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0:14
Hello, and thank you very much for listening to this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. I was thinking today I went to my local film store, my local camera store, dotson’s here in Eugene. And I dropped off a rule of actie film this 100 speed acti film that I that I recently finished I guess kind of is sometime in junior I finished the role I was shooting a Nikon nav camera with a 50 millimeter lens. I just dropped it off to get it developed. But I don’t I don’t do the scanning anymore. I kind of got tired of that I wanted to shift over to a more modern digital system. But I like shooting film, I dropped it off at DOT Dawson’s they do sort of a 24 hour ish. You know, return time, which is great. It’s fantastic. But I said well hey, like do the develop only I don’t need the prints. But I do want a digital version. So do a CD print up the CD for me. But now optical media is so rare. I don’t have a CD drive, I don’t have a CD drive in the house I have I have a computer over here, set aside or like an old desktop computer one that’s kind of in the closet, I’m going to pull it out, plug it in, just so I can put the CD in it, get those photos off, put them on a thumb drive and then transfer it over to my computer. So kind of one of those funny things where you think you’re in a system and then part of the system starts to get antiquated and made obsolescence and now we’re in a place just a few years after the Millennium where optical disk drives all of that stuff, all those trillions of dollars I’m sure that we’re invested in creating this technology of optical discs has now become obsolete and kind of turned into something you can hardly use. So it’s a kind of a funny system. And that works out but have a CD right now and a set of negatives of some really cool photos that I’ve taken between March April May of this year that I shot on film so excited to put those up here soon.
2:14
You can see more of my work at Billy Newman photo comm you can check out some of my photo books on Amazon. I think you can look up Billy Newman under the authors section there and see some of the photo books on film on the desert, on surrealism on camping, and cool stuff over there. This image that was a quick screenshot, or a quick capture that we made around the campsite, near Lone Pine, California and the Alabama hills and it was a really cool campsite. I think we stayed there for about, I don’t know four to six days or so in November and December of 2012 really cool time of year to be out there. And we were fortunate I think Easter this year in Nevada is we had that rain shadow so that it was just a lot drier on the east side of California than it was on that coastal side of this year in Nevada is when we were there a few weeks before that. But the cool thing about this campsite if you guys were to bother to look it up. It actually matches the broom Hilda seen from Django Unchained. If you were to watch that, we found that out I think right after we camped here at the spot, then we’d watched the movie Django just a few months later. And we’re like, whoa, wait a second. We just been to that spot. that exact spot right there right where this picture was taken. I think I think there’s a scene where it shows like Jamie Foxx sitting over on the rock that is currently the kitchen table in this scene. But yeah, it’s kind of interesting. I think the shot was set up a little different, but it was really cool to see and you’re like wow, that’s right where we used to be interesting when you find out a spot that you were or something else was filmed and it seems like a remote kind of campsite like this, but I’m sure over the years 1000s of people have been there.
4:01
You can check out more information at Billy Newman photo comm you can go to Billy Newman photo.com Ford slash support. If you want to help me out and participate in the value for value model that we’re running this podcast with. If you receive some value out of some of the stuff that I was talking about, you’re welcome to help me out and send some value my way through the portal at Billy Newman photo comm forward slash support. You can also find more information there about Patreon and the way that I use it if you’re interested or if you’re more comfortable using Patreon that’s patreon.com Ford slash Billy Newman photo.
