I got many great things, from my very generous family, but one I’m having particular fun with is the Pick Punch my (much) older sister gave me.

The Pick Punch

Essentially it’s a hole punch that goes through plastic such as gift cards and credit cards. The hole punches out a standard pick size and now all those unused hunks of plastic become your new guitar picks. Actually, it’s a pretty ingenious idea as I have actually, upon occasion, used a credit card to strum my guitar when I had nothing else available (the plastic is wayyyy better than a quarter or similar coin). Plus, as a teacher, I get a lotttt of gift cards this time of year.

Three of my iTunes gift cards —> picks

I find that you can get about three picks per card you use. I found my veeeerrry old and unused guitar center credit card, so I thought I’d do a little demonstration.

My Card

Since it’s a hole punch that looks like a stapler, you’d be tempted to just put your card in like so:

The Normal Way

But actually, I found that if you do it that way, while easier to do the physical punching, it’s impossible to really tell what you’re gonna come out with! But, if you flip it upside down, you can actually see what portion of the card you are punching, so by turning it on it’s backside you can position the card to punch out the exact design you want.

Centering in on the Logo

Then it’s just a matter of setting it down and putting some effort into it…

And then voila, you have your brand new pick…..

All in all, a great gift! Actually, if you’re any kind of guitar player, i suggest picking one up (no pun intended). It’s a fun way to get a few new guitar picks because you KNOW you’re gonna lose ‘em anyway. I played a bit with my gift-card-picks and they feel just fine. In the future, maybe they’ll adjust the design a bit so you can actually see where you’re placing the card. Or you know… just add some rubber to the top side as well so you can use it upside down more easily.

Visit www.pickpunch.com to grab one of your own.

Well, Orange Line is in the recording studio, so I’m gearing up to shoot a video for one of our three songs. I do want to get a newer better video camera, but the model I want doesn’t even come out until summer, so I have to make do with the camera I have.

So above I’ve shared a snippet of a Foo Fighters DVD. I actually got the Blu Ray for xmas, and it was really awesome. What I noticed is that the footage looked a little choppy. Kind of like that opening sequence in Saving Private Ryan? Anyway, it adds a lot of energy to the show. You can kinda see it on the youtube version but it’s very obvious on the blu ray that I have.

At first I thought it was just filmed at a different frame rate or something, but upon consulting with video guru Matt Killmon, I discovered that it was actually just regular film shot at a very high shutter rate.

The shutter rate is how quickly the shutter of the camera closes. The faster it goes, the quicker it captures the image. If it goes very fast, it eliminates motion blur which basically gives this choppy effect that we see. So, if I want that effect in our music video during the band rock-out scenes, all I have to do is change the shutter rate on my lil’ camcorder and then shoot and voila, “motion strobe.”

Too bad I can’t control shutter speed on my camcorder. However, it does film in slow motion. By filming in slow motion, it bumps up from filming at 30 frames / sec to 120 frames / sec. So, the footage itself is 4x slower. Along with the faster frame rate comes the faster shutter speed, so if i speed the slow motion back up to 30 (or 24) frames / sec, I should get that motion strobe look. So, I did a test of speeding some slow motion footage back up. Check it (aspect ratio is messed up…):

But for some reason when I speed it back up, it almost looks faster than normal speed. What’s up with that? I tried it again telling Premiere that the footage was 105 fps instead of 120, so it looks a little slower. Looks more real-time, but mathematically it shouldn’t be:

Anyway, looks pretty good I think. Now there are three issues:

1) Faster shutter speed = More lighting
2) My Sony camcorder can only record 3 seconds at a time at this frame rate
3) Recording at this frame rate isn’t HD… in fact, it’s barely SD. Maybe really good lighting will fix that.

Still have some more tests to try out, but it’s moving along in the right direction.