I cannot be the only person who has noticed this: For some reason 30 Rock’s scenes are being aired at approximately half the brightness of other programming, or even the shows own title sequences. The issue can be seen clearly in every episode of Season 5 on Hulu.com as well as NBC.com, but is not present on Season 4 or any other show on Hulu.

Here is a screenshot from last week’s episode of 30 Rock – ‘Plan B’:

Compare that to a screenshot from last week’s episode of The Office – ‘Garage Sale’:

30 Rock looks very dark and lacks contrast.

Now here are the histograms for each image:

30 Rock – ‘Plan B’

The Office – ‘Garage Sale’

If you’re not familiar, a luminance histogram measures tone in an image from pure black (on the left) to pure white (on the right.) The mountains and valleys you see in the meter represent the concentration of that tone. As you can see, the histogram from The Office has bits of data from end to end but the one from 30 Rock is solely concentrated from the black point to the middle, meaning there is no brightness data in the second half of the spectrum.

Now here is what the picture looks like when we fix the histogram.

Better right?

The thing is, it appears to be intentional, because as I mentioned before the issue is not present in the shows title sequences (and select cut-away sequences.)

So the question is why are they doing this? It’s already well established that the show does it’s best to shoot on Tina’s right side to not showcase her facial scar (which is oddly mirrored in the show’s title sequence) and many TV shows used to use soft focus lenses to hide the blemishes of their actors or actresses.

Is this dimming of the footage an attempt to hide the looks of aging stars Fey and Baldwin? Is it just a very weird, but completely consistent, mistake? Or is their some other less obvious reason I’m missing?

I’m posting this here on my site as I think you should check it out. On Friday I got the opportunity to help die in the making of a short film. Without further BS:

A contest entry submitted by the fine folks of lowcarbcomedy.com to be in the DVD release of Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.

Submitted for your approval (or disapproval) a music video I made for “Magnetic North” a Less Than Jake song in 2002 before YouTube and making your own video was all the rage. This was one of my first experiments with Final Cut Pro and video editing in general. Warning in advanced the whole thing is shot with a handheld camera and is very jerky. I just found this on my harddrive and figured I should post it for posterity’s sake. Unfortunately I appear to have lost the source project.

Enjoy and thanks for watching!

I already put this on my del.ico.us but I figured it needed more attention because it was that damn good…. More rotoscoping and compositing! I’m sure you’re thrilled oh fictitious reader.

Special Effects house Buzz Imaging shows off how it made the effects used in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The clip showcases some incredible 3d modeling, rotoscoping and compositing work and makes it almost look easy. Don’t be fooled, this sort of thing takes days, weeks even months to get right. But it’s still incredible.

(Via Daring Fireball)

So, I’m not really a big anime fan or that much of a video editor
but this blew my mind. I can only imagine how many hours this took to complete.

If you’re completely confused, let me explain. This guy noticed that Japanese cartoons or ‘anime’ tends to have a lot of running scenes and decided to do something with it. He spend hours combing over cartoons, isolating scenes and editing down shots to combine them fluidly and create one project. He wasn’t content with just cutting scenes together. He went into the video and used a process called rotoscoping to isolate individual characters from their shots and lay them out in other ones.

Think Roger Rabbit, Lord of the Rings and Forrest Gump.

Painstaking and time consuming to say the least. Excellent work by this Istiv guy, best of luck to him.

(Via Boing Boing)