I was talking to Lester about what I’m doing with the video stuff, and he told me that this video had gotten something like 14,000 views. Did I know that?

Nope. I had no idea. I had tossed these videos up just quickly and without going back to see if anyone was watching them; and so now that I plan on doing a bunch of videos I took a look at what was going on. The WTC One-Photo video has gotten 18,000 views. (Not funny). There were a lot of easy Ken Burns effects when I was using Elements… but I don’t see them in Premiere Pro 4.0 (on the mac) though they can all be done by hand, i.e. just with the motion placement key frame stuff.

Anyway – if you haven’t seen this one, which is meant to take the most boring thing in the world and make something of it, i.e. can you make a video of paint drying that gets some sort of crowd reaction…? And as I said – when I first picked up the movie software a week ago – I have to be careful with this stuff in terms of eating up time, and driving away my photo audience, as much as I enjoy it.

I wanted to go through the whole process with the Canon 500D and Adobe Premiere 4, and see what would come of it. The idea of this first experiment was just to learn the technical ropes. It was shot with the 30mm Sigma, and the camera was, as far as I could tell, setting the ASA it wanted, which moved all over the place. There is a lag after you take a shot before it goes back to capturing the movie. Whether this is true with the next Canon model, and whether there is any way of closing that gap, I don’t know. Not the worst thing in the world. The “freeze frames” which are a bit longer are actual digital cr2 files that I’ve run through Lightroom.

What else… Although I played with sound a lot, the main thing which is to do some explaining with voice over – that’s the one thing I haven’t tried yet. I need to find what happened to the good microphone I had a few years ago. I think it’s buried in the loft. The camera itself doesn’t have a jack for a mike, though that doesn’t matter unless I were doing a street interview. The actual narration would be done with Premiere.

If you want 30 frames per second, then you shoot at 720p. (720 is the height). At 1080, it drops down to 20 fps. I haven’t tried that.

The other thing to keep in mind is that this was actually something of a real test in that I didn’t have any plans that Sunday. There was an early walk to the bagel store (I shot enough footage just there to do five minutes); and then a walk to the Met; and then I took a cab to the Apple store. Anyway – the next version will have voice-over. After that, I’ll start to figure out if I can actually walk around in movie mode, without killing my chance of taking a good shot. I say that because there are all sorts of things that I don’t understand about controlling settings for the “still shot” when the camera is in movie mode.

I’ve got the basics down and I’m moving ahead now in Premiere.  The one thing I can tell you, is that making movies (editing anyway) is time-consuming.  And it got me to thinking why there were so many photo blog: that’s right, it’s quick to take, edit and post an image, right a few words about it, and voila – there’s your post.

But to make a movie… true it took a few days to get underway, but I’ve been into it for at least a day-and-a-half and I have less than a minute of edited footage, with maybe 20 cuts, dissolves, credits, mixes of soundtracks etc.  In other words, I threw the whole kitchen sink at it in the first minute just to see if I could do whatever I knew I’d need to do later.

Adobe Premiere doesn’t need to convert the files; which is nice, it takes them right as I see them in Lightroom; yes, Lightroom is happy to show you videos; and basically the whole movie is a sort of day in the life of… though it’s not really a full day; but it starts on a Sunday morning with me walking to the bagel place… into the bagel place… and eventually over to the met, and then to the Apple store… shooting all the time with the 500d… and then showing the shot.

You can see the futzing I do with the camera before the shot… the preparation… the wait, if there is a wait… etc. and the film might be interesting to other photographers.

I can tell you this: it will be about four minutes, five tops.  I don’t have time to do anything longer than that from the footage which was haphazard… i.e. really the shots are just the way I would have taken any shots… which means that there may be one good one, not great, but good, and bunch that stink.

But what I’d like to do to finish it off, is a voice over.  That scares me the most.  I don’t like my voice, and I know I’m going to be self-conscious about what I say… and how I say it.

Reminds me of that documentary about Henry Miller.  He was in his 80’s and after having read and been inspired by him, I heard him talk for the first time.  He had this heavy Brooklyn accent.  And he sounded like – I don’t know – Ralph Kramden from the Honeymooners (also from Brooklyn) but not an educated man.  But that was his voice.

I feel the same way about myself.  My writing doesn’t have an accent.  But my voice does.  Oh well.  Maybe I’ll have it done in a day or so.

Another sidepoint.  If I had the money, I’d buy the 550D and have it modified to do infrared.  Can you imagine an entire movie photographed in infrared?  I wonder if that’s ever been done before?  I doubt it.  Although maybe for reconnaissance.

So far, my first reactions to Final Cut Express – although it seems to have the same functionality as Adobe Premiere – I mean they all have to do the same stuff to make a movie; Final Cut has been much harder to get into.

When I made those films a few years back – the interview with my father about the war; the printer linked to the New World Symphony… I don’t think they had anything more complex than what I’m doing now – but the inputs files were smaller, that’s all.

