@cbrandin

Back to shutters – I dig Hammond too, BTW, remember Brian Auger and Julie Driscoll?

I think your idea is quite promising for two reasons:

– When people see footage shot on RED with HDRx, they generally say it looks more cinematic. I think it's the motion trail generated by the longer exposure for the darker parts, blended mildly into the highlights.

– Twixtor works very well if you don't try to generate serious slo-mo, but only fill in frames. I used it recently for a well-known video artist, who had her project already shot in 50p to slow things down, but later was still unhappy since her camerawoman made a few turns a tad too fast (it was a very long uncut sequence). So, we tried generating intermediate frames to screen it with higher (albeit fake) temporal resolution. We both tested 1080i50 and 720p50, and she liked i50 the best. After all, i50 is blending the additional temporal information into the motion, and it looked quite smooth.

So, let's start experimenting with intermediate frames generated by Twixtor and mixed in by different overlay modes, maybe even blurred to some degree and see if we can make electronic shutter look any better.

Here's Barbara, she's one of my faves, and Tony ain't too bat either:

Here's a link to the old rotating speakers I was taking about used by Hammond, these things still send a chill down my spine just like that smokey hazy that hung in the air of the clubs back then.. .hehe... Bit like Wabi- sabi actually :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_speaker

@pundit, I did a video 2 years ago using most of the "Once were Warriors" soundtrack (I'm a naughty boy for doing that i know, but the Kiwis loved me for it) He ( Charlie Tumahai) joined the band "Chain" too for a while.

Anyway, back to wabi-sabi !!!

@pundit, ha haa, one of my fav songs. reminds me of a time in Melb venue called Airport Club Airport Rock (something like) in Essendon early '70s) the band had the Hammond cranked and the those rotating/spinning speakers screaming just before the end of the song for a big finale when the power went out. The Hammond and speakers wound down in an awesome dying fade/slowdown over 30secs that had the audience clapping. When it fell silent, the lead singer announced what had happened was unintentional but sure was the best finish to a song they ever did.

Must have been giant Capacitors discharging or something to keep the thing sustaining for so long with the power dying, i'll never forget it.

R

cbrandin >One way you could go about this is to create intermediate, motion interpolated frames and combine them with the captured frames using lower brightness for the interpolated frames. That would give the motion strobing a softer look – like with film cameras. It would be quite a project, though…

Interesting that you say that Chis, I've been toying with sample/resample with 50p footage when exporting as 25p in Sony Vegas and with resample enabled the footage is very noticeably smoother with the interpolated frames when there is "moderate" motion in the scene. Of course extreme motion results in visible ghosting or double imaging, but with careful selection it's quite pleasing and very useful, especially if the footage was shot 1/100 for use as slowmo, but then decided to use it at regular speed.

Nothing like a real B3. crosstalk, keyclick, tubes, leslie . . . there are a million little quirks that added together make those monsters so wonderful. A VERY good B3 keyboard like a Nord can sound decent if you pipe it through a Leslie, but the playing experience is not the same. The Start/Run switches, the air of the generator, the crackle that comes from slowly depressing a key . . . the smell of oil . . . that's why I'm glad I've got the real thing.

In terms of wabi-sabi . . . I saw the same relevance to filmmaking last year when I learnt about it in my Asian Philosophy course.

Yes, I was the one who made the footage they shot in Arizona for the moon program look authentic

I knew, I knew!

Nick - No, I did this work over 20 years ago. I worked with Yamaha, Alesis, and Ensoniq. The B4 way very cool, though!

Chris, I am sure that you had been in US moon program :-) Most probably also developed security system of White House :-)

Nick - No, I did this work over 20 years ago. I worked with Yamaha, Alesis, and Ensoniq. The B4 was very cool, though! It's too bad they don't sell it any more - I think it was hands down the best B3 model I ever heard - I still use it to this day.

I have a computer I use that still has XP installed on it so I can use some of these old synths/samplers.

@cbrandin Yep - done similar thought-processes with samples of pipe organs, when constructing virtual instruments, where you alter the tuning of held notes according to how many other notes are sounding, to simulate the effect of differences in wind pressure as different numbers of pipes are called into action.

I was also thinking though of how obsessed we seem with "old" lenses vs clean modern ones, and yet are also keen on reproducing dynamic range and colour perfectly.

Many years ago I used to design synths and samplers. I remember one project in particular where I was asked to model a Hammond B3 organ. I got the waveforms perfect – but it just didn’t “feel” like a B3. Eventually I bought a Hammond organ (a M3, I think – it was cheaper) and took it apart to analyze how it produced sound. One thing I noticed is that the keys weren’t simple switches – rather they were a series of bars with several wires (one for each harmonic) that would touch the bars when a key was pressed. As an experiment I programmed the synth so that instead of having all oscillators kick in simultaneously I had them start at slightly different times (randomly). Suddenly the sounds “felt” much more like a real B3. In fact, all the precise waveform modeling turned out to not be very important because with this key “crick” gimmick almost any waveform (within reason) resulted in a fairly authentic sound.

What I learned from this exercise is that what makes a sound “feel” right isn’t necessarily the most obvious or prominent component, and that often we really don’t understand exactly what makes things sound like they do.

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” - Marilyn Monroe :)