This morning I finally finished the UP-REZ of all the footage. What that means is that all the footage I was previously working with was rendered out at MED-LOW resolution. I then went and re-rendered all the footage out at HI-REZ. I have decided to go into a little bit of an analysis as I managed to come up with some hard stats on the process. Most you will be saying/thinking, "who fucking cares!" and I would tend to agree with you. Except, that is, for the one fact that time is money. Not to mention time taking from my life spent watching the proverbial grass grow.

The figures below are based on the time it took to render out 28 clips shot at 3k (3072 pixels wide by 1728 pixels high). For a size reference go here.

28 clips @ med-low resolution output took 7 hours. So for every 60 sec of shot footage, it takes about 10.5 min to render.

28 clips @ high resolution output took 19 hours. So for every 60 sec of shot footage, it takes about 28 min to render.

So what that means is it takes a fucking long ass time. All these results where using Red Rushes on a Mac Pro with the following specs:

I dont think you will be able to see the difference between the med-low rez frame and the high rez frame but you can click on them to load them up at full size. I have included enlarged segments of the two for comparison. Keep in mind you are only looking at a single frame, 25 of these suckers go by a second so any grain is amplified through the motion of it all.

MED-LOW RESOLUTION

HIGH RESOLUTION

Well I guess you could say my whole point in showing you the difference is that, in and of itself, med-low resolution is still pretty good quality if you are finishing off to HD and if you are working with enormous amounts of footage (like for a documentary) and you don't have 2 months and a few Terrabytes of space in your budget, you could concievable do the whole thing in med-low rez. Of course I would never shoot with a RED Camera and not finish to HI-REZ, it would be kinda pointless don't you think?

(DISCLAIMER: I suck at math so if the figures are off a bit, I blame it on my schooling)

So I finally had a chance to get back to the "Lotaluv" edit. I am now done with the offline 02. Basically it's a complete edit in it's rough format. I was having a few problems with the end shot as on location we were under lots of pressure to get out before we got arrested. It's one of those "fix it in post" moments. I included some grabs below to show what i am working with. Of course it is a completely rough draft attempt, but as a proof of concept I think it shows that it is possible to pull it off. To make it work, I have to Rotoscope (manually outline frame by frame the characters) which allows me to extract them and place them in a different shot.

For the final version of course I will have to spend a lot more time doing it and make it as precise as possible, but for this test I did some power Rotoscoping.

Check out some behind the scenes action from the second location in Mong Kok.

I have been using this great little free app for Mac called Time Tracker to log the time spent on this project. Some may remember I first converted all the footage at medium resolution using RedRushes. The first round took me about 3 hours. Last night I started converting to Hi-Rez the same clips. Although I fell asleep and wasn't able to log the completion time, I predicted it was about a 4 to 1 ratio in terms of the time spent going to med-rez vs. hi-rez. I think I am pretty close to the mark as can see it took 13 hours about. Fun stuff really and no doubt all of you are titillated at this.

So then enough of this nerd talk, I grabbed a few untreated med-rez screen caps from the edit. What a bunch of characters!

This is where I am at with the edit at the end of the offline02.

I just wanted to say that contrary to what I may post in my temp pages when I am in the process of uploading and posting, Posterous really does rock. I tend to get rather frustrated with myself as I suck with html and usually try to do complicated posts that just are not conducive to the easy format created with Posterous in the form of email posts. Plus Mac's Mail App sucks with sending html text.

To placate my nuerotic tendencies, I will sometimes put place holder text such as "Posterous is being a bitch" or stuff like that. Really that is just my bad sense of humor and I hope no one gets the wrong idea.

Also I just want to point out what an amazing job these guys are doing, as I was recently posting something on my posterous account and was having extreme difficulties due to my uncontrolable desire to break things that work perfectly fine, and in the process of my fourth attempt to post, I recieved an email for Sanchin without me even putting in a help request.

From: Sachin Agarwal
Date: 19 October 2008 12:08:02 PM GMT+08:00
Subject: spacing between images

i assure you, we are formatting your posts exactly as in the emails. There is no spacing between the emails and therefore we are turning them into galleries. Just type some text between each picture and you wont get the gallery

thanks

Really I appreciate your trying to assist me :) Thanks for that and I promise I will keep my bitching to myself and stop complaining cuz I don't want anyone to get the wrong idea, Posterous is really a great (might I add FREE!) way to blog and before it, I had detested bloging. Thanks and keep up the great work!!

-vix