Today I join the extremely rare air of millions of internet folk. Today I do something that everyone from Roger Ebert to CindyCinema.com to your Aunt Rebecca does. Today I will list my favorite movies from 2009, to the excessively high amount of 25. Why 25? Because I go to the theater almost every weekend, I’ve seen about 60 movies from this year, so listing only 10 would inhibit my urge to talk about what movies I’ve seen. Plus everybody loves a list!

So let’s get right into it. I’ll be SPOILER-FREE. Here are picks for my favorite movies from the Year 1 A.D…K. (After Dark Knight)…

*** It should be noted that at the time of writing this post I have NOT yet seen Avatar, Crazy Heart, The Lovely Bones, A Simple Man, Sherlock Holmes, or The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. All of those may or may not have had potential to make this list…

25. Paranormal Activity

After first seeing the trailer several months before its release, this was on my radar as one of my most anticipated movies for the year. After seeing the movie itself, I was slightly underwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was good, but I was hoping that maybe, especially with the ending, that it would be 10x crazier. But in between countless (sometimes funny, sometimes pointless) dialog scenes, there are some actual genuinely creepy moments. My advice is that if you’ve never heard of this movie, rent it when it comes out on DVD this month, and watch it without knowing anything about it, and you’ll have an incredibly fun time. Whatever you do, DO NOT watch the trailer for this movie, they mind-blowingly ruin the final scene of the movie in it! I’m not joking!

24. Watchmen

I consider Watchmen to be one of my favorite books of all time, so I was definitely excited for the movie, as opposed to being skeptical from the beginning that there’s no way they could pull it off. In the end, this satisfied me. And for the most part (I think) it satisfied fans of the graphic novel. From what I read from reviews, the main problem was that people who didn’t know the source material wouldn’t know what the hell is going on. I can’t certify this claim, but I can understand that happening. Plus it’s very long. That being said, I finally plan on checking out the 3 and 1/2 hour Ultimate Cut over the holidays.

23. The Road

This might beat out Precious as the “feel-bad” movie of the year. While Precious had glimmers of hope scattered throughout, this movie is just one long depressing journey down a road to nowhere. And at no point did Precious ever have the threat of being cannibalized by rednecks. This film about a father and son trudging along a road in a post-apocalyptic wasteland did get draggy at times, but it stuck with me for a while after I left the theater. Let me just say that despite its flaws, the good parts are great, and the tense parts are intense.

22. Drag Me to Hell

Ah, this movie brings us all back to when Sam Raimi made awesome, hilarious, and fun horror movies. Not to take anything away from the Spiderman movies, but I’ll take a chainsaw on an arm over web slinging any day of the week. And his return to horror with Drag Me to Hell proved to be almost as fun as his old stuff (almost). The only things that may have potentially hurt this movie are the lack of Bruce Campbell, and the PG-13 rating. Regardless, it’s a horror movie that doesn’t try and be scary so much (except for a dozen or so “jump scares”) as it does to be funny, gross, and entertaining.

21. Bruno

You either like what Sasha Baron Cohen does, or you don’t. That is probably what determines who will like this movie as well. I happen to find him hilarious. Bruno isn’t as funny as Borat, and neither of them are as funny as Da Ali G Show. While I hate to be in awkward situations and confrontations myself, I love watching it happen to other people. Because that’s basically what this movie is, just an 80-minute awkward confrontation. And as how it was with Borat, the deleted/extended scenes on the Blu-ray are often as good or better than what actually made the movie.

20. Extract

Mike Judge is 3-for-3 with his live-action films in my opinion. Office Space is a classic, and Idiocracy is a vastly underseen comedic masterpiece. Now with Extract, he returns closer to Office Space, while at the same time staying original. It’s about a guy who owns an extract company that employs about a dozen very stupid people. Mike Judge might very well be the best writer of “stupid people dialog” out there nowadays. Plus I enjoyed seeing Jason Bateman and Kristen Wiig get high profile roles, even if it’s in a movie that (like Idiocracy) was not seen by enough people.

19. The House of the Devil

If you knew nothing about this movie, and I showed it to you and told you it was released in 1982, you would have no choice but to believe me. That’s how great of an homage to late 70s/ early 80s horror movies this is. And that’s exactly who this will appeal to, fans of that era of horror films. It’s pretty cool. Hell, they even shot it on 16mm!

