Tacos and Beer

Digitizing old video sources (stuff made in the 20th century) is a hassle for multiple reasons. Probably the biggest is that old video was stored in an interlaced format. This Wikipedia article digs into the details about interlaced video, but the short version is interlaced video is captured and stored as half-frames instead of full frames, and combining those half-frames for playback on modern displays (which are almost all progressive instead of interlaced ) can get messy. This is true for material that originated as video, and it’s also true of material that originated as motion picture film. The film-to-interlaced-video process often involved a hack known as three-two pulldown . That hack was necessary because of differences between motion picture film frame rates and video frame rates. Adding to the hassle of dealing with old video material is the fact that modern video editing software (stuff like Adobe Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve) just “fixes” the interlacing behind the...

I am an iPhone guy. And I’ve been an iPhone guy basically since they started making iPhones. It’s been fascinating to see the camera evolve from rudimentary (low-res stills and no video) on the first iPhone to generally amazing (comparable to many “real” cameras) on modern iPhones. My current phone is a couple of years old — I am an iPhone guy, but I am not a gotta-get-a-new-iPhone-every-year guy. But I am going to have to get a new one pretty soon, because apparently the camera on the current “pro” iPhone is legitimately pro. I mean, you can shoot “log” video on an iPhone 15 Pro and record it to an external USB-C drive! Stu Maschwitz has an excellent blog post about how he uses professional post-production tools to color correct shot-on-iPhone video. Be sure to check out the post’s embedded video to see some examples of how good iPhone video can look these days. Speaking of professional post-production... Here’s a video about the visual effects of (the most excellent) ...