Category — High Definition

I can see the opening scene now: Phelps shoveling down his 12,000-calorie breakfast, ending with those chocolate chip pancakes. There must be tons of footage available already thanks to all of those digital camcorders and video cameras that have been following him around.

I haven’t thought about swimming much since I was a kid, but watching Michael Phelps at the Olympics made me notice that something is missing from my life: the opportunity to eat whatever I want and not have it show.

Thinking of Phelps and all of the technology-assisted broken records as the subject of a film made me think of how Hollywood has looked at sports over the years. Here is a short list of my personal favorites:

1. Bang the Drum Slowly
2. The Natural
3. Hoosiers
4. Field of Dreams
5. Chariots of Fire

Rocky just rates an honorable message in my book.

I understand that the Grammy’s awards make strange choices, but Herbie Hancock beating Amy Winehouse and Kanye really takes the cake. I had no idea he was even nominated! This harkens back to 2001 when they gave album of the year to Steely f-ing Dan instead of Radiohead, Beck, or Eminem. But like they say, award shows are hard to predict and don’t really mean all that much.

Despite losing Album of the year to Mr. Hancock, Kanye managed to win quite a few awards. There’s no way can he be a sore loser this time. He won Best Rap Solo Performance, Best Rap Duo Performance for “Southside”, Best Rap Song, and Best Rap Album. And his performance with Daft Punk was pretty good, especially the camera close-ups of Daft Punk inside the pyramid. If I was running the show, I would have shown just a tad more of those funky robots since it was their US television debut.

After reading up on Sunday’s show, it turns out that this year’s show was the biggest one yet. They used 19 high definition cameras for the taping alone! And I’m sure filming Amy Winehouse via satellite cost a pretty penny. But seeing how she won five awards, I guess it was worth it. My favorite part of the show was seeing her win Record of the year. She seemed genuinely touched.

If you haven’t, you gotta check out “The Michael Showalter Showalter” on collegehumor. Last week’s his guest was his good buddy, Michael Ian Black. You probably seen Black on “Ed”, Vh1’s I love the 80’s, or heard he’s the editor of Cracked magazine.

This show is pretty easy to make with any digital video camera. You probably wouldn’t need a high definition camcorder for a web-content show. The quality of the image won’t help you compete with all these other comedy video collectives. It’s all in the writing. You’ve got to have funny sketches that can translate whether broadcast on the web or on a tv screen. Web-only video content is beginning to be recognized. Look at “West Bank Story”, it premiered on Myspace videos and now won an oscar for best short film!

Tons of High Definition (HD) electronics are popping up in the marketplace each day. There are HD televisions in various resolutions (720p to 1080p). And the battle between Sony Blu-Ray and HD DVD still rages on. Consumers are now thinking all about how many HD channels their cable provider will give them. Or to a further extent, does their favorite show even use an HD video camera yet. For camcorders, the new revolution is to use HDV technology instead of DV or miniDV tapes.

What exactly is HD or in the case of camcorders, HDV? According to wikipedia, HDV “is a video format designed to record compressed HDTV video on standard DV media”. And HD is truly what it sounds like: a higher resolution of the image. The picture comes out brighter with more realistic colors and detail (due to increased bandwith). All HD is presented in widescreen format.

Since the technology of the HD camcorder varies from a regular DV camcorder, you need new editing software. Or you must translate the HD image to apply it to previous editing systems. There are simple solutions to this problem. For Final Cut Pro, you can just use the Apple Intermediate Codec to modify the information. There is some quality loss, but HDV is still easily edited on a personal computer. There are also HD specific software like Sony Vegas, Avid Xpress Pro HD, and many others.

Some serious filmmakers have made the change to HD, but for beginners, HD is very hard to dive into using. For now, it seems HDV is still in the professional user’s domain.