Dear some nerd: Please port the Box2D open-source physics engine to an Adobe After Effects Script

See, first I watched this. Then I downloaded the original Crayon Physics to my XP partition. And then I found this flash demo of the Box2D physics engine used to create that addictive game.

And then I had a full-on Ratatouille flashback to this 2D physics app I used to have on OS 9 called Interactive Physics. I used to have so much fun with that damn app. John Knoll was a fan as well and actually found a way to use motion from it in his ElectricImage animations. A classmate of mine actually created short films using it back in the early '90s when computers were beige. Funny, funny films of bad things happening to little stick figure guys.

Natsukashii desun ne.

So now that a badass 2D physics solver is just sitting there on the interwebs, free for the porting, some enterprising AE genius simply must write a script to animate 2D AE shape and solid layers this way. You'd be a hero to the AE community. Your PayPal donations button would receive literally several clicks. You'd be a man among kings.

C'mon. Do it.

Is RED One Really a 4K Camera?

Anyone interested in the RED One camera should read this comparative review/diary of the Sigma SD14 and the Canon 5D (the latter of which I am a delighted owner).

Both are SLRs, both are a few years old. But the 5D has a 12.7 megapixel, full-frame chip, where the Sigma produces a mere 4.6 megapixels. Why bother even comparing them?

The reason is that the Sigma has a Foveon sensor rather than a CCD or CMOS. This sensor can capture distinct R, G and B light information at every pixel. The 5D's CMOS chip can record luminance at every pixel, and uses the common Bayer pattern of color filters at the photosites to capture RGB color, intermingling color fidelity and spatial resolution in a way that must be decoded by software using some math, some compromises, and some guesswork.

One way of looking at this is that the 5D spends three of its 12.7 million pixels to accomplish what the Sigma achieves in only one. If the 5D records 12.7 million tiny little light records per image, then the Sigma records 13.8 million (4.6 x the unique R, G and B records per pixel).

But that's not entirely fair. Our eyes tend to perceive detail more in luminance than in color, and the 5D is recording much more luminance information that the Sigma. For black and white photography, the 5D truly is a 12.7 megapixel camera and the SD14 truly is a 4.6 megapixel shooter.

So the truth lies somewhere in between—the SD14 is neither the 5D's equal in resolution nor is it possessed of one third the pixel count.

In one very real way the RED One is a 4K camera. It creates 4K images that look damn good.

And in another equally real way, the RED One is not a "true" 4K camera, as each of the 4K's worth of pixels it creates for each frame is interpolated (from compressed Bayer data at that).

And that's probably just fine—a topic for another day.

IRE Ire

Mike Curtis has been furrowing his bloggular brow about highlight clipping issues in his clever Final Cut workflows. I can't solve all his problems, but I can show you how to avoid giving your waveform a buzzcut when using Colorista.

Watch the screencast. You'll see me apply Colorista, which clips off the IRE values greater than 100%. I fix this by first applying Brightness & Contrast (Bezier), and reducing Brightness a bit. From there on out it's all fun and games with Colorista.

The part I didn't show was switching on High Precision YUV processing to make sure I don't lose fidelity in the rendering.

(This is the technique that I would use if for some weird reason I was actually doing color work in FCP—otherwise I'd use the slightly more complex method I outline in The Guide, as it makes for a cleaner export)

Colorista in FCP

I finally put together a little side-by-side demo showing the struggles I used to face with the 3-way color corrector in Final Cut Pro HD that, in part, led me to create Colorista.