4:41
As we move into 360 video is just real, a whole new threshold or 4k 360 video. It’s this whole threshold of stuff that I’ve not really worked on in media before, and I’ve not really, I guess what would it be? Like, I haven’t rendered it. I haven’t I haven’t brought a 360 video file. haven’t ever bought a 360 video file into like Final Cut Pro before. So I was trying that out this weekend and I had to upgrade a lot of stuff had to upgrade my Mac to Mac OS High Sierra, which has been out for a long time. But I’ve been kind of delaying on that because I wanted to, well, I just had a stable system and I try and use my computer for work long time. So I really don’t try and do updates that I don’t have to do with some stuff. And finally, it’s good that I waited six months to put ice on it, but it runs fine and run stable. And really, I was most interested in trying to work on this 360 video project which takes Final Cut 10.4 which is where they bring in some of those features for 360 video and VR editing and production. So it was kind of cool trying to check out but oh my goodness is that 13 inch MacBook mine really struggling when it tries to render out even just one minute of footage or when it tries to render in a 360 graphic elements is supposed to exist. You know it like on a dimensional plane, it’s interesting you can put you can like put text out into space in the 3d or the in the three dimensional well not three dimensional but in the 360 space. You can look to the north, let’s say and see words that are printed there you know, some kind of graphic that’s laid out there and rendered into the frame I guess is what you would call it or into the into the virtual environment. It’s just sort of stuck there. And so as you look around as the video elapses, you’ll see you’ll see this graphic object layered into the frame. And I can only imagine what kind of what kind of processing it takes to really produce some of those effects in the backend it’s amazing that we’re able to make what is it at queer rectilinear images
6:38
at akwil rectilinear i think is a format I don’t know it’s one of the format’s that, you see that’s where you see like the stitching of the two 180 degree images sort of melded together and it’s really interesting looking at that footage and I think it’s a phone is a pretty effective viewer for it and in the moment but I’m looking at other stuff like the I think it’s the gear not the Gear VR, well there’s the Gear VR the HTC Vive, there’s like the Oculus, I think it’s Oculus, right? The Oculus VR there’s like a cheap one now. I was really impressed or like it was like $200 it was like 199 to get to get a screen and goggles to do some of this 360 video experience and I’m trying to think about like this business ventures that are sort of attached to this with with a new medium that’s sort of approaching like I think a couple years ago was the advent of of aerial drone footage. You know before then you had to get a helicopter and a gimbal and that’s $100,000 shot to get to get aerial footage over your property or you know, whatever it is and so now it’s it’s just so much more possible than it used to be. I remember I remember watching I don’t know I think there was like a movie that had this gimbal shot and they talked they talked about in the you know the behind the scenes stuff where they had this cable camera that ran for like 200 yards is sort of swept in and and sort of did this one shot through this long sweeping intro into like this, you know this big opening scene, but they had this big cable camera ran across a football field basically you know, you know whole action field and they pulled this camera across so it’d be this smooth kind of gliding shot that was just a little bit 2030 feet above everyone and they couldn’t really pan it with just a crane. So they’re talking about technically how they engineer this shot and this is back in I don’t know 1999 2000 and now it’s just that’s an amateur ability where you can get a drone with a gimbal and put it 20 feet in the air and have it follow in for 200 300 feet and have a perfectly still 4k image that the tracks in on a party or you know looks really cinematic or you know any anything like that it’s just amazing what kind of options that are now with with the way you’re able to develop media so it’s cool thinking about just the level or the simplicity that we’ll be able to work in rendering or work in producing 360 or virtual reality footage or drone footage 10 years on from now like if you think about it for a moment like 10 years ago it was pretty hard to drop in like high definition footage onto your laptop or computer to like render out about 2008 April 2008 may 2008 that was still like a pretty car there was that it was starting to happen HD or you know amateur Lee recorded HD footage was starting to happen but really it was it was pretty rare to get HD cameras on the market for inexpensive prices. in that era it was still all standard definition stuff I mean while I was in college, doing new media stuff all the camera project or you know all the video projects that we worked on were all in standard def It was really an interesting invention that we switched over to 16 by nine for a lot of the you know the the standard output of a lot of the files that we’d render when I started the