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From: Tom Bray <tbray@umich.edu>

Subject: mindv ffmpeg capture preserve blog leolabs

Date: March 5, 2022 at 5:45:09 PM EST

To: Tom Bray <tbray@umich.edu>

https://leolabs.org/blog/capture-minidv-on-macos

Tom Bray

Converging Technologies Consultant

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2021 59th Ann Arbor Film Festival

 Once more into the breach.....

This is our second year as a virtual festival.  We had more time to plan this one - last year we had 10 days - but in some ways I think last year was easier.

I must give a shout out to all the Festival Staff - especially Angela! - who all worked really hard to make this happen.  An amazing group to work with, and all of them are really a lot of fun.  

Thanks, folks.

And also a big hand to the board of Directors who stood behind us again this year as we moved through uncharted waters.  Without their support & expertise this Festival would be a very different animal.   

Thanks, folks.

First, you have to understand that normally I touch every digital file and put a lot of effort into making the screening playback a nicely curated experience in the theaters.  I pay attention to the timing between the films and the program slides, and take care to get the audio levels across a screening are within a reasonable range.  Sometimes I have to add a fade in or fade out, but never without consulting the filmmaker.  I see my job as putting the best possible version of your films onto the screen for our audiences - as well as dealing with all the performance and installation projects.

Last year was a lot like being in the theater: instead of playing back files from a computer to a *projector*, I was playing them back into another *computer* that was sending out the program to Vimeo who was hosting the stream.  I still had all the files right in front of me so I could do all the curation I normally do for the Fest.  If you haven't seen it, here is my writeup after last year.

This is my workspace for this year - my 'living at work' desk...

This year was different.  All the files were delivered into the cloud so I never touched most of them.  We used both Cinesend and Eventive because we were told they would talk to each other and transfer files for us in the cloud.   If you are a filmmaker reading this, that' why we asked you to send your films to Cinesend.  That turned out to be wrong, so files were downloaded and uploaded manually.  I didn't know about that until it was done, so I missed the opportunity to finesse the screenings the way I would usually have done.

One other tech detail is the Zoom thing.  Last year I had some control over the level and tonal qualities of the audio, which helped.  It was a combination of being there in advance of airing the Q&A and being able to 'tweak' it as it passed through the laptop feeding Vimeo.  This year it is a straight hookup from Zoom to Eventive so we have to depend on what Zoom can do, which is actually pretty good.for audi leveling.

And we can't put up nice graphics between things as easily as we could last year.  I did make a little bumper to lead into the Q&A, nicely outfitted with a bit of audio from Mark Murrell aka Ed Special.

And as you have noticed (if you are reading this), the Eventive platform adds its own charm to the viewing process (those three boxes are our pets!").

At least they finally fixed - literally 2 hours before our first screening - the glitch they had where the "Forensic Watermark" screen was showing up in between each and every file that played back.  That would have been an awful viewing experience, so THANKS EVENTIVE ENGINEERS!

And I know that those of you used to just showing your pass at the theater are finding the process of having to individually sign up for each screening a bit repetitive.  But that's how Eventive works.  They are known for is their ticketing Kung Fu, and are getting better at the whole streaming thing now that pretty much every film festival in the USA is using their platform.  but they still have a few things to figure out.

Anyway, enjoy this years AAFF.  We all learned a lot about these online platforms, and we all think there are elements of the virtual we will keep when we get back to the theater.

But we just can't find a virtual replacement for the Michigan Theater's concession stand...

Streaming the 58th Ann Arbor Film Festival

Greetings.

Hope you find this interesting.  Among the other things I do, I am the Tech Director for the Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF).  Since we could not do the Fest in person this year, we made the decision to live stream it all about 10 days before it started.  It started on Tuesday March 24.

Our agreement with the filmmakers was that it would be a live-only, one time stream.  No files for later playback, nothing that could be downloaded.

The process of figuring the tech out started on Saturday. the 14th.  A lot of that was trying different ideas and seeing how they worked.  We paid a lot of money to Vimeo to be able to do the live streaming and get strong support. I have since learned that you can do the same streaming using the Premium version, which is about $900 for one year.  But you don't get the same level of support, and we needed it.  We were writing the playbook, and you can benefit from what we learned with the expensive level of support.  Check with Vimeo.

