Brett Noe Productions

From the Delicious blog:

Today, we’re pleased to announce that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. They are committed to running and improving Delicious going forward.

Read the rest here.

A great post by Stu Maschwitz on Prolost. Read it here.

This is my favorite quote:

Whichever is the case, take heed: your TV will try very, very hard to make whatever movies you watch on it look not just bad, but aggressively, satanically, puppy-drowningly bad.

While working on my site, I came across this post by Andy Salterri describing how to use Vimeo videos in ShadowBox JS.

If, like me, you do video production for a living and you are a Shadowbox JS user, this will be helpful. I dislike having to keep track of multiple copies of my videos. This means I have one less to keep track of now. I am pleased.

You can see the results here.

Editor Dylan Reeve has posted some tips that shooters might find useful for getting their footage edited more quickly and easily.

Numbers 1 and 4 are my favorites.

Recently, Brett Noe Productions was an exhibitor at The Phoenix Bridal Show. The show came upon us rather abruptly so we only had a couple of days to prepare.

We needed some way to loop video for display at the show and decided to use the iPad. After a bit of searching, we found a couple of apps made by Shinichi HISAMATSU called LoopVideoPlayer and LoopVideoInstant. The main difference between the two apps is that LoopVideoPlayer gives you more controls. LoopVideoInstant starts playing automatically and only stops when you press the home button to exit the app. We used this for this show but decided we needed a larger display for next time. We liked using the iPad but wanted to use a larger display.

The iPad can connect to HDTV at 576p and 480p with Apple Component AV Cable; 576i and 480i with Apple Composite AV Cable. This is not really optimal. It also can connect to devices with the VGA adapter to a TV or projector with a VGA input. VGA output is at native resolution of 1024×768, which is the standard resolution of many projectors. It is also 4:3 aspect ratio. The problem lies with HDTVs having 16:9 widescreen resolutions of either 1920×1080 or 1280×720. If you set your HDTV to 4:3, your image has both letterbox and pillarbox so you have a small but correct 16:9 aspect image. It looks like this:

There’s a lot of real estate wasted. On my 40″ HDTV it’s as if I’m watching on a 27″ screen. If you set the TV to 16:9, images are stretched horizontally without being scaled properly in the vertical direction. It looks like this:

Notice the shape of his head and the knob on the cabinet. Neither solution is ideal but what can you do to fix it?

The choice I made was to modify the video so it would display correctly with my TV when set to 16:9 aspect. This way we would use all of our available screen real estate. What you need to do is export your 16:9 video at the 4:3 aspect so that it properly fills the screen vertically. This makes the video look like this on the iPad:

Then when you set you TV to 16:9 the video stretches horizontally and displays correctly. It looks like this:

Now the video is completely filling your screen and presenting your footage as intended.

It’s a bit of a process but is mostly automated. Here’s what you do:

With 16:9 video save it at 4:3. For example, if your video is 1280×720 then save it at 1280×960 or 1024×768. If your video is 2.35:1 aspect, save it at 16:9. For example, if your video is 1280×540 then save it at 1280×720 or 1024×576.

This will make the video look stretched vertically on the iPad but will look correct on a 16:9 device that works the way mine does.

I hope this helps a few people.