Sachin’s Posterous

On Saturday we took the San Francisco cable car from the Powell St stop, where it turns around, all the way to Fisherman's Wharf. I shot the entire ride in 1080p with my Canon 5D. I'd never done the cable car ride before but now I highly recommend it. Make sure you are sitting in the front, or hanging off the side. It's a great way to see a lot of the city.
 
Check out the rolling fog over Alcatraz towards the end of the video. Very cool. Make sure you click to full screen the video, HD is on.
 

 
The Powell St station is also where the cable car turns around.
 

 
Details on the video: Canon 5D Mark II 1080p H.264. Edited on Final Cut Pro with ProRes 422. 1000% speed across the board. Exported to H.264 and then uploaded to Vimeo. The exported H.264 video still looks flawless on my machine, but Vimeo definitely added a lot of encoding artifacts. Boooo. You can click to download the quicktime video on the Vimeo page.
 
No, I'm not going to stop complaining about flash video. Get over it.

Click here to download:

DSCF3728.MOV (68723 KB)

I had so much fun with my dad's dog the past few days, I was very sad to see her go back home. So smart, so loyal. She never barked, she didn't shed. He hair is silky smooth. She's just like a little stuffed animal. Sometimes I didn't believe she was real.
 
She has so much energy. She always seemed to have a smile on her face and wanted your attention more than anything in the world. We played fetch with a ping pong ball. She loved jumping on me, and biting my hand. My dad made a really great decision to get a dog. I'm looking forward to spending lots of time with her.

My dad is visiting with his new puppy, Millie. She is a 4 month old Morkie. Incredibly cute, hard to photograph because she never sits still!

       

Click here to download:

Cutest_puppy_ever_takes_over_S.zip (726 KB)

Click here to download:

DSCF3719.mov (12081 KB)

We saw The Space Rockers at the Speakeasy in Austin. A group of guys dressed in space outfits playing 80s covers, it doesn't get any better than that. We had a blast. If you're in Austin, check them out. They seem to have a pretty full schedule (i'm not surprised, i would hire them).

Austin is known for its music. I was there a few years back for Austin City Limits and had a blast. We didn't see a ton of live music at SXSW (we were there for the dork interactive portion), but we were lucky to catch Ten Out of Tenn at the Speakeasy. "Ten Out of Tenn" is a compilation of Nashville singer/songwriters. They tour together and share a band, and play backup for each other. Great idea.

Below are Erin McCarley, K.S. Rhoads, and Katie Herzig. These were all shot with my Canon 5D Mark II and Canon 70-200 F4 IS. These are all straight from the camera, posted to Vimeo HD, click full screen to view them large.

I worked on Final Cut Pro for six years. The quality control was over the top. I worked on the real-time playback and effects system, and every single frame had to be delivered on time. Our playback mechanism wasn't used just for on screen previews, but even for realitime playback to recording devices, or live TV!

So the standards were high, the tolerances were low. Every single frame had to be delivered on time, along with the audio. If the video was one frame late, or the audio was one sample late (we liked to blame the audio guys!), shit hit the fan and we DID NOT SHIP THE PRODUCT.

Maybe this just goes back to my rant about beta software... But more specifically, Final Cut Pro had high standards for AV sync (aka, perfect), so when i was watching the world series today for 5 minutes, and then later watching a video on youtube, and noticed that both were out of sync, it drove me crazy.

Now, I agree that after 6 years of working on a video product where frame rate is god, my standards are high. But i'll still hold that I think products like Youtube and CABLE TV have standards that are low. Incorrect AV sync is crazy and out of the question. If you specialize in video, the least you can do is do it right.