Output results from that curve, comet Panstarrs April 2, 2013

Comet Panstarrs l4 2011 at HJRO.

125x processed with a curve in Filterstorm for iPad.





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Previous image adjusted with Filterstorm for iPad, the curve adjustment.

Ideally one would use stacking of many photos and a much more fine and smooth process than a simple program application or app, like Filterstorm.

Filterstorm for the iPad is a rather rough photo editing program for the iPad. I think due to limitations on the iPad it was written to use less than the full range of colorspace which would be available in other more expensive programs (like photoshop, nebulosity, practically any advanced editing program on the Macintosh or PC). The normal PC program likely has more internal color space storage for each pixel of the image, inside the program. Because of the limited processing, I believe color gradients may appear to be more rough and posterized with filterstorm, than one might get with a better program.

The positive of the app is instant feedback on a touchpad with Filterstorm. It seems like the process for editing is more organic and quick than a desktop program would offer.

So in this case, I traded quality for speed of use, especially with curve filters.

We can still use a curve process to try to take some sky glow out.

In this case I'm going to use some rather radical processes which is somewhat radical to most photo processors who do astrophotography. I'm going to use negative curves. I'm using negative curves to reduce the sky glow that we were picking up from the longer exposures. This sky glow
usually is in the reddish range from lights at night in the atmosphere, that is an orange like tint, from sodium street lights. We can reduce that by targeting the tint in the reddish range. The theory which is put forth in the Nebulosity manual, which can be found on the internet, is one can separate the colors from a bright photo and split off the histograms, using processes in Nebulosity that will do this. This is the opposite of what most image processors due with faint images. They usually try to merge the colors in the histogram. They usually want the red, blue and green color curves to be aligned. In reducing sky glow from a photo that is to bright, we will try to split the histogram in Nebulosity, and then pull down the sky glow portion of the image using negative curves.

Negative curves tend to bring an image back or part of the image back and cause the display to look like it was drawn back into the photo in a 3d kind of way. It often ends up showing a white over saturated image in parts often bright stars, and this looks like it was literally pulled back into the photo, giving a quasi 3d look to the photo. The posterized effect in the photo is due to the radical use of curves and there being little differences in gradient values, that is actual values of the trail of the comet from the sky glow.

So we end up with an image that looks like it's more posterized and where many values look like they were clipped. It's a posterized kind of view of the comet. Having less color space in internal processing will cause clipping and a rougher gradient as well, giving a pixelated posterized sudden drop off that is less smooth than most astrophotographers would like.

I can always say I was trying to be Artistic in a poster kind of way. Will that get me off the hook?

Some heavily processed photos that people create of Hubble deep space images end up having a posterized and somewhat granular glow and look to them. I suspect they are using negative curve processes or positive curve processes that are so extreme that the bright areas are pulled out and the 3d like effect seems to occur.

Below is the radical curve I used on the iPad




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Working on The Choir video, some notes

Had problems syncing up the three main clips inside the multi clip window.

I think the glitch was due to some kind of audio track shift, the sound didn't shift but the track looked longer on the timeline.

It could have been due to a glitch in the digitizing of the clip into the bin. In any event, this is more of a diary note than an update for others.

It's a little more challenging and time consuming to edit this than I thought it would be, One of the things however that is clear is wow, I'm a big Choir fan and this looks and sounds a lot better than I thought it would have from my memory of the video taping. I had some technical problems during the Choir taping for example at one time I was shooting and my autofocus on the Sony HD camera went out of focus and didn't go back into focus for 30 seconds. It seemed like forever at the time and I was very fatigued of course so I thought, it was an example of many video problems I'd encounter during the edit.

Having more camera angles gives the editor the ability to get rid of mistakes like that auto focus issue. Now that I'm editing and seeing the first three camera angles start to fit together, it doesn't seem that there are to Manu problems with the video. This doesn't mean I didn't have a lot of problems with the taping that I would not have wished to correct with better planning and having the luxury of hindsight to correct. One of the problems is the dreaded wind noise that the microphones picked up near the end of the concert. I didn't remember to rig up wind screens and didn't have them for the main audio recorder so some of the songs near the end have some wind noise during parts of the songs.

