My video class required me to make a montage to help teach us how to show the passage of time. The video is about Drew and Leigha (my friend Meg and I) on a date to watch all the lord of the rings movies in order. We set the camera up on a tripod and hit record... Thats all we did. We both liked the idea of being able to tell a story with only one camera angle and US moving around, doing all the action and stuff making the shot interesting.

A montage is suppose to be, but not always, fast paced actiony. It show the basic highlights between two points in time. Like in the video it starts at the beginning of the day early in the morning, but I didn't show you everything we did just the more interesting parts. If I just showed us sitting there for 3 1/2 minutes it would be very boring, I wouldnt watch that... Would you?

As always, let me know what you think about montages and their use in the comments below.

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Alright, its Codec time. For those of you who dont know what a codec is, its basically a program on a computer or camera that helps the device compute or understand the data it is given.

Codec stands for COmpressor/ DECompressor. Compressing the data makes it smaller to be able to transport easier. While Decompressing  makes it bigger again to allow editing and viewing of the data on different formats.

When thinking of a video file what is the first thing that you think of? .mov? .avi or .wmu? Well while these are video files, these are what we in the industry call "containers".  The containers are what the codecs go into. Common examples of codecs are: h.264, Prores, and DNxHD. Let me explain what these are for.

Types of codec
First there is the Capture codec which is commonly h.264. The capture codec reads what the camera records and processes it into a view able image. So when you are shooting a scene the camera is doing like 200 different things just so you can view the shot once you stop recording.

Then there is your Editing codec which from the above list is normally DNxHD. When editing you most of the time want to go for speed over quality so that it doesnt take like FOREVER to render out all of the images just so you can get a small fragment for the edit. It also helps your exporting speed, especially if you are exporting into an HD format like 720p or 1080p.

After you export your video there are two different things can happen with thee video:

It can be converted into a Delivery codec not unlike h.264, because it is very compatible with DVDs and the Internet. It finds a sort of balance between speed and quality so that the video still looks good but doesnt take a decade to load.

Or

It can be Archived. The most common archival codec is DNxHD but one that prefers quality over speed. You would really like to archive the video in a better quality or larger format than ever needed so that if the client needs the video again you can give them any combination of size to quality and you dont have to go back and re-export the video to get the right file size.

BIT DEPTH
Ok so bit depth is a bit more complicated... ish. Bit depth is a number of values between light and dark. So like if I have a gradient of white to black there is a set number value in that gradient. the higher bit depth the better quality, lower the bit depth and you will start to see vertical lines appear in the gradient.

That is because the computer now has to fit more of those shades into a smaller amount of categories.

The most common bit depth recorded in is 8-bit. But that is really 2^8 which equals 256. But then we have to  split that up into three parts because we have the RGB color range that it has to recognize.

  2^8= 256

                                   /       |       \  

                                 R      G       B 

But then there is 10-bit.

2^10= 1024

                                   /       |       \  
                                 R      G       B 

Which is 4X more color than what 8-bit can capture. Now you really dont need that much. Its just unnecessary to have that much color. But dont get me wrong more colors are all well and good, but 8-bit does just as good and can produce amazing shots and colors.

Chroma Subsampling 
Alright so Chroma Sub-sampling is when you tell individual pixels to take the brightness or color of another pixel. There are three different ratios that are used and they are: 4:4:4, 4:2:2, and 4:2:0

With 4:4:4 there is no sub-sampling at all.

[ ]  [ ]

[ ]  [ ]

All the pixels keep their own colors and brightness. So this one is very easy to understand.
When using 4:2:2 we start out with 4 individual pixels

[ ]  [ ]

[ ]  [ ]

And as we sample these pixels we basically throw away the color and brightness from two of the pixels and they take on the brightness of the other two.

[ ] <---[x]

[ ] <---[x]

So when you 4:2:2 sample those two pixels take their new brightness from the other two causing a sort of fade in between tow colors. You cant really tell any difference between 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 unless you go to the pixel level and look closely.

Spatial compression
This is when either the Capture or Edit codec runs an algorithm that basically cuts up an image into blocks to save space. So if you have one clip and there are a lot colors the algorithm will find all the colors that match in a certain space and will box them off and save them separately. If you have a lot of colors this can be bad because some of these algorithms will allow unlimited boxes, which means the boxes can be infinitely smaller and there can be millions of them and because they are so small it doesnt effect the image at all although these take up ALOT of space. And then there are the ones that have a finite amount of boxes. These boxes can become quite large and will show on the image. But having an algorithm for finite boxes can be good. If the image doesnt have very many colors or has large spaces of empty solid color, it can save space by only compressing one or two boxes instead of looking for very small differences in color.

Bit rate
Lets move on to bit rate. Bit rate is how much data a certain codec uses at a time. Which can be shown as Bits per second ( b/s)

Lets say that you start with a 8 mb/s video and you want to see how many Megabytes that would be after its rendered out.

Well we know that 1 Byte= 8 bits so we can convert

(8 mb/s) = 1MB/s

8              

^ the large B meaning Bytes    

And then there are 60 seconds in a minute so we multiply 1MB/s by 60

1MB/s(60)= 60 MB/s

Lets say you want the video to be 5 minutes long so we would again multiply but by 5 this time. 

