Creativity Base

I’ve always loved Kangaroo Island- from my first taste of it with my family back in the 1980′s, to the numerous visits paid in the last few years. Recently, Emma Sterling and I had another reason to travel there- to produce a series of promotional videos for a holiday home called Le Casuarina. Since this was to be a new endeavour for us, we decided we would make a number versions of the piece, demonstrating what could be done for a variety of budgets. Called as I often am by nature, I couldn’t resist spending time in the garden filming bees and birds, hanging over the ferry bow shooting dolphin… and along with interiors, exteriors, some peopled shots and stills, we came home with a hefty volume of footage.

The main distinguishing feature of our deluxe package (above) was the use of models and actors, and the video’s extended 3 minute duration. Stylistically, placing people in the video creates a much more personal ‘lived in’ feel for the property, and also helps hold the viewer’s attention for longer, with a suggestion of story. It does so at a price though, and working with actors is costly and more difficult to schedule than shooting bricks, mortar and the surrounding environment. Local filmmaker David Mackey (who I first met many years ago when I storyboarded his short film $um Assault) and his wife Belinda Mackey, a talented South Australian model and actress, both volunteered their time to play as guests of the house. Tess O’Flaherty, another talented local actress performed the voice-over once we’d returned to Adelaide, and the score was created using a great software package called SmartSound SonicFire Pro. While I’m a musician myself, SonicFire was able to save me countless hours of composition and recording time, and allowed me to conveniently export versions of the song at four different durations and with variations in instrumentation. Nice.

For the ‘standard’ version, another fine local actress Michelle Nightingale volunteered her time and talents. As you will see, many of the shots are the same as in the deluxe version, and there is much common material in the script. The whole process would have been much faster to turn around if we weren’t so obsessed with riding the bleeding edge of production techniques though! We shot all the footage on our new Sanyo Xacti VPC-HD2000 , and the pictures looked great. Since it is sold as a ‘Dual Camera’ (a hybrid of digital still and video) it offers traditional photographic control of the video image (aperture, ISO, shutter-speed) and offers the kick-ass bonus of recording FullHD progressive footage (1920 x 1080). We shot everything in the highest resolution and frame rate (1080p at 60 frames per second) without any expectation that our editing software, Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 would struggle processing it.

Sure enough, whenever our 1080p editing timeline reached about a minute of content, the program would crash. We purchased and installed the MainConcept MPEG Pro H.264/MP4 plugin and enjoyed improved results, but still could not get more than about three minutes of material onto the timeline without toppling the system. This is on a powerhouse i7 920 cpu, with 12 Gb of RAM, might I add. Admitting defeat after experimenting with countless variables, Emma edited the project in segements, down converting slabs of footage to 720p resolution, and re-importing them into a 720p timeline. We floated the two longest clips online yesterday, and as always, have spread the word using Web 2.0 platforms, most notably Facebook and Twitter to help get the pieces circulating. With any luck, we’ll be able to follow this job with more commercial work along a similar vein armed with the knowledge to just shoot 720p resolution footage in the first place… at least until the next patch for Premiere Pro is released.

If you’d like to know a bit more about Le Casuarina, please visit the property’s website.

Dan Monceaux

I recently ran into trouble when the activation grace period on one of my Windows XP-based notebook PC’s expired. I had no idea that after that period, XP would suddenly deny me access to my computer, the internet and the data on its hard-drives. I immediately started looking around for ways to regain some access to my computer, before making my next decision regarding an operating system install/re-install.

The two options were to either illegally cheat the system, by downloading a Key Generator and effectively stealing a copy of Windows… or find some other legitimate work-arounds which would allow me to do what I needed most urgently. Like most people would in this situation, I needed to backup my emails, move documents and data off the drive onto an external, and deactivate a couple of registered programs via the internet.

Having been through system overhaul pains plenty of times before, the first thing I tried was rebooting the machine in Safe Mode. This is achieved by pressing F8 as the system first starts up. You should then see a DOS prompt screen which gives you a few variations of ‘Safe Mode’ for you to choose from. Unfortunately, the ‘with Networking’ option remains blocked after the activation period is over… but the regular ‘Safe Mode’ option provides some limited access to your system.

Next, when Windows login prompts appear, click ‘Later’ or ‘Not Now’ or whatever the obviously relevant option is to defer product activation. Unlike on regular boots, you’ll find yourself now staring at your familiar desktop, in crunchy, low-res ‘Safe Mode’ glory. From here, I was able to wrangle my data onto an external drive (at painfully slow speeds) and achieve one of my major goals. If my machine wasn’t an ACER 6930G laptop, I could have alternatively pulled out the HDD, and copied the files to another machine directly, via an external drive housing, or docking station. Confound you, XP! Confound you Acer!

My next step was to backup my email. I swear by Mozilla open-source software and use it wherever possible, so that meant backing up my profile and emails from Thunderbird, by using the wonderful little MozBackup utility. If you haven’t heard of this before, it makes backing up and restoring settings and data across a range of Mozilla applications a breeze. It’s allowed me t move my email account painlessly from machine to machine (including old emails) on many prior occasions. So I opened MozBackup, but unfortunately, as is sometimes the case with ‘Safe Mode’, the program did not work as per normal. It was not able to find my profile information, so I could not create a current backup of my Thunderbird profile and its contents.

As the cold sweat began, I somehow followed a run of links that lead me to the Tomorrow Times blog entry ‘How to login to an expired windows’. Thanks to Steve Seguin’s help, I was moments away from achieving my next two goals- to backup my email, and then deactivate some software licenses, so they could be reinstalled later… after a new, clean operating system install.

The method Steve Seguin recommends is a back-door entry of absolute genius and involves the help of Narrator, one of Windows XP’s Accessibility tools, which basically reads aloud whatever your mouse passes over in a charismatic robot voice. After booting your system normally, you start Narrator by pressing the Windows key in combination with the letter U. You then click in the top left corner of the Narrator dialogue box, and select ‘About’. From there, you click on the underlined hyperlink, and ‘Hey Presto!’ you now have have an Internet Explorer window which allows you to surf the net, or do as I did, go to File ? Open, locate and run a few programs. After running MozBackup successfully, and then deactivating the Adobe Production Premium Suite by running Photoshop in the same way, I had all my valuable data and software registrations off the PC, and I was ready for a clean install of a new operating system.

After that horrendous experience, I was ready to choose the path forwards. As I need to run the Adobe Creative Suite on a daily basis, I had to choose between Windows XP, Vista or the new Windows7 RC (release candidate). Since the later is currently available for free download, with full updates until mid 2010, I figured I’d give that a shot… but that’s another blog entry.

Dan Monceaux