The moon in transit, moving in real time across the frame. By “real time” I mean that the tripod was locked down and the camera was stationary, pointing at one point in the sky. All the movement here is caused by the motion of the earth and the moon.

Except for some of that shaking. I’m pretty sure that was caused by walking within 15 feet of the camera. Sorry about that.

Shot with a Canon T3i at 24fps, ISO 200 and a FD ƒ/8.0 500mm reflex lens in Brookly, NY.

Say you have an event called Brian Visits Brooklyn on your computer’s internal hard drive, and an associated project called The Moon. The event is huge and you’d like to reclaim the space for your collection of 2011 WWDC session videos. So you connect an external hard drive and drag your source files (your event) to the new hard drive.

Do the same with the project, dragging it to the drive you want and selecting just the project and render files.

Uh-oh, the project is still pointing to the event on your internal drive. That’s no good. So what to do?

Access the project’s properties by choosing File –> Project Properties… from the menu bar, or by pressing Command + J. A new inspector-style window appears with two tabs, Properties and Sharing. Under Properties click the big Modify Event References button. You should see the referenced events on both drives, with the option to drag to the top whichever event you want the project associated with. Click OK and you’re done.

I realize it’s not as robust as it used to be, but it’s a bit more than the nothing I keep reading about.

I’ve gotten a few questions from friends and strangers about how I went from making videos to making iOS apps. Specifically, I’m asked what resources I used to get up and running in the first place.

To be clear, before August of 2010 I didn’t really have any programming experience. I worked in XHTML and CSS2 between 2007-2009. Around the same time I dabbled in learning Ruby on Rails (which was a complete failure). I’ve had an interest in programming for years, but every time I tried to entertain the thought I quickly became overwhelmed with how hard it was.

And it is hard. Really hard. In fact, it’s still hard. But it’s worth it.

Here’s how I got started.

One of the best technical books I’ve ever read is Beginning Mac Programming by Tim Isted. Tim, it turns out, is a fantastic writer. Also, don’t be scared that the book is about Mac programming and what you want to do is iOS. Tim teaches you valuable conventions and best practices that you’ll use in iOS development too.

As a person who previously had no concept of object-orientated languages, memory management etc., I couldn’t have asked for a better resource to help me get started. I loved this book.

If you get through that and you’re interested in learning more about what kind of neat things you can do with the iOS APIs, I’d recommend Head First iPhone & iPad Development by Dan and Tracey Pilone. Now in its second edition (I have the first edition which, unfortunately, was already out-of-date when I read it) this book doesn’t teach you to program. Instead it teaches you to work with the iOS-specific stuff. It’s a great tool to rapidly expand your skill set after getting the Objective-C language and conventions down.

It goes into some detail about working with web services, location-aware applications, animated user interfaces and so on.

One note though, I actually read this book first which was a big mistake. Since I knew nothing about Objective-C I had no idea what most of the code meant. This was a huge disappointment. After reading Tim’s book I reread most of the Head First book and had a much, much better time with it.

If you’ve finished those books and are looking for something exciting to get into (I chose Core Data), I’d advise against getting Marcus Zarra’s Core Data: Apple’s API For Persisting Data on Mac OS X (no link for this one). This might be the worst technical book I’ve ever read. It’s possible it’s just me. Maybe it’s a great book for other people. My experience with it was mostly unmitigated frustration and rage. If you’re looking for a Core Data book, maybe check out Pro Core Data for iOS by Michael Privat and Robert Warner. SO MUCH BETTER.

All of the books I’ve mentioned here are available in ePub except for the Head First book. Oddly enough, it’s still only available as a PDF. Kind of a bummer since reading technical books on an iPad vastly improved my learning experience. Being able to annotate something for later, or easily search for a term days after having read it, saved me a lot of time and headaches. Highly recommended.

Beyond the books I’d suggest making use and familiarizing yourself with developer.apple.com and devforums.apple.com. Both are indispensable tools you’ll come to frequent. The forums are part of a paid developer membership, but the iOS and Mac documentation is freely available. I found that reading Apple’s documentation was off-putting and frustrating at first. But now I love it. Mostly. There’s just so much information that it’s a little overwhelming when you’re starting out. And not knowing what most of anything means was really frustrating. But it’s like anything; if you stick with it you’ll start to pick it up as you go.

Another go-to resource is Stack Overflow. It’s a huge forum where programmers go to ask other programmers for help with things. As a bonus, if you format your searches like this: “[ios] UITableView” (without the quotation marks) you’ll be amazed at what you can find. The best part is that somebody has probably already asked the question you want answered. Spend some time there and you’ll probably find what you’re looking for. Stack Overflow is the first place I search when I run into a problem.

