Music Video Shot on RED Now in Production

Rolling through the streets of Detroit, Del Padre Digital recently became a player in the filming of a new music video for one of hip-hop’s rising stars.

We’re in the midst of editing now, after a whirlwind shoot in several locales in Michigan for Johnny ‘The Greek’ Saxx’s single Take Me Away. This will be the premiere video from his latest album, The Protagonist, released this year by BP/Universal Distribution.

Del Padre Digital’s creative director, Mark Archer, was pulled into the project earlier this month to serve as its director of photography. This created an opportunity not only to film in various challenging locales, from a cigar room to a Bentley cruising down Lake Shore Drive, but also to test the mettle of the firm’s new Red ONE 4k camera.

Mark Archer and lighting specialist David St. George film at Blue Sky Studios

“We shot a number of staged scenes at Blue Sky Studio in Troy, Mich., which is a state-of-the-art, fully-equipped production facility,” says Archer, “as well as at one of the state’s hottest night spots – The Harem Lounge. All of these locations posed challenges, but also unique, exciting filming scenarios.”

The plot of the video follows Saxx through a number of ‘high-roller’ scenes, from mansions to parties with plenty of bling in tow. The footage was shot over two days, and is currently being edited at Del Padre Digital’s suite in East Longmeadow, Mass. It’s slated for completion at the end of this month.

Saxx is already a cross-over draw in Greece and other Mediterranean countries; his previous videos are available on ANT1 Europe, as well as Viacom US.

New website and new name

We are pleased to announce a new website and a new name. Del Padre Visual Productions is now Del Padre Digital. The name change reflects the constantly evolving technology we harness in our business. Established in 1991 as Del Padre Video Productions, the name was changed in 1995 to Del Padre Visual Productions to better describe our services when we embarked in the new world of multimedia and internet development.

Today all of our services from web design to high definition video production is digital hence the new name.

The new delpadre.com is the sixth incarnation of the Del Padre web presence. This site was intended to fulfill several key roles. First and foremost this site was intended to be an easily scalable, dynamic, and easily managed web presence for our company.

Beyond this however the site was developed with many other end goals in mind. Our company wanted to highlight the fact that Flash is a viable platform for an entire website. We wanted a flash site that could emulate an HTML one in basic functions such that have long been unsupported in Flash. Features such deep linking and browser back button support , fast loading dynamic content, coherent loading sequences so users can get to the most important information fastest, and the ability to optimize our site for search engines. We also wanted to capitalize on the raw power of the Flash platform with animation, integrated full screen video, fully dynamic and easily updatable content, with transitions and other subtleties to increase the flow of the site and enrich the user experience.

Technical Challenge

• Back button support/deep linking
  


• By taking advantage of the open source SWFAddress project we were able to create a flash website that could interface with the browsers history allowing the user to use the browsers back button as well as bookmark and link to specific sections of the flash movie.
  
• Dynamic content
  


• To avoid needing to edit the flash project to add updates to our site virtually all the content was made dynamic, pulling from external files that can be edited via our in browser Content Management System
  
  
  
  • All news and gallery information is pulled from external files when the respective page is accessed. Once it loads the contents of these files, any borders or styles are generated by ActionScript on the fly.
  
  
• Speed
  


• This site was built to run on any connection above 756Kbps. We didn’t want our visitors to have to wait for 30 seconds at a loading page, or bring their system to a crawl downloading numerous large assets at once. There were many different ways we came at this problem to solve it;
  


• The site is almost completely generated by action script; the initial timeline in the flash file is very small and has few assets on it. By having greater control over the exact order content was generated in we were able to streamline the loading order in many areas without having to extend the timeline or rely on timeline based tweens or dead space. We were also able to reuse much of the code, further reducing the overall files size of the project.
  


• We took load order into account when adding more bandwidth and processor intensive assets to the project, for example on the index page, rather than sharing the bandwidth among the gallery content, the full background video, and music files, the site doesn’t initialize loading the video and music assets until the gallery is loaded. Accessibility to the information was our top priority, if that information is good enough the user will be around long enough to see the flashier aspects of the site as well.


• Server side bandwidth controls, on a slow connection the music player was bringing the site to a halt whenever it started to cache a new song. To side step this problem the flash site posts the song file information to a PHP file which restricts the download speed to 16Kbps leaving a 4Kb buffer over what the song needs to play, but preventing a 2MB mp3 from hogging all the site bandwidth.


• Much of the content of the site is populated by ActionScript loops, by writing these loops to be as effective as possible we were able to increase overall load times of galleries


• Processor usage and Memory Leaks. Some aspects of our site had potential for high processor usage and memory leaks, however by actively managing what assets were enabled in the website at any given time we were able to strike a balance between file size and processor demand we were able to keep the system resource footprint of our site relatively low compared to similar websites.
  