Final Cut has crashed once so far (this morning) when I was working on a title for the first time.  I mean, both systems use key points – little diamonds and green lines to raise and lower various things like opacity, color whatever – but I had more trouble doing the titles in Final Cut.  Even forgetting about the crash, it’s hard to think of any other program that’s crashed on the Mac… oh yeah, an old version of Fireworks regularly crashes, usually as it’s shutting down.

But anyway, to get back to final cut, I understand the hierarchy… project -> sequence -> clip -> actual file and some bins thrown in which are just folders…

It isn’t obvious to me how I would see what clips are in what sequence…

And why you need to render the titles… gads… I don’t like that…  If I put a title clip above a normal clip and then do a fade in / out superimposed it wants to render it.  And really, I am working on a high-end mac.  Anyway… I will continue with it, but I have an older version of Premiere and expect to jump into that at the same time – just for comparisons.  I had no idea this would take so long to just do a very simple shoot, i.e. no more than 5 minutes.  True, lots of stuff fading in and out and over lapping and being repeated in the cutting, but still… some very simple things are driving me crazy…

>>> And so I jumped back into Adobe Premiere and was able to import all the files without any conversions, or rendering or problems.  I just hit a button that looked at the file and told me what properties it had; then I picked a sequence with those properties; and that was it.  Maybe two minutes to do, as opposed to never really getting it right in Final Cut Express.

Then I just dragged the clips into the timeline… quickly created a title and some subtitles… and did more in a half hour in Premiere… okay… time for a cigar… <<<<

One of the most annoying things is when you are looking for information on a problem, and google takes you back to your own blog.  That either means that you’ve become incredibly popular, or you’re looking at an issue that not too many people are concerned about.

But yes, these searches for ways to get rendered movies into Final Cut Express have brought me to some zany conclusions, and some workable solutions, and frankly, and although I have a pretty serious film making background – digital film making (if that’s what it’s called) is new to me; and seems more complex.

What I can say for sure is that I can convert Canon 500D files at 720i (30 frames per second) for Final Cut Express without any hitches, except, that there is just this tiniest of borders (black) in the movie.  My sizing is not right yet.

But how I’m doing it, I’m actually using something that I had called Adobe Media Conversion (which comes with the creative suites) and works nicely to prepare the files for Final Cut in a batch process.

And you can also do the same thing in a free program called MPEG_ClickStream, though it is not as fancy in terms of interface, and there’s less documentation.

I can choose whether I want my audio to be stereo or mono, i.e. give me one or two audio tracks, though since this is really all ambient sound so far, I can’t see a big thing about stereo – though I haven’t looked into that deeply yet.

The 500D has three movie modes: 1080p (1080 x 1920) at 20 frames per second, using what is called the H.264 Codec.  This is the compressor that does the job of deciding on how to go from input to output.

The second mode (what I’m using now) is 720p (720 x ? ) at 30 f/p/s (which really does look nice) using same Codec

And you can do the old 640 x 480 at 30 fps also.

There are a lot of sides to this story, and one of them is that I haven’t experimented properly with the sizes that I’m shooting at.  In other words, I’m shooting at the highest resolution, but I’m still coming up with 720p during the conversion.  That may simply be that the conversion wants to go at 29.9 and so it is cutting things down… you see what I mean.. hopefully.  There’s a day left, or maybe the rest will fall into place tonight.

I’ve had my nap.  And I am refreshed, and ready for the last leg of this journey.

What footage am I using? Who else – but Buddy of course.  And I’ll tell you why.  He’s handy.  Do you think I’m going to change settings and go down stairs and come up and try this one; and then tweak something and go downstairs and — no that’s what cats were made for.

And nothing is easy, is it.

I’m getting a not-rendered message when I put one of my 500d files into the timeline.

(P.S. I’m exhausted at this point from going through a lot of this).

1) Yes, I can render the file in FCE so that it can be used in the timeline, but it is a PITA and time-consuming

2) I have a feeling that FC Express doesn’t have all the presets that the Pro Edition has.  At any rate, you can also run the Canon 500D file through QuickTime (latest version) and get something that looks very close: HD720P30 WITH H.264 Codec… but not everything is the same (yet) and this file still gives an un-rendered message in the timeline.  If you have to render, or transform all your files for Final Cut – that is not too pretty; although the interface and functionality – just what I want.  It seems as if it’s not quite up to dealing with the codex that the Canon digital slrs are spitting out.

There may be an update to Final Cut (have to look for that).

And then there are various transformation programs, like MPEG STREAMCLIP which will do conversions that Final Cut will work with.  I downloaded Streamclip, but haven’t tried it yet.

I believe you can also import the iMovie files.

Blah, blah, blah.

And of course when you ask a guy in the Apple store whether Final Cut works with the 500D movies; of course they say that it should.  Yes.  it should.  But none of these things are simple.  Two worlds being brought together, and not yet talking the same language.

My predication, I’ll get it to work.  A quick look around the web for Canon 500d movies and Final Cut render message, brought lots of back and forth stuff.  Tips, tricks, and whatnot.  None have worked so far.

Let’s just say that I ran out of cigars after a day and a half of this; but my package from N.C. with Gold Macanudos will be here tomorrow.

Tricky business, huh.

Good night, and good luck.

Infrared Film, with IR flash.