18. District 9

This movie was a nice little surprise this year, no one really knew what to expect of it. It played out as both a great sci-fi movie and an intriguing social commentary. For what it cost to make, the special effects were phenomenal and the aliens blended in seamlessly into the South African slums. I’m sure Invictus will get all the awards buzz and this will receive none, but to be honest I’ve seen Invictus, and the best movie about South Africa this year was District 9. And it won people over without a likable main character!

17. I Love You, Man

Despite coining the regrettable term “bromance”, this movie was consistently funny, and continued the trend of R-rated comedies being significantly better than PG-13 ones. If you’ve ever looked at Paul Rudd’s imdb page, you’ll notice that he is in a large amount of crappy romantic comedies and other garbage that no one really sees, and then he’s also in a small handful of good movies. This happens to be one of the good ones.

16. Moon

With shades of Kubrickian (if that’s a word) isolation and style, Sam Rockwell lives alone in a mining farm on the moon, just doing his job until his contract runs out. He’s been up there by himself for several years, his only friend is a robot voiced by Kevin Spacey. What I thought was going to be a movie about the descent into madness turned into one of the surprisingly cooler plots of the year. Like 2007’s Sunshine though, this movie may lose a little of it’s magic your TV as opposed to the big theater screen.

15. Trick ‘r Treat

I’m telling you, this movie is this generation’s Creepshow, if that means anything to you. I (like many other people who saw it) will be blown away at the fact this never got theatrical release (while garbage like Saw VI gets wide release). This mishmash of well made short stories blended into a moderately intertwined whole is probably the greatest straight-to-DVD movie I’ve ever seen. (also, some might consider this a 2008 release, but it didn’t get put out to the public until well into 2009, so it makes the list!)

14. 500 Days of Summer

I’m not a big fan of romantic-type movies all that much, but occasionally every few years one comes along that is actually a meaningful, well-intentioned, well-made film. This movie about heartache and the recovery process relates to me on many levels. And it’s easily the most cleverly constructed and edited movie about relationships since Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

13. The Hurt Locker

I liked this film a lot, I wanted to like it more, but it seemed like it should have been even better for some reason. It’s almost like Generation Kill: The Movie. I could have assumed a movie about a bomb squad in the Iraq war would be an extremely tense movie, but damn! This movie got me cold-sweating a little bit in the movie theater. This is the definition of an “edge of your seat thriller”.

12. Where the Wild Things Are

I normally go to the movies on Saturday afternoons, because I don’t like crowded movie theaters, but I knew if I did that for this movie there would be a bunch of annoying kids in the theater, as I see them wandering about in droves when I go in the afternoon (but I see non-children’s movies so I don’t care). So I went at night to see this hoping that maybe the amount of children would be greatly reduced, and it was, but ironically the theater was crowded and I ended up sitting three seats away from some annoying kid. And this kid, I swear to god, fell asleep during the last 20 minutes of the movie and started snoring…! The parent didn’t wake the kid up! How rude! That kid must have been dumb anyway, because he was missing a fantastic movie. But seriously, theater etiquette people!

11. The Hangover

It’s surprising that the most universally accepted comedy of the year was also really good, it normally doesn’t work out that way. And it’s nice to see Mike Tyson getting work again.

10. Observe and Report

I can’t stress how much I love this movie. It was probably 2009’s most “love it or hate it” film, but I was blown away by how much I ended up loving it. I read a review that called it a comedic version of Taxi Driver, and I couldn’t agree more. I’ve made pretty much all of my friends watch it since it’s come out on Blu-ray. It’s easily the darkest comedy of the year, probably Seth Rogan’s best role ever, and it saddens me that the most widely recognized movie about mall cops is still Paul Blart.

9. Adventureland

I can’t tell if this is actually a good movie, or I just love it for some odd reason. I personally don’t know anyone else who has seen it, so I can’t ask them. But I just clicked with this movie to an insane degree. Maybe I just related to it because it was similar to my life right after college. Regardless, it’s the best place to enjoy Kristen Stewart without having to endure Twilight.

8. UP

For some reason I never expect much out of these computer animated movies, then I watch them, and they blow me away 100% of the time (I just saw Kung Fu Panda the other day and the same thing happened as well…). In comparison to Where the Wild Things Are, this movie had adult themes but was more adaptable to children, while Wild Things apparently makes children fall asleep. My only regret here was that I didn’t see it in 3D when I had the chance.

