More frames and nibs (day 257)

As luck would have it, someone's been reading my blog that knows a lot about S3D with prosumer cameras.  He recommends either the Kodax Zi8 or the Sanyo Xacti Full HD line.  Turns out the sync problem is not as bad if the frame rate is higher, which makes sense.  They can be controlled with an infrared remote.  Both models can do 60fps at at least 720p.  I'll recommend these to Leila and we'll probably try one of them out during the residency.

On a completely different topic, I have a new addiction: Raw Cacao Nibs.  Deliciously crunchy cacao goodness.  Totally addictive, versatile, with a mellow stimulant.  Apparently they're a healthy snack too, though I view this as a bonus rather than a reason.  I ordered a Kilo from Earth Notions. 

A song for this post.

Inaugural spin (day 256)

The tech session with the stereoscopic rig went really well.  About 15 people came and for over two hours Marty talked about the technical aspects of the rig and took questions from the participants.  There was lots of great feedback and many said they would be interested in coming back and spending some time experimenting with the rig.  We ourselves will be spending some quality time with the rig in the coming days getting ready for the Western Economic Diversification announcement of the S3D Centre taking place at Emily Carr on May 20th.  We'll be filming the event with the rig and showing the live footage on a 3DTV LCD (Hyundai S465D).

I taped a lot of the session today but I haven't had time to upload the footage.  In the meantime here is a photo taken from an iPhone of Marty and I looking at the live stream for the first time.  The next shot is an older one of my first time seeing the rig at Kerner in late March.


Many people deserve thanks for making this session happen.  The Kerner team for getting the rig up here in time and helping organize some of the session logistics.  Marty Brenneis especially for so generously providing so much information to the assembled group.   And Rick Overington, for heroically wrangling technology and traffic to make sure everything worked in the end.
Our industry partners also deserve many thanks for their invaluable contributions and support: Panavision, Codex, Cine-Tal, Sony, Fujinon, Evertz, Silicon Imaging.

A song for this post.

Now in stereo (day 255)

Marty Brenneis from Kerner arrived at the lab today!  He's here for a 2 day visit and to help us put the stereoscopic rig together.  He's the engineer that built the rig.  It was really exciting to see the rig being come together and to see the live stream from the cameras on our new 3DTV.  Tomorrow we're having a tech session and Q&A mostly for internal technicians but also some technicians from IATSE.   May 20th is the official WED announcement of the funding for the Centre.

We'll be filming the session tomorrow so I'll post some pics and perhaps some videos.   I'll also put together a list of the rig components.

A song for this post.

A progressive discovery (day 252)

There is a glimmer of hope in our search for a low cost solution to stereoscopic video capture.  One of the technicians at Concordia found the Canon Vixia HF S200 camcorder which can record progressive (24p) video in HD and has a LANC terminal.  With any luck they will be better synced than the TG1s.  Having progressive recording means faster motion (like sports which we've been recording) will be better quality.

We haven't addressed the issue of post-processing at all.  I suspect this will be another hurdle.  With the TG1 footage we ran into a lot of codec and audio issues which never really got resolved.  The Canons probably record in AVCHD just like the Sonys.  Hopefully the tools got smarter in the interim.

That's it for today.  Just an equipment update.  I've been busy planning for the stereoscopic tech session happening on Tuesday in the lab.  Here's to hoping everything comes together.

A song for this post.

Resounding sanity amidst frustration (day 248)

Leila tried using the Sony TG1s with the digi-dat remote but she said it was highly frustrating to have to wait for the moment where the initial sync is less than 1ms.  It breaks all spontaneity and creates a lot of tension when trying to get a good shot.  She was shooting a soccer game with 10 minute periods so fiddling with the cameras for 5-6 minutes was too frustrating to be worth it.  She did get some footage but we didn't have time to look at it today.  In any case, it looks like we'll have to find another solution, or other cameras that are better synced than the ones we have.  We do have the Silicon Imaging cameras but are still waiting on the field recorder.  Hopefully we'll have it soon and can use the setup during the residency.  Time is getting tight but hope lives on. 

We also tried to make the singing bowl resonate without being struck.  Miles used a piezo vibrating at the same frequency as the bowl (~457 Hz).  The results were interesting but not as successful as we'd hoped.  The bowl would resonate a little bit at some specific spots but not to the point of giving the rich sound of stroking or striking the bowl.  Miles will keep working at it.  It's possible we could use a mix of vibrations or some kind of amplifier to create the effect we're seeking.

