Currently browsing posts by Lou Lesko.

Good comparative analysis of the quality of jpeg exports from Lightroom

Jeffrey Friedl has taken the time to create a javascript powered tool that lets you compare jpeg images exported at different quality levels.

The Lightroom default JPEG export quality of 75, falling in the 70〜76 range, seems to provide for as good a visible result as the highest quality setting for all the samples except for the bridge, which seems to suffer at least slight posterization banding at all levels, including even “lossless TIFF”.

It’s a great read for all photographers, especially ones using Lightroom.

Shout out to Daring Fireball, where I found the story.

Matt Plaxco produces a gorgeous behind the scenes of Alex Lim

Bringing a narrative thread to any sort of documentary project is always a challenge. Especially since the story takes shape in the editing room and not before the shoot like a scripted piece. Behind the scenes (BTS) videos are no different than shooting a mini documentary and should be approached that way. Yet so many of them are not. They end up looking like a wanna be music video with a bunch of vignettes mashed together. Effective occasionally, but not as a norm.

Matt Plaxco was kind enough to share his behind the scenes video of photographer Alex Lim. It’s a fabulous example of keeping the viewer engaged. The location is just a hop skip and jump north of my Sausalito office and is my old shooting grounds from when I got started in this business twenty five million years ago.

Big muchas gracias to Matt for reaching out to us here at PCN.

Photographer Profile: Alex Lim from PlaxPhoto on Vimeo.

Ultra Awesome

I know this has nothing to do with anything that we do on this site. Just take a sip of your coffee and laugh your ass off. The campaign was created by Wieden + Kennedy and has gone on to sheer viral super stardom with a string of YouTube videos in which the Old Spice Guy personally thanks bloggers, twitterers and celebrities who have commented about him online. He did 184 thank you videos from his bathroom before he hung up his body wash.

Do you know what a McGuffin is?

McGuffin by Hitchcock from isaac niemand on Vimeo.

Big muchos gracias to John August, who in turn credited Movie City Indie for bringing it to his attention.

The 5D is so last week.

Have a look at the video video that was shot entirely on an iPhone 4 in 48 hours by Michael Koerbel. With the iMovie app on the iPhone 4 and obviously fabulous results as evidenced below, I predict journalism is going to go through a radical change. If you recall Michael Britt and I used an iPhone rig, created by Michael, to cover NAB this year. We were shooting and posting video form the show floor, while our competition was up in the press room transcoding and cutting their footage from their 5Ds. Michael and I went with the supposition that sacrificing some of the quality in favor of immediacy was more important. It was a gamble that paid off. Our nascent blog got massive amounts of traffic and we were able to cover more things more quickly.

Now with the iPhone 4, it takes what Michael did at NAB to a whole new quality and workflow level that is completely viable for online journalism.

“Apple of My Eye” – an iPhone 4 film from Michael Koerbel on Vimeo.

This is huge, YouTube won its case against Viacom.

This was just posted on the YouTube blog.

Today, the court granted our motion for summary judgment in Viacom’s lawsuit with YouTube. This means that the court has decided that YouTube is protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) against claims of copyright infringement. The decision follows established judicial consensus that online services like YouTube are protected when they work cooperatively with copyright holders to help them manage their rights online.

This is an important victory not just for us, but also for the billions of people around the world who use the web to communicate and share experiences with each other. We’re excited about this decision and look forward to renewing our focus on supporting the incredible variety of ideas and expression that billions of people post and watch on YouTube every day around the world.

I haven’t researched the details of this story enough to deliver any sort of informed opinion, but I’ll do some digging to see how this affects the independent filmmakers utilizing the web as their distribution channel.

Behind the Scenes of Night and Day Pixar’s New Short

YouTube Online Editing

Could be good for journalists. As is the Google way; “it may be a little rough around the edges.”

Ebert on why you should hate 3D.

From one of the most respected voices in the movie industry, Roger Ebert, comes a balanced assessment on the 3D craze that Hollywood is currently going through.

That’s my position. I know it’s heresy to the biz side of show business. After all, 3-D has not only given Hollywood its biggest payday ($2.7 billion and counting for Avatar), but a slew of other hits. The year’s top three films—Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, and Clash of the Titans—were all projected in 3-D, and they’re only the beginning. The very notion of Jackass in 3-D may induce a wave of hysterical blindness, to avoid seeing Steve-O’s you-know-what in that way. But many directors, editors, and cinematographers agree with me about the shortcomings of 3-D. So do many movie lovers—even executives who feel stampeded by another Hollywood infatuation with a technology that was already pointless when their grandfathers played with stereoscopes. The heretics’ case, point by point:

To his point, when I saw Alice in Wonderland I loved every bit of that movie except for the fact that I felt like I was watching it with my eyes half closed because the image on the screen was darkish. It didn’t seem like a style choice by Burton, because he does well lit dark really well. It kills me to find out that it was a marketing choice to make the film look like that.

Read the full Ebert article here.

APA Raises Awareness About Corbis Copyright Issue

Reprinted with permission from the APA.

Do you have images with Corbis? Did you sign the Corbis Copyright Assignment Affirmation Declaration? If so, you may have invalid copyright registrations.