Well that's about it for the comment on editing. I know that practically nobody reads this anyways, so it's more like a diary for me to look back on in the future if I even choose to do that.

I can say that with bands like these and the editing process, I often get mesmerized by the performance of these bands and end up watching to much of the performance during the editing process, rather than editing the thing and moving on. A part of this process is just watching the footage and saying to yourself, what cut would look better and should I make a trim a little earlier or cut to the camera later. It can be interesting to watch, but sometimes I spend a little to much time watching intermediate edits, istead of moving on and getting that next camera angle into the program.

With this video I'm going to have more intermediate cuts, because I'd didn't get a four camera angle cut with six or seven clips into one multi clip time line. Having more intermediate programs with less camera angles earlier in the process will make the edit process a little longer than it should have been.



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Finally starting on editing the nest video from Cstone 2012, some issues.

Decided to start to edit a band I was going to wait a while on, The Choir.

I was going to do some more smaller set bands with less editing requirements because their set was shorter, but decided to try to get The Choir done.

Imported the audio and video clips, and started synching the audio with the recording I made.

Ran into a problem or glitch which I didn't notice or perhaps worked around somewhat differently.

I looks like the audio and video are drifting out on sync for this footage, meaning the audio on the video tracks and video on those match, but my master audio track was not transcoded correctly into the 48kilohertz sample rate correctly. Normally Media 100 will import the sampled audio and transcode it to the sample rate you select. I didn't do anything out of the ordinary as far as I can tell. Unfortunately I left the audio recorder at 44.1k sample rate while recording all the bands.

From time to time the sync would seem to go out of drift but was corrected with the other projects, I was able to correct that, but in this case, it doesn't look like it's something easy to correct. I wondered if I could mix sample rates and just import the file as a 44.1k rate and drop it on the timeline to compare it, but that doesn't work. All audio sample rates must match in the media 100 timeline, it's probably because the playback module has less effort in playing back one sample rate for all audio channels. Imagine the horsepower requirements to play and transcode everything to some common rate for playback in realtime.

To see if I can get a different length at the 48k rate, I imported the 44.1k audio at 44.1k and exported that audio as a 48k export, to be reimported into Media 100. If the transcoding is doing some kind of straight move from one bit by bit audio sample and just repacking the bits without doing a time calculation, kind of like an audio fit to fill, then the transcoded long sections will actually play back at a different rate. Which means the audio would drift out of sync.

I can do a playback and resample into another recorder using an analog mixing method to get rid of that problem if it becomes a problem.

I'm wondering if under default processing I've been getting this error and somehow my editing, with perhaps more cutting and moving around of smaller video clips masked that problem.

In any event, this is more of a diary update for future reference than a report of much progress. It's time to start editing again, been to busy with astronomy and various health issues around the house since the holidays.

I can say it was really run to watch some of The Choir again and relive the Cornerstone 2012 experience, without the 100 degree heat.






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My video editing project kind of ground to a halt over the holidays.

There was a lot of activity and some of this related to astronom which slowed down my edit process. Much of this was related to my not having a budget for more hard drives and my unwillingness to delete some of the older projects that has been delaying my editing.

There were other distractions. Most notably a DVD ripping project to inventory and rip DVDs we already own for my moms kiosk setup. This involved HTML encoding of a custom web page as well. This took quite a bit of time as we had about 400 DVDs many from laserdiscs copies we own that were put on the kiosk which is a Macintosh computer.

After the kiosk was setup for my mothers iPad mini which was a little Christmas gift, I decided to get serious about having w backup for the 900 movies we had for her kiosk. This meant getting a drive that I could use as a backup and boot drive as well. I wanted a backup boot drive that stored all the movies and would allow me to use it as a carbon copy boot drive. This took some time to setup as well.

I was ripping movies late at night. There was other issues, she kind of rejected the iPad web page thing after about three weeks worth of work getting the thing setup. It's a good list concept where a list a web page shows all hr movie names. Well my mother has an iPhone as well and I set that up for her for Netflix and a couple of stored movies. These are what she uses a lot. Netflix wasn't working. She had an old iOS and Netflix the old app was broken and wouldn't work or get updated. In any event, I decided to upgrade her phone to iOS version 6 and see if that would allow her to have Netflix. That update took five hours with various backups, one being a backup before I started the upgrade process. Then I signed in to my apple identification for her phone. After a few restarts I started playing around with her movies and realized that the newer iTunes which I also loaded on my laptop was showing movie sharing over the home wireless network. Hmm that library looks like it would include anything I'd have on e kiosk if I relinked the movies from a kiosk drive through my laptop.

