Life's a Beach - Margaritaville Cargo

We felt like kicking it old school, standard definition style with this commercial for Margaritaville Cargo Mixed Drink Makers. I haven't done anything at standard definition for years, and now I know why:) Once again, staring the usual suspects.

Not everyone can live by the beach, but anyone can have an instant party with the Margaritaville Cargo Mixed Drink Maker.

Starring: Thomas Meaney, Marty Vites and Sean Goodman
Written, Directed and Edited by: Michael Eggert
Original Song by: Marty Vites & Thomas Meaney

Special thanks to Michael Sattin of The Resonant Heads for letting us borrow your cool red guitar strap. You can get your own at Couch Guitar Straps.

Shot on location in Santa Monica, Ca.

MJPEG HD, 1280x720, Smooth Mode -2 -2 0 0, Conformed to 640x480 SD.

Shot on three hacked Panasonic GH1's at varying ISO's, 60 fps, 1/60th, with Canon FL 35mm f2.5, Canon FL 55mm f1.2, Canon FL 85mm f1.8 and Rainbow Imaging FL/FD Adapters.

Benro C-298M8 Carbon HVC Flexpod.

Sansdisk Extreme Class 10 SDHC Card.

Rode Video Mic Pro.

Edited in Final Cut Pro.

Composited in After Effects.

One Last Thing

Steve Jobs

1955-2011

Seat Frame/ End Tag - Retrospective

A seat frame, sometimes refereed to as an end tag or end slate, is when at the end of a commercial the clients logo or product appears prominently for about three to five seconds. I decided to put together a little retrospective of some of my favorite seat frames that I have done over the past year.

You might notice that my go to actor, Thomas Meaney, is featured in a lot of these spots. He's a great guy, super easy to work with, and always willing to go that extra mile to make the shot great. All you talent scouts take notice, and scoop this guy up before somebody else does.

So here they are, in no particular order, my seat frames.

Blended - Amazon Wireless

If you are like me, sometimes you get so frustrated with your cell phone, that you want to cause it physical harm. For this Amazon Wireless spot, I decided to torture a poor old Blackberry with a kitchen blender. The results? One crazy cell phone concoction. Drink it in:)

Written, Directed and Edited by: Michael Eggert
Original Score by: Marty Vites
Voice Over by: Thomas Meaney

Special thanks to Laurie for letting me "borrow" her cell phone:)

Shot on a hacked Panasonic GH1 at ISO 100, 23.976 fps, with a Canon FL 55mm f1.2, Rainbow Imaging FL/FD Adapter and Fader ND.

Benro C-298M8 Carbon HVC Flexpod.

Sansdisk Extreme Class 10 SDHC Card.

Shot on location in Woodland Hills, Ca.

Edited in Final Cut Pro.

Composited in After Effects.

Tangent Devices Element

Debuting at IBC 2011 in Amsterdam, the new Tanget Devices Element control surface, is a gorgeous device aimed squarely at the ever growing lower cost color grading market. Formed from solid laser cut aluminum, the Element looks like a great alternative to the venerable JL Cooper Eclipse.

Featuring OLED alphanumeric displays and magnetic snapping for aligning up to four modules. Expected to sell for around $3,500.00 for the fully loaded 4 panel version.

Hack The Planet

Recently, I came to the realization that I am a Hacker. Not to be confused with the stereotypical Russian hacker, who with some cool cryptic name, hacks away in a basement in Moscow, endlessly fueled by a steady stream of Stolichnaya and Malboro Lights. I like to think I am more of a "Freedom Hacker". Hacking gadgets and computers not for nefarious reasons, but rather for advancing the quality of life and artistic pursuits. I have no idea how to hack into a Swiss bank account, but what it comes to hacking a camera or a computer, I am good to go.

Over the past couple of years I have hacked a variety of devices. My first hacking experience was hacking Dell Mini 9 net-book's into fully functional OSX Macintoshes. After that, I built a Hackintosh super computer, that was faster and far cheaper than anything that was being offered by Apple. Then I hacked my Panasonic GH1 cameras, to fully unlock their amazing potential that was originally hindered by the manufacturer. I even went so far as to take an iPod Nano and turn it into an iWatch. And most recently, I hacked (rooted) my EVO 4G, to turn it into a free wifi hotspot.

To quote my boy Crash Override, "Hack The Planet!!!"

Klipsch Image S4 In-Ear Headphones

Way back in 2007, I did a little review of my then favorite in-ear headphones, the Etymotic ER•6i. These were awesome headphones and served me well for three years. About 6 months ago, they finally gave up the ghost and went to that great big stereo in the sky.

This time I decided to go with Klipsch and their Image S4 headphones. I am really enjoying these little guys. They are a lot more comfortable than my old Etymotics. Keeping them in for extended periods of time is no problem due to their light weight and ergonomic design.

Sonically they are great. They provide a rich full spectrum sound, that lets you hear all the smaller details in the music. They have a somewhat analog style sound profile. The complete opposite of the digital and brittle quality of some lesser quality headphones. The bass response is very warm, full and fat. Great for old school 70's classic rock.

