Realtime animation.

In don't know if this relly should go in this blog, but thanks to Quba at imagonewmedia for the heads up on this. It creeps me out but it's pretty astonishing all the same.

www.motionportrait.com/about/TIminoriHair.swf

Extreme Indie Small Crew Filmmaking.

Two stories here about some low budget feature films with one-person crews. The first is on new animated Sita Sings The Blues, a strange blend of 20's American Blues and Hindu mythology. The 80 minute long film was animated entirely by one artist, also the writer , producer and director Nina Paley. After six years of production, for a budget of $200,000, the film received its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. The film was made mostly in flash with some hand painted images scanned an animated in After Effects. The project started on a lowly Powerbook Laptop, but was finished (in HD) on a Intel Mac Pro (story via www.wired.com).

While obvious it is a tremendous achievement to design and animated a feature length film on your own. Sita is made with the necessary support of voice actors, a sound designer and a composer. The Lone Filmmaker on the other hand is trying to make a film entirely on his own: writing, acting, directing, costume design, makeup, cinematography, editing, composing. While one can't doubt the commitment and enthusiasm of the filmmaker, Robert Hindle, this seems a pretty cart-before-the-horse project.



Inspired by the video-blogging success of Four Eyed Monsters, the gimmick of a true one man feature is designed to garner attention on Youtube rather than produce a really great film. (also, one would think it advisable to make a normal film first before embarking on this extreme sports filmmaking style project). Four Eyed Monsters started as a film and became a blog about distributing the film. It seems the films that his girlfriend is making about him are the starting point for this project (Some have already hinted at a Lonelygirl15 style fakery). Unfortunately his audience in the regard is dropping off. After getting around 400,000 views for his inaugural video post, his subsequent video views have dropped to around 15,000-30,000 per video.

That said there is a lot of useful info buried in these blogs for those not on such a low budget, low manpower project (like what insurance cover you can get), though it often is swamped out by some rather cringey LG15 style goofing around with his girlfriend.

Previous Single Handed (or as-near-as) productions of note are the very professionally produced Lisa Gerrard documentary Sanctuary and the truly bizarre experimental animation We Are The Strange. by M.Dot.Strange.

Daily Motion, another HD video sharing site.

Whoops. this one slipped past me: www.dailymotion.com, a French video sharing site (don't worry the site is in English) is also now offering HD video sharing. You need to get registered as a "MotionMaker" but you do this simply by uploading an original piece of work and labelling as creative content. Once you're approved you get to have 720p video (up to 25fps) and unlimited time and file size uploads (Normal users are limited to 250MB or 20 minutes per movie)

It's easy. I uploaded Lenny's Luck, labeled it "creative content". Within two hours I'd been given MotionMaker status. Very flattering, - the video has since been removed. Based on a quick comparison, I couldn't see any difference between the picture quality of the online file from Vimeo or Daily Motion (both encoded from the same source file), the files are both 1280x720 On2 VP6 with stereo 44.1 MP3 stereo sound at about 840Kb/s; sharpness, brightness, gamma and colour all seemed identical.

Of course Vimeo still offers a couple of other sweeteners that separate it, such as the ability to download the full quality original source file and the option to swap out the movie with a newer updated version (something that's happened to Lenny's Luck a few times!).

Update: Tuesday 8. April 08 - actually after a bit of playing, Dailymotion is beginning to sneak in a couple of extra plusses. Its embedded player is HD capable, whereas with Vimeo you need to go to the Vimeo site to see content in HD, and I'm finding on older hardware (such as my 2 year old iMac PPC G5) that the Dailymotion video plays at a much better frame rate - at 24p, on my G5 Dailymotion is dropping a frame or so a second, whereas on Vimeo 24p plays consistently at about 12fps. However, faster moving material, such as the (dreadful) Wanted trailer that's been hosted in HD drops a LOT more frames on that computer, so your milage may vary.

