This week’s City Newspaper has a good overview of the local film community, written by Susie Hume.
Susie is the reporter who spoke with me last year for the Rochester Insider. This time, she took on the entire film scene and talked to tons of people. John Vincent and Matt Ehlers get some facetime, as well as The MAD DOG MOVIES Podcast, Rochester Movie Makers, and Rochester Film Lab.
An excerpt:
Vincent, a Rochester native, worked in both New York City and Los Angeles before eventually settling back here, his hometown. His long list of film credits includes visual effects work on cult classics like “Freaked” and sci-fi favorites like “Robot Wars” and “Prehysteria.” He now works full-time as a writer, director, and effects artist, and as president of his own production company, Philrose Productions, which provides effects and production management for industrial videos, commercials, and feature films.
“There are other smaller cities with big film communities, like Austin and Portland, that are really promoting their work, and it pumps millions of dollars into their economies,” Vincent says. “We need to promote that here. We’re not Hollywood, and we never will be, so to people here it’s very intangible to think of Rochester as a film city. But to us, it is what we do already, so we need to change the way they’re thinking.”
Vincent also remains involved with a core group of local filmmakers committed to boosting the Rochester film scene. He co-hosts a podcast on local writer/filmmaker/animator Mike Boas’ website, maddogmovies.com, and will shoot a lower budget film (“100 grand or less,” he says) with Boas this year with the working title “Lake Midnight.” In addition, Vincent acted as second unit director to Matt Ehlers’ recently premiered film, “Smoking Laws.”
“People like Matt and others could be working in L.A. or New York, but the great thing here is that we just help each other out or work for free on each other’s films,” Vincent says. “It’s a ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ mentality, because we’re all in this together.”
Read the entire article online here: “Rochester’s local filmmaking scene” By Susie Hume.
Thanks for the press, Susie!
Links:
Look, I’m famous!
Several weeks ago, I was contacted by Susie Hume of the Rochester Insider. She had run across the Mad Dog Movies MySpace page and wanted to do a profile of me in the August 31 issue.
So I invited Susie to come by Animatus and ask me 20 questions, give or take. Actually, I tend to ramble, especially when talking about my various projects. She probably had enough material for an unauthorized biography by the time she left.
As a follow-up, photographer Matt Wittmeyer carted in all his various lights and tripods to get a picture. Something about my face suggested “fisheye lens,” so there you go. It’s funny, my brother keeps bugging me for a serious photo for his family tree project. Oh well — this ain’t it.
Click here to read the whole article.
The Rochester Insider is a publication of Gannett Rochester Newspapers.
NOTE: I’ve updated this post a couple times. See my latest notes at the bottom.
I’m often asked how to optimize videos for websites like Youtube or Myspace. The eternal struggle is between quality and file size. My first uploads were Windows Media (WMV) files. Lately, I’ve been using Quicktime.
My edit program of choice is Adobe Premiere, but I don’t trust Premiere to do a good job with Quicktime compression. Quicktime Pro does it right because that’s what it’s designed for. For $30, you can buy a registration key from Apple to unlock the editing functions of Quicktime.
I really like the IPOD export settings from QT Pro. Here’s how to take advantage of them.
OPTION “A”
1) In Premiere, go to “export movie.” Choose Quicktime (MOV) as your format. Set the pixel ratio to square with an image size of 320 x 240 pixels. You want to delay compression until the last step, so
choose the Animation codec and set the quality to “best.”
2) Your resulting MOV will still be too large for Youtube, which has a 100mb size limit for uploads. Open the MOV in Quicktime, and go to “export.” One of the settings for export is simply labled “ipod.” These settings are locked by the software developers, so you can’t adjust them at all. I presume that the mystery compression utilizes the much-loved H264 codec.
Your resulting M4V file should look great and have a suitably small file size. There may be some video sites that won’t accept M4V, but Youtube likes ‘em just fine. Youtube will recompress your uploaded file as an FLV (or H264 for Iphone users, although this is a new development).
OPTION “B”
Let’s say you’re not working from a Premiere project, but from an AVI file with DV compression. Can you still use Quicktime Pro and the Ipod settings? Yes, but it requires an interim render.
1) Pull the AVI through Quicktime and render a 320 x 240 uncompressed Quicktime (Animation codec set to best) to correct the pixel ratio.
3) Open the resulting MOV in Quicktime and render again using the Ipod compression settings.
Rendering the Ipod file directly from the DV AVI is a bad idea. The Ipod settings don’t know what to do with the DV file’s rectangular pixels, and you end up with a stretched image.
OPTION “C”
Youtube’s actual Flash interface is 400 x 300 pixels, so if your file is 320 x 240, it will be blown up a bit during playback.
If you don’t like this loss of resolution, you can set your first export as 400 x 300 before running it through Quicktime. The problem? Your final file size will be significantly larger. Keep in mind that your typical Youtube viewer may not appreciate longer download times.
***
If anyone has additional tips or corrections, feel free to comment below. I’ll be updating this post if necessary.
***
UPDATE 09/18/07
It’s only been a couple months, but I think I have a more streamlined approach.
I believe the mysterious Ipod settings are really the same as H264 set to “high.” Not best, which is huge, but a rung below that.
So the other day I tried exporting a 400 pixel wide MOV from Premiere with H264 set to 75%. (Premiere doesn’t have medium, high, or best.) The resulting file looked pretty good and played nice on Youtube.
***
UPDATE 06/18/08
So, what’s the problem with exporting H264 compressed files directly from Premiere? No AAC compression option for the audio. AND no “Prepare for Pnternet Streaming.”
I’m back to rendering out of Premiere with uncompressed audio with the video Animation codec at best.
In Quicktime Pro, I’ve been pretty satisfied exporting 400×300 MOV’s with H264 compression set to medium.
Writer/Director Ben Radford gave me the go-ahead to put some scenes from Clicker Clatter online. You can check them out at Youtube:
PLAY SCENES FROM CLICKER CLATTER
Clicker Clatter is an animated short that exposes television and TV journalism for the wasteland that it is. From scare-of-the-week programming to Katie Couric’s stupid interview questions, inane drug ads, randy rhinos, “boob terrorism,” and the frustration of scrambled porn, nothing is safe in this sharp satire! Mike Reiss, writer/producer for The Simpsons, calls Clicker Clatter “smart, funny, and beautifully executed.”
I served as animation supervisor on this cartoon short. Flash and After Effects work was produced by the artists of Animatus Studio, with character designs by Adam English and Brian Oakes.
Ben is currently sending the short out to film festivals. You can read more about it on his website at radfordbooks.com
When YouTube hit, everything changed. Now there are a thousand video sites where you can watch 400×300 pixel videos of your pets and favorite bootlegged moments from Family Guy.
What’s next? JOOST is on the horizon, designed to bring high-end content and high resolution video. They’ve got deals with Fox, Sony, and Time Warner. That might be hard for the indie filmmaker to break into.
Today I uploaded a short to VUZE, (formerly ZUDEO), an on-demand service from Azureus. Using VUZE requires downloading a special browser. There’s a ton of content, from movie trailers to A&E programs and the sci-fi show Red Dwarf. I believe the content is downloaded to your computer using bit-torrent, but I’m not sure yet.
To download the full version visit vuze.com
Another site I’ve been toying with is DOVETAIL, which is aimed at independents. Again, you need to install a special program.
What worries me is that none of these is available in your standard browser. It will take a lot of persuading to get the bulk of mainstream users to download a new program.
It could happen — just look at iTunes. That interface had the advantage of being tied into the Mac operating system and the popular Quicktime player, though.
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