Can’t really add much to this image, it pretty much speaks for itself. It’s beginning to take form, people.

Thanks for the headsup and commentary, Mike. Beautiful images, Jarred.

A pair of filmmakers based in Sydney, Australia have organized a very unique collaborative documentary project that spans the globe and aims to involve YOUR New Years Eve celebration plans.

We are actively seeking footage (from either video camera, movie function on digital camera or mobile phone video) of how you celebrate YOUR New Year’s Eve. This is your chance to get your footage to 30 million homes in the US

Simply shoot a maximum of sixty seconds worth of video (to help expedite the delivery of media) and upload it to Current TV by 9AM PST New Year’s Day. I know this will mean a very late night for some of you! There are several ways to upload your video, and instructions are here; www.current.tv/pdf/upload_instructions.pdf

The documentary will be aired at 8pm New Year’s Day, followed by an encore the following day at 11pm. More info here.

Digital Juice has a section of their site devoted to general videography tips and tricks. It’s called DJTV, and they share a new video tip each month. I’m finding that the material presented does a pretty good job of covering a wide range of skills…even experienced pros may find a few nuggets of useful info. A recent “Take 5″ clip that deals with interview setup tips is a good example. Check it out.

Adolf Hitler was a film buff. He once said of cameras “Every German family must have one. Every aspect of the nation’s growth would be captured.” And in 1936 be bought his companion Eva Von Braun a silent 8mm camera for her birthday.

When Hitler’s secret Berghof mountain retreat was inspected by the US Office of Strategic Services, they discovered reels upon reels of film in the cellar. Most had been shot by Braun, and the footage offered a silent and chilling look into the seemingly mundane day-to-day happenings at the retreat. Engaged in casual conversation on the terrace are high ranking staff such as Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Karl Wolff, Albert Speer, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, and Reinhard Heidrich. But because the films were silent, they were largely regarded as useless for information purposes, and have languished in storage for years.

In the documentary Hitler’s Private World: Revealed, you can see some of this footage. And now thanks to a technology called ALR, you can hear it too. It is a very unsettling experience to hear Adolf Hitler “speaking” in “normal” conversation. To hear him cracking jokes, talking about films he enjoyed (such as Mickey Mouse, who knew!), and even casually flirting with his mistress Eva Braun.

ALR stands for Automated Lip Reading, and was developed by speech recognition expert Frank Hubner. In the simplest of terms, an ALR system uses a computer to motion track digitized footage, recogonize the shapes made by the lips of onscreen characters, and reconstruct the appropriate sounds to match the lip movements. It is uncannily accurate, even at extreme angles of view.

You can watch Hitler’s Private World: Revealed on Google Video. I highly recommend it.

We noted a few months ago that Blackmagic would be bringing an HDMI capture card to market. The $250 card is now shipping.

A good friend of mine picked one up the other day, and is doing some testing on a Mac system. After creating a striped RAID array for the captures (don’t think for a second that a single drive can keep up), he’s now wrangling with the card and drivers. It works part of the time, but there are some issues with it randomly not being recognized by his system. More details to come. Have any other readers had success with the card?

Jim Jannard and Co. have released photos of the Red Digital Cinema “Spike” prototype camera body. This is fresh off the mill, and is not a production version. The announcement was made at the new RedUser.net forum.

In related news, Mike Curtis has some recent updates on the Red Digital Cinema camera:

Some Red news - 320GB Red Drive, new images, lattitude tests - all happened last week, just reported today (been busy!)

My unofficial GUESSTIMATES on what frame sizes & rates will give what data rates and recording time on Red Drive and Red Flash. Includes a screen grab of Excel sheet with 24/25/30/50/60/120 fps for all recordable compressed frame sizes.

Tore Nordahl has crowned XDCAM HD the 2006 HD Camcorder of the Year. Though XDCAM HD is a format, not a camcorder…but I digress.

Apart from the obvious of making great HD video, three primary reasons made me choose Sony’s XDCAM HD as the professional HD camcorder of the year for 2006: (a) internal recording to the removable non-linear PD optical cartridge, (b) the high performance 1/2-inch 3xCCD imager with native 1440×1080 pixel matrix, and (c) a competitive US list price of $16,800 (without lens).

The guidelines for the selection process were:
- First delivered to North American customers in 2006
- Main stream professional HD use, with significant field usage
- Selling price range from $5,000 to $40,000 including basic lens
- Recording to internal “built-in” removable non-linear storage

It was only a matter of time. In shades of DVD Jon’s DECSS, a clever member of Doom9’s forum has released a video showing him copying and playing an “uncrackable” HD-DVD on a Windows PC. The HD-DVD was protected by Hollywood’s vaunted Advanced Access Content System, which is the DRM of choice for both HD-DVD and BluRay discs.

Details are somewhat sketchy at this point, but it seems that the clever cracker found a way to retrieve the software DVD player’s AACS access key from computer memory, and use that key to decrypt the content. The cracker is shown using PowerDVD in the video, though it’s not clear if the keys were obtained from that software.

Ironically, one of the protections offered by AACS is what angered the cracker enough to devote time to cracking the DRM…without a PC equipped with HDCP compliant video card the DVD wouldn’t play.

“…I started to get mad… This is not what we can call “fair use”! So I decide to decrypt that movie. I start reading the AACS specification I have found on the net. I estimate it will take me about 4 weeks of full time job to decrypt that. I was wrong, it was in fact, easy…”

It’s worth noting that contrary to old fashioned CSS keys, the new AACS keys are supposedly revocable. If it is determined that a licensed software DVD player’s key was compromised, that key can be revoked in new media releases. So what happens when Joe Consumer purchases a HD-DVD, and suddenly cannot play it on his Media Center PC without an update? I don’t think that consumers would tolerate that. Will studios risk it?

