Recently in Project Studio Category

I'm always looking for more audio sound effects - especially free ones. Beatsuite.com has a collection of Royalty Free and free as in no cost audio samples designed specifically for podcasters. Terms of use are simply that you need to credit Beatsuite.com for providing them. As far as I can tell, the collection is available only on Apple's download site and the files are listed as requiring Mac OS X, but fear not, the WAV files in the download will work just as easily for Linux and Windows users too. The list of included sounds in the Royalty Free Podcast Promo Soundpack include:

Cafe Quarter Sting
Energize Sting
Night Metropolis Sting
Urban Tribe Sting
Constellations Loop
Eko Loop
Sci High Loop
Wave Movement Loop

While this isn't a massive collection of free loops, some is always better than none.

Royalty Free Podcast Promo Soundpack

For other free and royalty free sounds, be sure to check out Meanrabbit Sound Effects and The Freesound Project.

I started out with a plan to write an article about how HD-DVD is visually superior to downloads available in Xbox Video Marketplace. After all, how could a 6.1GB HD 720p download possible look as rich as the 1080p content on an HD-DVD? As it turns out, Xbox Video Marketplace does an outstanding job of delivering great looking video that is almost indistinguishable from HD-DVD. Here's how I came to this conclusion.

With the current limited selection of movies available in both HD-DVD and the WMV HD format used by Xbox Video Marketplace, I used V for Vendetta as my movie of comparison. Watching each movie independently, I could find no artifacts in either video file, no macro blocks during motion sequences, and a great range of colors in both cases. The Xbox Video Marketplace file looked just slightly brighter than the HD-DVD, but overall I couldn't tell any real difference.

Since my reasonably well-trained eye couldn't see a difference, I decided to go a step further and compare the videos using software tools. At the moment the HD options on Xbox Video Marketplace are limited, so I choose V for Vendetta as the title available in both HD-DVD and the Video Marketplace for a test. I captured the 20 second segment of V for Vendetta on the rooftop where the explosions happen during the 1812 Overture. You can read more about how to capture HD video from an Xbox here. I captured both versions of the movie at 1280x720 and left the VBI data, which represents 20 pixels at the top of a movie file, as a reference color for true black.

After capturing the videos, I created an AVISynth script to play the two clips side-by-side to look for obvious differences in each frame. To my eye, the only difference is a very slight color variation.

Full-size comparison

For deeper analysis, I enlisted my friend and colleague, Brandon Wirtz, who is among the smartest minds in video compression. Brandon does a very detailed analysis of each video, with the net result that both look great. You can read his video analysis methodology for more details.

The one thing I'll point out about the slight difference in color variation is the HD-DVD authoring tools must use a different encoding solution to get their output than the Windows Media Encoder used to create the Xbox Video Marketplace files. By pulling the two files in side-by-side in VirtualDub, applying a level filter that drops the Gamma of the video to 10, and looking at the result you can see that the color in the two files does not match. Setting the Gamma of the video to 10 has the net effect of moving colors darker than the exact middle of the spectrum closer to black and colors lighter than the exact middle of the spectrum closer to white.

You can see that the HD-DVD file on the left has blacks that match the VBI data in the top 20 pixels of the file, while the black levels in the Xbox Video Marketplace file are effectively shades of grey. This exposes an existing limitation of Windows Media Encoder and the newer Studio Encoder from Microsoft, which both apply the NTSC color space to all video encoded rather than the ATSC standard HD color space when encoding video that's meant for HD.

For the end viewer, this comes across as looking similar to running the contrast and brightness up a little on your screen and gives the image a marginally flatter feel. Considering most people don't calibrate their television correctly in the first place, this is likely a non-issue, although it might throw off one of those dynamic filtering options found on many HD screens. There's no artifacting in either the Video Marketplace file or the HD-DVD. Both have smooth motion. Both give you a great looking movie.

If you own a 1080p screen, HD-DVD is definitely the way to go, since the disks provide the full 1920x1080 video. If your screen is either 720p or 1080i, Xbox Video Marketplace movies give you a great way to sample HD movies and ultimately look better than anything I've ever rented from Comcast's HD On Demand.

It's still too early to call the horse race on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. One format may win or we may end up with two competing formats for the foreseeable future. I'm going with HD-DVD because I can connect an HD-DVD drive to my Xbox 360 and get great looking movies.

One of the key disadvantages of HD-DVD is no convenient way to make back-up copies of the discs. The HD-DVD spec supports what's known as a managed copy, but so far none of the HD-DVD disks I own have this feature. If I want to watch my HD content somewhere other than my Xbox, or if I want to backup my $30 investment, at this point, I have to create my own solution. Until someone starts giving me managed copies, I'm making copies of my HD-DVDs to watch them where I want to using an analog solution. Following the guidelines presented here, you can use an Xbox 360 with the HD-DVD drive and a PC to make copies of HD-DVD movies.

As the image outlines above, you need an HD capture card with analog component inputs. This card captures both the audio and video from the Xbox 360 via the component output cable. Audio will be passed either via the stereo outs on the component cable or via Toslink to your soundcard (the 5.1 Surround option). A four drive array of SATA disks provides enough disk write speed for real time capture of the HD video.