Now that I have actually built all the program show files, I have time to do stuff like this.  This is just to give you an idea of what my life has been like these days, taking the AAFF live-streaming online.

Stream link and program info at aafilmfest.org.  Almost ready to be outdated, but there you go.

These photos show my "office" and my "desk":

Looking at the photo below, the laptop on the left is what I used to generate the stream, using software that acts like a TV control room (Livestream Studio 6). Everything comes into that gets mixed/chosen, and it outputs the live stream to the Vimeo site.

The laptop on the right is what I used to join each Q&A session so I can put it on the stream.  It looks like a camera input to the streaming software.

The iMac on the right is playing back the video files that make up each program.  The one on the left is our backup, and what I used to build the rest of the Fest once we started.

A quick description of the work flow here:

A computer plays back the files that make up a program, or collection of movies and interstitial bits like program listings, slide shows about upcoming screenings, etc.

Another computer joins the Zoom meetings for each Q&A session that happen immediately after each program.  Participants include as many filmmakers as can join, a moderator that handles the questions - both prepared and live from the audience via a chat window on the Vimeo site - and someone from the festival staff that fields those live questions and puts them into the Zoom chat window for the moderator to read.

A third computer acts the hub for collecting these signals and creating the stream that goes out to Vimeo.  I used Livestream Studio 6 software, which has an interface much like a TV control room switcher.

Finally, there is a second iMac that is standing by in case we need to generate another input  for the stream.  Mostly I used this to keep building the show files for the rest of the Festival, but it came into emergency use for the Saturday 4 PM program.  

It turned out that the file I had for a 40 minute movie was corrupted, and stopped playback around 6 minutes in.  So I had to scramble to get a link from a site from where I could stream it.  I connected to that site on the backup iMac, went fullscreen with it, and then switched to that input on the laptop generating the stream.  The whole emergency switchover took about a minute, and I was able t start the replacement playback at the same time the original had failed.  Viewers had no idea what had happened - they just thought it was a normal glitch that happens in the live festival event.

This is a pic of what the Q&A looks like, along with a large monitor in the background that I use to monitor the live stream.  You can also have a closer view of the software I used to generate the stream.  If you look closely you can see the little tiles that represent all the possible inputs to the stream.

I have to be part of every Q&A Zoom meeting so I can bring it into the live stream, but I turn off my sound and image.  You can see me listed as "Tom Bray Tech Director" in the middle of the top row. When you turn off your video in Zoom you just show up as your name like that.

And since I had some time, I also built this graphic.  Viewers that go to the Vimeo site see this:

Most of the work up to Saturday had been building the rest of the shows.  We moved into our undisclosed location with just the first day ready to go, so since then I was building the rest of the Fest show files as we are streaming.  Kind of like crossing a bridge while the construction crew is just ahead, still working to get to the other side...Also very much like being a filmmaker, producer, VJ, DJ, and Tech Sergeant Chen all at once.

(bonus points for identifying Chen without Googling it...)

At least there are some windows.  I seem to have chosen a vocation that usually keeps me in small rooms under artificial light most of the time.

And.......we're clear!

Until next time, have a good time!

-t

2019-09-12: Cyborg Art at Penny Stamps Lecture

Thursday Sept. 12, 2019 was the first penny Stamps lecture of the Fall term.  Speaking were the founding members of the Cyborg Foundation:  Moon Ribas and Neil Harbisson.

Unfortunately, Neil was unable to get a visa to come to Ann Arbor.  But that's where I came in.

Chrisstina Hamilton contacted me in the last week of August to ask if I could help them arrange a way top present Neil remotely in a fully professional way.  I worked with Andre Grewe of Stamps to put it all together.

I brought our DMC streaming kit to the mix which allowed me to use the Presentation laptop from the stage and the Video Conferencing laptop backstage as inputs to Wirecast.  I was then able to switch between them, and even make a Picture-in-Picture output combining Neil and his presentation images.  And the output of my computer was then sent to the video crew that was capturing the event and to the Michigan Theater projection system.