  
• Public bookmarking has become a powerful and effective way to get a website noticed so we decided that lacking that support was not an option, this also pushed us to write a much more advanced URL handling system than the one included in the SWFAddress project. This new handling system allows the site to dynamically generate unique links to newly added content keeping our dynamic content source files much more manageable and easily updatable.
  
  
• Intelligent resizing, the site gives priority to certain elements and will attempt to keep them within the viewable area as long as possible when the browser window is resized, lower priority elements dynamically moved and the centering and scaling scheme is modified based on the current window size.
  
  Search Engine optimization was something that we intended to include from the start, and luckily SWFAddress comes with a good platform to do this from. Some aspects of the platform were modified to handle our different URL management system as well as much more dynamic SEO abilities.
  
  The entire site runs off index.php however .htaccess rewrites the URL header to reflect the current location in the website. Due to this, any static meta tag information we set in the index.php file would be repeated on every single page of the site, negatively effecting search engine rank. To overcome this we replaced the static information with PHP function calls which would determine what content was showing and update the Meta tags to match.
  
  
• SWFAddress also writes the contents of its data file to the index page as html so that anyone viewing the page without flash player or JavaScript can still view the exact same content as is in the flash site.
  
  All links in this no JavaScript mode will link to the proper flash page once JavaScript is enabled, this means any links a Search Engine crawls will link to the same section in the flash site.
  
  
• Benefits of this site include
  - Fast and easy updating of content from anywhere in the world.
  - User friendly, intuitive navigation that brings the user to the information they want
  - Search Engine optimized
  - All the power of flash without losing any functionality or benefits of an html site.

Recent Video and Flash Design Work

Video Production

Like a good wine, this concept was well aged. Over the course of a year or so, the Trifecta Wine commercial was conceived, written, shot and edited. The final result, we think, is as sweet as the private reserve Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon it features.

This entire spot was shot at 60 frames per second in HD resolution with an M2, 35 millimeter lens adapter from Redrock Micro and Nikon glass. The copy for the spot was specifically written for the amazing voice of South African Patrick Willis, which goes down just as smooth as a bottle of 2004 Trifecta.

view video

Flash Website Design

Our newest Flash site, for Pennsylvania based home technology provider STI uses some great features including dynamically populated content, SEO - friendly Flash content and deeplinking.

The services of STI include home theatre design, security, automation, lighting design and structured wiring for homes and businesses. The site needed to be not only informative, but also appeal to a high-end client looking for a particularly tech-savvy company. STIworldwide.com does just that.

view website

Del Padre Visual Sees Red

It’s been a while since we have been in touch with an update. Things have been crazy busy! I hate to dump all this on you at once but I want to share some of the exciting projects we have had the opportunity to work on for the last few months and introduce you to an exciting new technology that has to be the most important innovation in digital video to date and we are thrilled to be able to offer it to our clients.

We worked on two videos to be shown at the Paris Air Show for Barnes Aerospace and Hamilton Sundstrand during the summer. Our friends at Proficient Audio have been keeping us busy, working on a group of videos to introduce their new products at the 2007 CEDIA show. You can view the videos here on the new Video Dashboard that we just completed.

Mark and Joe had a chance to shoot video for long-time collaborator Brad McLain, on a “zero-gravity" aircraft flight that creates temporary weightlessness. NASA has used this method to train its astronauts for the last 45 years and it's the same way Tom Hanks floated in Apollo 13.


The Northrop Grumman Foundation has teamed with the Zero Gravity Corporation to develop the Weightless Flights of Discovery program. The program is designed to inspire students to pursue science and technical careers by inspiring their teachers first. DVP's footage will be included in a documentary McLain Science Education is creating about the program.

Nino was an in-studio guest on The Howard Stern Show for the Riley Martin site we launched in June. Riley Martin is a well-known author and radio host. Martin is the author of The Coming of Tan, a book that describes his life and his alleged abduction by aliens. He currently hosts The Riley Martin Show on the Sirius Satellite Radio channel Howard 101 and Artisfirst Radio Network.
We just started a three year project for the Space Science Institute. STEPS (Science Theater Education Programming System) is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. When completed, STEPS will allow museums across the country to create multimedia presentations that will be shown in their museum theatres with an estimated target audience of over one million viewers in the first 5 years.

Now for the exciting new revolutionary technology that I mentioned.



It's called The Red One Camera. And ours is on the way. To say this camera is groundbreaking would be an understatement. Here's some background.

