The Eagle Has Landed

Welcome to the new ProLost.

I'm sure some things are broken, or lame, or brolameken.

I'll be expermineting with layout and features and whatnot, so let me know what you like and don't like.

I'm most curious about your comment-posting experience. On Blogger I did not allow annonymous comments, and I'd like to keep things the same here, which means (I think) that you need to create an account and log in to post. Let me know how that treats you.

Update on 2009-03-20 01:36 by Stu

OK, as you've noticed, there's no sign-up required to comment. There is a login feature, but it's not as simple as I'd hoped. For now comments are moderated, which is a pain, but I'll figure something out.

And hey look, this is a "follow-up." I have a feeling this will be handy.

Soon this blog will break

And soon after that it will be fixed.

I've been messing around with Squarespace, and I think I like it. When I move this blog over to it, a few things will happen:

• The blog will get a little prettier
• Some things will become slightly more awesome
• Some things will become slightly less awesome
• External links to specific posts will break (but will be redirected to a site directory with a search field)

ProLost.com has always redirected here to prolost.blogspot.com, but soon ProLost.com will be the one and only address for this site, as FSM has always intended.

This Now Please

Apple today announced that the iPhone 3.0 software will add support for external hardware devices. That means that someone could create an HMDI-to-dock connector, which would allow you to use an iPhone/iPod Touch app to monitor your video on-set. Such an app could features scopes, focusing aides, and about a million other amazing things that I haven’t thought of yet.

So, uhm, what are you waiting for, someone?

Convert H.264 Quicktime to PS3

My Playstation 3 is the nexus of my home theater, largly because of how flexible it is in playing back various media formats. But the one format it won't play is the one I (sadly) work with most often: Quicktime .mov files.

Many Quicktime movies are encoded with H.264 for the video and AAC for audio. The PS3 eats these formats for breakfast, but only when they are wrapped in an MPEG-4 .m4v file. So I figured there must be a way to convert an H.264 Quikctime to .mv4 without re-encoding. Google did turn up a solution, but it was hard enough to find that I thought I'd post it here in case anyone else can use it.

Open your .mov file in Quicktime Pro (I presume you need Pro for this, although maybe not for long — anyway, if you have Final Cut Studio, you have Quicktime Pro). Select File >Export. In the resultant save dialog, select MPEG-4.

Then click on Options. Under the Video tab, select MP4 at the top, and for Video Format: Pass through.

For Audio, the settings are also that simple: Pass through.

Click OK and wait. The process is fairly speedy, since ostensibly no re-encoding is happening. The result will be a file with a .m4v extension that should be almost exactly the same size as your original Quicktime movie. Sneakernet it over to your PS3 on a thumbdrive and enjoy.

I've been doing this to preview my edits and color correction work on the Stunt People short (I revealed the title today on Twitter), but it also works great for movie trailers downloaded from Apple.

GH1 Live MOS Skew

I hate to admit it to y'all, but I went all CSI on a crappy sample video from the pre-production Panasonic GH1 to check out its jello-factor. Verdict: skew is present, but it's minimal, and hard to see without this kind of party-pooper hoop jumping.

The original video is here. Props to Slashgear for making a 720p version available for download.

Here's some 5D Mark II footage for (highly unscientific) comparison. I assume this has been run through some kind of auto-stablization such as one finds in Final Cut Pro and iMovie 09, which is not unlike what I did to the GH1 clip.