Playing with iPad 2's new iMovie

Just bought new iPad 2 last friday when it was released here in Finland and immediately downloaded new iMovie app. I have to say iMovie is much more usable on iPad 2 than on iPhone 4. You can actually edit hours with it. So I uploaded some material from my christmas holiday to iPad and edited short cheesy holiday piece in an hour.

All the material was shot with iPhone 4 and Flip Ultra HD. Nice surprise was that it supported Flip Ultra HD's video natively. Although I had to put video material first to pictures folder in my computer and then sync through iTunes because connecting Flip Ultra HD straight to iPad gave me an error for consuming too much power.

Also now when looking video I actually realize that there seems to be sound glitches in cuts where Flip Ultra HD's video material was used. Strange. Anyway if you shoot with iPhone 4 then iPad 2's new iMovie is absolutely the easiest way to edit short pieces on fly.

I color corrected & onlined a 30-minute documentary

I've been mostly working with short form audiovisual production such as trailers, promos, advertisements. So getting a chance to color correct and online a half an hour documentary was a nice opportunity to try something new.

Name of the documentary is 'My brother, the buddhist monk' and it tells about Santeri (26) who decides to become a monk in Thailand and give up everything he has in Finland. His sister and the director of documentary Anja Ahola, wants to understand her brother's great decision to leave behind his possessions, friends and family and to become an ascetic Buddhist monk for the rest of his life.

Anja shot all the video herself. Mostly with Sony HDR-FX1 but also with some cheap HDV camcorders. So I got all the material in HDV format. I decided to master documentary in 720p because I had to reframe, deinterlace and noise reduce many shots so after all the post-processing there wouldn't have been actual resolution up to 1080p.

I onlined documentary inside Final Cut Pro 7. For color correction I used mainly Red Giant's Colorista 2 and Mojo. For deinterlacing shots from cheap HDV camcorders I used Red Giant's Frames. Almost all the products from Red Giant are great but I have to say what really saved some shots is Neatvideo's excellent denoiser. There were some really dark noisy shots with lots of HDV compression and Neatvideo did excellent job getting rid of all the artifacts. I think Neatvideo is one those plugins everyone who shots in not so ideal conditions should own. It really makes your production value higher.

(Click on picture to see it larger.)

And if you're in Finland remember to watch it!
Documentary premieres on April 5th at 8pm on Yle TV1.

My first real Flash job

Okay, everyone hates banners. So do I. But after learning Flash for a while it was nice to have some real life project where to put my new skills to use. So I made series of animated banners for Merlin TV-series which premieres 19th of May on Sub. I definitely won't become full-time Flash designer but it's nice to have one more tool in my pocket where I can make some basic things if needed.

If interested you can still see one original live banner here (Megaswf puts uploaded flash files offline after half an year).

Subject of my master's thesis

Christmas has gone and I'm back to studying. We spent three great weeks in Thailand with my girlfriend. If you want to have super relaxed holiday in Thailand I can highly recommend Bamboo Hideway resort in Koh Mak. If you don't believe me you can also read Bamboo Hideaway's raving reviews from Trip Advisor.


But back to topic. I've been lately thinking the subject of my master's thesis which should be done by march 2012. So I've little bit over year left to make it. As you might know I've been very interested about realtime graphics and particularly about realtime graphics in television broadcast.

Usually the systems used to play realtime graphics in television are very expensive and difficult to use and maintain. Also because those proprietary systems are not used by big masses there are usually lot of bugs. Another thing is that those systems are often developed from engineer perspective so user interfaces aren't very friendly for designers who are used to Adobe's After Effects, Photoshop etc..

Last years I've been experimenting with VJ softwares and other realtime video manipulation softwares and thinking why I can do complex realtime video stuff on desktop with cheap laptop but in broadcast world I must buy some super expensive and difficult to use system for those things. Okay I know there are lot of technical stuff why you don't want to use VJ softwares for television broadcast (drop frames, jitter etc.) but still nowadays you can buy quite cheaply SDI output card from Blackmagic, AJA or Matrox and output broadcast quality SDI signal from your desktop computer.

But what makes things interesting for broadcast is that with right software you can actually output videos and graphics through SDI output (without drop frames, jitter etc.) and also get fill + key from separate outputs. And when you get fill + key separately it's easy to connect computer to video mixer and play graphics overlaid on top of video.


I've been looking for some cheap desktop solutions and came to conclusion that at the moment two most interesting platforms for realtime broadcast graphics are Adobe Flash and Quartz Composer. Both have some pros and cons and I'm not saying those are easier to learn (or better) than systems used nowadays but at least those are commonly available and you can find tutorials and help easily from internet. Also for both platforms there are already some commercial applications made for broadcast use.

So what I plan to make as my master's thesis is to research how suitable these platforms are for 24/7 broadcast television. What are the advantages and disadvantages. I also plan to make some real life broadcast project with Adobe Flash or Quartz Composer and see how it works out. I have lots of stuff to do and I think I'll have to start with getting myself more familiar with systems used nowadays. I guess this is best accomplished by visiting TV-stations. Let's hope they let me in :D I'll be also testing different softwares, learning flash etc. and keeping this blog as my master's thesis diary from now on.

So in short I think my master's thesis subject will be: Adobe Flash & Quartz Composer for Realtime Broadcast Graphics - Case X.

Composing with Pure Data

Last week I was introduced to Pure Data. A visual programming language made for interactive computer music and multimedia works. We were asked to build Pure Data scene and include some physical interaction through Pduino, iPhone or webcam. Very interesting things were made through week. I built some "Pet the Cat" scene for my iPhone that works through RjDj app but it's so buggy at the moment I won't publish it. Later this year I'll have Physical Interaction course and I'll definitely continue doing some sort of stuff with Pure Data/iPhone and hopefully then even publish something.

Red Danger

Last weeks I've participated to software studies course and as assignment we were supposed to do little app in Processing. But for some reason I wanted to try doing some interactive piece in Quartz Composer. So after hitting my head to wall almost whole weekend I got it somehowly working. So here's the result. Little game called Red Danger.



Download Red Danger here.
Download source code (Red Danger.qtz) file here.

Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6 is required to run Red Danger.

Little bit personal stuff

This post is more personal than usually. Anyway I shot lots of stuff last summer with my Flip UltraHD pocket camcorder. Now couple weeks ago I started to look material and decided to make little montage of those. Hope you enjoy the summer feeling :D