Category Archives: Videos

Green Screen Filming With Charlie Christ

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Photo Oct 22, 4 33 32 PMOver the weekend I acted as a camera operator. I took on this role to help film a few scenes from a movie my friends are making called Charlie Christ: The Gospel According to Fools. You can click to see the movie’s trailer page (which I made) and the movie’s trailer as well.

The shoot was a resounding success! We started at 11:30am and finished at 11:30pm. It was a long day but completely worth it. We got so many hard shots done and had a fun time doing it as well.

Towards the end of the day my fingers were beginning to cramp up from constantly readjusting the tripod. Also my eyes were beginning to lose the ability to focus properly, which wouldn’t allow me to properly focus the camera. Thankfully I never hit that wall and we were able to get all our filming done.

The day’s shoot was filmed on my Nikon D7000 (which I’ve written about before). At the beginning of the day I ran out to get a second battery for my camera. I’m very glad that I did: we ended up swapping batteries four times to get everything on film.

The movie is almost done! Rest assured you’ll hear more as we near the release date.

Occupy Wall Street in New York City

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Over the weekend I was in New York City with my girlfriend for my birthday present: a wine and pizza tasting class at New York Vintners. It was an awesome present. We each got served 7 glasses of wine paired with 3 different flat-bread pizzas. The wine was great and the pizza was delicious. (The best pizza was one with Boursin cheese, mushrooms, and truffle oil. Delicious.)

Before our class began we walked a few blocks down to Occupy Wall Street at Liberty Plaza. That was an interesting scene.
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Transcoding Final Cut Pro X Media

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Today I’m doing some video editing work in Final Cut Pro X. One of the neatest things about Final Cut Pro X is when you import media into an Event, FCPX automatically begins to transcode your media into Apple ProRes 422.

This is great because when you edit your movie, and all your media is in the same video format, it makes the whole experience much easier and faster to use.

Rendering time to apply special effects is cut down. So is cutting clips and rearranging them. Everything works better.

The one down side to transcoding your media is the extreme toll it takes on your computer’s CPU. In certain configurations it’s enough to make the rest of your system unusable while you transcode.

Fortunately I’m equipped with a 2GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro with 8GB of DDR3 RAM. This makes the entire experience of transcoding much easier.

However it does amuse me how much FCPX sucks down CPU resources when it transcodes.

Case in point:

Blizzard Sunday And Chase & Status – Blind Faith

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What a wonderfully lazy Sunday. I hope you’re having fun lazing about like I am. I’m up here in New England caught up in the first blizzard of the season and enjoying my movie marathon of Despicable Me, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (surprisingly highly enjoyable), and after dinner I believe Taken will round out the day.

While I wait for dinner I’m sitting here and listening to a new song from Chase & Status, titled ‘Blind Faith’. The album isn’t out yet, and I’m listening to the song (on repeat) from a radio rip on YouTube. Have a listen to it and let me know if it has you moving like me.

The Boxee Box, Lethargy, and Performance Anxiety

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Over the weekend my friend’s Boxee Box arrived in the mail. If you don’t know what a Boxee Box is then the easiest way to catch you up to speed is for you to check out their website, Boxee.tv, and to know that in a large part the Boxee Box is akin to the Apple TV – in as much it allows you to play video on your TV. The cool part about Boxee is that it allows you to play pretty much any type of video file, unlike the Apple TV which limits you to only one type of video file.

I had it in my mind yesterday to record myself opening the Boxee Box and give a little video overview of what the device looks like and how it operates. Ultimately this plan proved semi-fruitful: I managed to set up my camera and record myself opening the box, ramble on about how cool it was, however after reviewing the video I found that for a large portion of the video my head was cut out of frame.

This is the trouble of being your own DP (director of photography).

The ill-framed footage can be easily rectified by re-recording, however by that point my lethargy – which I had been fighting off all day – had reasserted itself and the notion of enjoying more TV watched through the newly opened Boxee Box sounded too appealing to pass on. And so that’s what I did: I quickly hooked up the Boxee Box, propped myself on the couch, and lazily played with the new gizmo from my seated position.