Lastly, today I came across this interview with Father Miguel D'Escoto, former President of the United Nations. I had never seen or heard him speak before.  Sometimes the strength and sanity of older humans are awe-inspiring.  Miguel D'Escoto has that awe-inspiring quality.  I think there is a lot of truth in what he is saying about the way we name things to normalize them.  We name wars and they become crusades.  We name groups of people getting killed and we forget they were ever individuals.  I also liked the way he talked about being unashamed to stand up for 'Mother Earth'.  It is not us that are insane.  We should care. 

A song for this post.

Preview day and night (day 245)

Another day, another preview of things to come.

We spent the a good part of the afternoon working with the cameras and the remote again.  After giving up on finding another set of cameras by going shopping locally, we decided to give our current setup another chance.  We got as scientific as we could with imprecise tools and calculated the drift to be about .6ms per minute with a period of about 15 minutes.  So after 15 minutes they get in sync again.  Once they are in sync we have about 5 minutes to shoot before things are too far out of sync to be usable.  This is an estimate and would depend on the speed of motion in the scene.  So it's workable but certainly not amenable to spur of the moment shooting.  Leila will test it out this weekend.  In talking with Sean, he said that he's had the same issue with recording sound and video separately.  The oscillators were just slightly out of sync so the sound and video didn't match up.  Luckily with sound you can play around a bit and get things to match.  Not so with video.  We haven't found video editing software that will manipulate a sub-frame level.  Changing the frame rate to be a fractional number would not work.

We spent the later afternoon brainstorming some ideas about Breath I/O.  Here are the notes (not edited):

Lungs jostling/bending
Moving around forming clusters, groups, fights, collaborations.
Number of lungs - individual to couple to quartet to nine to multitude (varying)
Environment - rain, wind, snow, vidéo windows in bg
Internal video associated with personal internal space. External video associated with public videos.
When lungs touch each other could generate traces
External videos can affect internal videos (a mixture)
Lines in space delineating groups and boundaries
Breathing patterns affecting video speed and direction
Video particles or atmospheric around the lungs maybe more visible when they are actively breathing. Somehow visualizing sharing of the same air.
Sometimes lungs not having video (tuning out?)
Death/decay (line drawing?)
Events like a bird flying through. Each set of lungs associated with an event that can get triggered. Internal event or external event.
Provoke tenderness in viewer.  A sense of protecting.
Resonance, sound, visual resonance, synching, harmony/disharmony, oscillations that are sometimes in sync, oscillations that affect each other. Rhythms, ebbs and flows, events affect the patterns.

The day ended with the Grad Show preview night.  I toured about a third of the show before going home.  I'll see the rest during the week when it's a bit less busy.  It was great to see the MAA student work all in one place.  The official opening is tomorrow night.

A song for this post.

Oscillating and Resonating (day 243)

Leila and I spent the afternoon testing the LANC twin remote with the Sony TG1 cameras, then shopping for other cameras that would work better than the TG1s.   It was a futile attempt.  In the end we ended up with a nice assortment of chocolate from Xoxolat, and a singing bowl from Maiwa.  Not a bad day altogether.

So what about the LANC twin remote.  It works as advertised but our TG1 cameras have mismatched oscillators.  We have yet to do the precise calculation but it's somewhere around 1ms per minute.  This is a lot.  And it's hard to get them to be in sync at startup.  On average it seemed to take about 15 power ups to get a sync better than 4ms.  We may try to make the LANC 3D Master which is capable of manipulating the frame rate to compensate for the oscillator mismatch.  The 3D Master has an open source hardware design.  I have no idea if the TG1 are even capable of responding to the frame rate manipulation of the 3D Master.  There doesn't seem to be any way to find out beside making the remote and checking.

We went to the Sony store to see if there would be other cameras that we could test for a match.  No luck there.  The cameras we were interested in either had a design flaw which prevented the physical connection of the remote, or weren't available at the store, or weren't able to be taken out of the box for testing. We looked at Canon cameras too but none seemed to have a LANC connection.  Maybe their higher end cameras have this.  So we are a bit stuck.  We could go higher end but the higher end cameras tend to be bigger so cannot have a inter-axial distance of human scale. 

The singing bowl will be used to generate sounds and perhaps be part of the interface for the Breath I/O work.  We will go to Long & McQuade tomorrow and see if we find a tuning fork that will resonate with the bowl.  The bowl resonates at B Flat which a quick search reveals could be heart, crown, or solar plexus chakra.  There is an intriguing NPR report about B Flat which claims it can stimulate alligators to bellow, and is the note hummed by black holes (yes, black holes).   Guess that means black holes make alligators bellow.  There's also a nice bit in there about a room that resonates at B Flat (a room mode).  This site has an interactive orchestra piece in B Flat.  There doesn't seem to be any agreements on a mapping between chakras and tones which makes sense I suppose.  Anyway, B Flat sounds good for  now.

