While I get my video editing gear up to HDR standards and prep for Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 2025, I’ve found time to appear on some podcasts the past few months:
More Fun Talking Retro Episode 7: The Oldskool PC Jim Leonard – Piracy Is Not The Theme:
Atari Podcast Episode 55 – The Past, Present, and Future of MobyGames:
I’ve enjoyed all of these, and I think I’m getting slightly better at it each time. If you think I can contribute to your podcast on anything from vintage computing history, PC retrogaming, programming old systems, the early demoscene, 1980s gaming history, or who knows what all else, drop me a line at mobygamer@gmail.com.
On November 1st 2023, I released the first part of a 4-part series on the IBM PCjr on YouTube. The opening shot is a slow dolly push into the frame, showing an IBM PCjr’s startup screen. It is some of the best product footage I’ve ever shot, perfectly calibrated and exposed, showing the CRT’s 16 colors as accurately as I’ve ever seen in 4k footage. You can check out the opening shot (and hopefully the entire video!) here:
Someone mentioned to me that at first they thought it was rendered CGI, which is one of the best complements I’ve ever received. :-)
While I’m not a professional photographer, I’ve been studying videography for about a decade, and gotten some tips from experts that include an Emmy-award-winning cinematographer, so I feel somewhat qualified to advise on the process of shooting vintage computer product photography/video. I’d love to see better vintage computer videography on YouTube, so here’s my process, and I hope it helps someone.
Misconceptions
There’s a lot of bad advice out there, so let’s start by tackling some misconceptions:
Color grading is a stylistic step, not a correction step. Color grading is the process of adjusting and enhancing the colors of a video to achieve a desired visual aesthetic or mood, but in order for grading to work consistently, the input footage needs to be perfectly exposed and neutral. The procedures in this blog post will help you get your footage to be as close to neutral as possible out of the camera, which you can then color grade if you want to.
Gear Doesn’t Matter — but whatever you use, it must have manual controls for aperture, ISO, and shutter speed if you want to control the process. If any of these are outside of your control, then you probably need to revisit your choice of camera or cell phone. (Most modern iphones and android phones either come with a “pro camera” app, or you can buy one, or try an Android open-source solution such as Open Camera.
Achieving neutral footage via best practices
There is a fairly consistent workflow you can use to achieve neutral and balanced video footage every time. As mentioned above, it requires manual control over several camera settings, so if you’re using a full-automatic camera, or a cell phone without a dedicated “pro camera” app, not all of these steps will apply to your gear, but following as many of them as you can will certainly help.
Also, it is best to follow these basic photograph steps in order. ISO, aperture, and shutter speed are all points on the exposure triangle, but two of them affect video much more than photography, so it’s important to set them in the correct order to prevent unintended artifacts in video.
Let’s go! Here’s the basic process I follow after I set up my scene:
1. Adjust lighting in the real world to get the look you want. Vintage computing enthusiasts understand “garbage in, garbage out”, and the same applies to videography. You can’t fix everything in post, so make sure you have enough light. Not sure if you have enough light? Add more light! The more light you add, the more photons hit the camera sensor, which translates to less noise in the final video. (As a bonus, additional light sometimes fills in harsh shadows.)
2. Set camera to full manual. We need individual control over ISO, aperture, and shutter speed. Preferably, also manual white balance.
3. Set ISO to the base ISO of your camera. This reduces noise in the video. Think of ISO as amplification, or gain, added to the signal registered by the camera sensor: Higher settings produce more noise, just like turning up the volume on a vintage stereo system adds more noise and hiss. Base ISO settings differ from camera to camera, and the base setting is usually NOT the lowest ISO setting of 50 or 100, so you need to check your camera’s manual (or, sadly, the internet) to determine the correct setting. For example, on my Panasonic GH5s, the base ISO is 800 for its LOG picture profile, and ISO 400 for all other picture profiles. (On my Panasonic G9 II, the camera limits the low end of ISO adjustments to its base of 400, and won’t let you go below that. I find that very helpful, but I think that default behavior can be toggled.)