My setup backstage: VC on the left, Wirecast on the right.

PIP as seen on Wirecast screen.

I also used our camera to feed a view of the stage back to Neil.  it was getting audio from the house mix so the stave mics and audio from the presentations could be heard clearly in Switzerland.

Moon and Adam during setup.  You can't see it, but the VC camera is off to the left.

The BlueJeans video conference was all done over the Michigan Theater's wifi network, and it all worked almost flawlessly.  There was an occasional glitch in the VC image, but Neil's voice never dropped out.  We were prepared to "throw an ethernet cable" over to Lane Hall if needed, but we were good.

For about the past decade, Moon and Neil have been putting sensors of various sorts into their bodies in order to become Cyborgs.  For example, Moon seems to be very interested in earthquakes.  Among other things, she had sensors surgically implanted into her feet that would vibrate any time there was an earthquake anywhere on the planet.

She also had an interesting story about how she and Neil had a prosthetic tooth put into a gap they each had in their mouth.  They could send a click to each other by pressing on it with their teeth.  This photo shows them on a table with their backs to each other communicating by morse code.  And the teeth used Bluetooth to communicate: it was a Bluetooth tooth...

The Bluetooth tooth demo.

Installation of Moon's earthquake sensors. 

Neil has an antenna surgically attached to the back of his head.  It curves up over his forehead.  He is color blind and he uses this antenna to sense different colors and then produce a musical note. So when he hears a G he knows the color is yellow, etc.

Neil's antenna seen from the Wirecast screen.

And it took some doing, but Neil actually has his UK passport photo showing him with his antenna.

Their talk started with a bass drum piece whose score was written by the number and intensity of earthquakes around the world from 1976 to 2019.  Each year got 10 seconds.

Moon gave her presentation while Neil was watching via BJ.

Of course, he could not resist taking a few photos with his phone - but I was the only one that saw it since he was not yet "live".

Then she introduced Neil and she ran his presentation locally while he spoke from Switzerland.

The best part, though, was when their colleague Adam came out with *his* antenna, and he and Neil connected them across the Atlantic to share information.  Adam first pointed his antenna to a variety of colored objects and then Neil would tell us what color they were.  This was all the more impressive because Moon forgot to move the camera so Neil could see at which object Adam was pointing his antenna.

And the Grand Finale was when Adam went out into the audience and "read" the faces of some people.  Neil then recorded what he was hearing from his antenna and played the notes back to us.  A fine time was had by all.

That's it for now - and until next time, have a good time!

2019-07-18: Treetown Murals Projection downtown

Mary Thiefels and her husband Danijel Matanic are the partners of Treetown Murals.  And this past July, they once again enlisted me and Marin Thoburn to assist them in starting a new mural. Martin & I had done this for them before when they painted the McKinley building mural on N. Main St.

McKinley photo here

We used a projector and a digital file of their artwork to project onto the wall where the mural would be.  This is the finished mural:

Working at night, they then painted the outline of their artwork so they could fill it in during successive daylight hours.  As Mary put it: when we were done, they had a giant page from a coloring book.

The "coloring book" finished outline.

This wall was a bigger challenge than the first time - literally and metaphorically.  It was 10 stories tall, and we needed to get onto the roof of the bank across the parking lot.

Some views of and from the roof.

From the ground, daytime.

From the ground, nighttime.

Jeri Hollister & Tom Bray on the roof.

Tom Bray & Martin Thoburn on the roof.

The sunset from the roof.

The projector setup was interesting. We had to do the projection in 3 setups, for the bottom, center, and top parts.  The bottom required that the projector be turned upside down so the projected output would reach the bottom.  The center and top parts were with the projector right side up.

Projector setup for the bottom part.  Note the safety line going off the right side of the frame.

 We had wood barriers and clamps used at the front or the rear of the table, depending on how the projector was tilted.

Wood placed at the front to raise it, and a barrier at the rear to keep it from slipping off the table.

We had a laptop with the full color graphic and several layers we used to align the projection correctly each time.

The full wall, showing the center section getting set up

The alignment grid, with vertices at each actual intersection of the wall finish.