first camera like the first camcorder I was really working with was it was a Canon XL one. And like the 2002 2006 seven era and man fantastic camera. I think there was like A lot of documentaries that were put together that you know, is a real workhorse kind of professional camera. And I was really fortunate to be a person in Southern Oregon getting to work with that level of video technology back in the early 2000s. It was really a cool opportunity that I had. And then kind of thinking about that now just the level of like, wow, okay, so we moved on from standard definition, we moved on from the four by three aspect ratio, we moved on from tape media, or from AV capture files, and you know, capture card systems, and so on, that’s kind of transitioned into much simpler h 264. Pro res file systems, these digital file systems that are easy to upload easier to write to a computer. And amazing what processors can do now to just in the the level of work that they’re able to output. And what’s interesting is like this, so 10 years ago, the difficulty of rendering HD footage that we had, that’s similar to now 10 years later, in 2018, the difficulty I’m having, trying to render out this 360 degree footage that’s, that’s been recorded, and it’s just so much, you know, you’d imagine it’s like an HD video in front of you. Now, this is a 4k video that’s all around you. And it’s just seems like you know, just seems like dozens more,
11:15
I don’t know, just seems like a way bigger file to render, I guess that’s really what it is, 4k files are real big. And for this virtual reality 360 thing, it really seems like you need that level of resolution so that when you look in any particular spot, you know, through like a VR headset, you get a full resolution image from that, that single vantage point that you’re looking at. And when I was talking earlier about ventures or you know, business ventures that I’d like to incorporate into the 360 video idea, I was really thinking a lot about like, like wedding photography events, or you know, there’s, there’s wedding videographers. But I think now with, with like the release of the, just this season, the release of the GoPro 360 fusion, which has, I think it’s like an integrated digital gimbal support. So as you as you move the camera around through three dimensional space, the camera kind of digital reacts to the motion that you’ve created. And so it sort of stabilizes that. So I guess considered you’re you’re walking and you’re taking steps and so you kind of have a trot to the the motion of the camera. Well, I guess Apparently, this gimbal is supposed to this digital gimbal doesn’t. McCann or it doesn’t, you know, work in the real world. But it just, it takes the video file and I guess it’s able to gimbal it, whatever that means, but it’s able to smooth that out and stitch it together so that, you know you kind of lose a lot of that shakiness to the video, I guess they’ve had stabilization for years. But apparently they’re explaining at least that it might be a different level of it. So it might be an interesting thing to check out. But what I was hopeful to do was, you know, try and do something where you’d you’d record like, a 360 video of let’s say, like a wedding ceremony. And then as a as an offer to a bride and groom, you give them a headset, and you give them the 360 experience so that they can either I guess give that to family that wasn’t there perhaps really that’s just like a Facebook opportunity in a big way like because you can just share those videos. You know, share those videos online and kind of see them digitally through the browser, which is a really exciting thing about social media sharing YouTube 360, Facebook 360. And I think Vimeo 360 are all video sharing platforms where you can you can view that content in a browser. I think chrome works the best for right now I had a lot of trouble in Safari viewing 360 browser stuff but but really interesting stuff. And it’s been kind of cool. I was trying to think though Yeah, like, oh, be cool. Yeah, set up for the you know, set up a 360 video. And then years from now, you can come back because a big track, but years from now you can come back and like put on goggles or view just everything that was happening at a wedding, but it’s a really immersive experience. I thought it’d be kind of cool. So I guess all that’s to say I rented a GoPro 360 fusion, I think it should be here this week. So I’m gonna try and run through and put together like a portfolio of 360 images, and in 360 videos from a lot of the locations. You know, a lot of the natural outdoor landscape locations that I’ve sort of come to learn about over the last 10 years of doing landscape photography across Oregon in the northwest, so I’m hopeful to try and do that over like the Memorial Day weekend. I think it’s going to be kind of fun. Try to hit it hard. Thanks a lot for checking out this episode of The Billy Newman photo podcast. Hope you guys check out some stuff on Billy Newman photo.com a few new things up there some stuff on the homepage, some good links to other other outbound sources, some links to books and links to some podcasts. Like this blog posts are pretty cool. Yeah, check it out at Billy new minnesota.com. Thanks a lot for listening to this episode and the back end like you next time.