I still much prefer Vimeo's site design. It definitely gives a feel that the site, and the movie's page is about YOUR movie, wheras Dailymotion has a definite youtube-esque/viral video/"hey there's a ton of other crap you could surf to right now" vibe to it.

2nd Update: Friday 11. April - scratch that frame rate advantage. Dailymotion are now running extremely intrusive animated Flash adverts on the movie pages (Vimeo already ran flash ads on movie pages but farther down the page rather than right next to your film). This means a major performance drop for HD and even some SD material. At least Youtube shares advertising revenue with users if it posts ads on your page (which it only does in agreement with the user) or Vimeo posts ads but leaves your page free of links to other films.

H.264 HD flash demos

Some extraordinary results for flash using the H.264 codec can be seen on this page. Double click the image for it to play in full screen. 

The encoding was done by Fabio Sonnati (his English language blog is here) and he gets a 1280x 720 version of the trailer for  the Sigur Rós concert/tour film Heima into a 500kb/s stream. To put that in context, Youtube's older .flv streams are usually at about 200-250kb/s at 320x240. So at just over twice the bandwidth, Mr Sonnati has managed to cram 12 times the image!

Now there are a few caveats. 

• The Heima footage is very compression friendly: clean, grainless images, largely still frames or slow pans with little fast cutting and almost no fades or dissolves. Faster cutting, grainer footage or more movement (especially hand-held) would look much worse. (I posted before about how to get Youtube or web video in general to look better and Heima it seems follows almost all those rules - it still looks GREAT in HD though.)
  
• This was hand crafted compression. On his blog S. Sonnati explains that he worked very hard and carefully optimised the settings for the footage at hand. This wasn't a pre-baked server side formula as used by Youtube/Vimeo et al.
  
• Despite the above, severe compression artefacts are very clearly visible on the footage, expecially in mid range detail, high frequency/contrasty detail shows up quite clearly but slightly softer textures and backgrounds quite obviously suffer at this extraordinarily low bit rate, and smooth gradients (such as skies and clouds) have noticeable quantizations blocks in them.
  

Still, let me just say that again, 720 HD at 500kb/s. The entire four minute video is only 15MB! 

S. Sonnati reckons "generic" 720p footage  (so a bit more aggressive, but not The Bourne Ultimatum or 24) would look OK at about 1 Mb/s and above (i.e. 2 times the data rate here) for similar results, 1080p would look OK at 2Mb/s and above.

By comparison, FFmpegX recommends 2.5 Mb/s for 720p and 5.8 at 1080p (assuming 24fps) if using all the features, encodes can be a little more efficient than that. Apple trailers in H.264 run at about 5MB for 720p  and 8-10MB for 1080p.

There are more examples at www.lithium.it/fvf/demoH264/demo.html, including a 1.5 Mb/s 1080p version of the Heima trailer, the far more visually aggressive trailer for a Nine Inch Nails concert film (1080p 2Mb/s), as well as some very sedate 720p BBC wildlife footage encoded at slightly higher bit rates. Be warned, you need a fairly powerful computer to watch the footage at their full frame rates (they work OK for me well on an 2Ghz intel core duo iMac with 2GB of ram) and the server they on doesn't really have enough bandwidth and there is a lot of buffering on the higher bandwidth videos.

Higher quality Youtube?

[update: It's working again!]

Seems there is a hack to get better quality out of Youtube!

add "&fmt=18" or "&fmt=6" to the end of the URL you of the vid you're watching and see the improvement in quality (tis doesn't work for ALL videos, some obviously haven't been re-encoded yet).

Below is an example, a project by some of my students.

Normal Youtube video is encoded as FLV (OnVP6) 320 × 240, 200 kbps, Audio mono, 22.05 kHz, 61 kbps

The higher quality video is encoded as MP4 (H.264), 480 × 360, 400 kbps, audio is stereo, 44.1 kHz, 118 kbps

So better resolution, better datarate, better codec, better audio.

However at present you can't embed the H.264 versions.