4. Set shutter speed to match the frequency of your lighting. This eliminates subtle “banding” in the picture that results from a mismatch between shutter speed and light flicker. There are really only two settings, 1/50 or 1/60, and you should pick whichever matches the AC frequency of your mains voltage. For Europe, this is 1/50; for North America, this is 1/60. (European users might have some trouble getting exactly 1/50, as that is not a traditionally common shutter speed; pick 1/48 instead as a compromise.)
If you’re using professional flicker-less light rigs, then you don’t need to worry about mains/electrical flicker, and can set the shutter angle to something that looks more natural. Set your shutter angle to 180 degrees if your camera has a “shutter angle” setting. If it doesn’t, set it to double your shooting framerate; for example, if shooting video at 24 frames per second, set shutter to 1/48.
5. Adjust exposure using the aperture. With our ISO and shutter speeds set, the only way we can adjust exposure is by adjusting how much light entering the lens hits the camera sensor. If the picture is too bright, stop the aperture down (ie. go from f/4, to f/5.6, to f/8, etc.) until nothing is clipping in the whites. If too dark, stop the aperture up (ie. go from f/8, to f/5.6, to f/4, etc.) until it nothing is crushed in the shadows. If it’s still too dark after opening the aperture all the way, then add more light (see “Adjust lighting” above).
How to check exposure? If your camera supports it, turn on a “levels”, “histogram”, or “waveform monitor” display in your camera’s settings (or cell phone’s “pro camera” app). If your camera doesn’t have that, enable the “zebras” camera setting with the threshold set to 95% or 100% to ensure nothing is clipping; with this setting on, moving “zebra outlines” will appear on-screen where clipping is occurring. (And if your camera doesn’t have either of these monitoring features, consider getting a better camera.)
6. Set white balance in camera. This is to ensure nothing has a color cast, and that white is truly white. Use your camera’s function to set white balance, which usually involves putting a white balance target in front of your camera so it can calibrate itself. Ideally, use an “18% grey card” (they’re cheap on B&H or Amazon), but you can also get by with a pure white sheet of paper.
7. Focus on your subject. If you’ll be moving the camera or subject a lot, or you know your camera uses a superior focus system like phase detection, it’s ok to use autofocus. If you are not moving the camera or subject significantly, or your camera uses an inferior focus system for video like contrast detection, use manual focus instead.
You don’t have to be scared by manual focus: If your camera supports a feature called “focus peaking”, you can enable it to make in-focus areas easier to see. But you don’t have to trust your eyes using manual focus; your camera should support a “tap to focus” feature when in manual focus mode, where it will focus exactly where you tap on the camera’s flip-out screen. (Just remember that tap-to-focus only sets focus once — it will not track your subject and continually adjust focus.)
8. Put a color chart in front of your subject for a few seconds when you start shooting video. This provides a known good reference to further correct any color issues later during editing. The Calibrite (formerly X-rite) ColorChecker Passport Video is a great choice, as its “video” chart can be used directly by some editors, like DaVinci Resolve, to automatically color-correct any subtle differences from neutral in the footage. If using other video editors, both the MBR Color Corrector III plugin (Premiere, After Effects) as well as Cinema Grade (Premiere, Final Cut) can also use this specific color chart. Simply apply whichever process you have to a frame that contains the color chart, and you will notice the footage will subtly get more accurate; you can then cut out the piece with the color chart in it so it doesn’t show up in the final result.
What about picture profiles?
As long as you’re not using a “special effects” profile, anything called “standard”, “natural”, “rec709”, or similar will be just fine. The actual picture profile doesn’t matter as much, because as demonstrated above, we use the color chart shot to correct the footage to a neutral color balance anyway. But if you’re not sure, take some time to test these procedures with all of your picture profile settings, to see which works best. For example, some picture profiles have different contrast levels than others, even if they don’t change the colors, so you may want to find a low-contrast profile to fill in the shadows if you have trouble lighting your scene.