Breaking this down, the requirements for copying HD-DVDs using this method are:

• An Xbox 360 and Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive.
• Tons of fast-write drive space
• HD capture card with component inputs
• Video Capture Software
• Proper cabling
• Video conversion software to output a compressed HD video file

Xbox 360 and HD-DVD Drive

The Xbox 360 and HD-DVD drive are self explanatory. If you don't have these, you likely don't have any reason to copy HD-DVDs. In theory, you could also create a similar workflow with the Toshiba HD-DVD player. I find the Xbox 360 to be more compelling because it allows you to extend your media from your PC, play HD-DVD movies and play games. After further investigation, the component output of the Toshiba HD-DVD player only supports resolutions up to 480p, so an Xbox is required to make this work.

Allocating enough Hard Disk Space

Capturing HD video requires massive amounts of drive space. More importantly you need drive space with fast write times. The easiest way to do this is to create a cheap RAID 0 array using either an onboard SATA controller or an external SATA card. For the HD-DVD capture scenario, you want a minimum of 4 eSATA drives connected to a controller, which provide throughput to easily caputre 720p or 1080i video. Capturing HD-DVD consumes approximately 6GB per minute of video. For a combination of speed and space, a four-drive configuration of 320GB SATA drives provides a little over a Terabyte of storage at a reasonable price.

Promise SATA 4-Drive Enclosure
Promise SATA Card
Seagate 320GB SATA Drives

HD Capture with AJA XENA LH

The best solution I've found for analog HD capture is the AJA XENA LH. It includes both HD-SDI support as well as the analog connections required for this component out capture process. I connect the onboard component input connections from the Xbox to the XENA LH. For my purposes, I'm capturing the audio as stereo, but you could also capture to a Toslink-capable audio card as well. The XENA LH ships a video capture application called Machina, which also has plug-ins for most major video editing apps.

PC Optimized for Video Editing

Most PCs can handle standard definition DV from a digital video camera with no problem. HD capture is more complicated because you need to write the data as fast as it's coming off the capture card. Disk drive write speeds will be a major limiting factor, but you also need plenty of horse power from your CPU and more memory will come in handy when it's time to process the final video output.

It's worth noting this scenario currently will not work with Windows Vista as there are no HD capture solutions with Windows Vista drivers.

After recently grumbling about the smoggy haze in some of my photos from Beijing, Gary B. sent me a tip from Luminous Landscape about how to tweak contrast to make subtle details pop. The original article was geared to making subtle highlights like shadows standout for printed photos, but it seems to work for improving the look of images taken on a couple hazy mornings in China. The trick involves using some kind of Unsharp Mask filter, which as defined by the Photoshop Elements help file is a technique for giving the illusion of greater detail in an image (sharpness) by increasing the contrast between the light and dark areas of the image. Photoshop, Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro all have an Unsharp Mask built in. I haven't found a good freeware plugin solution for this particular technique if you happen to use some other tool.

I'm stepping through the process here in Photoshop Elements, but the process is very similar using virtually any other sharpen filter with an Unsharp Mask. After opening your image in the editor, locate this tool from the menu by choosing Enhance > Unsharp Mask (or from the Sharpen Filters and choosing Unsharp Mask in older versions of PSE).

There are three settings here to work with:

Amount determines how much to increase the contrast of pixels. We're working with subtle highlights here, so for most cases you won't want to boost this by more than 20-30%.

Radius is used to identify how many pixels around edges to sharpen. For sharpening contrast in the localized fashion were working with here, a number between 40-70 seems to work well depending on the image, because you can really make edges stand out.

Threshold determines how far pixels must be from surrounding area in order to be considered an edge. By leaving the threshold at 0 the entire image is sharpened. Increasing this number to anything greater than 0 seems to make the effect useless for what we're doing here.

In my two examples, the original image is on the left. The Unsharp Filter is applied in the image on the right.

In this example I used the following settings:
Amount = 30
Radius = 50
Threshold = 0

A number of things grab me about the changes here. The pillars stand out more. The roof has the appearance of more detail. Even the wall in front of the building seems to have a little more character. I'm sure the settings could be tweaked further for a better result, but I was impressed by how little effort was required to make a few more details stand out.

In this example I used the following settings:
Amount = 25
Radius = 50
Threshold = 0

The big thing I notice here is that the trees have more edges to them and the doorways on the tower jump out a little more. The original image was flat.

The ideal scenario remains having great lighting in the first place. There's no replacement for having a clear sky or an overcast sky with no haze.

For more on this technique, you can also check out the Luminous Landscape tutorial

Here's several other Digital Photography related articles you might find useful:

Panoramic Photography Tutorial

Using your camera's Continuous Mode or Burst Mode

How to Take Glamor Photos

Tom Bihn was kind enough to help me out with luggage for my trip to China. I also talked them into giving away one of each of their three most popular bags to you, my readers. Obviously they can't give a bag to everyone reading this, so the three recipients will be selected at random.