[UPDATE: On Thursday 6th March 2007. The "feature" seemed to have been disable. However by friday it is working again!]

BBC iPlayer getting 1.3 million unique viewers a week...

According to BBC figures quoted in this Guardian Unlimited article. In addition it reports that "iPhone and iPod Touch owners will be able to access iPlayer content within the next few weeks. This will be the first time the broadband TV service has been available beyond PC and Mac computers." This means a move away from WMV for the high quality Windows only download to the H.264 codec (WMV is available on Mac and linux, but not the DRM). This would also make the downloaded videos compatible with AppleTV, even though AppleTV is not mentioned in any of the many articles carrying this story, Ashley Highfield, the BBC's Director of Future Media & Technology, discussed the possibility previously:

"Apple's (long anticipated) move to a rental model, means that we can look to getting BBC iPlayer onto this platform too, as we should be able to use the rental functionality to allow our programmes to be downloaded, free, but retained for a time window, and then erased, as our rightsholders currently insist."

This would make three services that are AppleTV compatible, after iTunes (which is already selling BBC shows) and arthouse movie download service Jaman. The Jaman plug-in is an unsupported hack not an official update (and I've no idea if it's been kiboshed by the recent AppleTV makeover). It's odd that Apple haven't been more welcoming to services like Jaman, since iTunes basically sells iPods as much as it sells music, the more third party services that are supported on AppleTV the more attractive it is as a commodity.

This article from The Register included an addendum which says "the BBC got in touch to say it will always offer a Flash version", presumably in the browser embedded player, but since flash is moving away from the old Sorenson Spark codec to H.264 too, the statement may mean the embedded player will remain SWF based, even if the codec is updated.

This hopefully will mean a significant step forward for H.264 becoming a de facto web standard for online video, since it will be seamlessly supported by Quicktime (installed on all Macs and 60% of PCs) and Flash (installed on 90% of internet connected computers).

Perian

Perian is an amazing component for Mac OSX quicktime that allows Quicktime to handle additional video codecs, including Flash video. If you want to use flash clips with the also-incredibly-useful MPEG Streamclip, (say to trim and convert videos downloaded from youtube) Perian will allow you to use them. It's just become one of those mandatory to install programs for me. I used it recently to convert some public domain video on Youtube to DVD and DV.

Safari for PC

The Apple web browser Safari is now available for Windows. It's a public beta and still very buggy (it crashes a lot on my work PC) but is the simplest and easiest way to dowload or find the link for Youtube videos if you want to embed them with Jeroen Wijering's superior JW FLV Player instead of the YouTube embedded player, as described in a previous post.

If you open the activity window, the largest file, and one that;sporgressively downloading, will be the flash video file (it;s usually a few megabytes, depending on the running time of the video. Double click on it and it will download to Safari's chosen download folder (by default, the desktop). You'll need to add the .flv suffix; this file will play in VLC player. At this point you can't copy/paste from the PC version of Safari's activity window, but if you want to find the location of the original flash video file, then you can do it with this website: keepvid.com You simply copy the address in the "URL" textbox on the YouTube page, and paste it into the download text box on the Keepvid page. Click "download" and the Keepvid will then show a direct link to the page. right click (or CRTL+click for one button mouse users) on the >>Download link<< and copy the link location. You'll get an address somthing like http://chi-v18.chi.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=ZFQ6FLP2GHo. Paste this link into the "file" variable when using the JW FLV player, adding ".flv" as an extension to the end. You can even make the file on YouTube private so it can't be seen via youtube, only on your own website.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, I don't even play one on TV, but I can't see anywhere that this violates YouTube's terms of use, though I can't imagine they WANT you to do this. However in terms of the features it adds to video playback I think it's worth doing, until I'm told to cease and desist.

Youtube, Flash Video, posting online video, etc.