The bottom part of the projection. 
They wanted to do the person standing at the bottom first, to get that height correct.

Martin scrutinizing the projection alignment.

Projection showing just the white light output from the projector.
We used this so they could see their work without the full color overlay.

The white light showing the work so far.

And of course, there was a lot of waiting time to fill...

Tom reading while they painted.

Finally, just a nice shot of Mary on the scaffolding at night, waiting while we got the alignment right for the center section of the mural.

That's it for this entry.  Until next time, have as good time!

-t

2019: The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin part 1

In May 2019 I helped create and install a groundbreaking exhibit at the Uganda National Museum: “The Hidden Archive of Idi Amin: photographs from the UBC”. This exhibit is mostly photos, but it also has about 30 minutes of time-based material from digitized films and audio tapes.

The promotional flyer for the exhibit and associated panels.

Here is a short video we made at the museum that helps to explain this exhibit.

This trip and the exhibit that we installed was the culmination of over 2 years of work. It started with my first trip to Uganda at the behest of Dr. Derek Peterson, a UM Professor of History that does his research in Uganda, to visit the UBC (Uganda Broadcasting Corporation) and discuss their options for digitizing their extensive U-Matic videotape library. That project may never happen for a bunch of reasons, but I remain hopeful.

On that trip, Derek and I discovered a large filing cabinet filled with thousands of 2¼ square B&W film negatives of Idi Amin’s official photographer(s). 

Derek examining the filing cabinet

On our return, we found a relatively small amount of funding for me to buy and set up a film digitizing system (laptop, scanner, archival supplies) and go back to Uganda for a week to set it up and train 2 grad students from Makerere University, Jimmy Kikwata and Edmond Mulindawa, to do the work. The project was to be supervised on-site by Edgar Taylor, a former Ph.D. student of Derek’s who has deep knowledge of Ugandan history and politics.  Over about the next about 8 months, they cataloged over 70,000 negatives and digitized over 25,000.  Photo of the setup below.

The digitizing room at the UBC.  L-R: Edmond, Jimmy, Jacob, Edgar

Meanwhile, 6 reels of 16mm film were found by Jacob Noowe and Malachi Kabaale who work with us as our UBC colleagues.  Edgar was returning to the USA in August 2018 and we got permission from UBC Managing Director Winston Agabe for Edgar to bring them to UM so we could have them restored and digitized at Colorlabs in Maryland.  They arrived in Ann Arbor at the end of August 2018 and went to Colorlabs on Sept. 27th.

And this one was in *good* condition...

Then in April our colleague Richard Vokes from the University of Western Australia had arranged for a shipment to UM of about 60 reels of ¼” audio tape of radio speeches by Idi Amin.  I supervised Mark Murrell - one of the few people other than me in Ann Arbor with significant experience with ¼” tape - in the digitizing, right here in the Duderstadt Center.  It took about a month.  All of them were baked first but only three were too far gone for playback.

We got the low-resolution film scans on December 27th, 2018, and the final high-resolution sections on May 9th.  I was to leave for Uganda on May 12th, so I had to work quickly to assemble the video and audio files for the exhibit.  Fortunately, Derek had put together a paper edit based on the timing of the low-resolution scans and audio files so it was mostly replacing low-res with high-res and tweaking the edit.

All these media resources became the source material for the exhibit that was installed on this trip.

My role leading up to the installation was to organize all the digitizing of the various media, edit together the media reel that is part of the show, and design the AV systems to be used for playback in the Uganda National Museum.  Here is the floor plan of the exhibit, rotated so I could make it bigger.

And here is a walkthrough I made with my iPhone which gives you an idea of how the floor plan worked out in real space-time:

It was about 2 months before I left that I was asked to come to Uganda and supervise the AV install, as well as to capture the public events and some private interviews, etc.  Here is a link to my instructions for repacking the AV gear of the exhibit.

INSTALLING THE SHOW

Doing something of this scale in Uganda is not without its interesting aspects.  For example, the electricity at the museum was off more than it was on.  For the opening day, we ran the LED lights we had installed along the timeline and the projector and sound system from a generator parked outside.  Fortunately, we did not require much power at all.  Much of the installation is actually more or less documented in my AV "How To" PDF, but there is more to tell about the setup and execution of all the events.