You don’t have to color-grade
Now that you have color-corrected neutral footage, you may be artistically tempted to color-grade your footage. While it can be fun to make video look like your favorite movie or tv show, stop first and think about what your video is trying to do: If you’re trying to convey a certain narrative, color grading might make your footage more impactful and dramatic… for example, going for earth tones if simulating a 1970’s flashback. But when it comes to historical accuracy, the last thing I want to do is color my footage artistically. For example, CGA has 16 distinctive colors; I want everyone to know exactly what those colors looked like, in ideal conditions. So what I put on YouTube is the neutral, balanced footage out of the camera with very few adjustments, and certainly no color grading. I want people to see what the machines actually look(ed) like.
It is entirely possible I am a moron
I hope this helps you with your own product photography — but if you’ve had better results with a different process, I’d love to read about them; post your experiences in the comments.
When my crew and I wrote 8088 MPH and Area 5150, we had a secondary goal other than to amaze: It was to spurn emulator authors into improving the emulators. Anyone who grew up with a 4.77 MHz system understands that most emulators just don’t play pre-1985 games very well, as most of them were written for that target speed and are unplayable on anything faster. DOSBox is woefully inaccurate for this era of PC gaming — which is why I think most people are trying to forget it, but that would be a shame, as there are some wonderfully surprising action games for this class of system.
MartyPC rises to that challenge, and because the author is as tenacious as we are, he didn’t stop until it ran Area 5150 perfectly. You can even see it single-stepping through the demo’s bit-banged video mode here:
MartyPC single-stepping through a portion of Area 5150
It took 42 years, but we finally have a decent 4.77 MHz 8088 + CGA emulator. And if you’re into that sort of thing, you can even run it in your web browser.
I’m nearing 50. I’m developing the usual amount of physical issues for someone who doesn’t take care of themselves, but nobody told me about the mental issues that follow.
The human brain is an organ, just like every other organ in your body. It’s highly specialized, but then again so are most major organs. As we age, our organs don’t perform as well: We are slower to perform, slower to adapt, slower to heal. Sometimes organs that performed well in our youth start losing the ability to perform their primary function, such as your kidneys leading to early-onset diabetes. And, I’m now finding out, the brain suffers from this as well.
It’s no secret that the elderly have easily-identifiable mental issues, mostly speed of processing and the difficulty of forming short-term memory. What isn’t as well communicated is how less-than-peak-performance brain function affects you long before you become that old. In the last few years, I find myself:
Sensitive to emotion and empathy. I guess this comparison is inevitable, given my nerd pedigree, but it’s very much like Bendii Syndrome, where you feel emotion more strongly. There have been times when I was expected to be impartial in a situation, only to find myself quite subjective and borderline irrational based on how I personally felt.
Feeling a pervasive sense of loss. When I first started out in my career (and hobbies), I had an experience and intellectual advantage in my field. Someone much older than me described me as “the smartest kid in the room”, and I definitely felt that way up until about 8 years ago. You can see a definite correlation between how much I felt I was losing that and my demoscene productions from 2013 through 2015 — almost as if I was desperately trying to cling to that feeling of being the smartest kid in the room.
Being resistant to change. As emotional response increases, logical reasoning has to fight harder to win. There are many changes in last few years I’ve resisted because I felt about them a certain way, when logically they made perfect sense to me.
Tiring after periods of concentration. What happens when you work a muscle too much? It gets tired and hurts. What happens when I have to learn something new, or concentrate on a difficult problem? I feel fatigued.
There are ways to mitigate the above, but the cruel irony is that your brain is the organ that has to fix itself, and it’s malfunctioning. I should get more sleep, exercise, eat better — but my brain wants everything to just go away.
(This is a short rant about morals and obligations, not the ability to make money off of your work. If you rely on copyright law to earn your living, you are not the audience for this article. It is also not a call to action to break the law, which you do at your own risk without holding me responsible.)