A song for this post.

Wanna see a demo? (day 216)

I only travelled with my iPhone this time.  It was a quick trip and I didn't want to carry one more bag.  I fancied I would write a short blog post with the iPhone.  For several reasons including tired eyes, intermittent wireless, and an oncoming cold, I decided against it in the end.  I think if I'd had a netbook it would have happened.  Reason enough to get one?  Probably not.   But if I continue with these short trips, perhaps.  I'll have to try out the iPad keyboard to see if it would even be a contestant.

The visit to Kerner went really well.  It was not at all what I expected.  It's a place designed to build things and blow things up.  It has a shop feel combined with some great creative (destructive?) energy.  There are lots of warehouse type spaces and remnants of models and sets built in the past.  I think I expected something more polished or cleaner.  I've seen so many CG effects that I hadn't thought through the mechanics of real demolitions.  The double meaning of the word demo was a great source of puns. 
Kerner was split from Industrial Light and Magic a few years ago.  They drifted for a while but are now being steered by a team of highly competent people.  The talent that makes Kerner so successful is still there.   In fact, I've rarely met such talented people.  It's great to meet individuals that are doing what they love.  One of them has been with Kerner for 30 years!  I don't know anyone else in that category.

I saw the S3D rig they've built for Emily Carr and it is very impressive.  I can barely wait to give it a spin in Vancouver.  We're just waiting for all the pieces to be integrated in their lab and we'll be showing it off publicly on May 13th for Industry Evening in the Intersections Digital Studios at Emily Carr.

A song for this post.

Monday skirmishes (day 206)

I have a theory that half of us get to Monday raring to go.  The other half are dreading the first half.  Sometimes I'm the inflicter of pain and sometimes I'm the victim.  Today I wasn't sure which one I'd be.  It seemed like a pretty good day and by noon I was pretty much on top of my email but it became obvious I was outnumbered by the energetic Monday lovers.  By the end of the day I was behind and it kept on coming past 9pm.  I'm hoping tomorrow the Monday lovers take a breather.  I'll catch up and give them a Wednesday worth any lover's Monday.  

People in IDS are hard at work getting the Stereoscopic 3D Centre off the ground.  I've been playing around with stereo 3D for about ten years but always on the CG end of things, the easy 3D where you generate the views rather than capture them.  Because a big emphasis in the new S3D centre will be live action capture with a cinematic rig, I've had to get up to speed really quickly on video hardware for movie making which can get arbitrarily complicated it seems.  A simple look at movie credit gives an idea of the complexity.  Looking around for a portable capture system gave some relief.  In a previous post I mentioned I had settled on a rig from Inition with some Sony cameras but I ended up changing my mind after speaking with Ari from Silicon Imaging.  Their 2K Mini cameras with a matched field recorder seemed ideally suited to what we wanted to do.  High quality cameras with a choice of lenses and the capacity for calibrating and recording on a mini touch screen.  I'm totally looking forward to testing it out in the spring.  At 7cm across, they'll be great for a range of shooting situations.  And then once I have the footage, I'll go through the learning curve of editing S3D footage.  I have a feeling this summer will be one interesting journey, starting with the Oboro residency in May.

But many Mondays until then.  One at a time.  One at a time.

A song for this post.

The promise of compromise (day 189)

The search for a portable S3D continued yesterday and today.  Some incredibly useful people helped narrow down the search including Michael Verity, Vic Love, and Chris Lakes.  There is no perfect solution out there but in the interest of time and future intrepid field stereographers of the S3D Centre,  I had to make a decision.  I settled on a system by Inition which integrates lower end but narrow Sony HVR-A1 cameras on a side by side rig, a LANC sync method, and a 3D preview monitor.  The total weight should be around 30lbs but I'm missing some info to give a precise number.  I think this system will be a nice complement to the full-featured Kerner rig with Sony HDC-P1 cameras.

