Hieroglyphic Overdrive

This is the latest version of Hieroglyphic  Overdrive.

Friend's Stuff

Ian Hubert revamped his web page. Check out Robot Soup.

My buddy Tom Sanitate has a new site for uh... well stuff. Mix Media Factory. It's social. It's got stuff. No politics, no porn.

Kodi TV. I don't know what it is.

Various Drysuit Thinkings

USIA makes a $700 drysuit called the Aqua Sport.

It actually has decent reviews. It's a bilaminate rather than a trilaminate.
One would need some undergarments with it. Like Fourth Element maybe.
I also need an SPG.

Volume

The Lehle volume pedal is probably one of the cooler volume pedals out there.

Thing is, they cost the better part of three hundred bucks.

Night Gods of the Sleeping Earth

So Greg Bartus and I are putting together a band to do some playing out. I asked what we should be named and he told me to give him some options. Night Gods of the Sleeping Earth was the first choice and that's what we're going with.
We're gonna need at least one fog machine.

We're also gonna want to do a version of Superstition by Stevie Wonder.
This dude, Jacek Korohoda (I think there's a diacritical mark missing in his YouTube name), has an excellent guitar arrangement of the tune.

And here's an article breaking down the original recording of the song with individual tracks on .mp3. Three tracks of live drums. That's right. 8 channels of clavinet. 3 of drums.

Various Variations

I do love the dynamics in this version of "Sultans of Swing" (H/T Vinnie Marano). The Moog Theremini looks awfully cool for three hundred bucks. A funny thing about a lot of the metal of the rather "heavy" variety is not just how much the guitarists tend to be into Bach, but also that many bands de-tune so they're playing a whole tone or more lower than standard tuning. And for some reason it hadn't occurred to me until recently how very Baroque that all is. Because many of these bands are emulating actual (albeit extreme) Baroque tuning standards.

Costumes I like

There are things I like about The Expanse. Many of those things are set design. The chairs on spaceships. Spacesuits which are wetsuits and drysuits.
But then there's this costume.

Normally you'd think this kind of thick collar would not be flattering. But good grief it works.

She gets to wear a new costume in every scene.

Various Audio Related Things

VexTab music notation for Google Docs.

Even with the upgrade price from the fullest version of Samplitude, Sequoia is $2300 USD. Ugh.
The only real reason to move up to Sequoia is to have all the completely integrated LUFS metering. And I predict that the day is coming where I'll need that.
Future Weapons II is a sound library from SoundMorph. I expect we'll want it for our next couple movies. Heck, I got TimeFlux too. I have a LOT of work to do.

Time Code and You

Let's face reality: in indy feature films there's practically no reason to use timecode. There just isn't. You can't really sync any sub-$100,000 camera with timecode on set, and so you can't really use it in post.
But because I was a sound mixer in a previous life, I have a fancy-pants timecode slate made by Ambient. Thing is, I've never fed it timecode. Originally I had one of those Fostex PD-2 DAT machines. That was a clunky thing. Expensive. Fiddly. But it could read and write timecode in whatever format you wanted, do pull-up and pull-down and whatever nonsense people used to do when shooting at 24fps, blah-blah-blah.
Then I went to a computer system. Metacorder. Way over-priced but fairly workable. That system would actually jam timecode too. Uh. Just on the output? I think maybe it just output timecode which the slate could sync to. I think. Wow. It's been a number of years...
But then we worked with non-timecode Sound Devices recorders for the last many years. And we use the slate because it comes down and makes a "whack" sound which is easy to sync up on the timeline (actually, I like the Ambient slate because there are these lights which come on when the slate actually hits and that makes finding the visual mark where the whack happens really simple.)

The slate here is twice as expensive as the 8-channel recorder. What you see here is the transmitter to the slate, a battery (top) and the Zoom F-8 (in stop so it's not transmitting TC), and an Ambient slate.

I found that as a production sound guy, producers loved the numbers going around and around on the timecode slate. They never used that timecode and pretty much nobody on set knows what they're going to do with anything you deliver anyway, but that's just how it is.

The timecode menu on the Zoom. Note that you can set the "user bits" to be almost anything you like. Here I'm experimenting with having it display the number code for a movie called "1601". The "auto mute" means that it only puts out timecode when the recorder is running, so the slate will only display moving timecode when you're in record.

So now that I have timecode available again, even though we'll never use it, I'm still going to make sure the slate receives it. Why? Who knows? It's completely irrational of me. But we can do it, so we're going to.

It's ten minutes of 8pm. You can see the record light is on and the Zoom is recording, therefore it is outputting timecode. When the slate is clapped, the user-bits will show up for a second or two but that is just about impossible to photograph with a still camera.

Loudness

So a thing which concerns me is that I think in the future we're going to start seeing demands for ATSC A/85 loudness standards in deliverables.

But we do care. We care so much.

