Category Archives: Movies

Moving pictures for snappers

Wireless video routing

iPhone, Movies

Made possible by the A5 CPU.

AirVideo:

A few months ago I wrote about ZumoCast, software which, when installed on a computer and an iPad or iPhone would permit routing of movies on that computer to the iDevice wirelessly. The use was obvious. When you have a lot of movies on your computer or on a file server connected to that computer, it’s nice to be able to view them remotely. The iPad is ideal for this sort of thing when you are in bed!

Sadly, ZumoCast is not available for iOS any more. Motorola bought the company and that business now belongs to Google. Google and Apple are not friends. Goodbye ZumoCast.

But there’s a new alternative named AirVideo, available for your iDevice for all of $2.99 with a free app which has to be installed on the computer in question, as with ZumoCast. AirVideo works well and you can enjoy movies over wifi from your file server or computer on your iPad or, for those with great eyesight, on an iPhone. My iPad 1 or iPhone 4S receives and plays the video and sound fine as long as I am in range of the home wifi.

Rebroadcasting:

But why not take it a step further?

One of the major changes in the iPhone 4S and iOS5 is the ability to rebroadcast whatever the 4S shows on its screen to any display device to which an AppleTV is connected. This is non-trivial and Apple has done a poor job of publicizing this feature, also available on an iPad2. Earlier iDevices which do not have the fast A5 CPU in the iPad2/iPhone 4S cannot do this. They call this AirDisplay and it’s much improved in iOS5.

The Apple TV is an inexpensive, unobtrusive gem, much underappeciated and poorly marketed. I wrote about it extensively, starting here.

Invoking AirDisplay:

First hop into AirVideo on your computer, set up the directories where your movies reside – this only has to be done once – and you can start AirVideo on the iDevice.

To enable rebroadcasting of the iDevice’s display, double click the Home button on the iPhone 4S/iPad2, then swipe the displayed app icons at the base of the screen twice to the right. (Clicking the AirDisplay icon from within an app does not cut it). You will see a volume slider and the AirPlay redirection icon. Touch that icon and available output devices will be displayed. If you have an Apple TV on the same wifi network it will appear as a choice. Choose it. Below the Apple TV choice, if you have upgraded the ATV to OS 4.4 or later, you will see a Mirroring button. Turn it on. (If your ATV is on OS 4.3 or earlier that button will be missing. Update your ATV software).

Air Display Mirroring control in iOS5, on an iPhone 4S.

Choose the movie to watch on the iPhone/iPad and you will see:

You can now play the movies on the display attached to the AppleTV you chose earlier.

Topolgy:

  • My stored movies reside on the ‘file server’ – a bunch of wired hard disk drives.
  • The file server is connected to the MacMini and can play those directly.
  • I am instead re-routing them to the iPhone 4S and thence to the AppleTV, both wireless.
  • The software on the MacMini and iPhone 4S is AirVideo.
  • The Apple TV routes the wireless video signal to a wired screen of choice – to any screen the AppleTV is attached.

Here’s how things are connected:

AirServer topology.

Why bother? After all you could simply watch the movie on the MacMini without any of the other hardware or software.

And why not just put all the movies in iTunes on the MacMini?

Well, first iTunes is very restricted as to which file type it will accept. No .avi, no .VOB, etc. And my stored movies are in many different formats.

Second, the display device with its attached ATV can be anywhere there is a wifi signal!

And, finally, the hard wired approach dictates just that – physical wire connections which are not always possible.

So to get a wireless signal to a remote big screen, say, without having to move server boxes or having to run cables, all that’s needed is an iPhone 4S/iPad 2 (the iPad 1’s CPU cannot hack it and stutters), and an ATV connected to the remote display device of choice – big screen TV or overhead projector. The iPhone 4S acts not only as receiver/converter/transmitter but also as a wifi remote, no IR line-of-sight controller required.

When a call comes in, the movie is automatically paused and the phone call is answered. When you hang up, one touch on the iPhone’s screen gets the movie playing again.

Display quality is identical to that when the movie source is hard wired to the display.

