Sunday, Sunday, Sunday

When I was growing up, I lived close to Pomona, home to drag racing events of all kinds. (Well, the kinds with cars, nothing involving cross-dressing. As far as I know.) During the season, there were endless ads promoting the big events -- and that darn "Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!" announcer about every 15 minutes.

I feel a bit like that, as I've been promoting our next screening a bit heavily. Hey, I just want the tickets to sell out.

So, here's the spiel:

This Sunday, 1 p.m., our short documentary Hoop Springs Eternal will screen at the Coney Island Film Festival in Program 12. A fun time will be had by all. Advance-sales tickets are available for $6 so buy them now.

Don't make me come over to your house and act out the TV commercial version of this post.

Dowser Interview Edits, Part Three

Dowser Video: Joan Sullivan, Bronx Academy of Letters from Dowser on Vimeo.

A while back, I edited four interview-based pieces for Dowser. Three are now online, so here's the third one.

Dowser Interview Edits, Part Two

Dowser Video: Elizabeth Scharpf, Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) from Dowser on Vimeo.

A while back, I edited four interview-based pieces for Dowser. Three are now online, so here's the second piece.

Dowser Interview Edits, Part One

Dowser Video: Maura Minsky, Scenarios USA from Dowser on Vimeo.

A while back, I edited four interview-based pieces for Dowser. Three are now online, so here's the first one.

GH1 1080p Camera Test (After Firmware Hack)

Panasonic GH1 1080p Camera Test from Ted Fisher on Vimeo.

Previously, I posted a one-minute video showing a "Stress Test" of the Panasonic GH1 in video mode.

For that, I shot 720p / 60 footage in Central Park -- and found generally great results, but that the camera clearly had its limits. A sharply-focused shot of highly-detailed trees combined with camera motion could hit the limit of the codec -- resulting in "mud" in the shot. (That is, poorly-resolved digital smearing. Think of a low-resolution JPEG.)

On the plus side: most footage turned out great, and if you planned your shooting you could get excellent HD video without some of the issues (moire, for example, and false detail) that the Canon HDSLR cameras were reported to be experiencing. (And the Panasonic allowed twice as much footage per gigabyte of memory, had no need for a specialized add-on viewfinder, could autofocus during video, presented a live histogram -- and so on.)

Since moving to Los Angeles I've applied the supersecret firmware hack to the camera. (Google it. I'll post more on the details soon.) So I decided it was time to test out the 1080p / 24 mode as well.

For this shoot -- purposefully handheld, shaky, and shooting subjects that tended to bring out "mud" in the stock GH1 -- I used lpowell's "40Mbps AVCHD High Reliability Patch" settings, recording 1080p/24 AVCHD clips. I then processed the MTS files using Voltaic and edited those transcoded clips with Final Cut Pro. I exported a 1080p QuickTime file, then used compressor to create the 1280 by 720 file I uploaded to Vimeo.

My thoughts: the "40 reliability" settings are excellent in quality and stable enough for documentary shooting. As well, all clips play back in camera. Follow the link to Vimeo if you want to download the 720p version -- but trust me that the full 1080p file is even better.