Even though I got back from London (and decided not to really post more about the art exhibition I went to see. focus.) almost two weeks ago, family and work and travel have largely kept me from my newly resolved screening schedule. Last week was characterized by an ultimately abandoned attempt to register our new car (purchased happily through ebaymotors) at the Virginia DMV, where the confusion, cognitive dissonance and abuse are running high, no doubt due to links to the September 11 hijackers. New York's DMV proved to be reassuringly back to normal, requiring only an all-afternoon wait and the same sheaf of documents they always did. We comemmorated by ordering New York City plates, but with "Manhattan" instead of the "Bronx." [note: Props to all Bronx readers. We just don't live there.] NYC truly rules.
Screening and Logging: While a search on the web for "fierce vignetting" inexplicably came up empty, a similar search of my logging notes produces nearly 10,000 results. The combination of lenses and filters we used to shoot (see August entries), including a wide angle lens, resulted in an effect called "vignetting." This is where the outer edges of the recorded image pick up black rings, which are cropped from the camera's viewfinder. The Sony VX-1000 camera is known for this, and I thought we were aware enough before shooting to avoid it. Nope. There are entire scenes-minutes long-where we were shooting a farmer moving a stream of irrigation water that have pretty deep rings around the image. Whether it's fixable or not or usable or not remains to be determined.
Searching for a fix turned up this set of pointers on 2-pop.com, a great resource for DV info.
Poking around yielded this insane article by Paynie, who shot, edited and screened a feature-length dv docu about this year's Burning Man festival. Sounds amazing, and on an impressive schedule. "BurnBabyBurn," is playing December 1 at the New York Independent Film & Video Festival (in LA, somehow). Get tickets here. If only my grandparents hadn't chosen 2001 to stop attending Burning Man, maybe I could've made more progress by now...
