The Click of Death...(Prayer Needed)

I could really use some prayer right now. We just lost the main AND secondary drives on our family's main computer. The CPU had had some overheating issues, so I cleaned the dust out of the case and then checked it for stability. It was running fine (and cool under major load), so I put the side back on the case and left it to run overnight. When I got up in the morning, it had bluescreened again like it had overheated. Mom hit restart, and when the BIOS came up, it said the main drive had failed, and the second was in bad condition. Both drives started making the dreaded Click of Death that signifies that it is a mechanical failure, not just a chip burnout (which still be fixed relatively easily). I tried it in a different computer--no go. Some people have had success with cooling off a failing hard drive and getting one last boot out of it to pull the data off. It's not working for me, though. To cut a long story short, the second drive failed when I tried to boot off of it--and neither the freezer trick nor anything else I have tried is working. The main drive seems to be unable to initialize, not to speak of spin up. The second one just can't spin up, even though the electronics seem OK.

And here comes the bad news: when I started looking around for backups, the latest I had was a February 14th backup--and it was incomplete. To save time, I had not backed up ANY of my film footage or masters. I have the only extant masters of seven separate short films on that drive (four of them mine) including three San Antonio semi-finalists. Obviously, I'm about to come unglued over it--I don't know why the Lord is putting me through this, but I'm having to pray for faith to deal with all this a lot right now. I have been researching recovery options, and I understand that a recovery service can in some types of hardware failure open up a drive in a cleanroom and swap the platters to another drive to pull the data off, just as long as it's not too badly damaged. The only thing is that that sort of service STARTS at $600 PER DRIVE, and I just don't have that sort of money at the moment. Something strange--both drives--from different manufacturers, one used at least 4-6 months longer than the other, with very different usage patterns--failed within 12 hours of each other with a physical hard drive crash.

Anyrate, I could really use some prayer. I have the drives on ice (literally, but don't worry, they're sealed up) and I'm praying that they will stay stable until I can check out the options for possibly getting them recovered in the future. As it is, it's only the Lord's mercy that I have as much of it as I do backed up--I was rather remiss with backups, needless to say, and I only backed that 10GB up because I thought I had a virus in February. So if y'all can pray that we have the faith to deal with this and start reconstructing everything on those drives (it wasn't just video, it was the main family computer for four years)... And if anybody knows anything about hard drive recovery...well, I'd be glad to hear something. Pretty stressed right now...

In His Service,
John Calvin

San Antonio 2007 Videos

For those of you that weren't able to make it down to SAICFF this year--or those who were and just want to remember it better!--thank God for Christian filmmakers who have YouTube accounts! Quite a few of us were there this year, video cameras in tow, shooting things here and there. Some, like Nathaniel Bluedorn, had VERY nice video cameras there and were shooting quite professional interviews. Some of us had consumer video cameras and just shot handheld videos. All of them are interesting though--little clips and cuts from sessions, meals, the award ceremony, and the all-important discussions in the hallways!



There are 9 movies on the playlist at the moment, and more will be added as they are uploaded and I find them. If you have good videos of the '07 San Antonio events, please reply back in the comments and I will add them to the list!

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

Globe Reacher TV: Tutorials and Tips for Filmmakers

My good friend Daniel Rivera, of Spring Branch, Texas, has announced a new series of short filmmaking technique videos to be posted on YouTube. The first episode deals with a quick fix to help improve camera movement on a tripod. I won't reveal the secret--go ahead and watch it below!



If you have a YouTube account you can comment on the video here--we want to see more things like this in the future!

IHS,
John Calvin

Messages gone awry: American Gangster

I recently read an interesting analysis of "American Gangster" by George Will. I have not seen this film--from what I've heard, though, it doesn't look like one which I will be seeing...

However, this review includes some very interesting scrutiny of how morality and our impressions are manipulated in this film. I don't know how accurate George Will is overall, but this is pretty incisive.

In "American Gangster," Frank Lucas, proud of the purity of his Blue Magic heroin, upbraids a dealer for selling a less-pure product under that name, denouncing the "trademark infringement" that damages "the brand." Message: A drug kingpin can master MBA-speak; the line between commerce and crime is blurry. (paragraph 5)

Read the whole story here.

"And rise up from the waters anew..."

I have been listening to some new music recently--prerelease music from EliEli's new CD He Went That Way. The band is composed of three brothers from Saskatchewan--Stephen, Nathan, and Aaron Nasby. They have put together some beautiful new music in traditional, yet new styles--glorious instrumental Celtic-tinged music interwoven with solid, God-honoring lyrics and the brothers' complex vocal harmonies. My favorite song from the album is "I Am Called"--

I hear, I hear a voice out of heaven
I see the heaven’s open up
I see, I see the dove is descending
A sign from God in whom He is well pleased

Chorus
And I am called to take another simple step of obedience
An open witness of my faith for you
So I will sink underneath the waters to crucify the old man
And rise up from the waters anew

If by faith I have accepted
All my life I yield to you
If by example you say follow
Then by water I will prove

Chorus
That I am called to take another simple step of obedience
An open witness of my faith for you
So I will sink underneath the waters to crucify the old man
And rise up from the waters anew

Repeat Chorus

Awesome baptismal hymn--Stephen said they sang it at his baptism. Unfortunately you won't be able to get it on CD for some time yet, but you can see why I can't wait to get the full CD if you listen to this sample from "I Am Called" here.