Everyone knows that anything created more than 90 years ago is no longer eligible for copyright and is in the public domain, right? Not so fast: In 2011, copyright law was amended in a way that affects audio recordings: The composition might be public domain, but any recordings of it are not. From https://www.copyright.gov/docs/sound/pre-72-report.pdf :
As a consequence of this legal construct, there is virtually no public domain in the United States for sound recordings and a 55 year wait before this will change. To put this in perspective, one need only compare the rules of copyright term for other works. For example, a musical composition published in 1922 would have entered the public domain at the end of 1997, but a sound recording of that same musical composition that was fixed the same year will remain protected for another 70 years, until 2067.
That means this recording from 1887 will somehow have a copyright term of 180 years. That’s seven generations. But hey, the recording artist’s great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren will still have the right to earn money off of the work or remove it from public consumption, and that’s the important thing, right?
It’s laws like this that turn people like Jason Scott into crazed archival psychopaths. While I don’t agree with his methods, we definitely share the same concerns: Copyright law in the US is not merely unrealistic, but works to actively and permanently destroy original works every year by preventing their archival.
I had this conversation with my father recently, who is a numismatist internationally recognized as an expert in some areas in his field. He has archives of the articles he’s written over the past 50 years, but wants none of it archived in a public forum because the work is technically under copyright under various publications’ names, and he holds a firm moral stance on playing by the rules. In my opinion, this dooms his work: None of those publications have publicly-accessible archives. His articles are already inaccessible (unless some library somewhere has numismatic publications from 40 years ago, which is not a realistic expectation as libraries these days are migrating towards digital as a way to save money and offer more services), so unless somebody does something, his work over the last half century will likely be lost forever.
Nobody cares about your work enough to preserve it after you’re gone. If you don’t do it, it won’t get done. The changes in information technology over the last 20 years have enabled the human race to produce so much content per second, over so many different topics and channels, that anything you produce has hardly any audience. Worse, any tiny audience you might have rarely has the free time to consume it. At the end of the day, that leaves a handful of people who consume your content and care about preserving it for future consumers, but the existing state of copyright law enforces penalties for that. The days of printing a book and expecting it to be available in public libraries for 50+ years are long gone.
For those who desire copyright law so that they retain control over their work, realize this: Our contribution to the world — our only purpose in life — is what we do, and what we leave behind. If you write a book, it’s ostensibly because you have something to say, and want people to read what you have to say. You create a work that you’re proud of, and release it into the world. Copyright law grants you the right to request it destroyed at a later date, but it is selfish, petty, and immature to do so.
There was a time when conversion of real-world images to computer screens was considered a black art. Those days are gone, but it’s still fun to dabble.
My friend Jim ‘Trixter’ Leonard is a bit of a CGA aficionado. You know, that computer graphics mode from the 1980’s? He did a nostalgic conversion of my photo into one of the two available 4-color pallets (I think that’s correct?) and the results are dithertastic. Take a look.
Pretty remarkable how well the photo holds up with such a severe restriction on colors. Thanks for the fun conversion, Jim!
I remember a time when I was productive in my home life and my hobbies, both of which brought me great joy and validation. What’s changed since then? What’s happened to my output and my mental state? Two things: Social media distraction and impostor syndrome.
Dealing with social media distraction has many gradients of severity and treatment, but being a member of Generation X gives me an advantage: Because I didn’t grow up with social media, it is easier for me to quit it cold turkey. I’m going to gain back the time I waste on social media by cutting it out completely for several months, if not an entire year. I might pop on once on a while to announce something, but it won’t be a daily check-up. Back-of-the-napkin calculations suggest I will gain back at least 120 hours (that’s 5 days!) of free time per year giving up twitter and facebook alone.
Impostor Syndrome is possible to overcome if you can accept that you have provided real value at one or more points in your life. If you accept that, there are various methods that can help. I’ve adopted some, and they are indeed helping, such as keeping a file of nice things people have said about you, finding one person to confide in about feeling like a fraud, and — cliched as it is — “fake it ’til you make it”. (If it’s good enough for Henry Rollins, it’s good enough to give it a shot.)