Is that serious magic or what?

You can get some sense of how much faster the 4S is at processing tasks, compared with its forerunners, from this Apple Insider chart:

I think I have just solved remote routing of movies from the file server to a large, remote drop down screen!

Performance:

I ran a full length HD movie through this and the iPhone 4S used about 40% of its battery during the two hour test. It is working very hard, converting the received movie from the MacMini on the fly and rebroadcasting it to the Apple TV. Despite that the movie does not stutter. If the battery is low simply connect the iPhone to a USB connection on a local laptop or to the mains. iPad2 users should have no battery capacity issues.

Simple animation

Movies, Technique

A time lapse movie is easy to make.

Our 9 year old son likes to get traditional games from Mindware, a source which specializes in non-electronic toys and games with the common theme of making a child (or adult assistant!) think.

His latest is a study in criminality, also known as the building of Manhattan. First you assemble a jigsaw puzzle of Manhattan, complete with cutouts for all the buildings, then you insert the buildings in chronological order showing how Manhattan, as we know it today, grew. The oldest is the 1812 City Hall, the newest the Millennium Tower, that monument to hubris and stupidity which is an open invitation to terrorists for an action replay of 9/11.

When assembling the puzzle, Winston reminded me that he had taken a movie animation class during his summer holidays, so it was a matter of moments to set up the G3 on a tripod, hand him the wireless remote and instruct him to press the button after each building was inserted. This he proceeded to do with great aplomb, giving the remote a dramatic swing and press each time. David O. Selznick would have been proud.

You can download the result by clicking the picture below. Two things are immediately obvious – the white balance control in the Panasonic G3 sucks (as it did in the G1) and I really should have used a constant light source like an electronic flash. A couple of frames are unsharp, probably the G3 waking from sleep and failing to focus in time. Further the inevitable bumps of the tripod make the result move around a bit. Finally, the Statue of Liberty was not the oldest structure, but as a proud American, Winston insisted of placing it first.

Click the image to download.

I have a pretty good knowledge of Manhattan’s architecure from having lived there many years and because architecture fascinates me, so it was no surprise to find that the easiest buildings to place were those built before 1960 with the hardest dating from the International Style boxes which dominated the subsequent decade. I mean, how do you tell one smooth-sided slab from another? I’ll make honorable exceptions for Seagram for its quality and Lever House for its airiness, both on Park Avenue, but the rest of that period would benefit from a wrecking ball. And if you want something quite unsurpassed for sheer ugliness, try the grandly named 1 New York Plaza on Water Street at the tip of Manhattan, where I worked at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. The miscreant designing this had some sort of obsession with those early touch type elevator buttons because that’s all it resembles.

While you can get a far higher quality result than in this case, the technique involved is simple. Dump all the pictures into iPhoto, click Command-A to select all, then drop them in a New Project in iMovie. I used iMovie ’09. Hit Command-A in iMovie to select all the images then hit C for Crop. Click on Crop to avoid the Ken Burns effect default, which does not work for time lapse movies. Then export the movie (‘Share’). This one has 127 images/buildings, one second for each. The download is just 11mB in size.

Once Upon a Time in the West

Movies, Photographs

A Western masterpiece.

It took an Italian to make the greatest Western movie of all time. When Sergio Leone came to make Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) he already had three of the finest Westerns under his belt – The Man with No Name trilogy with Clint Eastwood. But for this, his final effort in the genre, he set out to surpass himself. He did so, in spades.

Forget Shane, forget The Searchers, forget High Noon, forget The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, forget The Long Riders.

Once Upon a Time in the West is in a class of One.

What makes this masterpiece so special? A great director, of course, who has an innate grasp of what the railroad meant to America’s growth in the nineteenth century and an organic sense of the great expanses of the west. A script which is direct, simple and easy to follow. The finest actors – you cannot make a great movie with pikers. Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, Claudia Cardinale and Jason Robards. You can’t improve on that. Superb cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli. But the glue that holds the whole project together and escalates it to greatness is Ennio Morricone’s extraordinary score, in turns lush, comical, poignant, tragic and triumphal.

