“Lens Wacking” to Create Video Flares

Mitch over at Planet5D compiled a nice set of videos and emails (including step-by-step instructions and useful tips) from those who have been experimenting with “lens wacking” - detaching the lens slightly from a camera to allow light leaks around the edges to hit the sensor. This results in broad colored streaks that look different than your typical lens flare. As 5D owner who finally sent his camera back to Canon to get rid of stubborn dust-on-sensor (and in viewfinder) issues, I cringe a bit at this idea, but it’s a nice artsy effect. Click through and read on.

102 Year Old Lens on a Canon 5D mkII

A lot of people have been following the exploits of Timur Civan as he plays with a 1908 Wollensak Cine-Velostigmat f5 lens that a friend of his - “a brilliant Russian lens technician and owner of Panorama Camera Center” - modified to mount onto his Canon 5D (although of course any camera with interchangeable lenses would be a candidate for such surgery). The results have a lovely combination of vignetting, glow, and flare. Here’s a few links so you can catch up on the fun, including still images plus video results:

Canon Develops Ultra-Large, Ultra Low-Light, Video-Capable Sensor

The astute folks over at DP Review assembled a series of press releases about Canon’s 202 x 205 mm CMOS sensor (compared to 36 x 24 mm for the 5DmkII), which they claim can operate at 60 fps, and requires only 0.3 lux of available light (“roughly one-half the brightness of a moonlit night”). The pixel resolution has not been announced, nor has compatible lenses. In general, the larger the “pixels” (photosite receptors), the higher the sensitivity to light, and the better low-light performance. Larger sensor sizes also result in shallower depths of fields, all else being equal. According to Canon, “potential applications for the new high-sensitivity CMOS sensor include the video recording of stars in the night sky and nocturnal animal behavior.” Plus I’m sure we can think of a lot more…

Data Rot

Well-known author David Pogue recently aired this interesting piece on “data rot” for his CBS Sunday Morning tech series, which has been transcribed for the New York Times web site. Aside from containing some interesting geek trivia and a renewed warning that DVD lifespans vary greatly (5 to 100 years, depending on the brand and storage conditions), the line that smacked me in the face was “well, hard disks only last five years, generally.” And that’s not Pogue saying it; that’s Dag Spicer at the Computer History Museum, who is trying to preserve these things.

I know a lot of people have migrated away from tape backups to hard drives stacked in a closet; I know I copied as many of our old Exabytes as I could read onto an external FireWire 400 drive (in addition to using redundant DVDs of more recent material). I’ve always worried about stored drives spinning up again and potential “sticktion” problems; this is the first time I’ve personally heard a time frame put on it by someone of authority. And as we know, FireWire 400 is getting dropped by some computers as well. It sounds like backing up data is no longer a save-and-forget-it exercise (not that it ever was), but instead a shell game we need to be playing constantly in order to keep backups up-to-date.

Regardless of media used, as we noted earlier still make two copies - just to be extra safe.

Anything Worth Backing Up…

Recently, there was a good discussion on the MediaMotion After Effects list about archiving projects. Some use RAIDs and shared network storage devices; some use tape drives such as the Quantum LTO-3; some use stacks of DVDs; some use raw hard disks with adaptors like the Wiebetech ComboDock (which Art Adams wrote about a few weeks ago). However, three universal themes emerged:

Migrating After Effects Between Macs

With the recent announcement by Adobe that After Effects CS4 will not run on PowerPC-based Macs, some users are thinking about upgrading their hardware. With new hardware comes the question about how to get all of your software moved over. In the old days, you might consider just dragging folders from one drive to another. Sadly, that often doesn’t work anymore.

Recovering From Failure

(Note: Names have been concealed to protect the helpful from becoming inundated with support calls.)

This past Saturday, while setting up for our first presentation at Post|Production World at NAB, we were having trouble getting our MacBook Pro to recognize the projector. We put it asleep and woke it back up again, and got a kernel panic: that nasty darkened screen with the “must reboot” message. From that point on, no Adobe CS3 application would run on our computer - including the installer/uninstaller, which meant we couldn’t replace the apps we needed in order to do our demos. Oddly enough, Apple’s Safari wouldn’t run either. Repairing permissions, safe reboots, and creating new users didn’t help. Fortunately, we were able to copy our files off to another computer (with special thanks to Jeff Foster of Lynda.com for the timely loan of a very large memory dongle) so that the show could go on. But if you’ve had a similar catastrophic crash involving a Mac and Adobe CS3 applications, you might want to read on to see how at least this particular problem was resolved.

We’re Off To See The Wizard

It’s been awfully quiet around here lately…too quiet. But you know why: It’s the week before NAB (the National Association of Broadcasters) Convention, the largest annual industry trade show for those of us in North America), and we’re all hunkered down either a) finishing projects before NAB, b) getting our presentations ready for NAB, c) making out our shopping lists for NAB, or d) all of the above.

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