7. Funny People

Judd Apatow will probably forever have a free pass from me to do whatever he wants for making Freaks and Geeks, but this is my favorite of his three movies. I don’t know why people are claiming it wasn’t actually funny, it was very funny, and it was also very serious as well, I think that’s the genius of it. All of the actors fit in perfectly with the roles they were given, and it’s disappointing that people didn’t like this movie more. I’d say give it another chance. I would also like to note that the special features on the Blu-ray collector’s edition are as amazing as they are plentiful. Hours of good extra stuff, especially the Raaaaaaaandy documentary.

6. Zombieland

Is it surprising that a zombie movie is likely the most fun movie of the year? It shouldn’t be, zombie movies rule! Woody Harrelson is in top comedic form, and I’ll need to see it again before I make a statement as bold as it’s better than Shaun of the Dead, but it’s pretty close. And I won’t ruin it, but there is a big surprise cameo that does not disappoint. I’m hoping for some sequels.

5. Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson hasn’t let me down yet. I was pretty excited when I heard he was going to be making this movie, because I knew he would do great things with it. It’s probably his most accessible film to date, I could see just about anyone enjoying it, but at the same time it’s still vintage Anderson and fits right in with his auteur style. It’s still in theaters right now, so get the cuss out there and cussing see it!

4. Star Trek

This might be the perfect blend of nerdiness and coolness. This is a Star Trek movie! Should it be this cool??? This JJ Abrams character might actually know what he’s doing. I’m not a fan of the Star Trek series, and I was able to jump right in and understand what’s going on. This looked great in theaters, and the Blu-ray looks pretty spectacular as well.

3. Up in the Air

I didn’t really know what to expect when I went to the theater to see this other than it was super ultra mega critically acclaimed. What I ended up seeing was an incredibly simple movie, that was equal parts powerful. This is perhaps the most moving film of the year, and it does it without ever being hokey. In fact, the whole thing seems very realistic. This goes to show that you don’t always need a big spectacle of a story to make an amazing movie. I’m sure this will end up winning every award known to man come awards time.

2. Inglourious Basterds

This has everything you’d expect from a Tarantino movie; witty dialog, extreme violence, stolen ideas turned original somehow. I’m sorry, I’m something of a Tarantino fanboy, I can’t help it, I eat this stuff up! I even love his segment in Four Rooms! As he himself has recently stated, this may be his masterpiece. I may agree. Wait, Pulp Fiction is probably still better, but Basterds is quite amazing. I just watched it again this week on Blu-ray, it just reinforced my love of it. I really wanted to make this my #1, but I had to go with my gut…

1. Black Dynamite

No movie this year made me laugh as much as this did. I was laughing out loud in the theater from the first scene all the way to the absolutely insane ending. I saw the trailer for it earlier this year, and was excited to see it, hoping it would be kinda funny. It ended up being ridiculously funny. I drove 45 minutes away to see it during it’s one week theatrical run, and I almost feel special for being one of the undoubtedly few people who have seen it. All eight of us in the theater sort of bonded that day, we all walked out the theater looking at each other and chuckling with stupid smiles on our faces, eight strangers. Did we then go out for drinks afterwards and regale in hilarious banter? No, of course not, I don’t talk to strangers. But in all honesty, this is the definition of a cult classic (if you can call it that this soon, I’m doing it anyway), and when it comes out on Blu-ray in February I suggest you check it out, though, it may not be for all tastes. If you find the trailer funny, then you will probably agree that this is one of the greatest things you’ll ever see. Maybe I’m just crazy, who knows?

For your possible enjoyment, here’s two other quick mini-lists:

JUST MISSED THE CUT:

35. Orphan
34. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
33. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
32. Coraline
31. 2012
30. The Informant!
29. A Serious Man
28. Invictus
27. Precious
26. The Blind Side

The WORST films of 2009 (that I saw, I mean Old Dogs and Twilight New Moon are probably worse, but I didn’t bother subjecting myself to that torture):

10. The Final Destination
9. Whatever Works
8. My Bloody Valentine 3D
7. X-Men Origins Wolverine
6. Surrogates
5. The Men Who Stare at Goats
4. Friday the 13th
3. Year One
2. Ninja Assassin
1. Jennifer’s Body (not worth it even for Megan Fox or the lesbian kiss)

2009 was a good year overall for movies, and here’s hoping for a great 2010!

Happy holidays!

Video compression has come a long way from the days of using Cinepak on a Quadra 950 tower and the old NuBus slots. For the most part, the wars between online formats has been settled with Flash leading the way. But behind that Flash Player is often H.264 encoded video, ever since it was introduced with Flash 9 in December of 2007. Even video powerhouse YouTube is pushing out H.264 video wrapped in a flash player. If that’s not enough, one of the officially supported video formats for Blu-ray is H.264.