I want to get back to a time when I wasn’t worried about what people thought of me. I want to feel like one of the smartest kids in the room again. I want to will new things into existence because I feel they should exist and can help or entertain people. Most importantly, I want to work on myself so that I am available for my family, and be mentally sound enough to not lose sight of how important that is.
To accomplish all this, I’ve removed all social media apps from my phone. I’m also clearing out both of my email accounts, and being realistic about what I can and cannot accomplish for people. (If I’ve volunteered to do something for you, I promise you’ll hear from me, but you might not like the answer.) I might still be active on a forum or two, but with much less frequency. If you need to contact me this year, please email me instead of trying to reach out to me over social media.
Self-improvement is a journey that requires a realistic world view and making some hard choices. With sincere apologies to Johnny Marr and the late Kirsty MacColl:
No it’s not a pretty world out there
With people dying of their own despair
But in a written testimonial you’d say
You never really knew them anyway
I’ll never satisfy you
I’ll never even try to
I really couldn’t tell
It just depends what you remember
At the end of a perfect day
I was hospitalized recently for a kidney stone. Kidney stones are small deposits of minerals that form inside the kidney when there is an unusually high concentration of certain chemicals that crystallize and then stick together. Smaller stones migrate into the ureters, then into the bladder, then are expelled when you urinate. Larger stones, however, don’t fit; they get lodged in the ureters, and prevent urine from draining out of a kidney. This is obviously very bad for the kidney. It is also very painful.
I’ve been asked by many of my like-aged friends what the procedures were like, what caused it, how I knew I had one, and how to prevent it. Here are my thoughts on what happened.
The Basic Timeline
(For the purposes of this section, “The Event” is when I decided I needed medical treatment.)
Four days prior to the event, I’d had odd feelings in my pelvic region. (I recognize this is particularly funny phrasing — go ahead and laugh; I did.) It is hard to describe what I felt; all I can say is that it felt like I had a stomach located there, and that “stomach” was “rumbling” as if it were empty and I were hungry. I wasn’t sure to make of these feelings, but they weren’t painful, so I just went on with my day.
Five hours before the event, I developed mild lower left back pain. I’ve had back pain before, and it was 10pm, so I thought I’d take some ibuprofin and go to bed once it kicked in. I also had what I thought was bad gas, so I voided both solid and liquid in an effort to fix that problem.
Three hours before the event, it still hurt, but I thought I could lie in bed, relax, and sleep it off. For the next three hours, I tried unsuccessfully to go to sleep while the pain slowly grew from mild to acute pain, which I still wrote off as having wrenched my back or something. Still unable to sleep, I decided to try voiding again, and when that didn’t fix anything, I woke Melissa and told her I probably needed to go to the hospital.
After driving to the emergency room, I was immediately given a hospital gown to change into and a bed to lie in. Anticipating I would need fluids and pain medication, an IV was inserted:
I was also hooked up to various monitors:
(My blood pressure was elevated likely because I was in a hospital for the first time since being born, worried about my condition, and in some pain.) I was then examined by a doctor, who ordered a CT of my midsection, and the results showed a 7mm stone lodged just inside the beginning of my ureter, close to my kidney.
The size and placement of the stone dictated my treatment. There are various ways to remove lodged stones:
Smaller stones can eventually migrate down and out. These are managed with pain medication until they pass, which can take a day or more.
Larger stones must be removed, and are typically broken up so that they can be passed or extracted. There are two ways to break them up: Sound waves, or a tiny medical laser.
If the stones can’t be broken up, or are in a completely inaccessible location (which is rare but happens 5% of the time), then the final recourse is to cut open your back, then further surgery to remove them.
Luckily I didn’t fall into the rare category. But because my stone was so close to the kidney, they couldn’t use sound waves, so I was scheduled for the frickin’ laser.
