Autumn Gem

Lately, the numbers 0.82, 0.84, 0.88, 1.0, 1.24, 1.3, and 1.4 have been foremost on my mind. These are the gamma correction values that I find myself frequently applying to video clips coming into and out of Apple’s Final Cut Pro, Color, Compressor and DVD Studio Pro software. Although I’ve read numerous articles on the [...]

Well, it’s finally time to make it official! We’re transitioning away from our working title The Qiu Jin Project in favor of Autumn Gem as the official name of the project. The domain names have been purchased, email has been set up, and the redirects are now working. You can still reach the website by [...]

Here’s a screenshot from the Mac OS X Activity Monitor showing all eight cores on our Mac Pro working hard to encode Autumn Gem into a DVD. Our documentary is about 60 minutes long, and it takes roughly two hours to perform a 2-pass MPEG-2 encode. As of today, we’ve created five different cuts of [...]

The past few days, Rae and I have been preparing the film to submit to a number of film festivals in California and Oregon. We’ve been furiously finishing up cut number four, along with writing applications, burning DVDs and assembling press kits. On Friday, we drove up to Stanford and San Francisco to drop or [...]

During the filming of Autumn Gem, we used Phoxle SpectraSnap White Balance Filter 1 to set a custom white balance for each scene. I’ve used many white balance products in the past, including ExpoDisc, WhiBal, and gray cards, and I’ve found the SpectraSnap to be one of the better products out there. Its ability to [...]

How time flies! A year ago this time, we were planning our trailer shoot and preparing for our trip to China. The film has been built out in six month increments. Rae started pre-production work around July of last year. We started filming in January, wrapping things up around the middle of June. The past [...]