It's been a long time since I started this blog, and not really a much shorter time since I last posted! I've been (not unreasonably) distracted by buying a house, and my daughter growing up. Since then I have been working on two new film projects. The first is a script I wrote that Ayşegül will direct. It's a comedy set in the world of filmmaking, or rather a slightly daft satire on the world of filmmaking. At the moment we are casting and scouting locations but hope to shoot in June. The second project I will direct, again from my own script. It's a pastiche of old gangster movies, combined with some urban myths.

However I feel I should wrap up with the last entry on the previous film (close to a year after completion). The film "Christmas Present" is now available online here: www.geocities.com/epengin/present.html

The movie is actually hosted by Youtube but we have managed to stream it to Ayşegül's Geocities site using the excellent Flash Video Player by Jeroen Wijering. This allows us much greater control over how the video plays in our website than the Youtube embedded player allows.

For example, we can put a higher quality preview image of our own choice rather than the random image that Youtube chooses, which is of appalling quality (and, in the case of Ayşegül's film, something of a spoiler). The Flash Video Player also allows control of the aspect ratio, and for Flash 9 users, the image can be blown up to true full screen. For "Christmas Present" we shot in 16:9 HDV, but Youtube allows only 320x240 4:3. If you upload other aspect ratios, Youtube's server side software letterboxes the image to maintain the correct ratio (there is a version of "Christmas Present" like this on youtube from an earlier upload). In this case you're only using 320x180 pixels for the actual movie and wasting 25% on black bars.

We uploaded a 4:3 frame with an anamorphic squeeze, which meant that we filled the 4:3 Youtube frame (no letterbox bars) but of course on Youtube our image is out of proportion (see it here). With Mr Wijering's Flash Video player we set can the proper 16:9 proportions for height and width when the flash player is embedded in our website, and so get a much better image quality over all. Widescreen in DVD, DV cameras, Digital broadcast and even HDV cameras works in the same way. Of course quality is still very low compared to some other sites, or hosting you own high quality QT or WMV file, but the advantage is we're using Youtube's bandwidth rather than paying for our own, and Flash video, while not the most modern and efficient codec, has the widest installed base of any video codec (largely because it's used by sites like Youtube).

We bypassed Youtube's embed feature, and found the original location for the Youtube FLV file (there are numerous websites and programmes that help you do this on the net. On Mac OS X, Safari will show you the location of the FLV file under the "activity" window - you might need to add .flv" to the end of the file location though.) It's possible this is a violation of Youtube's terms of service, but it's not one that I would feel too bad about, especially as we've put links by each video directly to the original Youtube page. Anyway I can't find anything in the terms of service that clearly states that we're forbidden from linking to our intellectual property - but then I'm not a lawyer, I don't even play one on TV... [update 6, March 2008: Youtube has recently changed its terms of service to explicitly forbid bypassing Youtube content in this way to avoiding using the branded Youtube player]

Mr Wijering's player is an excellent tool for web video: it also allows other cool features such as subtitles, logo/watermarks, playlisting, alternative audio tracks, chapter markers... I suggest checking it out.

I've been asked by some one the web about getting the best quality out of Youtube, as generally Youtube is seen as offering very poor quality web encoding. Actually this is unfair. It is low resolution. and it is very highly compressed, and there are better codecs out there with superior quality to data-rate ratio. However the poor quality seen in most Youtube postings is because the videos are often "badly" (i.e. for Youtube, unsuitably) shot in the first place. Certain styles of filming, such as hand held camera, fast cutting, transitions and fast moving changing images all stress the Flash Video codec and can cause objectionable artefacts.

While the online version of Ayşegül's film is not artefact free, it does better because, by chance, for this film, she adopted a very restrained, classical style, which she has used in a few of her drama productions. By contrast she has made a documentary on the Dance Music scene in Turkey which we will put online in the near future (after editing a 10 minute version) that uses a more "aggressive" visual style, one which I think will not compress quite as neatly. In that case. we may host the film on Revver, as it does give over a lot more bandwidth (more resolution and lighter compression) to the video streams than Youtube.