60MB(5) = 300 MB 

So because you have an 8 mb/s bit rate after everything is saved and exported you will have a 300 MB video.

Thanks for reading! I hope I explained everything well enough but if you are still having troubles understanding please check out this video. Its talks about everything I did plus a little more and maybe a little better. 

Film crew positions

When the idea of a movie pops into your head what is the first thing that comes to mind? Is it the actors? The story or plot? What about the crew members? At the end of the movie you always see those I-cant-believe-so-many-people-worked-on-this-movie credits. Like those credits can literally go on for 10+ minutes. But have you ever stopped to wonder what it is all those people actually do for the movie? What their part was in the whole scheme of things? Up until recently neither did I. 

In my video production class we started talking about all the different positions on a crew because we have to "interview" for the production position that we want so we can produce a short film this year. Which I am SO excited about!

 One of the most famous positions is the Producer. This is a job for the more organized, work-closely-with-others sort of people. They are in charge of making sure everything runs smoothly. They hire all of the key personnel and run fundraisers. Man that is a lot of responsibility. Although I may think I'm an organized person many would beg to differ. I have my way of filing just like everyone else but it may just be a little more chaotic.

The one I feel has a lot of pressure is the casting director. They have to find just the right actor for the part because if they dont then the movie will look bad and neither of us wants that especially if they are making the movie about a book that you like. Like think about what the Harry Potter would be like with out that cast. You cant can you? The cast that was hired worked so well that even J.K. Rowling said that she couldn't have chosen better. Personally when I read a book I keep a running cast list for who I would want to play each character just in case the book gets made into a movie, because then I could, in theory, just send my list off to the casting director and see my vision come to life; or is that to much to ask? Either way I think I would make a pretty good casting director because I can visually see them in the movie, speaking the lines, interacting with each other, and creating the movie master piece that I hoped the book would become.

I bet that we can all agree that music videos are pretty cool right? How they take the song, all the beats and melody and all that other musical stuff, and put it into a visual form is SO amazing! Like they have to think of a story and plot for a roughly 4 min song, but are constrained to the lyrics, what the record label wants, and what the actual artist wants. Thats a lot of constraint for a seeming small project. But most of the time they can produce a video that looks great and still conveys the overall message of the song. 

Like the Maroon 5 song "Animals" that is apart of their new album. If you watch the music video here it details how the lead singer Adam Levine portrays a admittedly over dramatized stalker/ psychopath. I have a personal take on the song and video that it is playing on one of the two primal instincts of human nature when referring to "the beast inside"which are: sexual lust and the urge to kill. If you watched the video you know which one it is.

Lets break all that up shall we?

A psychopath is person who (I'm about to blow your mind with some science right now, so hold on) suffers from malformation of either the cerebral cortex, temporal lobe, or limbic system.  All three of these are connected to decision making, inpluse control and emotional correspondence to stimuli. When severally underdeveloped, a person can be driven back into the pre-coded instincts that are needed to survive.  Another thing these three have in common are how they help a person connect to other people on a social level. Most psychopaths are very antisocial or have problems acting correctly in a social environment.

So when Adam Levine just looks at the women lustfully in the beginning of the video, it isnt because he is to shy to talk to her; its because he doesn't know how. Or when they are in the club when he does try to talk to the same woman, you see he isnt doing a very good job at it and she goes back to talking with her friends. This is the point where he creepily tries to touch her shoulder because he lacks the ability to control himself very well. It is also very prominent that instead of talking to her, he follows her... like everywhere. He also waited outside in the rain looking through her window, like wow thats some hard core stalking.

What do you think the video is about? Or am I right?

Plot vs Story

Most people think that plot and story are the same thing, they both make for a great movie. But people dont understand how different they are. 

When you tell a story you are explaining HOW things are happening. Like when you go and break and arm or leg and everyone asks how it happened. You will tell them how it happened, you where doing a sick trick on your bike, hit a ledge and went flying. You give them all the details and all the thoughts that where running through your head, and everything sounds so cool and they just keep listening.

Plot is like the structure of the story without the plot the story could have holes in it, or it doesnt make any sense. The plot makes sure that the story makes sense and allows the reader/ viewer to follow along with what is happening and to make connections to different elements of the story.

My personality

My personality ( according to Myers & Briggs test) showed that I am an INTJ

Now for those of you who dont know what that stands for lets break it down

The first letter "I" stands for Introvert, which means that I like to work independently without interacting too much with others. The second letter "N" stands for Intuition. people that test for intuition focus on patterns and expressions/ emotions. They look to the future and see only the most creative possibilities. "T" is for the Thinkers. They rely heavily on facts and interpreting data to make a logical decision for a problem. The last letter "J" for Judging means that those people prefer structure and a strong understanding of  what is happening.

With all of those letters put together you as a result get a person like me. One who will start a project, take charge and see it to the end. One that has high expectations, not only for himself put for the others on the team. I think this fits me very well and this has let me see some parts of myself that i never noticed before.