You probably know that I am a technophile. And you know that my tools are of utmost importance to me. So it should come as no surprise that I have acquired the new Canon 1D Mark IV camera. So far I am thrilled at the new capabilities it gives me. Ill be posting updates as it works its way more prominently into my workflow.
I had the honor once again of being hired by Facebook to be the official photographer for Facebook f8 2010. This is a gathering to promote Facebook’s platform, their tools and their business to partners from all over the world. I am grateful for the many years of partnership with Facebook, and it has been an extraordinary thrill to watch this rocket blast ever skyward.
My photographs are posted on the f8 website for all the world (or at least the 1/2 billion or so of you who are on Facebook) to see. Check them out at facebook.com/f8. And see you online!
10 years in the making, 30 minutes to set up, 2 minutes to shoot and 15 minutes in post-production. That is a Steve Maller headshot.
And here is the 2 minutes part in the middle, where I am called to a client’s office, given a random conference room, a list of names, and a check when it’s over. 
Sophie celebrated her bat mitzvah yesterday along with her parents Neal and Amy and her sister Ella. It was an amazing day filled with the love and appreciation of two families brought together to celebrate this simcha. Many of Neal’s family traveled to Burlingame from Thailand, and that made the day even more special.
I edited together a piece of fusion photography combining still images and some videos shot with the Canon 5D Mark II. Notable about these videos is that they were mostly shot in extremely low light, and did not use any lighting or post-production adjustments. The equivalent ISO in some of these video pieces was as high as 5,000.
Please widen your window as large as it will go so you can see this video in its whole 720P high definition glory!
I use the excellent Firestore device sometimes when I’m shooting video with my Canon XL2. It provides up to 7 hours of runtime (along with the excellent PowerBagJunior battery) and allows me to quickly edit video without dealing with tape.
However, a few months ago I noticed that an update to Final Cut Pro (or maybe Quicktime) broke my workflow. The Firestore segments its recorded video into <2GB chunks (which is about 9 minutes of video). This isn’t much of a hassle because it’s easy to drop them all into a Final Cut Pro timeline and have them automatically line up. But at some point a few months ago, I noticed that there were very short (1-2 frame) gaps appearing in the audio at each join in the timeline. Needless to say, this was very disconcerting. Try as I might, I could not get anybody interested in this (not Focus, not Apple…nobody). I could not believe it was my problem.
So this week it bit me again, and this time I decided to revert to my old debugging chops from Back In The Day when I used to be a fearsome software coder with a reputation for leaving no bug unturned (or something like that).
Suffice it to say, this was difficult to figure out, but I’ve finally gotten to the bottom of the problem, found a solution (albeit a clunky one), and figured out how to get a few more years of use out of my Firestore.
In a nutshell, the Firestore is recording my Canon XL2’s “24P” video at the “drop frame” rate of 23.98 frames per second. Quicktime Pro’s player says “that’s fine” and plays it seamlessly, as do most other Quicktime applications. But Final Cut Pro sees the 1-2 frame gap in the audio. Why? Because the actual framerate of “24P” dropframe video is 23.976 frames per second, not 23.98. And for some reason, the Quicktime applications don’t seem to care. But Final Cut Pro is obviously far more fussy, and assumes the Quicktime file is 100% accurate, and in this case, it’s wrong. That’s because the audio is actually 23.976 frames per second (4/1000 of a second shorter) than the video, which is 23.98 frames per second. Over the space of the 9+ minutes of a segment of video on the Firestore, that means the audio actually ends a fraction of a second earlier than the video, causing the gap.
So, the right way to fix this problem would be for the Firestore’s manufacturer to fix this bug in their device. I’m not too sure they’d be interested in doing that because they’ve since moved on to newer Firestore devices. However, I wonder if this bug is also in their newer devices. Hmm…
Anyway, here’s the clunky fix I found. There’s a nice little Quicktime player application called QT Sync (get it here: http://www.qtsync.com/qtsync.php) that is capable of directly editing a Quicktime movie file and changing the frame rate. This is a non-destructive change, as this just changes a notation in the file itself. However, now the movie file has two extra blank frames at the end. So when you drag it into Final Cut Pro’s timeline, you have to carefully trim off the last two video and audio frames.
I hope this proves helpful.
We celebrated Lindsay’s bat mitzvah last night, and had a terrific time. I am rarely without my Canon 5D Mark II these days, because I find the ability to fuse my photography with little video moments to be invaluable. And here was such a moment.
Lindsay’s dad was at the microphone delivering a touching and fun tribute to his daughter when, out of nowhere, one of Lindsay’s little cousins provided a moment of comic (and sagely!) relief. Watch and listen here…
Was playing around with the 5D Mark II at a Mothers’ Day gathering at my sister’s house today and shot some nice video with it. I used the 35/1.4L and 85/1.2L, both wide open using exposure lock. I killed off the audio track in Quicktime Pro, conformed the video to 24fps (slowing it slightly) using Cinema Tools, then re-compressed it to 720P at about 2800bps using DV Kitchen.
Make sure your web browser window is stretched out as big as you can get it.
If you don’t know what any of that means, just watch and enjoy. 
Today the Jewish community celebrated Purim. I was at the Wornick Jewish Day School, and I shot a little video showing all the fun that was had there.
Please click on the picture below to play the video. If it doesn’t play properly, you probably have to upgrade to the latest version of Quicktime from Apple. It’s a free download for both Mac and Windows. Enjoy!
I was hired to do a marketing piece for a company that does high-end digital sales training, and when I told them I could do not only photographs (as I have done for them before) but video, too, they jumped at the opportunity. I decided that I would commit to the Canon EOS 5D Mark II to film this piece for a few reasons.
Overall, I was extremely pleased with the results. And my clients were flabbergasted when I was not only able to show them results in near real-time, but I was able to edit together a fun slideshow recap with about 10 different video clips embedded in the show.
Anyway, here’s a photo of the rig perched on the camera. It’s an Azden dual-mic receiver with two XLR outputs. I ran its outputs into a BeachTek XLR-Pro adapter, which in turn has a stereo miniplug output, which works nicely with the 5D Mark II’s audio input.
Now here is a very short example of what the video looks and sounds like. It’s sampled way, way down so as not to swamp my poor server. See what you think…
I was leaving my studio mid-day today and noticed that the cherry blossoms (is that what they are?) have opened up, and they’re simply gorgeous. So I grabbed my Canon 5D Mark II and figured out how to get it to capture this scene. It was done hand-held, conformed to 24fps, then slowed down by 50% to 12fps, then compressed using DV Kitchen.
Beautiful stuff! You’ll need the latest version of Quicktime, a fast internet connection, and a reasonably fast computer, too. There’s no audio on this one.