The actual procedure goes something like this:
A stent is inserted into the affected ureter, with one end in the kidney and the other end in the bladder. It is a thin hose with perforated holes near both ends so that urine can drain into the bladder around the lodged stone, which brings the kidney out of immediate danger. You want this, because it isn’t always possible to get the stone out during the procedure, and you want to be able to pee semi-normally while waiting for the second attempt, which could be few days.
The stone is located with a scope, then a medical laser blasts it into pieces. Thank the gods of fiber-optics for that bit of medical technology.
The pieces are then extracted, and sent off for analysis. The analysis usually returns a few weeks later, to be discussed with you and your urologist; the mineral makeup of the stone can be used to determine what caused it and possibly how to prevent it.
The stent is left in 2-3 days to facilitate healing, then removed either at home or at the doctor’s office.
You are, thankfully, knocked out for this. Knowing the procedure — the stent is inserted exactly as you think it would be inserted — I would have insisted on it.
After I recovered (which didn’t go well; more on this later), I was sent home, where I rested for an additional day. Two days after the procedure, my wife helped remove the stent, which, again, is done exactly how you think it is done. It wasn’t painful, but it sure was unsettling!
Expect the unexpected
The above sounds very routine, which it mostly was. The surprises for me came after the procedure itself. Here is a list of things that surprised me:
I did not come out of anesthesia very well. Some people wake up slowly and act drunk, crack jokes, act silly, etc. Others wake up normally as if nothing had happened. I fell into the relatively uncommon category of people who wake up atypical; in my case, I was panicking. I felt very anxious, like my brain was racing without a limiter, and my heartrate was elevated. Melissa described my actions as if my body were trying to process trauma signals, but the actual pain itself was being blocked by medication, so my body wasn’t sure how to process everything else. I tried to sit up and walk it off, but I was on a lot of pain medication that made me very dizzy and nauseous, so I couldn’t get up. For at least 8 hours afterwards, I oscillated between this state and sleep.
Pain medication has enough goofy side effects that I will consider going on much less of it if this ever happens again. For example, my urine was discolored a bright orange color for days. The pain meds also gave me constipation; I had my first normal movement four days after being admitted to the hospital. Then, the constipation turned into diarrhea for a day after that. What fun!
I was extremely tired for up to a week afterwards, despite getting plenty of sleep every night, and never actually having been cut open. It felt similar to recovering from a bout of the flu, where you are tired all the time and slightly short of breath. I took this as evidence that my body had some healing to do even though I was never cut open, which goes to show you that any invasive procedure usually incurs some trauma that the body has to spend time and energy healing.
The IV insertion point stays with you for a while. Over a week later, I still had a bruise and marks from the surgical tape. Nearly two weeks later, I still have the marks from the tape, and scrubbing doesn’t seem to remove them:
Moving forward
Statistics show that people who get one stone have a 50% chance of developing another in the next 5 years. (That is why this article is somewhat negatively titled “1.0”.) Lifestyle changes (mostly dietary) can help reduce this. While I haven’t yet gone over analysis results with the urologist that performed my procedure, he told me after the procedure that he had quickly examined a piece and was fairly certain it was the most common type of stone (calcium). To reduce the changes of another occurrence, I was advised to:
Drink more water to dilute the amount of uric acid produced
Eat less salt
Avoid “dark” sodas (coke, pepsi, dr. pepper, etc.) as these contain phosphoric acid as a flavor additive. (Phosphoric acid has been shown in some studies to assist stone production.)
As I only enjoy dark soda, I’ve essentially given it up completely, and replaced it with water, sports drinks, and tea. I have to be careful about the tea, as some processed teas also adds phosphoric acid. Read your food labels, kids. Also: I’m not fond of tea.
I was sad to give up pop. It was my only vice; I don’t drink alcohol or coffee, smoke, or do pharmaceuticals. I drank it every day, and I am really going to miss it. I may still have once a month or so; perhaps as a treat at a restaurant.
I still think it’s really cool that a medical laser was fired inside my body
Oldskooler Ramblings 
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