The last bit of advice I have is to seek out other people that are trying to learn this stuff too. Or, if you get lucky and can find somebody who’s already doing development, try asking them some questions. Most people are pretty friendly if you’re not a jerk about it.

And with that, I’d like extend an offer to leave a question for me here (which I’ll do my best to answer) or via email. My email address is jason at makefilmwork dot com. I trust you can sort that into a workable address.

I hope you’ve found this writing helpful.

What is Preflight?

Preflight was designed to be a quick and easy way to take notes and make short lists of things needing to get done.

There are no shortage of task-management apps on the App Store. I don’t expect to redefine the category. But I’ve yet to find a to-do list app that really works for me, so I thought I’d do something about it. I felt like it would be a good first project to go after.

Preflight is currently US $0.99.

What’s Next?

I’m already working on version 1.1 which will include a few big updates and a few small ones. I’ll probably be looking at initial feedback too, trying to incorporate what I can into the next release.

If you have any feedback for me, I’d love to hear it. I can be reached (for app-related inquires) at jason [at] flightdivision.com. Thanks, I hope you enjoy Preflight.

We got our first major snowfall here in Salem and, just like last year, I wanted to try and capture it. If you’ve ever scrolled through a long grid of photos in iPhoto, Aperture or Lightroom you might have seen something that looks a little like the video above. That’s where I got the idea anyway. Unfortunately, it didn’t really turn out like I had imagined. I was hoping the difference in color would be really apparent as the snow blew in and night fell. But, at this point, I’ve already spent two days on this and I’m sick of looking at it.

I used the iPhone’s camera and let it shoot every five seconds for two hours. The phone was supported by my Glif on top of a camera extender on top of my Manfrotto 501 baseplate.

I used a replicator in Motion, each offset by one frame in a six by six grid. That was enough for my computer to beg for death, so I baked it out and finished the rest in Final Cut. The music is Dirty Glass by WHY? [iTunes].

I made another title animation in Motion, this time 20 seconds instead of 10. That turned into around 16 hours of work and another 9 or so for export.

The texture I used for the floor and wall came from cgtextures.com, who appear to have a very reasonable terms of service regarding commercial and non-commercial use. The reason it took so long to export was because of the text. Since I wanted the camera to fly in so close to the title I needed the text to render at a very high quality. That takes time. The settings I used also did some hardcore anti-aliasing for object intersections which helped sell the point where the wall and floor met.

To compress for the web I ran it through an iOS droplet I made from Compressor with a data rate of 1Mbps. Any higher and my web host seems to have a problem delivering the video fast enough to iPhones or iPads. The Ogg Theora (Firefox) version was encoded in Terminal with FFMpeg2Theora at 3Mbps. The WebM version was done with Make Web Video, a Firefox extension (also at 3Mbps).

If you have any questions, feel free to write.

I’ve never spent a ton of time working in Motion. I’ve always assumed After Effects was a superior application for compositing, so trying to become as skilled in Motion as I am (or at least as I think I am) in Final Cut seemed like a waste of time. I recently watched this tutorial by Andrew Kramer and wondered if it was even possible to create those kind of elements within Motion. He, of course, was working in AE.

Turns out you can, more or less. I spent a few hours yesterday poking around in Motion and made a proof-of-concept title animation. This is what it looks like.

Here’s something I worked on recently. Shot with the DVX100a equipped with polarizing and UV filters. Edited in Final Cut Studio and graded using Magic Bullet Looks.

Meagan was invited to speak at Front End 2010 in Oslo, Norway. While we were there I took some pictures. Click on the modern Scandinavian architecture above to view all 106 photos.

Have you ever had a hard time getting an apostrophe while typing on your iPad? Because I have.

Initially I did it the long way by hitting the “.?123″ button. Eventually I realized I could just press and hold the comma / exclamation point button for a slightly faster selection. It still took some time though, and the few seconds it took to bring up the apostrophe was enough to break the flow of typing. But then I discovered a shortcut where an apostrophe appears if you tap the comma / exclamation button and slide your finger up a little before releasing. Tada. Instant apostrophe.

Our friends, Justin & Elise, asked us to watch their friends while they went camping for a few days. Everything here was shot on iPhone 4 and finished in Final Cut Studio.

A quick video shot and edited on iPhone 4 in Beverly, MA. If you have trouble with the video above, watch it on Vimeo.

Our eyes don’t see all of the subtle variations between every color. We do, however, see the difference in shades of a color. In video, this is called luminance. The color is referred to as chroma, or chrominance. Since the dawn of video, cameras have been using a technique to reduce the amount of color information captured to reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to deliver it. Since our eyes won’t see these colors anyway, we’re not missing much.

How is it done?