When James Jannard, the billionaire founder of the eyewear and apparel company Oakley, set out to create a new video camera with a 4K sensor that rivals the definition of 35mm film and image quality that exceeds anything else available today, everyone said it couldn’t be done. After all if the big boys like Sony and Panasonic only produce cameras with maximum resolution of 1920X 1080 pixels how would a sunglass maker create a camera with a 4520 X 2540 resolution? Compare that to the super high end 2K Genesis and Viper cameras that many feature films are being shot on. The difference is four times the resolution (see chart below).


Well after 5 years and a lot of public bashing that this is and always will be “Vaporware” the cameras are finally shipping. Well kind off at least. They have been taking reservations for the camera for years and only 100 have been shipped so far. We should get our hands on ours in June. The Red One Camera is the future of Cinematography.

Typical high-end HD camcorders have 2.1M pixel sensors and record with 3:1:1 color subsampled video at up to 30fps. Red delivers 12M pixels at up to 60fps and records RAW, or 2x over-sampled HD in 4:4:4 or 4:2:2. That’s more than 5 times the amount of information available every second and a vastly superior recording quality. With the Mysterium™ Super 35mm cine sized (24.4 x 13.7mm) sensor, RED gives you the same breathtaking Depth of Field and selective focus as found in film cameras. Mysterium™ boasts a greater than 66db Signal to Noise Ratio thanks to its large 29 sq. micron pixels. And 12,065,000 pixels deliver resolution that can only be called Ultra High Definition.

One of the first real field tests came from recruiting veteran filmmaker, Peter Jackson to test two RED camera prototypes named “Boris” and “Natasha.” The result was a film called Crossing the Line. Here’s a clip.

Steven Soderbergh, director and cinematographer of Ocean's Eleven, Traffic, and Solaris, said "This is the camera I've been waiting for my whole career: jaw-dropping imagery recorded onboard a camera light enough to hold with one hand...I know this: RED is going to change everything."

Soderbergh’s making two new movies (Guerrilla and The Argentine) with it; the upcoming Angelina Jolie assassin-fest “Wanted” was shot with it and, from the trailer, looks visually amazing…

What this means to you is that your corporate video or television commercial will look more like a major motion picture or a national TV spot .

DVP Shoots Riley Martin Video

Riley Martin is a New Jersey resident, a former sharecropper, and a true believer in the knowledge he accrued during an alien abduction several years ago.

He's also a regular on The Howard Stern Show, and he's amassed plenty of fans in recent years -- some because they enjoy his stories of extraterrestrial jaunts, and others because they've heard the Riley Martin prank calls on Stern.



It's not so much of a logic jump as it seems; Martin has, over the years and through various T.V. and radio appearances, parlayed his space-travel induced visions for the future into a marketing vehicle that is chugging nicely along. DVP signed on to produce his new Web site, and saw their own site's hits skyrocket shortly after its launch, which also garnered some praise and valuable air time on Howard Stern News.

Martin visited DVP to record portions of the audio version of his book, The Coming of Tan, and to add a few new components to his merchandising repertoire. In addition to the book, t-shirts, and other items, DVP also produced some Riley Martin ringtones and outgoing answering machine messages. We shot Riley on green screen for videos that will be featured on http://www.rileymartin.com/

It's been a while. Whats new at Del Padre Visual Productions

Thought I'd take a break from the usual format and use this Miniblog as a chance to tell you a little about what we've been up to. We just finished up a project with a company launching a new iPod product called George. It hasn't hit the stores yet, but if you want a sneak a peak you can check out our featured video. It's pretty wild. We combined Maya product renders with HD footage shot with Redrock Micro's M2 35mm lens rig. We also handled all creative and copywriting for the spot, making this a full branding effort. The company that created George is Boston-based Chestnut Hill Sound. They, and George, won best in show at Mac World back in January. Nice job guys.

I should also mention that we just won a pretty exciting award ourselves. This had to do with another special client of ours, Speakercraft. The project that we collaborated with Speakercraft on, a video to promote their new product, MODE, won the prestigious Telly award. To put this in perspective, past recipients include; Nike, CNN, HGTV, Microsoft, FX Networks, Comedy Central, etc. Not bad for a guy who was told he might not make it past Mrs. Stevenson's math class in the 6th grade! Needless to say, I am very proud of our team for this incredible national recognition.

You can read more about shooting with the M2 in the March issue of Studio Monthly. We wrote the cover feature reviewing the system and offered up some tips for shooting with a 35mm lens. You can also check out the footage online. Special thanks to Bob Zemba from Robert Charles Photography for the great production stills and lens insight.

Nino Del Padre
Del Padre Visual Productions
Helping Businesses Exceed Expectations