HQ (Almaghrib Headquarters) called me up late last week to make a trailer for their seminar A Heart Serene coming to Toronto soon. They wanted the trailer for a conference that took place this past weekend. Normally I would say no to such a request mainly due to the short notice. The trailers I’ve made for AlMaghrib in the past take me about 80 man hours of work (2 weeks full time hours) from coming up with a basic idea to delivery.

Why did I take up this challenge considering I had about one day to make this trailer?

Simply for the challenge! (…and to focus my mind away from some stress makers in life). I don’t recommend that you do this often mainly due to the mental and creative strain it puts on the individual and the effects of partial burnout that take place afterward, but I do advise that you challenge yourself once in a while.

Keep in mind that the video below isn’t near in quality (in my humble opinion) as my past trailers, but then again my past trailers were made in over 80 hrs of work spaced out over 2-3 weeks.

You probably noticed this graphic at the beginning of the trailer:

Leechon’s stance is that sound produced by musical instruments, whether they be made from percussion, brass, wind, or string instruments of music are not Islamically permissible. All projects that have been done officially done under Leechon (2005 and later) have kept to this principal. Some people have confused sound tracks of the videos to be sourced from musical instruments, for that reason all productions will now feature this slate before every video to remove that confusion/assumption.

If you wish to use this graphic slate for your videos, you are more than welcome to. Simply click the image to download the ZIP file which contains the image.

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A couple weeks ago I made a post about the Canon FS100 and HF100, one of which I reviewed. Read about it here:

• Canon FS100 Review and Process

After going back and forth I was undecided on which camera to purchase. Here’s what I had going for each camera when compared head to head:

–

Canon FS100 Pros:

• Cheap! Close to $300
• I could add extra accessories like the Steadicam Merlin and Lavaliere Microphone for the extra cash
• Easy editing

Canon FS100 Cons:

• No manual audio gain control
• No HD (not really a con at this point in time)
• No lens attachment feature (I fixed this with a lens adapter)
  

–

Canon HF100 Pros:

• Has HD (but wont be using it really)
• Had manual audio gain control
• Can add lens to it without and fiddling

Canon HF100 Cons:

• $600+ causing me to go out of budget with other accessories

–

So what did I purchase?

–

Canon FS100

–

Transcend 8GB & 16GB SDHC Flash Cards

–

Lens adapter with 52mm to 37mm step down ring

–

Audio Technica ATR-35S Lavaliere Mic

–

Tiffen Steadicam Merlin Camera Stabilizer

–

I’ll be posting about my experiences with this camera and how well the steadicam merlin performs after this weekend. I’m also planning on doing a head to head comparison of the Merlin with the $14 steadycam I built and tested here: http://www.leechon.com/14-steadycam-9.htm

If you have any questions of comments to share go ahead post them before the end of the weekend.

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The following video is a song that brothers from the group called “Travelers” did at the entertainment session at ICNA2008. The song they did was titled “Every Night and Every Day” by Metus Curtis, but they instead of using instruments had very well done beatboxing.

enjoy

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• ICNA Day 01
• ICNA Day 02
• ICNA Day 03

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Shirien explain more about the background of the development of this PSA on her blog post titled, “Why do you wear that rag on your head?”

When one of my good friends Ahmed read the formatted PSAs, and decided to make the videos. He went out filmed and editing the videos and the following was the result!

This PSA is only the first of three. There are two more to come (which haven’t been produced yet) so stay tuned

Also, I want to say a HUGE jazakallahu khairun for all people on and off screen to make this PSA happen. After the taufeeq of Allah-swt YOU made it happen. May this be on your scale of good deeds on the day of judgment. Ameen.

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-

- if for some reason you cant view the video, go here: http://blip.tv/file/1058537 -

I hope you benefit from this session.

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I’m about to become a raving fan of Canon. If you guys have been keeping up with some of the stuff I’ve been writing about you’ll notice that I’ve begun taking quite an interest in recent Canon products. See the following previous posts I made on the subjects of:

• Canon HV20/30 and HF100 cameras
• Canon Powershot Digital Cameras

A friend of mine recently got a Canon FS100 digital solid state camcorder for about $400 from Best Buy withan 8GB SDHC flash card. Having played around with it I got to testing it. Now I’m not going to write a full review for this. Camcorderinfo.com has alread done that here:

• Canon FS11 Camcorder Review — only difference between FS100, FS10, and FS11 is the onboard memory capacity. The FS100 comes with no onboard capcity and takes only SDHC cards, which isn’t really a downside.

