And in other news… It’s very strange to see someone you’ve met being interviewed about an international art theft. We met Van Gogh museum director John Leighton in October 2001 when we were in Amsterdam for the opening of The Photograph and the American Dream at the Van Gogh Museum. He was generous and soft-spoken, I imagine this is close to the worst thing that can happen to you as the director of an art museum (unfortunately, I can think of worse).

It seems that Venezuela is possibly on the brink of another coup, if not a full blown revolution. I wish I had more time to research this because I’m not sure what to think, though I’m leaning slightly against Chavez for a number of reasons.

This story is not getting much attention in the US media so far as I’ve seen, even though it has huge implications for the balance of power in OPEC and potential reverberations throughout the world.

Friday night a gunmen fired on a crowd of opposition protesters in Caracas, killing three and wounding 29. The government has accused the opposition of staging the shooting, however a video from a few nights before the shooting seems to show the confessed gunman alongside a Venezuelan government official who happens to be a Chavez supporter. There also appears to be a discrepancy between the number of bullets fired the number of people wounded.

Oil plays heavily into the picture. In the ill-fated coup back in April, the US supported the interim government, and was diplomatically embarrassed when that government lasted two days. Yesterday, the entire board of Venezuela’s largest (only?) oil company, PDVSA were apparently forced out by Chavez. This chart shows that, as of 1998 Venezuela had the third largest share of OPEC production. The previous third largest produce was Iraq.

I believe one long term goal of US strategy is to destabilize OPEC. Afghanistan’s proximity to the Caspian Sea oil fields was a side benefit and Iraq is a major OPEC producer, even with sanctions. A US friendly Venezuela could very well leave OPEC, allowing Venezuelan oil companies to increase production and sell more. Economically Venezuela is a mess, so more money has the potential to benefit Venezuela’s citizens. Currently Venezuela supplies 15% of the United States oil. (Note that figure is unclear as to whether that is 15% of all oil or 15% of foreign oil.)

Besides being bored with Bush bashing, I’ve come to realize that the US oil lobby probably had a much clearer picture of the direction the world was heading than many of the rest of us. If you want an expert on a foreign country, a good place to look would be in businesses which operate there. Assuming American oil companies knew of the state of unrest in Venezuela, the terror-funding and increasing ruling class isolation in Saudi Arabia, any number of things about Iraq, social unrest in Iran, terrorist threats in Yemen and any number of other places, it would make a lot of sense to push for domestic sources of oil in the near term. Drilling in Alaska still seems like a gamble and a mistake, but I understand the motivation.

I would love to see the US move away from dependence on oil, foreign or otherwise. However these things take time and the computers and machines which have the potential to make that happen still need oil to run. I also recognize that our first priority right now has to be doing everything possible to prevent anyone in the US or other countries from being blown up by terrorists. It’s like triage on a geo-political scale. Fix the immediate threat first, improve the status quo second.

Superficially, Chavez appears to have one leg in the bizarre “I wear a uniform” club. Lovely company that puts him in: Hussein, Castro, Kim Jong Il, Arafat and others.

Thank you to Miguel Octavio in Venezuela for writing about what’s going on outside his door. His brother Alfredo works at the Venezuelan e-commerce site Patilla which today has a page up saying simply, “Cerramos hoy para abrir mañana…en LIBERTAD!” That translates to something like “We’re closed today to open tomorrow… in freedom!” I really wish I had a more informed opinion of what to hope for.

Fedexing Santa.

Well, the new set of filters are basically out although I’m still going to send out a press release early next week. The documentation is not finished but I think I’ll be able to wrap it up this weekend. I’m tired.

Since word got out about the Final Cut Pro update the Joe’s Filters site has been getting pounded, averaging two hits per minute with peaks of up to 5-6 hits per minute. I know that’s no slashdot, but it’s a lot of traffic for me. All the PHP and MySQL stuff is working flawlessly so far (touch wood). I guess all that reading and experimenting is paying off. I’m proud to see it working so well.

Thanks for all the great comments and notes. There are some really wonderful people using Joe’s Filters.

and now I wait for it to hit the fan…

My wife’s design firm Ideas on Purpose is up for the Fast Company ‘Fast 50’. Please go vote for them. The better they do the more time I have to work on filters.

I wrote a fairly lengthy response to a question about desaturating video clips on Apple’s FCP message board, but it seemed like something worth posting here too.

YUV should correctly be called YCrCb, with Cr and Cb begin the red and blue channels, the 1:1 in 4:1:1. Y is the green channel plus luminance, the 4 in 4:1:1. Being able to select the green channel produces better results in DV because that’s the channel that carries the luma information.

Yes, broadcast technicians seem to consider ‘YUV’ to be slang. That said, there are plenty more hits on Google for YUV than for YCrCb, and FCP and QuickTime use the term ‘YUV’ internally.

YUV refers to a method of storing RGB data in a smaller bandwidth. The information in YUV is converted back to RGB in order to display as a full color image. Part of the reason for separating Luminance from Color was to create a transmission method for color television which was backwards compatible with b/w tv and used less signal bandwidth than sending three b/w (rgb) channels of information. The solution is an incredibly elegant hack and a testament to the genius of the people who invented television.

The reason the Green channel looks clearest is because 60% of luminance is made of green light. The two color channels are not red and blue, they are ranges between Red-Green (Cr, U) and Yellow-Blue (Cb, V). This is sometimes confused because those ranges are determined by subtracting from Red and Blue. Something to note is that green exists in all three YUV channels: it’s 60% of Luma, explicit in Cr and Yellow is an additive combination of Green and Red. Blue appears as 10% of Luma and only half of the Cb color information. I suspect this is a primary reason for using greenscreens instead of bluescreens for video keying.

I wrote about YUV here, with links to several good sources: FXScript Reference: RGB and YUV Color.

I’m not remembering whether PAL is 4:2:0, but the 4:1:1 sampling in NTSC DV is quite easy to see. Sampling color information every four pixels is the reason DV Chroma is so blocky and drifts off to the right side of hard edges. I’m pretty sure the 4:x:x syntax has nothing to do with RGB and instead refers to the recorded sampling of information in YUV space. One of the great things about DV is that the Luma information is the same resolution as any other professional video format. The only degradation is in the recording of color information, which is usually very hard to distinguish unless you’re specifically looking for it.

When using the channel-blending trick the results mimic black and white film shot with a colored glass filter. The color channel(s) used are the chromatic opposite of the glass filter which would produce the same effect. For example the Green channel looks like b/w film shot with a pink/magenta filter, the Blue channel looks like b/w film shot through a yellow filter. It’s possible to combine channels to get more specific intermediary colors, something a lot of people do with the Channel Mixer in Photoshop. Combining 50% Red with 50% Green yields similar results to a blue glass filter. That idea is the basis for my Saturation & Colorize filter, I wanted to give the same level of control over b/w results as a person would have when shopping for glass filters at B&H. One cool side effect of math instead of reality is that the same methods can be used to saturate as well as de-saturate, with some useful results.