They have more samples and lyrics on their website--check it out!

Adobe OnLocation CS3

I recently had the opportunity to help shoot Hoplophobia, a short film that we shot DURING the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival--yes, screenings all day and shooting all night! More on that later...

Anyrate, I was handling some of the audio/computer stuff, and so I downloaded a thirty-day trial of Adobe's new product, OnLocation CS3. I want to get CS3 so bad! (Actually, OnLocation is bundled with Premiere Pro now, as is Encore DVD, so I don't HAVE to buy Adobe's CS3 Production Pack to get it...) On that set we had some filmmakers who really KNEW lighting--such as Josh Moore out of California. He and Jesse, our DP, used my laptop with Adobe's wonderful scopes (vector and waveform) and DV monitor all night long both nights to help adjust the camera and preview footage. Wonderful stuff--can't wait until I can get it for real.

I'll post a quick screenshot when I can find one from the set--I'm about run out on the trial. I might be able to find some video of it in action from the set on my camera to post on YouTube. For those that can't buy Adobe yet (like me) there is an alternative in some things--Blender has scopes in its Video Sequence Editor pane, although they don't work on live streams. For live previewing, VirtualDub works for a 1394 DV monitor when put into capture mode. No zebras though--pity--I really got used to using them in OL and will miss them on my next project, as my camera doesn't have zebras...

Ah well, I guess we'll have to wait and see what the Lord does--it isn't out of the realm of possibility that I could have the Adobe pack come January!

In His Service,
John Calvin Young

"This Award Belongs to Him!"

I had Scottie shoot this video with my camera @ the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival, during the awards ceremony. Not a very formal speech, but very much the sort of thing that has made the SAICFF what it is.



This would be either Stephen or David Bowman, makers of the winning trailer, "A Glorious Sunrise".

I will post a link to the trailer if and when I can find it. Rumor has it that Doug Phillips posted it on his blog, but I haven't been able to locate it.

Reuters Story On Christian Filmmakers' Academy

This morning at the San Antonio Christian Filmmakers' Academy Doug Phillips announced that the first day of the academy had hit international news: Reuters had a story this morning about our Symposium on Disney, Film, and American Culture on Monday!

There are a few things that the reporter obviously didn't understand. Mr. Phillips commented that it's not quite the way he would write it... But it's very interesting that our decidedly Christian academy has become respected enough that Reuters went to Disney for a quote in response to our arguments!

Read the article that has hit news outlets around the world at:
http://www.reuters.com/article/filmNews/idUSN1835715920071022?pageNumber=2

Blender 2.43 Depth-of-Field

I recently posted on the Christian Filmmakers Email List - Tech a quick tutorial on how to use Blender 2.43's new Defocus node to create a realistic depth of field. After posting the first tutorial, (which simply doesn't compare with the release notes page at the link below) I was asked to post an example .blend with the node settings for DoF. Here's the original tutorial, with an example frame and the .blend file below.

The DoFDist setting in the Camera Edit menu (F9) feeds a new node, the Defocus node. Turn on Limits in the Camera Edit menu. You will see a yellow X on the sight line where the focus point is set. Adjust the DoFDist slider until the X is at the approximate point where you want sharp focus. Then go to Node view and add a new Defocus node. Wire in the RenderLayer, but do not wire it to a Composite or Viewer until you get the settings in place--else Blender feels the need to recomposite after every change. For some reason, it takes a lot longer to do that while you are changing settings than when you finish. Then turn off Preview Mode and No Zbuffer in the node, verify the Zbuffer from the RenderLayer is wired in as well as the RGB, and adjust the f-stop down. 128 focuses to infinity, so to test it, you might want to change it to 32 or even 16 (half the f-stop doubles the blur). After you have all that set, you can enable Composite rendering in the main render menu (F10) and wire the Defocus node into the Composite output node. Just be sure to unlink it again before changing the defocus settings.

Here is a proof-of-concept render I tried, the classic line-of-spheres scene. I rendered it with f-stop=8 and OSA=16 to HD resolution. The full image render is available at http://www.youngchristianstudios.com/2.43_DOF.jpg.

The .blend file is below. It is a simple scene with 1 light, 1 camera, and 16 spheres. (15,904 verts) It rendered with two threads in 1:44:44 on my 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, though I was running some other programs at the same time. The .blend is available at http://www.youngchristianstudios.com/2.43_DOF.blend (1.1 Mb).

I hope this helps you get out there with 2.43 and render even more photo-realistic scenes!