I spent about an hour doing that and all the movies about 930 show up on her phone and on her iPad mini. She seemed more receptive of this interface and the visual representation of the movies, with thumbnails than my info page kiosk setup.

In any event she seems to enjoy the new setup and can stream the audio through apple tv as well but not video and audio. So she can get the large speaker sound from the living room setup but have the movie display on her iPad mini.

In any event, with all these late night jet lag like renders and astronomy, ive delayed editing and setting aside time for more cornerstone videos. I have to start on that again. I even realized that I forgot a Trace Bundy concert that was going to happen last November? Or was it early December in Detroit? I really wanted to see him again in a local venue which would have been cool. But it's a small venue and lily was sold out anyway. Kind of bummed and shocked I forgot about the concert and also a bit surprised how fast the time flew by. These iOS devices and wild movie kiosk projects can sure take a ton of time and the time can fly by.

All in all iOS 6 looks to be pretty cool on her iPhone 4 but no Siri assistance and voice controls. The biggest hassle with iOS 6 is they changed the phone dialed button colors to white with outlines on white, which is stupid and something we can't change. There is a fix which is reverse colors in accessibility, bit at reverses everything and makes pictures and backgrounds look like they are negatives. Looks like apple is making some goofy mistakes in some of these updates and not realizing the users need better interface options, especially for the elderly. I could increase default fonts foe her, but I doubt that would help. Maybe I need to buy a phone diaper program for her now to solve the keypad problem.

I hate to complain about apple in this blog post, but it's just a short subject for the day. Maybe the newer iPhones would have this solved or an iOS patch will fix this in the future.

In any event it's about time to start up on editing again. I've been going at it much slower mostly because I haven't spent the time to cull and setup née drive space. That's the bottom line.

Also my winter activities have been cut back a bit due to the weather and some health issues at the house. Time to cut short this post as I'm about to eat dinner and much of this stuff is off topic. This is likely mostly a diary entry, there is little or no interest in this blog anyway.

Greg



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Hoping to get back to editing soon

