Flapping Crane, 2007
Workin on some things.
First is kind of a lead-up to finally doing the Flapping Crane DVD. Believe it or not, putting together a good DVD is tougher than it may seem. I don’t want to just toss it together in iDVD. I want to at least be able to have a secondary audio track.
Anyway, one of the biggest concerns is aspect ratio. Most of our skits are shot in 4:3. Some, however, are shot in 16:9 (widescreen). This makes things a little complicated when it comes to putting together a dvd. If we want to mix 4:3 and 16:9 footage, we run into trouble. Do we letterbox the 16:9 footage? If we do, it will look very squished on 16:9 displays.
One would think that dvd progs are smart enough to look at a movie’s resolution and set it up appropriately. If it imports a move that’s 853×480, it should know what’s going on. Or, if it’s anamorphic footage, I should be able to tell it to format it as 16:9. iMovie and iDVD get very confused. They tends to treat everything as 4:3.
Even if they could figure that out, I’m still not confident that I can mix 4:3 and 16:9 footage in the same track.
So, I’m experimenting with cropping some of our 4:3 footage to 16:9. This is, in some ways, bad. It cuts off 180 pixels vertically. Actually, it’s a little more than that in my case, and about 18 pixels horizontally, for some good but otherwise uninteresting reasons.
It’s not so much that I miss the cropped pixels, it’s just that the resulting movie is 640×360, which isn’t exactly kickass. I’m not too concerned about it, though. This stuff was not shot on the best equipment anyway.
It is possible to get better quality from some skits. What is Love?, for example, was shot in anamorphic widescreen, which means that it could be stretched to 853×480. I’m not sure it’s really worth it, though. I’m not sure how evident it is on the version of the skit on the web site, but we had a lot of problems with focus with that camera and lens. All of the closeups of the connect four board are quite blurry.
Anyway, I’m gonna be able to fart around with all this stuff pretty soon. AppleTV is coming out in several weeks, and it’ll be a good start.
Other things —
We’ve actually meant to shoot the last two weekends, it just hasn’t worked out. Looks like we’re shooting this Saturday, though.
I don’t think I mentioned it here before, but Fatty Burger was put up recently.
There are several skits that are unfinished:
- Men Gone Romantic — Actually not much work left on this one. Expect it pretty soon.
- Dicknation — I dunno if I’ll ever finish this one. I’ll need to be pretty motivated. I’d actually have to dig around for the footage.
- Teen Wolf — May be released someday. No one could really agree on a cut, and the footage wasn’t exactly top-notch.
- Platoon — I thought that this one was abandoned, but apparently the missing parts do exist. We’ll see.
- Esteban — Last I heard from Shawn was that he may just make a blooper reel of this, like we did with Time Gnomes.