Whether you like Philip K. Dick or not, A Scanner Darkly looks amazing. The rotoscoping technique used by Richard Linklater was perfected in his previous film Waking Life and applied in a beautifully disturbing way in A Scanner Darkly. If you want to make something similar yourself, all you need is a video, Photoshop and a whole ton of patience. A guy named Jared at barnt.org walks through how to start with a video clip, export it as individual images using QuickTime Pro and then edit the resulting image files in Photoshop using specific filters before ultimately re-importing the files back into a video editing app to publish your finished file. While this isn't exactly rotoscoping, the visual appearance of the footage looks very similar and you get a striking result.

Learn how to make your own Rotoscope video

You can see a sample video hosted on Metacafe (for best results, right-click save target as).

Or here's one based on the same tutorial from YouTube:

Exact Audio Copy is one of the most reliable tools for ripping CDs. If you've ever ripped a disk only to play it back with strange skips and pops in some tracks, you know the frustration of dealing with a bad audio copy. Exact Audio Copy (EAC) solves this by building in smart error correction to handle the issues associated with ripping tracks to your hard drive. Digital Media Thoughts recently posted a tutorial on how to use EAC to rip your music directly to MP3.

"Ripping MP3s from your CDs can sometimes be a daunting task.
Daunting enough that people are often willing to use the first program they find, which is usually supplied on a disc with their digital audio player. I know I was in the same boat until I found Exact Audio Copy, a powerful CD ripping program available for the price of a postcard. The difference was immediately clear and I never went back. Unfortunately, while EAC is a fantastic program, it is a program written by Andre Wiethoff, a student in Germany, and therefore, is still (and likely to be for a while) in beta. There's no documentation to the program, and guides and tutorials are scarce. So while I raved about this fantastic new program I found, and recommended it until I was blue in the face, the majority of my friends and family were unable to use it. I decided to write a guide: this guide. By following it from beginning to finish, you will learn to use one of the most powerful CD ripping programs available. I encourage you to try it out, even if you don't think you need to. You may be as surprised as I was at the difference."

Read the Tutorial on Ripping the Perfect MP3

Bre's Video Output Recipe

Deciding which video formats to support when creating a Web video project is confusing. Whether you're video blogging, posting video how-tos online or sharing your short film with an online audience, you need to offer video in formats the audience can handle. At the moment, this means publishing in several formats to a number of different services to make sure the widest audience possible can watch your video creations. One video maker with a massive online viewing audience is my pal Bre Pettis who makes video for Make Magazine and for himself. Bre recently posted a detailed list of all the formats he outputs for the Web, including the reasoning behind why he choose the formats and resolutions. While not everyone has available bandwidth to distribute a 1280x720 HD version of their video project online, it's great to see he's looking to the future and offering a high res version that should look great both on computer screens and on television. The rest of the formats are definitely good common sense and should be emulated by anyone making video for the Internet.

Using a dolly for motion camera shots is likely a little out of the norm for home movies. For tracking motion or creating perspective motion in a video shot, it's an absolute must because you can't get a smooth sequence without a dolly. In most cases a camera dolly consists of a platform with a tripod mounted camera and seat for a camera operator elevated on a track to obtain smooth precise motion along the path of a planned shot in a video sequence. While doing some online research for a little video project I want to create, I ran across several inventive solutions for do-it-yourself dolly rigs from common parts available at the local hardware store (or possibly the local skate shop).

For tracking a shot in a confined space like a large room, a dolly mounted on a small track like the one at Andersson Technologies, pictured here is likely an easy solution. If you ran a track on the ground using this type of setup, you could build a path to emulate a dog's or cat's eye view perspective run through the house. The hardest part in shooting is likely keeping the track out of frame because you're dealing with potentially narrow entryways between rooms.

In larger spaces or for outdoor shots, building a track using a combination of PVC, skateboard wheels and a plywood platform creates a dolly large enough to support a person, a tripod camera mount and a way to power the dolly for smooth motion throughout an entire shooting sequence like the two examples below. It appears the more detailed directions from Joren Clark are essentially the same dolly stucture as what's found in the Matt Hawkins How to Make a Dolly schematic, although I have no idea which came first.

Regardless of the size of your dolly, keep in mind that you need extra track to build up momentum to get smooth video throughout the motion shot with enough extra track at the end of the run to avoid running out of track before your shooting sequence ends.

Word HTML Cleaner

If you have a Microsoft Word document you want to format for the Web, do not post it online until you have use the Textism Word HTML Cleaner. Word is notorious for adding a ton of funky text formatting to .DOC files. Converting those files in Word by saving them as HTML only makes matters worse. All this extra formatting can make your text display badly and it's guaranteed to greatly increase the size of your page, ultimately slowing down page load times and creating a lousy experience for many users. I use Microsoft Word and I've almost never used the feature of Word that re-formats text to HTML because it's simply to awful. Word HTML Cleaner fixes this problem for free. Simply save your current Word document as Web Page using the Save As dialog in Microsoft Word, find the new Web Page document on your hard drive in the Word HTML cleaner dialog box, hit process and you'll have a kinder, gentler version of your file ready for posting to the Web minus all the messy formatting. Your readers will thank you. It's Web-based so it works with both Mac and Windows.

Thanks to Business Know-How for the tip.