Now for them of us in the indy world, there's frequently some allowances for certain standards which exist in the big network TV world which we get to slide by. But I don't think the international loudness standards are going to be one of those things.
So I want to be ahead of the... 8-ball? Curve? Whatever it is one needs to be ahead of to make sure we're delivering masters which are compliant to CALM act and that sort of thing.
The high-end version of the audio mixing/editing software I use (Samplitude) is called Sequoia. It is comically expensive (almost $3000). But it has built-in tools for decent loudness metering.
There are cheaper LUFS meters, but not necessarily what one is looking for in the way of broadcast audio.
In any case, measuring A/85 or any of the other loudness standards is... weird. You're measuring an average of an average of a level but only within a certain frequency range and only when the signal is above a certain level. Right? Because loudness is a subjective thing and making a meter to measure it is a pain in the tuchus.
Dig this (from the above TC Electronics link):

Target levels are specified in various broadcast standards, but only vary slightly. For instance, the ATSC A/85 standard recommends a target of -24 and uses the LKFS term, whereas the EBU R128 standard sets the target level at -23 and uses the LUFS term. One of the reasons for this difference is that the R128 standard employs the above-mentioned gate, which in effect makes most measurements equivalent to -24 LKFS/LUFS without the gate - yet more useful for aligning loudness across genres.

Yup. The broadcast standards are sort of difficult to get one's head around. But it's doable. And if we can guarantee the deliverables (which I imagine might be important for VOD) it will help.

The Conspiracy to Make Popular Music Suck Part II

I'm tying some disparate threads to make this thesis.

"Pop" music is, by definition¹ the music that was most bought and played and performed during a given week.

Radio stations play popular music because they figure "Hey, this is what everyone wants to listen to right now" right?

The problem is that not everyone wants to listen to all the songs on the Hot 100 every week. Some people only want to listen to classical music. Some only want to listen to underground rap. And some want to listen to cheery pop music with a sweet female vocalist singing over the top. You can't make a radio station that will satisfy those three listeners.

Even taking away the heavy underground hip-hop and the 12-tone arias of Lulu, listening to one radio station which actually plays the wide variety of music that is popular can make for a station which is sonically kind of jarring.

• Now I would stipulate that diversity in popular music is what makes it good. And that during the periods when pop music is "good", it was also more diverse. This is a stipulation. It cannot be argued. If it's argued and my whole thesis falls apart then I have to rebuild the thing from the ground up.

But radio stations, and for that matter record companies, do not want diversity. The reason for this is that diversity is bad for ratings for "hit music" stations. If the hit songs are country, calypso, heavy metal, and dubstep, the programming directors would go insane because listeners would tune in to whatever music they want to listen to and then immediately turn off once very different music shows up.
If the radio stations can keep all the music sounding roughly the same, they don't have to sweat genre changes.

So all of this makes for a system of big record companies and high-power Hot 100 radio stations conspiring to make sure music sounds relatively similar on those radio stations.

ººº

¹Although arguably it could also be defined as a specific structure of music with repeated verses and choruses. This is the difference between "popular song" and "art song". But we're not using that definition here.

Thinking while Rotoscoping

In the indy world, anything which even remotely seems like it might be inexpensive has to be quashed right away. Shooting in HD is now the cheap thing to do so 4K is the new hotness.
Personally I'm not into the look of the giant-sensor cameras. That super-shallow dof reads "Oh, someone's got a Canon" to me.

 My buddy Chance Shirley thinks that the frame size of Super 16mm is about the sweet spot between narrow depth of field and not having an image so shallow it's simply impossible to focus. I have to agree with him there.

 So I like the micro 4/3ds format. It's, you know, about the right size for a sensor. The trick is finding a camera (which has to be 4K) plus a global shutter.

Global shutter. Dang nab it. We solved every problem -- we got big sensors which solved the un-film-like deep focus that those tiny 1/3" sensors had, but doing so we introduced a new and really annoying problem -- rolling shutter.

 The irony is that film, yes film, has an inherent rolling shutter. It's just a lot shorter than what these new big-sensor DSLR's have. And honestly you can shoot a lot of movie without seeing any artifacts. And also, the new cameras are getting their artifacts down to motion-picture "wet film" levels. But still, I'd like it to be gone.

 Filmmaking is a learning experience. One thing I learned is to NOT rely on rotoscoping out an entire scene with multiple characters from a background that does not match what you want.
Oy freakin' vey that's a lot of work.

4K

I've been told to never again put anything involving budgets on any blog post again. I listen. And obey.
Our budgets keep going up though. And we're getting better at certain things.

Virginia Logan modified these flight suits and Brian Schiavo built the masks (not seen) that the androids wear. It's actually quite a goodly bit of costume design. Ian Hubert is building background and yes, that's his robotic drone in the foreground (middleground I suppose).
Ian is also responsible for how smooth this composite is. I don't know what wizardry he does but oof. It's nice.

What else hath been dictated from on high? 4k. We're shooting in 4k from here on out. We might not even be delivering in 4K for a while but for the time being we need to finish in 4k because VOD channels on the interwebs are going to start demanding it.

We shot our last movie (not the above one) in 4K. So we'll be shooting 4K from here on out.
My fantasy is to get one of those Black Magic cameras, mount it so it feels like an Aaton, and get a 4K recorder for it.

Closing tabs

Broken link checker. For, you know, checking broken links on a website.

i09's 10 best and worst sci-fi/fantasy of 2015. No I don't agree with all the choices but I actually haven't seen any of the "worst".

I can't find any real reviews on the Beauchat Baltik Dry suit. At $700 the price is certainly reasonable. But I have no idea.

Bulk rename utility for Windows. It's got a hostile interface but sometimes that's just what you need because otherwise how would it work?

Ecco Track 6 boots for $240.

The Aqualung Pro HD BCD.

Films by Frank V Ross.

Rescuediver.org has information.