The most common model of color subsampling uses an area that’s 4 by 1. Four pixels wide and one pixel high. For each of those pixels measurements are taken, and values assigned. The first is for how luminous each is, measuring once for each pixel. When we’re done we’ll have four unique measurements for each of our four pixels.

Next, color information is measured. We already know that our eyes aren’t going to see all of the color that we’ trying to record, so instead of getting a color value for each pixel we’ll be averaging the colors together. This dramatically reduces the amount of data needed to transport the image. Colors accuracy is also significantly reduced. When we’re done we’ll have one measurement that represents four pixels.

This example assumes we’re using 4:1:1 sampling. It’s commonly found in consumer DV cameras and for most applications it’s just fine. The real problem starts when you get into color correction and — even more so — when working with green screen. It’s then that the more color information you have to work with the better off you’re going to be.

Below are brief descriptions for some of the most popular color sampling methods.

4:1:1

DV video, represents a highly subsampled image. Sample area is four pixels wide and one pixel high. Found in cameras like the DVX-100.

4:2:0

Some HD cameras use this including the Sony EX-1 and EX-3. Technically, its the same as 4:1:1. The camera is still averaging the color of four pixels down to one. The difference is that the sample size is two pixels high by two pixels wide. Commonly used in HDV cameras.

4:2:2

Vastly superior to 4:2:0 and 4:1:1. Each color sample size is further broken down from four pixels to two, yielding much higher color accuracy. Used by DVCPRO HD and Digital Betacam.

4:4:4

Every color is represented as accurately as possible. No subsampling. Used by RED, Viper and Genesis camera systems.

4:4:4:4

Same as 4:4:4, but includes an alpha channel, typically used for chroma keying.

Why care?

Maybe you’ve noticed artifacts in your image; blockiness where colors bump up against each other. This is because the same algorithms are trying to average the colors the best it can. Sometimes, especially in these transitional places, it may guess wrong.

This is important to understand when doing color correction, and absolutely essential when doing any kind of chroma keying. If you’re working with a camera that has low color sampling resolution you’ll need to know what kind of limitations you’re up against. You may not actually be able to get the seamless VFX shot you originally had planned. But that’s filmmaking, right?

Now what?

I encourage you to figure out what color sampling method your camera uses. The more you know about your camera, the more you’re going to be able to get out of it. You’re also going to make things easier on yourself once you get to editing.

Additional resources

Color Subsampling on DVXuser

Subsampling notation PDF

Halloween in Salem, MA, 2009. Occurring on a Saturday, it was said to have been the largest event in town for nearly a decade. An estimated 100,000 people showed up to celebrate.

Used our Flip Ultra HD to capture our cat’s holiday excitement.

I’m less impressed with the mouse’s integration with Final Cut Studio. Or maybe I just haven’t explored it enough. The frictionless scrolling in Final Cut isn’t quite precise enough to be useful for me. I expect more support is on the way, though. Especially in future versions of the Studio.

Anyway, there wasn’t enough room on Twitter to say all of that.

Same basic setup as last time. But instead of scaling up for 1080p I scaled down for 720p. I thought maybe this would make the picture a little sharper, and that seems to be the case. It was still light outside which makes the image cleaner anyway.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to capture anything interesting out the window with this one, and it looks like I was right. The most note-worthy observable change here is how the snow on the street melts away — not terribly enthralling.

I used the iTimeLapse Pro [iTunes, $2.99] iPhone app to capture the beginning of the first major snow fall of the season here in Salem. 760 frames total, playing at 24 frames per second. The phone was standing vertically in its dock looking out the window.

Each individual frame started 1536 wide by 2048 high. Which is almost wide enough for a standard 1080p video (at 1920 by 1080). After assembling the frames in a custom FCP timeline, I exported the video and dropped it in Motion where I added the camera movement. The video was still very red from all of the street lights, so I ran it quickly through Color to make it more blue. The graininess is from shooting in such low light.

The final version was exported using the Apple TV preset in Compressor.

An interview with Charles Woodbury Wallace, B-17 pilot in WWII. Filmed at the Wings of Freedom event held September 19th, 2009 in Beverly, MA.

See it on Vimeo.

I wasn’t super happy about how I color graded the Boat Festival video. So I thought I’d take another stab at it. Afterwards I was curious to see just how much I had deviated from the first grade — quite a bit it, it turned out. You can see a side-by-side comparison below. Some shots will jump out at you more than others.

A video snapshot from an antique boat show here in Salem, MA. Shot with DVX100a at 24pa, with a 1/48 shutter, using polarizing and UV filters. Audio captured with a super cardioid shotgun microphone. Edited and graded in Final Cut Studio 2. See the rest of the series here.