DVGuru reports that Camcorderinfo’s review of the Sony HDR-FX7 has been posted. And it’s not a very glowing recommendation for the FX7. Here’s a few snippets to ponder:

“Sony has categorized the HDR-FX7 as a consumer camcorder, despite the very un-consumer MSRP of $3500…and Canon’s XH A1 makes a very persuasive contender at a mere $500 more…The FX7’s ClearVID CMOS sensors make a great impression in bright light, but under low light conditions the performance falls to pieces…The XH A1 has a ton of great audio features and the Sony FX7 doesn’t…We like the HDR-FX7 in itself…But in a comparative, competitive market, it simply can’t hold a candle to its main challenger.”

Read on for all the gory details.

Ars Technica reports that ownership of the DVD player has FINALLY surpassed ownership of VCR players for the first time.

During the third quarter of 2006, 81.2 percent of all US households reported owning at least one DVD player compared to 79.2 percent for VCRs. That figure marks a 6 percent increase in DVD player ownership from the same period in 2005, while VCRs ownership fell. It’s a far cry from 1999, when Nielsen first began tracking DVD ownership. At the end of the 90s, only 6.7 percent of households owned a DVD player, compared with 88.6 percent owning VCRs.

Now, a little history…the DVD version 1 standard was ratified in 1996. It took until 2003 for DVD rentals to surpass VHS rentals. And now 10 years after the DVD was first created, it’s players have finally gained a slight margin of ownership over the VCR. 10 years!

Now consider this…the format transition from VHS to DVD is uncannily similar to the format transition from SD DVD to High Definition DVD. Both represent a major format change, requiring new equipment. Both are regarded as a marginal perceived quality improvement over the “old” technology. Both are costly for early adopters, and require the re-purchase of movie libraries.

The major difference this time around? There are not one, but TWO competing HD disc formats that consumers are forced to choose from. So how long will this format shift take? Are we looking at another 10 years? Longer? Or maybe never? Because another 10 years is plenty of time for even the archaic studios to get the kinks worked out of digital downloads. Good luck, HD-DVD and BluRay. You’re going to need it.

I swear, this is the last time. I auctioned off a Sony VX-2100 just before Christmas, unfortunately the buyer is a complete deadbeat non-payer. Gotta love Ebay, it’s like the Wild West only a little more dangerous…

If anyone is interested, I’ve got the camcorder relisted as a one-day auction with a low Buy It Now. Thanks, and now we return you to your regularly scheduled post-holiday madness.

Video Trainers GeniusDV offer a handy free tip on marker durations for FCP editors. Did you know that you can extend a marker’s duration on the timeline? It’s pretty simple…create a marker, move the playhead down the timeline, and use Mark > Markers > Extend to stretch the marker to the playhead position. Presto.

Walter Graff dispels a commonly held misconception about depth of field in this short essay.

“I can’t tell you how many times I have heard the phrase, if you are shooting an interview and you back up your camera and zoom in your lens putting the person back into frame, you will decrease the depth of field making the background softer. I have heard this from first time movie makers all the way up to very experienced 25 year directors of photography. And there you have one of the greatest myths involving depth of field. It is such a myth that many textbooks print it to this day.”

Graff goes on to explain that what is really happening is a shift in perspective which lends to the illusion of a shallower depth of field. The reality is that the background retains the same amount of out-of-focus blur, but since a longer lens focal length compresses the angle of view, the blurry background objects are larger in the frame, and therefore appear more blurred. Don’t believe me? Go check out the article, there are a few example images that illustrate the point perfectly.

Wolfgang’s HDV Blog has an in-depth comparison of the new Sony FX7 up against the slightly older Sony FX1. The blog is completely written in German, you can view a Google Translated version here.

Wolfgang has posted a ton of HDV still frame grabs comparing the two camcorders. A large variety in the shots, so you can see how they relate in a wide variety of situations and settings. His is the first comparison I’ve seen that also contrasts the two camera’s focal lengths, one of his image sets clearly shows the extra length the FX7’s 20x zoom offers. For the other tests, he’s taken pains with the FX7 to approximate the FX1’s 12x focal length.

There is also a set of 9 HDV MPEG streams you can download and peruse, one from each camcorder. All shots and settings are matched and noted. German-speaking or not, this review is a must-read for anyone considering the new Sony HDR FX7 camera.

Both Kendal Miller and myself have been pretty busy lately what with projects and the holidays fast approaching, so a thousand apologies for the dearth of updated posts and content. Mea culpa. All better now, eh?

I will make time for a little shameless self-promotion though…I’ve got a good used VX-2100 camcorder for sale. It has been well cared for, and I’m frankly sorry to be losing it. But I’ve already got too many cameras, and it just doesn’t match my needs at this time. You can check it out here if you are interested, and there is also a matching Canon WD58 wide angle lens here. The auction includes a generic NP-F950 battery, but I’ll also throw in a used genuine Sony 950 batt for any FresHDV reader that should win the auction. (Just note “FresHDV battery” in the additional comments when you checkout.)

To commemorate the passing of one of my most fondly regarded cameras (they really are workhorses), I’ve taken a whole 30 seconds to whip up a honorary Haiku. Try to keep your excitement under control. :-)

An Ode To One Lux (in Haiku)
Sun gun, what is that?
Alas, we once knew you well
Traded for pixels

We’ll miss you, One Lux. Feel free to add your own Festive Video Haiku in the comments…