The Oblivion Ball in Tokyo, Japan - Review, photos, and movies

[TheBang]

Well, like I said, I don't have much more footage from The Oblivion Ball aside from small snippets and mostly crowd shots.

Hm, what's on these other video tapes here though...

[King of Snake]

I was doing some video compression testing today and thought I'd use this huge Pearl's Girl vid as an experiment. Here's a smaller version of the video. This one is 512x288 and a little less than 50 MB, using x264 codec, for those of you who don't want to have to resize the vid in order for it to fit on their screen I also deinterlaced it cause the original was 1080i which is not really perfect for viewing on a computer screen really (although it wasn't really that noticeable).

I must say the quality of the original is really surprisingly good for a handycam, both in terms of image as well as the sound.

[TheBang]

The original was encoded with x264 also, but it's much bigger because, well, the movie's much bigger.

My camera actually records 1080p24, but it's encoded within the 1080i60 fields. Final Cut Pro might not have gotten the pulldown cadence correct in some places because I noticed a few interlacing artifacts in the beginning when the lights are really low. For the most part though, it got it right. There was a lot of motion in this whole video, and if you step through the frames, you really won't see any interlacing artifacts except at that beginning part.

[King of Snake]

Originally Posted by TheBang

The original was encoded with x264 also, but it's much bigger because, well, the movie's much bigger.

My camera actually records 1080p24, but it's encoded within the 1080i60 fields. Final Cut Pro might not have gotten the pulldown cadence correct in some places because I noticed a few interlacing artifacts in the beginning when the lights are really low. For the most part though, it got it right. There was a lot of motion in this whole video, and if you step through the frames, you really won't see any interlacing artifacts except at that beginning part.

ah yes, I must say that that was the impression I got as well. I stepped trough various parts of it and noticed the interlacing in some parts, but not in others. They really should have done away with the whole fields thing with HD formats, but alas they seem to have made stuff even more complicated than it was before.

It's great that cameras now just record straight into H264. Definitely a step up from fucking DV Does it work with a harddrive, or some kind of optical media?

[TheBang]

Hey man, DV was a revolution; don't knock it!

My camera, a Canon HV20, actually uses HDV, which is kind of the high-definition successor to DV. It uses MPEG-2 compression on video tape for the video. The other major consumer HD format is AVCHD, which is what most of the hard drive, flash, and recordable optical media HD camcorders use.

I did a lot of research before settling on HDV over AVCHD. I read that in head-to-head comparisons, HDV still beat AVCHD in quality. I think it's partly because AVCHD is immature (vs. HDV using the time-tested and well-understood MPEG-2) and the manufacturers are using much lower bitrates (maybe too low) with AVCHD. The editing tools are much better for HDV too. Most of the major software packages couldn't even handle AVCHD until the middle of last year. Recording straight to h.264 just makes it harder to edit later. And also, I chose HDV because I still like the "permanency" of tape. All the reviews also gave super-high marks to the HV20's image quality.

I've done some tests authoring some of the footage to BD5 (Blu-ray on DVD-R media). It looks amazing on my 52" LCD TV. It's hard to believe that such beautiful quality came from me shooting on that little camcorder.

[King of Snake]

thanks for the info. You'd think I should really know all this stuff since my job is in the video/graphics industry

So far though I haven't really had to deal with HD footage but at some point it's gonna be unavoidable.

[froopy seal]

Thanks, LeBang!

Awesome... TO THE MAX!

[TheBang]

A time-lapse video of the Art Jam is on the Tomato website (click the article title to expand):

http://www.tomato.co.uk/?p=1419

If you want to save the video right-click on the small picture and choose "Save File As..."

[TheBang]

Matt posted his high-res photos from that night. Nice shot of the mixer strips!

http://www.darktrain.jp/thumbs.php?galleryid=19

Also, I found this nice Flickr pool, which looks like it was put together by several of the ArtJam assistants from that night. I recognize some of the photos ending up in the Book of Jam 3:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/makuhariartjam/pool/