Here is a timelapse excerpt of Derek and Richard beginning to hang one of the post-movie-room galleries.

Me at the entry graphic.

Richard and me prepping the hang.  You can see the gap above the walls we had built where I placed the speakers.

The entry hallway with photos from the pre-Amin era - the colonial days.

The iconic "This way!" photo of Aminpointing to the door to the exhibit hall.
When this photo was taken I was using the same AKG mc stands to do Eclipse jazz concerts in Ann Arbor.

The galleries hallway.

The movie room.  I hung the speakers and projector and used the wall for the screen.

Signage outside the museum.

Richard taking photos in the Timeline hallway. We bought and installed he overhead LED lights.

One of the challenges was just finding things we take for granted here at home.  For example, these bins were what the hardware shopping looked like.  It was not a storefront per se, but the interior of a store opening with multiple stalls of vendors selling the same kind of stuff.  I did manage to find what I needed, but it was not Stadium Hardware.

 

This was one of a number of handmade tools available.

Me recording one of the pre-tours before the opening.

A couple of UBC crew absorbed in the timeline photos.

Reunited: Malachi, Jacob, Tom (me), and Edgar. 
In front of "the how we did it and thanks" wall, opposite the opening graphic.

"ACTUALLY, TOM, YOU'RE A VERB"

OK, now I get to brag a little bit.  When I first arrived and we sat down as a group to get organized, Derek said "So. Tom, you've become something of a legend at the UBC."  Before I could follow up we had launched into far more practical issues.  It was not until a few days later when, after a long day at the museum, we were having beers and dinner that I was able to follow up and ask "So, Derek, can you explain the UBC legend comment?'

And the Edgar piped up and said: "Actually, Tom, you're a verb."

Of course, I was fascinated: I had never even imagined this was something one could aspire to!  Edgar explained that because of the way I worked during the digitizing room setup - basically conjuring something out of nothing again and again - it had transpired that when the group needed to do something but had no resources to work with, they would just "Tom it".  That meant finding whatever was around and figuring out how to make it work to accomplish what was needed.  In other words, I had become the Uganda MacGyver...  Here is the blog entry that sort of set me up for this.

And we had a real live "Tom" moment during setup.  A nice young woman was having a very hard time trying to get the black backdrop for the panels to hang anywhere near to straight.  The critical issue was that she had no stiff rod or pole or something to which to attach the material. If it was on a stiff rod, she could then hang the rod.

So I asked Alex Odom, the wonderful exhibit installer for the museum, if he had anything long and not likely to sag.  He could not think of anything but took me to his 'storage' area, shown below.

I found 2 abandoned track light bars, which together were longer than the drape we were trying to hang.  I lashed them together with some tie line I had brought along, ad the used the black conductor form some extra speaker wire to attach the drapes to that.  And then we hung the whole thing.  It was not perfect, but it was much better.

The track light bars lashed together.  You can also see the black wire used to hang the drape.

The whole thing being hung.  You can see it is not perfectly straight, but once it was in place it was just fine.

So why is this exhibit so remarkable?  First, very little has changed in the Uganda National Museum since it was built by the British, so having a modern exhibit like this is unusual.

I've been told that over 70% of the population of Uganda was born after the era of Idi Amin, so this is the first time they have had access to first-hand artifacts of that era.  It is the hope of the museum that this will start a dialogue between grandparents, parents, and children about that era and what happened.

And finally, even for me, seeing 120 large B&W photographic prints along with film and audio recordings from the '70s is a transportive experience.  Most of the young people in Uganda have never seen an actual photograph, let alone so many in such a large format.

And it was the 1970s: it *looks* like the 1970s.

And that’s why I was in Uganda from May 12-24 of 2019.

Once the exhibit was running and the opening panels were done, we went back to the UBC.  In part to get organized for cataloging and digitizing the 35mm film reels, which were all that was left to do, and in part to look for additional reels of 35mm film.

That story is coming soon...

-t