I've been pretty busy and need to start looking at starting to edit the next video. I've been busy doing astronomy, going to a couple of concerts locally and involved with family medical issues and errands. Above you can see a photo I took of Gungor in concert locally. This is a 3d cross eyed photo. It was a very interesting concert. It's difficult to describe this group without describing the variety of styles they play. It's like a mix between contemporary Christian Praise music, a movie soundtrack from a modern movie, Rock, and all kinds of other influences. The music is excellent. Most of the songs at the concert were from their Creation Liturgy album. You never know what to expect. There is some short times in some pieces where a critical musician might feel that the songs or even the orchestration fall a little flat, almost going to a simple praise worship set, or perhaps the overuse of xylophones like percussion. But these are very few and brief, and the extra variety of music probably makes it more appealing, than less appealing. I heard a quote by someone who "attended 30 ooncerts" who said this was the best show they ever saw. (Perhaps they were young, as I've attended many more concerts. In rating the concert, for the shear variety and stage setup they get something extra. The light show was pretty good, matching a low budget Petra light show I've seen, pretty cool with the new LCD programmable lights what they can do at these events. The light show was awesome. I arrived a little late and missed part of the first song, so much to do. How would I rate this concert. It's difficult to say because I've been to a lot of great concerts. For a local concert at a hall, not compared with outdoor festival concerts, this has to be way up there in the ratings. I'd have to give it a rating of 9 out of 10. What would be "ten" as far as the pinnacle of Christian concerts. Well I'd say it's a concert that I haven't seen in a long time, I'm not talking a typical Petra concert, because this rates up there perhaps above that. It to me rates as good or as high or higher than the top level concerts I've seen, this would include Amy Grant and Michael W Smith, which have far more equipment and budget than Gungor. I can only recall one local (Metro detroit area) concert that I would rate higher and that would be The 2nd Chapter of Acts. I saw a concert of The 2nd Chapter of Acts, which was near the end of their touring career at U of M Dearborn. That concert was a definate ten out of ten and probably the best concert I've seen. That only slightly edges out the Gungor concert. Why? Well the Second Chapter of Acts created songs that were all praise worship hits, in their own right. They had harmonies and vocals that were unmatched by most and excellent band support with awesome synth lines. They lacked the variety of the Gungor concert however, even with the synths that they had. I believe the Second Chapter of Acts toured with a Fairlight synthesizer during the concert I saw at U of M and I'm really taken back by some of those patches and what they could add to a concert. Gungor is more evolved in some ways than the Second Chapter Of Acts. It's difficult to top Matthew Ward and his sisters or even approach their level of concert performance quality. Gungor actually is in some ways more evolved as they have more instrument variety and fuse different musical styles in a way that can likely keep everyone interested and at times guessing as to what will come next. How would I improve the group? I don't know if I could honestly say there is a way to improve much, because they are doing so much right and to move them in any one direction might not really improve them much. Some of the songs and song writing fall a little flat, but only in spots, they resemble some of the failures of modern praise and worship music, but only in small spots of some songs, not in a sustained fashion that would kill off even one song or cause me to drop it from the play list. There is so much positive with their approach and the way they blend the songs together I can't really think of a way I would approach and suggest a change. When you're hitting mostly home runs out of the ballpark, there is no need to change. The songs have a positive feel to them. They have enough variety to keep the most Attention Deficit Disordered fan, alert and attentive. I also like the way the songs build up and build up. I saw one song that the Farewell drifters sang that was not a typical structured song, but it had a "building and building" as if it was going to soar higher and higher, and it kept rising as the song developed. I really liked that Farewell drifters song. Gungor's songs all have a build up path, they tend to just keep soaring higher and higher. Could a show have songs that were more even and had more slow lower performance levels, giving the "highlights" more contrast. That might be one theoretical argument you could make against the show if you're splitting hairs looking for ways to improve their performance. But actually each song standing alone and having a nice steady buildup, seems very enjoyable, and I really wouldn't change that. I can remember MXPX having many short songs, built for radio play. They were all explosive. They could have tried to craft a song that was longer, but the energy they built in a concert, was sustained and it was really great to keep their shows moving forward. Gungor does the same thing really with their songs, they keep building and building. It's really difficult to put into words the effects of that concert. When I listen to their music it's very exciting. I only bought their Live album. I can't go to sleep listening to that album, it gets me moving and motivated. One evening after a late night astronomy session at the observatory I played the album to relax and go to sleep, it had the opposite effect. I was so inspired and motivated, I took the CD and laptop to the observatory to hook it up and do more observing. I ended up listening to the album over and over again while observing and looking up at the heavens, taking photographs of M42 and Jupiter much of the morning until sunrise. The observatory was my own private cathedral for observing during that time. The background of Gungor added to my observing session and kept me going. Most of the time we don't play music while observing, when others are there we don't want to change their experience of looking up and allow it to be a personal one, not one of a message or style of music being mixed with their observing impressions. But I was alone, so I had the music blaring up while looking up. At times I wondered if this would be the example of a pinnacle of music you might send out into space in a space probe. They sent an album on a space craft hurling out of the solar system, it had some kind of scientific greetings, and samples from the earth. If I was to send out a spacecraft right now, I'd probably prefer to send out the Gungor album to that. If you had a chance to send out a time capsule and say, this is what Christian praise music can be, a representation of the "best praise music to the creator". Gungor would fit the bill. . . . for an evolved music, that is current and represents many current trends of the last 100 years. The Gungor album pretty much says it all. I think I've written enough about this band. I really wish I could have shot a video of them and had the times, equipment and crew to throw together a concert video for them. That venue they were in in Canton was pretty good as well. My biggest criticism of the concert was, it was to short. . . left me wanting more. . .maybe I'll see them next time.

After a late night editing last night really enjoying tonight's concert in The Metro Detroit area.

Watching The 77s right now, it's awesome.

Check out the painted wall featuring artwork from their albums.




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