At almost three hours in length this is not a movie for modern attention spans. Nor is it one for poky screens. With a 100″ screen you begin to understand what Leone demands – that you must be totally immersed in the picture, at one with the landscape of Monument Valley and the West. But you really need to see this in a revival house on something 250″ or more in glorious widescreen, which fits the infinite vistas of the west just so. And if you have never been through Monument Valley in Utah and Arizona, you must go. Your appreciation of the vastness of the west will redound to your enjoyment of the movie.

Not only is the whole an immersive, captivating experience, there are individual pieces of magic which, even out of context, are memorable like in no other Western. The opening 14 minute sequence, with barely a word spoken, culminates in an explosive shoot out. Yet during those fourteen minutes you are treated to an orgy of sound – wind, creaking floorboards, rusty signs swaying, the ticker tape machine, the fabulous sequence of Jack Elam with the fly – it’s all there. And it is magic.

Here are some favorite vignettes:

Jack Elam, awaiting Bronson’s train.

Al Mulock in an extraordinary ultra wide close-up, awaits Bronson’s train.

A sadistic Henry Fonda about to kill the McBain child in cold blood.

This was Fonda’s only bad guy rôle, and his greatest by far. The mix of sadism and delight in what he is about to do in the original is palpable and chilling.

When Cardinale’s character arrives in Flagstone, the railroad town in Monument Valley, there follows what is simply the greatest soaring pan shot in cinema history. Not even Hitchcock comes close to anything like this and only Kubrick’s opening Steadicam work in ‘The Shining’ even compares.

She enters the station house:

The camera then rises in the air and soars over the building , showing her exiting the other side:

Morricone’s music soars with the camera and there, in one 10 second sequence, you have a perfect encapsulation of what America’s nineteenth century growth was all about. The effect simply cannot be conveyed in a static web page.

Jason Robards’s lovable bandit rogue provides comic relief, suitably aided by Morricone’s score.

There are many stunning still photographs, like this one of Claudia Cardinale.

Perhaps the most memorable still is of Cardinale lying on her bed after attending her husband’s funeral. The shot, from above, views her through a black veil.

One of the most effective techniques used by Leone is the super close-up of the many craggy faces in the movie, never more effectively than with Bronson’s. On a huge screen this is quite overwhelming.

Bronson at the final shootout with Fonda.

An orgy of pictures, sound, emotions, the triumph of right over wrong, this is any photographer’s ultimate movie.

Update February 28, 2016:

Ennio Morricone just won the Oscar for the best film score for his music to Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Hateful Eight’ at the age of 87. The oldest ever recipient of an Oscar. He should have received it 48 years earlier for ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’. Or for ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ in 1966. Or for ‘The Mission’ in 1986. Or for ‘Bugsy’ in 1991. Or …. heck, this will do fine. Just delighted for him.

Update July 5, 2020:

Ennio passed away.

The Music Teacher

Movies, Photography

A visual feast.

Made in 1988, the Belgian movie ‘Le Maître de Musique’ dispels the oft held belief that there is no such thing as the Belgian cinema. Directed by Gérard Corbiau it is a lush, visual masterpiece. The story of a great baritone who retires and grooms two star pupils to once again defeat an old nemesis whom he himself bested in a singing duel years ago, it is replete with image after image that any photographer will warm to.

It doesn’t hurt that the whole thing is made on Fuji Film and set to Mahler, Verdi and Schubert. As befits the greatest baritone of his day, José van Dam does his own singing and superb acting, the latter understated to a degree that will never capture modern attention spans. But if there’s an overpowering reason to watch this movie it’s for the luminous beauty of Anne Roussel who has one of those faces a camera adores. An exceptionally beautiful woman, and ably supported by the darkly sensuous Sophie Fennec as van Dam’s accompanist and factotum.

The movie has long been out of print but DVD copies are available from Amazon US on a regular basis, which is where I got mine, having worn out the VHS version! It’s in French with available English subtitles, but you really don’t need to understand the words to enjoy the movie.

