Film & TV

As a filmmaker, Greg Pak is best known for his feature film Robot Stories, which won 35 awards and played in over 70 film festivals. Pak studied at the NYU Graduate Film program and won a Student Academy Award for his short documentary Fighting Grandpa. Pak’s recent short films include Happy Fun Room and Mister Green.

Feature: Robot Stories

Short: All Amateur Ecstasy, Asian Pride Porn, Cat Fight Tonight, Everybody’s Supersonic, Fighting Grandpa, Happy Fun Room, Happy Hamptons Holiday Camp for Troubled Couples, Mister Green, Mouse, Mr. Lee, Ode to Margaret Cho, Penny Marshall Project, Po Mo Knock Knock, Super Power Blues

Educational video: Informed Consent Zone

Video darkens when converting to MPEG-2 for DVD production — problem and solution

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By Greg Pak
I recently noticed that my new short film looked considerably darker on DVD than in Final Cut Pro. I hadn’t seen this problem with DVDs I’d made of other projects I’d cut in Final Cut Pro.
The problem: The project was shot with the Panasonic DVX100 in 24P. The sequence in Final Cut Pro was set at 23.98 frames per second. I had been exporting this sequence directly to NTSC MPEG-2 for the DVDs. Apparently, FCP makes images darker and more contrasty when exporting from a 23.98 fps sequence to an NTSC MPEG-2.
The solution: I exported the 23.98 fps sequence to a 29.97 fps DV/DVCPRO – NTSC Best Quality QuickTime file. I then cut that QuickTime file back into a 29.97 fps FCP sequence and exported to MPEG-2. And now there’s no noticable darkening of the image.
I did notice that the process of exporting the 23.98 fps sequence to the 29.97 fps DV/DVCPRO file seems to have affected the colors very slightly, making them a touch warmer. It’s a faint enough adjustment that it doesn’t bother me — and it’s vastly preferable to the darkening which had been happening before.
System: Macintosh G4 533 MHz Dual Processor running FCP HD 4.5

“Robot Stories and More Screenplays” book shipping soon from Amazon.com

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The screenplay for Greg Pak’s feature film “Robot Stories” has been published by Immedium as a 222 page paperback which includes an introduction by David Henry Hwang and the scripts for several of Pak’s award winning shorts, including “Asian Pride Porn,” “All Amateur Ecstasy,” and “Mouse.” Each script is preceded by an introduction by Pak.
The book should be shipping soon and can be pre-bought now at Amazon.com for a special discount price.

MT-Blacklist to fight comment spam

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By Greg Pak
If you create a blog with open comments, you’ll soon discover that scumbags like to post spam in the comment sections of blogs. So what to do? If you’re using MovableType, you can check and ban the IP addresses through which the spammers are accessing the internet. But that’s pretty ineffective, as spammers tend to use a variety of IP addresses. You can use a plug in which creates an image with a code which anyone posting a comment must reproduce in a form field. But spammers have actually started manually filling in those forms — or they’ve cracked the code to automate the process.
The solution?
I’m very happily using MT-Blacklist, through which you can build a blacklist of website addresses which you cull from spam posts. When you hit “De-Spam,” the software automatically deletes any message which contains the blacklisted URLs. And new comments featuring any blacklisted address can’t be posted. This hits the jerks where they hurt — if they can’t post a link, there’s no point in their posting at all.
If you end up using MT-Blacklist, feel free to get started with the blacklist I’ve built for use with this site. I’d recommend using a smaller list like this rather than the giant list you can download through jayallen.org. That list may be pretty comprehensive, but its enormous size seems to bog the software up a bit.
For my email, I’ve started using SpamFire from MatterForm. It’s Mac OS X compatible and is working nicely so far.