All this last minute shopping has made me realize how much I hate making decisions.  Yes, I'm a director and making decisions should be easy by now but sometimes knowing that there is no perfect solution is really heart-breaking.  Or knowing you don't have the right people for the job but strategically you still need to go ahead and hope the right people show up.  And seeing everyone else's press releases on the same things you are working on and wondering how you'll ever stand out in the crowd.  I find comfort in logistics but just like cooking, there's no point being precise without a plan for all the food to complement each other.  This is where a good team comes in.  And I do have a good team.  Shout outs to Rob Inkster, Alexandra Samuel, Dawn Whitworth, Lynn Leboe, Shannon McKinnon, Morgan Brayton, Simon Overstall, Rick Overington, and Bobbi Kozinuk!

A song for this post.

A 3D you can lift (day 187)

bacterial update: I'm waiting for my tea to cool down so I can put the kombucha mushroom in it.   It's important not to shock the mushroom.  Usually I spend time worrying about things getting cold.  It's amazing how long it actually takes for things to cool down.  I've been underestimating all this time.  Next time I'll plan a bit better.  When I did a taste test today, I realized that I had to bottle the current batch before it went way too acidic.  So it was a bit of a mad rush around the kitchen to get everything organized.  I think this batch ended up with a bit too much yeast.  It's not as good as the previous one.  And the mushroom didn't form as quickly or get as thick either.  Hopefully this next batch is a bit more healthy.  I also realized that I need to buy a jar with a spigot.  That way I don't disturb the mushroom formation when I need to test the pH.  These used to be so popular in the early 80s because of Sun Tea.  You'd think they'd be a dime a dozen.  But a quick look at the Kitchen Store didn't yield any loot.  The Happy Herbalist does sell some containers with spigots but they are twice as large as what I currently have.  With the size of my kitchen I can't really fit anything bigger than a gallon jar.

I spent the day looking for portable stereoscopic 3D solutions.  They are harder to find than I thought.  Panasonic just came out with a twin lens solution but it's not really available yet and has limitations like fixed inter-axial distance.  Still at 6.6 lbs it's an amazing solution for quick field work.  Other than that, it's really a DIY market out there.  I love the little Iconix cameras but the issue with those (besides the steep price) is getting small diameter matched lenses.  It would be so great to have such small cameras to work with not just because of the lower weight but also to shoot in confined space or at close range.  Love knows no bounds and I will find a way.  I've also been looking the 3DFilmFactory rigs for smaller side by side setups.  The ideal setup would be a system where everything fits in a backpack, is less than 30 lbs and runs on batteries.   I remember seeing pictures of Ansel Adams and all the gear he use to lug up mountains in Yosemite.  Not sure how much weight he had but it probably wasn't much more than that.  I have to have some sort of defined shopping list by tomorrow morning.  I've put out lots of leads out there, hopefully some of them pan out.

A song for this post.

Go where the love is (day 147)

bacterial update: The kombucha scoby appears to have survived.  I tested the pH and it decreased a little bit.  I got a bit more brave (stupid?) and took the scoby out and added sugar.  It foamed like yesterday but then reverted to a normal state.  This is my last ditch effort at saving this batch.  I'd say if by the end of the weekend it's not approaching a 3.5 pH, I'll let it go.  I'm looking forward to starting from scratch.  It would be a bonus if I could get some tea out of this batch though!  I haven't even been optimistic enough to buy some bottles.  Many kombucha tea brewers recommend getting a heating pad.  I'm intrigued by this idea but I would rather do without mostly because I can't think of a location with a plug nearby that would also be appropriate for brewing tea.  I may try putting a hot water bottle near the brewing container and see if that helps.
The Kefir grains woke up with a new zest for life and I knew I was in trouble when I saw the fermentation was almost done as I was leaving for work.  There was no way I'd be back to strain it at the optimal time.  And I wasn't.  When I got home it had separated into a thick layer of curd with whey at the bottom.  So I decided to make Kefir-Leban, the kefir equivalent of "if life gives you lemons, make lemonade".   It's currently straining through cloth and should be ready in about 20 hours.  It can then be used like cream-cheese, or made into a harder more mature cheese.  I'm intrigued by cheese-making but not enough to make my apartment smell like a cheese factory.

I know that a few days ago I said that I would keep going to the Stereoscopic Displays and Applications conference.  Now I'm not so sure.  I did come away with some new insights about stereo technologies but considering the cost of attending, it doesn't seem like a good trade.  For the same price I could go to SIGGRAPH and be much more satisfied.  It dawned on me that my interest in stereoscopy centres around two topics: the art of making stereoscopic movies, animations and artwork; and the hardware and software people are using to create these on the cheap.  In other words, I am interested in stereoscopy for artists and amateurs.  I don't think this will ever be a central part of the SD&A conference.  But it could be part of the new Stereoscopic 3D Centre currently being developed at Emily Carr in partnership with Kerner Optical.  In fact, I will make sure it is.  With that in mind, here is a piece of information I picked up at the conference.  Colby Systems has created a relatively inexpensive stereo video camera that records at full HD resolution.  The cost is $699 USD, plus an extra $99 for a camera stabilizer.  I will purchase one for the Breath I/O project and put a review on this blog once I try it out. 