When I got to testing the FS100 camcorder there were two things that I realized.

1. The format that the video records in is .MOD files. For those of you who don’t know, this format is basically MPEG2 in a highly compressed form. In 8GB you can record up to 110 mins of video at the highest quality. Video editing programs don’t import .MOD files.
2. The camera doesn’t allow for any lens attachments. So this means if you want to add a wide-angle or telephoto lens out of the box, you won’t be able to do that with this.

Solution to Point # 1

To edit files in Premiere (that’s all I tested it in) all you have to do is rename the file extention from .MOD to .AVI. This way you can simply import it into Premiere. Now once imported you’ll notice that the aspect ratio is off. To take care of this simply right click of the file in the bin and click “interpret footage” and tell it to “Conform to” D1/DV NTSC Widescreen 16:9 (1.2). This will take care of the editing process.

Bye bye TAPE!

Another solution is to simply install a plugin into Premiere CS3 to enable the program to read .MOD files. There is more on this at Eugene Turkov’s Blog.

Solution to Point # 2

In the post about Canon Powershot digital cameras I wrote, I mentioned a lens adapter.

My question is whether or not I can use this adapter on the FS100 or not. Has anyone tried it? You think it will fit on the Canon FS100 camcorder? If it does, then I’m sold.

• Less than $350 for the camera (Amazon price)
• $80 for a 16GB flash card
• $70 for the lens adapter

That makes for ~$500…umm…wait a sec….

…for ~$150 more I can get the HF100 camcorder (see Amazon).

What are the Pros and Cons for spending the extra $150 now?

Pros

• It has the ability to accept lens attachments.
• Records in HD
• only $150 more

Cons

• HF100 only records in HD (no standard-defintion option) and AVCHD isn’t easily edited unless you put it through some conversion mumbo jumbo.
• They’re probably going to come out with a new generation of AVCHD solid state camcorders very soon that have better imaging. I’m personally probably better off sticking holding off on going HD for now.
• HD isn’t widely used for most consumer objectives and currently not widely demanded from my current client base.

What do you guys think? Give me your feedback.

–

Update: 6/22/2008

See below for .MOD test files:

• Indoor Shot - Black and White - Talent on Screen (me)
• Outdoor Shot - “Tracking” Shot - Red BMW
• Outdoor Shot - Sky, Sun, and Clouds
• Outdoor Shot - Zoomed in at 20x - Birds Chirping

I tested out the solution that was provided at Eugene Turkov’s Blog to change the files to .M2V via the command prompt (see link for what I mean) to be far more efficient and quicker.

I’m going to purchase the lens adapted and test it out at a Best Buy to see if it will fit on the camera or not. If it does them I’m going to go ahead and make this purchase in July inshaAllah.

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What do I mean by “filming totally naked”? The trailer above was shot with a “naked” Canon HV20…

…without any special 35MM lens attachments or gizmos. Just your simple $600 camera.

It’s amazing what sort of results keeping to simple principals of video, photo, lighting, sound, and editing can get you.

Personally I’m looking to get the Canon HF100.

It’s similar to to the HV20 in price and features, except that instead of recording to tape in HDV, it records to SDHC flash media in AVCHD (compressed high definition) format. Personally I hate tape and the time it takes to transfer.

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The other day a friend of mine was telling me about Microsoft Silverlight and stated that it’s a “Flash Killer.” This interested me in the sense that, being in a field were media is the main for of communication, I’m always looking out for different vehicles that might help me get results faster than I’m currently getting them.

I figured I’ll ask you all about it. So…give me your thoughts about this program

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Don’t agonize, organize.

~ Florynce R. Kennedy

Lately I had found it a bit difficult to find posts within this blog that had become buried into the archives over time. In the past I attempted to create a archive page, but the layout just wasn’t “clean” if you know what I mean.

Today I decided to see if I can find a simple plugin to take care of the problem, lo and behold! I fell upon SRG Clean Archive. I now have a nice, clean blog archive! Its got a really cool feature where you can expand and collapse the different months.

If you have a Wordpress blog setup, I highly recommend that you set it up. It makes it easy for your viewers to find past posts easily and without trouble.

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