So from on-line video (SD or HD) to high end Blu-ray DVD’s, h.264 is a huge player. It’s all good, right? Well, mostly. Have you ever compressed an h.264 video file? It can be unbearably long. We first started running into this bottleneck when we switched from doing mpeg-1 client web approvals (something that was very fast to compress and widely compatible) to h.264. We switched mainly because we wanted to post high resolution web approvals for our clients at higher quality, and MPEG-1 just wasn’t cutting it. H.264 really filled that need. But even a shorter video, say 10-15 minutes could take 60-90 minutes to compress on a Quad Intel MacPro, and some of our videos are more in the 30 minute range. If you have the time, leaving it running overnight is no big deal, but most of the time we’re doing these web approvals close to 5 or 6pm and they needed to be posted and sent to the client that same day. Waiting around just to finish a web post feels like a waste of time (although we did minimize this to some degree using LogMeIn as covered in my previous post).

After hearing others brag about how great it was, we finally decided to try the “to good to be true” Turbo.264 USB key from Elgato (the non-HD version). I really fought it because I had a hard time believing that a little USB key could do what my huge expensive multi-processor MacPro could not. But also because it did not integrate with Compressor, which is part of our workflow. For the price though, we decided to give it a try.

For what you end up paying, the Turbo.264 does a pretty good job. It is FAST for sure, and the output is not too bad, but it’s not perfect either. It gave us the speed that we wanted, but not the quality. One of the main reasons it’s able to do what it does so fast is that the very first thing that’s done is resize the video frame, and then pass it off to the USB key for processing. This is key, because the rest of the processing is done on a lower resolution frame instead of working with the original uncompressed frame. Great for speed, but not optimal for quality. But for many people, this might just do the trick depending on your needs and budget. You end up seeing compression artifacts in places that you wouldn’t when using compressor with similar settings, typically areas of fast movement, effects or dissolves. But it did take care of the time bottleneck that we were having. So we decided to sacrifice some quality for the sake of actually getting home on time but continued to look for other options.

Then I read a press release about a new product from Matrox called CompressHD, and I had a warm and fuzzy feeling all over. I contacted Matrox and asked them if it was possible to get a review unit and they were nice enough to send it out a week later. While it’s 4-5x the cost of the Turbo.264 USB key, (depending on which one you compare it to, the first SD key or the more recent HD version) it has some great benefits that make the cost worthwhile.  I’ve been using it for nearly 2 months now and it has taken the pain out of h.264 encoding.

Installation

Installation is easy, but for most editors the biggest problem may be finding an open card slot on your MacPro. We decided to sacrifice a SATA card to make way for the CompressHD card. All it needs is a PCIe slot. Once installed I started the computer and installed the software, and after a quick reboot it was good to go.

Integration with Compressor

The biggest selling point (aside from the speed)  is the seamless integration with compressor. Inside of compressor there is a new preset folder called “Matrox MAX H.264 Settings”. If you take a look at what’s inside, you’ll find that the presets are very similar to what you’re used to seeing in the Apple Settings.

If you’re used to using compressor, not much changes in your workflow for creating h.264 files. You pick one of the Matrox presets that fits your needs, apply it and submit just as you did in the past. However, much of the processing is now handed off to the CompressHD card. The only thing handled by compressor now is the decoding of the video frame, everything else is handled by the CompressHD card. The card has 2 processors that are optimized for different functions. One chip handles resizing/scaling, and the other handles the color space, compression and output. So what you end up with is this nice little video assembly line and each frame is passed from chip to chip to perform it’s designated function.

But what if you don’t want to use one of the presets included? What if you have specific needs of your own? No problem! You can create your own settings and still take advantage of that nice processing power. As an example, here is a setting that we created to use for web approvals.

What is the difference between the Apple h.264 presets and the Matrox ones? Nothing really. The Matrox folder was created for convenience and to streamline your experience. You can choose any of the Apple h.264 presets and they too will access the card.

If you want to compare performance with and without the card, there’s no need to pull the card out and then put it back in. Open up the control panel and you can turn the card on and off. This is what we did for the comparison tests. We’ve been running version 1.6 of the software, but the current version is 1.8 and is now Snow Leopard compatible. However, we’re still using Leopard and do not plan to upgrade until sometime late next summer.