A song for this post.

Not (yet) my tribe (day 143)

It's odd to be surrounded by thousands of people and feel alone.  This is the second time I've attended this conference and I thought it would be different this year.  But I'm starting to realize that there is a fundamental mismatch between the average SD&A attendee and me.  I remember once sitting at  Tim Horton's waiting for someone to pick me up.  I wasn't eating the doughnuts but I was watching other people eat doughnuts.  The atmosphere was ok and I was enjoying reading the paper.  I think I might have been sipping coffee too.  Anyway.   At some point I looked around and I thought "If I hung out here all the time, eventually I would look like the people that come here regularly".  The thought was sobering and I looked for my friend's car.  I feel the same way about this conference.  I look around and I think "I don't want this to be me in 10 years."  Needless to say the feeling seems to be mutual.  They can't see me becoming like them so they don't bother engaging in more than superficial conversation.  The saving grace?  Some pretty great content.  And there are other sub-conferences happening so I can duck out and take in some other type of information when I've had enough.  I will keep coming here because of the content and because I think eventually it will change.  And if it doesn't, maybe I'll start my own regular stereo conference.

If I could change SD&A I would add some art tracks, change the venues to be smaller, and add some technical courses.  Maybe change the management team to proportionally include fewer engineers.

BTW, Disney is converting the original Beauty and The Beast to stereoscopic.  They showed a preview and it is beautiful.  They said they aim to have it done (start to finish) in a year.  

A song for this post.

Stereo ahoy! (day 35)

This week Leila and Thea were here from Montreal to work on the Breath I/O project.  It was worth the stress of carving time from a busy schedule to work on the project in a more sustained way.  The main thing we are trying to work out is a workflow for the output of the Sony HDR-TG1 cameras we are using to shoot stereoscopic footage.   We had great hopes for the little Sony's and I think they will work out in the end but we've hit many walls along the way.  The TG1 is ideal for us because of its small size.  We can mount two TG1s beside each other on a Slik twin camera mount and shoot stereo at varying inter-ocular distances.   Miles built us a remote that controls both cameras so we can start/stop and zoom them in tandem.  Another ideal aspect of the TG1 is that they record surround sound.   With such a small microphone we wondered how good the sound would be.  It turns out to be quite good!   Overall we were pleased with the output of the camera but we started to hit some snags when it came time to edit the video.  The footage is in AVCHD format and the sound is Dolby Surround.   Here is what we know so far:

• The Picture Motion Browser software that comes with the camera will export the video to mpg2 or wmv with surround sound but not full resolution (it downgrades to 720x480)
• Final Cut Pro downgrades the audio to stereo
• Adobe Premiere can import the mts with surround sound and full res, but cannot output surround sound.  We did find a plug-in that may help but it's $295 and at this point we haven't given up on a cheaper solution.  CS4 says it comes with a trial version of said plug-in but we don't seem to have it.
• Stereoscopic Player does not play the surround sound (this is just a minor irritant since eventually we'll be playing the stereoscopic footage in a virtual environment)
• Interlacing is an issue.  The TG1 records at 1080 60i and needs to be deinterlaced to 1080 30p.  

So we currently don't have a workflow that preserves both resolution and surround sound.  The belief that this it must be possible keeps us searching.

Despite these setbacks we had some nice stereoscopic results with the footage that Leila shot of her nephews in track and field, and hockey.  The twin camera mount needs a level so some of the footage  had some vertical disparity but we were able to fix that in post-processing.  We tested the stereo footage on the old lung prototype and it looked interesting.  It kind of looked like the lungs were transparent.  Not exactly what we were looking for but perhaps with a little bit of a bumpy surface on the lungs, they won't look so mirror-like or transparent.

Another highlight was Trent's new model of the lungs.  They look great!  With any luck we'll be working with these on Monday (Leila's last day).

Miles was also around working with different sounds.  Making soundtracks on the fly for the silent videos we were playing.   We talked about different ways of teasing out the deeper resonance of someone voice in real-time.  He showed us an effect in super-collider which may be the start of what we're looking for.

A song for this post.