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Writing this now I wish I had perhaps enjoyed a second cup of green tea to get me through recording some usable footage. I may yet re-package the Boxee Box and mime opening it a second time to get some better footage. What surprised me about recording last night was how different it feels to be the person in front of the camera – performing for the camera. It gave me an odd feeling of anxiety that I feel will pass as my level of comfort increases.

Sadly, all I have to share with you today are these written words. Perhaps (and hopefully tonight) I’ll have a vide of the Boxee Box to share as well. I will not make any promises, because if I do make a promise and break it then I’ll feel downright rotten. So instead here’s to hoping.

A Beautiful Nikon D7000 Video Montage

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Last night I stayed up way too late to finish putting together my second compilation of footage from my Nikon D7000. The previous one I rushed to finish, leaving it in many ways incomplete and not up to my satisfaction.

This new video that I put together uses the same source material as the my first video, however it is arranged in a more coherent manner. Through my use of Final Cut Pro’s subclips I was able to put together the video with much greater ease and less frustration. The next step for me is to start playing with transitions a bit more – I’ve hardly delved into that library of effects.

Click through to see the video. Be sure to watch it in 720p! Continue reading →

Facebook Anxiety and More Nikon D7000 Videos

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I read a post the other day that links posted to Facebook in the morning perform the best, i.e. they are more prominently displayed on other friends’ news feeds, thus getting seen more and subsequently (it is the hope) being clicked on the most. For the past two days I’ve been more or less consumed by this factoid, halting myself from writing and posting a post because it’s past 10am EST.

Well shit, that’s ruined at least two good posting impulses I’ve had in the past few days. All because of this little dirty factoid.

So it finally came to me today, even though it’s past 10am, to just fricken write about how I can’t get this factoid out of my head. It has wormed its way through my consciousness and given me a weird form of writer’s block that would not exist more than five years ago.

It’s amazing how much can change in such a short amount of time.

I want to write more about my new camera, the Nikon D7000, the flash mount for my Zoom that I ended up buying, and the videos that I’m putting together and posting on my YouTube account. (Find my YouTube account on the right rail, over click on this link: Harry Wolff’s YouTube Channel.)

So if you clicked on the YouTube link you’ll see I posted two vides taken with my new camera. I’m in the process of re-editing the ‘Demo Reel’ clip, putting in a little bit more example shots as well as cleaning up the video narrative. I hope to have that out by the weekend, but hopefully/probably sooner.

Also I’ve decided to make the posting frequency on this blog be as random as I am. I feel stupid stating this here because I know I’m damning myself to future transgressions of posting behavior, however that is just what I do, so I’m doing it. Be sure to sign up so you can get updates when I post. That is, if you like me. And even if you don’t like me sign up to be updated. I like you even if you don’t like me. And as the old saying goes, there’s not a whole lot of a difference between love and hate.

Tips For Buying a Tripod

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Who knew buying a tripod could be so complicated?

For the past hour I’ve been trying to track down some good information on what makes a good tripod well, good.  I started off with the preliminary Google search for ‘tripod’ which didn’t exactly pull up too many winning results.  I poked around CNET’s reviews of tripod’s but their interface can confuse and irritate, which it did for me at this occasion.

My second search I let Google help: I typed ‘tripod’ into the Google search bar and waited to see what was the second suggestion.  Turns out ‘tripod reviews’ is searched almost as much as ‘tripods’.  Looking through that search results page didn’t seem to be much of an improvement until I saw two highlighted video results.  One linked to a video hosted on Vimeo.  It was so good that it spawned the creation of this post, and my inclusion of it here.

So if you’re in the market for a new tripod, or interested in what to look for when buying one, take about five minutes to watch this video and learn what’s important.

Tips For Buying a Tripod: Product Reviews: Adorama Photography TV