The cocoon image, the second below, is a straight take on the opening to Ken Russell’s expressionist masterpiece ‘Mahler‘ (1974). Also unavailable. What is it with US movie studios? Those familiar with Andrew Wyeth’s painting ‘Christina’s World’ (1948) will see it in the third picture below. And if ever photographs could be styled ‘Mahlerian’ well, the last two have it in spades.

Best of all, if you are into Mahler and Verdi, you are in for a real treat.

ZumoCast

iPad, Movies, Photography

Your own iPad cloud.

I have some 800 uncompressed movies stored on a 4+4 terabyte ganged series of hard drives, attached to a MacMini which is connected to our TV. Uncompressed because one day I believe 100″ LCD screens will be affordable and compression drops quality. That 100″ screen will need a high quality original DVD file. These movie files, in VOB format, average 4-6gB each and while you can copy these to your iPad there are two snags.

First, you will run out of space on the iPad very quickly, and you are wasting resources as an uncompressed file is unnecessary for the iPad’s small screen. Second, you are wasting your time as the iPad cannot play VOB files; it’s limited to m4v/H264 video files which average 1.2-1.3gB. So I have a few favorite movies on the iPad which I have converted to m4v using Handbrake and RipIt (where needed) but the process is very inefficient. Conversion averages 30 minutes, and I have to rotate the files on and off the iPad owing to its very limited storage.

Well, there is a miracle app for the Mac and your iPad which does everything you could possibly wish. It’s called ZumoCast and it makes your Mac or PC into your own cloud storage. It will access your movie, picture or music files over the air and can access these whether they are on the Mac or on HDDs attached to the Mac. And here’s the magic part. ZumoCast converts those monster VOB files to m4v on the fly and displays them perfectly on the iPad after a few seconds of buffering using our home wifi. To set Zumo up you download the Mac app, tell it which folders you would like your iPad to see, install the iPad app and click away. The movie quality on the iPad’s screen is superb.

So now my iPad has access to the 4tB of storage attached to the Mini, access to the Mini itself and access to any other Intel Mac on the network where I have installed the Zumo Mac app. Unless I have the Mini doing some processor intensive task like a backup there is no stuttering, multitasking works fine and for music files I can route the sound to any network device in the home. The Macs in the home have suddenly become my own cloud storage, accessible from the iPad.

Two other items of lunacy – Zumo says the iPad app works over 3G as well as wifi (I have not tried that as my iPad does not have 3G), and ZumoCast is free. Quite how their business model works I have no idea as there are no ads, but free is good.

Showing the folders on the MacMini made available to ZumoCast on ther iPad – including four remote ‘Movies’ HDDs.

AirPlay works fine for sound but not for video.

The iTunes library on the remote Mac works beautifully with AirPlay.

A movie directory from one of the remote HDDs seen in ZumoCast on the iPad.

Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ – the original VOB file plays on the iPad over the air.

If you want to store the converted file on your iPad, ZumoCast allows you to do that though it’s hard to see why you would need to do this – maybe for viewing/listening where you have no wifi or 3G access? The stored file will be in the appropriate iPad format.

Limitations: ZumoCast cannot play copy protected DRM files – like older iTunes music purchases or any iTunes movie purchases. However, if your content has all been ripped from DVDs and CDs, like mine, this is not a problem.

ZumoCast compared to Apple’s Remote iPad app: ZumoCast doesn’t care what format your remote file – music or video – is stored in, as long as there’s no DRM. Further, you do not have to have iTunes running on the remote Mac for the iPad app to work as ZumoCast addresses the remote files directly, not through iTunes. Remote will play DRM files on the remote Mac but that Mac must have iTunes running. So it seems the only time you would prefer Remote is when the remote file has DRM.

So with ZumoCast you can use the iPad as a remote controller for your file servers where your music and video files, regardless of format, reside, and watch them on the iPad; further, for sound tracks you can route the sound to your AirPlay device of choice. There is no need to perform format conversion to suit the limited range supported by iTunes or the iPad and storage is not an issue as your files never make it to the iPad, the latter being used solely as a routing and display device. Inspired.