Even though I really loved my old ER•6i's, I think I am going to love these new S4's even more.

But, as it is with new loves, only time will tell:)

Pros: Comfortable, Great Sounding, Warm Bass.

Cons: Limited Sizes of Ear Tips.

List Price: $79.00

DaVinci Resolve on Smaller Screens

DaVinci Resolve is designed to work on monitors running at 1920x1080 or 1920x1200. For this reason I highly recommend the 24 inch Dell 2407 WFP/2408 WFP series. These are professional quality workhorse monitors. In terms of price versus performance, these monitors are hard to beat.

For those of you who are trying to run Resolve on a smaller monitor, such as a 15-inch MacBook Pro, which has a resolution of 1440x900, you have probably found out that the Resolve interface does not fit on a smaller screen. This causes the interface to become cropped and pretty much makes it impossible to use.

Luckily, there is a workaround, even though it is not officially supported by Black Magic Design.

Go to Applications - Utilities - Terminal

After launching the Terminal, type this:

defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.75

Hit return.

Then launch Resolve. You will now see that the interface has been resized.

To return your screen back to normal, type this:

defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1

Hit return.

There you go. Now you can run Resolve on any size monitor, just change the amount of the "ScaleFactor" to fit.

Happy Resolving:)

RAID Hard Drive Tests

Recently, I spent the better part of three days reformatting, tweaking and testing my main Hackintosh Mac Pro Tower. It is now the foundation for my new Davinci Resolve/Smoke Suite.

I have a redonkulous amount of hard drives connected to this system. Fifteen to be exact, but who's counting?:) Yet the most important drives to me are the ones that make up my RAID array. If you are going to be doing any serious video work, especially HD or larger, you will want to setup and run a RAID as your primary video playback and capture drive.

I always go with Western Digital's Caviar Black hard drives when building my own systems. These 7200 RPM drives are absolute screamers and offer great performance and reliability at a decent price point.

For my current rig I decided to stripe together three 1TB Caviar Blacks. Since this is a budget build, I am going with a software RAID rather than a RAID card based solution. I have been very happy with the internal software RAID that OSX provides. Super simple to set up and works like a charm.

I decided to do some hard drive speed tests to see what kind of performance I can expect from these drives.

The first speed test was of a single Caviar Black. This one drive produced some very respectable numbers. It peaked out at about 105 MB/s for both disk read and write speeds.

The second speed test was of two Caviar Blacks stripped together in RAID O by using the disk utility. This 2 disk array maxed out at about 208 MB/s for both disk read and write speeds.

The third speed test was of three Caviar Blacks stripped together in RAID O by using the disk utility. This 3 disk array topped out at a smoking 312 MB/s for both disk read and write speeds.

I could have gone for a 4 disk array, but felt that 300MB/s was more than adequate for my current needs. Keep in mind, that these tests are best case scenario. In the the real world as the the drives fill up and start to fragment, performance will take a hit and these numbers will plummet. As long as I can maintain a sustained rate of over 200MB/s for the long term, I will be pretty happy.

So, if you are like Maverick and "feel the need for speed", you better get yourself a RAID.

Santa Monica College Media Technology Campus

Back in September of 2010, I posted an article about the upcoming additions to the AET campus.

It looks like Clive Wilkinson Architects have been busy, as the above rendering shows. The 79,000 square foot "Santa Monica College Media Technology Campus", as it is now called, is a marvel of modern design.

Having the broadcast and digital media classes in one central location will help foster creativity and promote interdepartmental networking.

I love how the new studios for the all mighty KCRW are will soon be on Stewart Street for all the world to see. There is also going to be a new cafe and courtyard on campus. If we just add a hotel, we would never have to leave:)

Poptent Promo - Shot on GH1 (GH13,GH17)

Poptent Final Composite

MJPEG HD 1280x720 YCC 4:2:2 30fps 85mm @ f4.0 1/60 Sec. 400 ISO

MJPEG HD 1280x720 YCC 4:2:2 30fps 20mm @ f4.0 1/60 Sec. 400 ISO

I recently shot some green screen footage using two hacked GH1's (GH13, GH17) with my young and talented Promo Pathway students. I thought this would be a great opportunity to try out the new MJPEG HD 1280x720 YCC 4:2:2 settings. The fact that these little cameras can shoot 4:2:2 without the need of an HDMI capture card, is rather mind blowing.

I am very happy with the results, even though it did require some serious garbage matting and rotoscoping. Unfortunately, as with most chromakeying, it is never just a one click proposition.

GH13 & GH17 using Pixelphile NTSC Indy Filmmaker Settings.

MJPEG HD
1280x720 YCC 4:2:2
30fps
1/60 Sec.
400 ISO
Smooth Mode
-2 Contrast
-2 Sharpness
0 Saturation
0 Noise Reduction

Canon FD S.S.C. 20mm f2.8 @ f4.0, Canon FL 85mm f1.8 @ f4.0

Sansdisk Extreme Class 10 SDHC Card.

Rode Video Mic Pro.

Edited in Final Cut Pro.

Composited in After Effects.