Sunday 16 August 2015

30 Years Ago....

This is a shot of my edit suite in Islington, London - set up in 1985/6 using U-Matic tape decks, Timebase correctors, Timecode Generators and all kinds of funky hardware - most notably, the CEL P147 and 151 Framestore !! super cool dudes... all built by my business partner Simon Garton, and myself..


Tuesday 19 May 2015



PFCLEAN

Whilst shooting some surf footage a couple of weeks ago, a Canon stills camera fitted with a 300mm lens, which was being used to capture some from shore action was dropped - small particles of sand got onto and into the lens.

During the edit session, a couple of the shots proved to be worth keeping, and whilst we were running a 2:35:1 crop and lost much of the edge dirt, de -focussed blobs still existed.

To the rescue, PFClean.

I exported the 1920x1080 progressive clips as DPX files which is the PFClean source file requirement, it accepts not, any .mov or other stream of vision. I used a default DPX output from PPro CC14 - which does this job very quickly, and imported the folder to my newly set up project in PFClean. In the filter section I selected "Clean lens dirt" This filter requires you to select marquee areas where the dirt exists, you can do them one at a time, or multiples, preview allows you to see the result immediately, and very impressive it is too - the larger the area selected, the longer the processing time is, but on my 16 thread 4.5gHz system, it was almost always pretty well instant.

It is possible to set the dirt detection to Dark, Light or both, multiple passes of the same area usually result is image aberrations, some testing and fiddling is required for best results. I was not able to find a way of saving the "map" of a particular dirty lens for use on other clips - maybe there is a way, but not obvious.
As with all post remedial work, not everything cleaned perfectly, but it rendered shots use-able where previously, there was doubt about including them.





shot before treatment
and after
top left corner at 200% before cleaning


 
and after cleaning.

whilst there are still some residual errors which I did not bother to worry about as they were cropped out in the edit, the final movie clips were a huge improvement.

Dylan's video is here:
Making my own surfboard

Wednesday 6 May 2015

Stop Spotify from updating itself:

1. Close Spotify
2. Go to %appdata%\spotify
3. Delete Spotify_new.exe if it exists
4. Create an empty text document, rename it to Spotify_new.exe (if you don't see .txt etc. activate file extension's first).
5. Right click on the Spotify_new.exe and go to the properties, set the attribute Read-only.
6. Download old Spotify 0.9.7.16 from filehippo (google spotify filehippo 0.9.7.16).
7. Install it.
8. Have fun.

Sunday 3 May 2015

Goodbye Joseph

I was saddened today to hear that my friend Joseph, died after an accident
 whilst cycling home from San Carlos on the island of Ibiza.

Joseph was a lovely guy, very gentle and, what is really hard, is that his son,
is now left alone, as his mother died recently, from cancer.

Sometimes, this God forsaken planet throws more at you than you 
can reasonably handle.