Back in August of 2006, Alice in Chains did a free show on the Del Mar fairgrounds infield. I was fortunate enough to be there armed with the first 3CCD Mini DV camera I ever bought… It was bottom of the line for triple chip cameras and I was definitely struggling to hold the camera above my head for so long, but in the end, I ended up with some pretty damn good footage. It’s been languishing on YouTube for the last year or so and “Nutshell” alone has about 100,000 hits on it. Small potatoes I know compared to the millions of hits others get for God-knows-what, but pretty respectable as far as I’m concerned…

So, as I mentioned previously, holding the camera above my head was a bit tedious to say the least. The camera had an electronic image stabilization feature (the good cameras have optical image stabilization) but I turned it off to conserve battery life. I was also using a small aftermarket telephoto lens, which, you really shouldn’t even use unless you’re on a tripod… Needless to say, some of the footage looks as if it were shot from the seat of a thrill ride on the midway. Especially when I tried to zoom in tight on someone; at times it was almost enough to make you go running for a bottle a Dramamine… Enter SHAKE…

Shake is a post production tool that can accomplish many of the same compositing tasks as programs like Adobe After Effects, or Apple Motion 3-D. It requires the user to adapt to what is known as a “node based” work flow but once you get the hang of it, it really is incredible what this software can do. I’m not going to go into the many zillions of features, or even the basics of node based editing because most will be bored to tears… Instead, I’ll just talk about one feature, and how it applies to my AIC videos…

I’ve got to believe that “Shake” is named as such because even if you ignored everything else it does, it is the single best piece of software I have ever scene for eliminating unwanted motion from your footage… No matter how bad it is. I recently dug up the original uncompressed footage of the AIC show at Del Mar and began “re-producing” them from scratch using all the latest software that I simply didn’t have access to two years ago… The results are really amazing… Check out the original videos posted on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/ZenBezier… After you’ve had a look at those, go to http://www.meetube.com/live and check out the first two AIC Secret Stash Videos… They’ve been graded in Apple Color and motion stabilized in (yep, you guessed it) Shake… What a difference… Can’t wait to see the DVD

I suppose I could still get Radiohead tickets but I’m sure what’s left is slim pickens, kinda like my wallet… Even so, I felt compelled to bring them up not only because they’re a killer band coming to San Diego, but because I think these guys are the new pioneers of independent music.

In case you didn’t know, the new Radiohead release In Rainbows was first made available to the public free as a digital download. Or at least, you had the option as to whether or not you wanted to make a contribution… Personally, I went ahead and opted to spend the money on the digital download and ordered the available box set released later. Anyway, they were the first major artists to basically thumb their noses at the business model that the music industry had enjoyed since almost the very beginning. They simply got together, recorded In Rainbows how they saw fit with no label, no deal, no nothing except Radiohead making music… Then they took it right to The Internet. In salutation of that effort, I embedded a slide show of the photography shot by the band during the recording of In Rainbows.

Granted, Radiohead had the luxury of working backwards to get where they are today in that they “made it” in the industry on more conventional terms before breaking with the system. Props are still in order for them being first to jump out. If I’m not mistaken, Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails aren’t far behind.

So the movement is on people… If you’re an aspiring musician, it would seem that one of the most important things to have these days is a broadband Internet connection. Your audience is out there, waiting for you…

There’s a lot of cool artwork other than the photos that came with the In Rainbows box set. I’ll be putting a slide show of that stuff together in an upcoming post.