Performance

Once we got this card in the machine, we just couldn’t wait to start compressing something… ANYTHING, just to try it out. It’s not that compression is all that interesting, but I really wanted to see how this baby performed. It was like dropping a new engine into a used car, we just wanted to hear the engine fire up. Here are the details on how we tested the card.

All tests were performed on a 3.o ghz Quad Core Intel MacPro with 12 gigs of RAM. We ran each compression twice. Once with the CompressHD card enabled, and once without. During these tests there were no other operations being performed on the machine, but only for the sake of making sure we were comparing apples to apples when we got the final numbers. One of the main reasons to use this card is that it handles so much of the work load, you can continue to work and even do processor intensive functions on the computer while having little or no effect on the compression times that the card puts out.

We used version 3.05 of compressor, that is part of Final Cut Studio 2. If you’re running the latest version of Final Cut Studio (we call it 3 because Apple forgot to give it a number) you will already have the ability to create Blu-ray movies within compressor. In our case, the card actually adds that ability to compressor, since this version of compressor does not directly support Blu-ray (only the now dead HD-DVD standard).

Our test video is 14:12 long and in 720p format using the ProRes 422 codec. The original file is 7.85 gigs in size, and we compressed it to 6 different formats as part of a single batch for each of the tests. We chose some of the most common presets that we might use, as well as one custom one that we use in house.

Here are the results.

As you can see, there is a significant difference with the card enabled.  There’s something very satisfying about watching it crank through the data so fast. It does however cut down on the coffee breaks and long walks on the beach.

One thing that I noticed is that the biggest benefit comes when you are changing resolution. This is where having the dedicated hardware really pays off. When you’re simply just converting from one format to another (say ProRes to h.264 with no other changes) the speed bump is less noticeable, but still there.

As an example, look at the Apple TV bar compared to the iPhone bar. Because the frame size for Apple TV does not need to be changed, the card just passes the frames through at the same resolution. But for the iPhone version it has to be scaled down a lot, something that the card does much faster and with better results then just using compressor.

*NOTE:  You might have noticed that the Blu-ray bar is the same on both passes. Because I was running Compressor 3 instead of the newer 3.5, Blu-ray is not supported natively. So on both passes, the CompressHD card was used. So kind of pointless for our purposes, but I left it in anyway.

Image Quality

The image quality is as good as anything coming out of compressor natively, but at a fraction of the time. In all of the tests that we did I couldn’t see a quality difference between using the card or not. Compared to video run through the Turbo.264 key, there was a noticeable difference. Again, I’m not totally knocking the Turbo.264 product, it does have its place. I use it all the time to convert movies/tv shows from the TiVo format to iPhone so that I can watch them while at the gym. But for trying to exceed the expectations of my clients the Turbo.264 key falls short. We’ve also had problems with it dealing with anamorphic footage properly without having weird scaling and cropping issues.

One thing to be aware of is that the CompressHD card will only do CBR compression, not VBR. Not a huge deal, but something to be aware of. This is also a limitation of the Turbo.264 usb key. VBR adds a much better quality to file size ratio then CBR, but in my experience this is not much of an issue. Disk space is abundant, the internet is fast and both SD DVD and Blu-ray can hold plenty of data. Not a huge deal.

Just to give you an idea, here are some file size differences based on the same source video.

Compatibility

One of my original concerns was that the card might interfere or conflict with other capture cards from AJA or BlackMagic, but it plays nicely. The codec’s that Matrox wrote are based on the Quicktime Component architecture built into QT, so any hardware or software that supports the implementation of QuickTime Component will work just fine.

Matrox Product Integration

It’s worth noting that you can get the CompressHD hardware (called the “MAX“) as part of some of the other Matrox products. For example, you can purchase a MXO2 and get it outfitted with the MAX card for just $400 more, saving you a $100 over buying the card separately. One of the great benefits of this is the ability to run this type of hardware on a laptop that has a Express34 slot, instead of just a tower. One of the down sides is that you can’t use both the MXO2 Max for editing/monitoring while the hardware is compressing. It’s an either/or situation. But for many that will be a small trade off for the ability to take this mobile.

The SuiteTake

At a street price of $499 the CompressHD is not exactly cheap, especially if you only occasionally need to compress to h.264, and time is not an issue for you. But if you encode as much as we do and don’t’ want to spend your whole week watching a progress bar, I would whole heartedly recommend getting the Matrox CompressHD. It’s a solid piece of hardware that integrates nicely with the FCP workflow so seamlessly you will forget it’s even there. That is, unless somebody takes it away from you.