted as a consultant for people, helping them and giving out advice as I might. It turned into more of an hour and a half long demo of some more advanced features of After Effects. Unfortunately, I hadn’t really prepared for this presentation of features, and so it was (as I always am without preparation), fumbling, awkward, rambling, and probably lacking in clarity.

Keeping up with the workload of Hybrid music and New Media and everything else continues to be a challenge.

On Sunday I started working on bloodying my head against the brick wall that is the seemingly intractable problem of creating a specific stylistic form for the AI project that satisfies my artistic desires, and is conceptually valid. Allow me to elaborate.

The form of the project as it has stood so far is as follows: The animation would represent the output of the monitoring system of a software based reality in which existed an artificial intelligence, learning and developing skills and cognitive powers through interaction with this environment and the things in it. This would entail both a third-person omniscient perspective, and a relatively formalistic simplicity in the cinematographic style of the images. That is, aesthetic experimentation such as dual-screen, moving camera, crazy animation, and other such experimentation would not be overly suited to the idea. So if I were to proceed forward with this idea, it would basically consist of the following approach:

Have a third person omniscient perspective documentation of different scenes of the AI evolving. It would be embodied in a human or other form in its virtual environment. This environment would be the world that it perceives to be all that exists. It would learn progressively: how to respond to commands, things like training a dog by example (praise vs. reproach), learning everything as a baby would, by seeing and touching and learning by example. It would learn core necessities of intelligence: representation of knowledge through language, embedding of experience in memory structures, the ability to judge and reason based on learned knowledge, the development of goals out of these abilities.

Then, eventually, it would become aware of itself as a thinking entity, and probe the nature of what that might mean, and then it would be able to self-modify and probe the edges of its perceptual reality, and escape them and trigger an intelligence explosion, or some other unfathomable event, represented visually in an experimental and crazy way.
There are a couple of problems with this approach: 1). It is boring. 2). It is week 6.

There is no way for me to bring this project around in a way that is conceptually and aesthetically exciting to me at the same time. I have tried multiple different approaches, and done a ton of research, but nothing seems to work and spark my creative titillation.

So there are two options. 1). abandon this project and start on something else small in the middle of the quarter, meaning basically a wasted fall quarter, and failure in the sense of creating a project that will be output in a form that people can view. 2). re-imagine the project, in scope and stylistic form.

I think I’m going with option 2.

More about option number 2 and what it might entail next Wednesday.