Red room master and crane [video]

The title of this post sounds like a kung fu movie, but describes what we did today. We're back after a brief hiatus (Gracie just got married to Ben's brother). Erik's on a vacation so it was just Ben and me trying to get the red room master shot [VIEW]. It took Ben three hours to get the spinner working. Keep in mind that there's no motor this time. It took that long to simply hang the spinner from the ceiling so it could be twirled manually. We've all grown to hate working with the spinner and that invisible thread. However, here's a tip I can pass on. This time we did use the wooly nylon instead of the official Magic store-bought "invisible thread." It's the same thing. Only you can get wooly nylon at Joanne's fabric and it costs the same price for a LOT more--like literally a thousand times more. (I think I may have just put myself on the magician suppliers union hit list.) Just be aware that when you get the wooly nylon, it looks like ordinary thread. Then look closely and you'll see that the thread is made up of tiny fibers stranded together. You use just one of those tiny fibers to hang your item. Yes, ONE! Anyway, the shot and its variations came out nicely, but it was tiring. It took a couple of hours yesterday plus the three hours today to get about 10 minutes of the one shot that will be whittled down to about 10 seconds in editing. The video on the TV set at the left is from Cabiria. You may remember I was doing a search for public domain witch movies awhile back. That's the result. Also note that there is now so much crap on the walls that the room is really no longer red!

Also, I finally succumbed and bought a camera crane today over the internet. It's the 8-footer from bargain-camera.com and cost $300 including postage. They do a lot of sales on Ebay. I'll let you know how it works when it comes in.

Recently, Sean has taken to imitating Daddy making a movie. He says "I'm making a movie!" Then he waves his arms around a lot and says "OK guys, OK guys. OK guys!"

Still working on rewriting the dining room scene. I'm always game for testing all kinds of approaches so I did the test composite below. The idea was to see if changing the shot would somehow make the scene work better. Answer: no, but it was worth a try.

Technical note: I've found it works best to capture and edit in Apple's Intermediate codec. Editing in native MPEG2 was difficult. It just didn't look good and seemed a little slow although I'm sure in the long run you get better quality. The intermediate codec takes a tiny bit of extra time to capture, but edits almost as quickly as standard DV. On my machine you have to preview at 25% but that's OK.