Tag: Video

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Bike Commute, Pushing Codecs

Had a few ideas about ways to present multiple views of GPS data in a multimedia project, part of which involved videotaping my bicycle commute along the Ohlone Greenway from handlebar-eye-view, then speeding up the 27 minutes of footage to a more watchable five minutes. Mounted a camera with a very sturdy professional cam clamp left over from a long-ago project and set off. Hit a bunch of snags, and am not sure whether they might be show stoppers for the whole project. What I had hoped would capture a lovely ride turned into a struggle with the outer limits of the most advanced codec technology, and ended up looking like total dooky.

Problem #1: Because camera is rigidly attached, it picks up every little bump in the road. This mounting method is inherently shaky.

Problem #2: Because camera is on handlebars rather than on my head, the camera view doesn’t track my line of sight, which is very disconcerting for the viewer (or maybe just for me, since it doesn’t match my experience at all).

Problem #3: Video doesn’t account for a human’s peripheral vision, which accounts for so much of the experience not shown here. Again, disconcerting (makes it seem much more dangerous than it actually feels).

Problem #4: The natural side-to-side pumping action of bicycling adds to a seasick, high-motion effect not actually experienced by the rider.

Problem #5: Once the footage was speeded up, pauses at stop signs pass by in a blink, making it look like I ride with total disregard for both death and the law. Not so! Though I do do some rolling stops, I’m actually very careful at intersections, especially because the Ohlone Greenway cuts across streets a ways away from the “real” intersections, so most drivers aren’t in the headspace to be expecting cross-traffic (despite zebra stripes and big yellow warning signs). I wear an orange safety vest and treat those intersections with kid gloves.

Problem #6: Video codecs rely on data similarities between frames, and none of them perform well under high-motion conditions. What could have more motion than shaky footage played back at 5x? Thought I could convey a beautiful morning experience, but this looks completely pixelated and smeared-out, even though I used the usually gorgeous h.264 codec. Of course, YouTube also apply their own compression, but my local version doesn’t look much better than this one. The only version that came out looking passable was the version with no compression at all — and it’s 750 MBs.

The footage is also a bit over-exposed, but that’s operator error rather than endemic. Hope to have access before long to a helmet-mountable lipstick camera, which should help a lot with problems 1, 2, 3, and 4, but will do little for problems 5 and 6. Back to the drawing board.

Music is “High Water” by Bruce Lash – Bruce gave me permission to use his stuff in projects back when I was at Adamation, and he now offers a bunch of downloadable music free for personal use.

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lynda.com

An unheard-of week at work – students gone, most staff gone, pushed aside half a dozen simmering commitments and immersed myself in a week of intensive Flash training. Flash is a skill I’ve wanted to pick up since forever, but have never cleared time for. It’s not the kind of thing you can pick up by dabbling – you have to throw yourself at it, give yourself over to its strange logic, swim in its strange waters for a while. Things that are trivially simple in HTML become nuttily difficult in Flash… but with juicy pay-offs.

Used two books as references, but spent most of my time at lynda.com – a site stocking more than 16,000 online training videos on piles of common software. Haven’t checked out their non-Flash coverage, but was blown away by the clarity and thoroughness of the Flash training. $25/month gets you access to all-you-can-eat, on any topic. Killer deal.

Anyway, great to finally have general comfort with the program after all these years. And before you ask, the answer is no — this doesn’t change my overall feelings about Flash. My caveats remain: Use it judiciously, use it only where standards-based development won’t get you where you’re going, be mindful of accessibility and search issues, etc.

Music: Kalama’s Quartet :: Lei E Hula
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More Plastic Than Plankton

There’s more plastic than plankton in the ocean — about 6x more. Every piece of plastic ever made basically still exists; pieces break down but never decompose entirely. The impact of 100+ years of plastics production on our oceans is tragic, and seemingly unfixable. Heartbreaking (but tiny) video: Our Synthetic Sea.

Long list of resources on the topic of our plastinated oceans. The biggest problem are nurdles – the raw material used to make everything from CDs to plastic pipe. America alone produces 100 billion pounds of nurdles each year. In the ocean, they function as attractants for extremely high ratios of PCBs and other toxins. Since they look to fish and birds just like fish eggs, they are consumed by sea life in quantity. But while plastic in the oceans is a mixture of pre-consumer and post-consumer, “The American Plastics Council says the problem is not with the people who manufacture the material, but rather the people who use it.” In other words, litter.

Humans have a hubris that we can fix any problem we create. But it’s our belief that this is one problem we can’t fix. All we can do is stop polluting and hope the ocean will clean itself up in a few hundred years.

Send a message to your governor asking for support reducing the amount of garbage being legally dumped into oceans.

Music: Turtles :: You Showed Me
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The YouTube of the Avant-Garde

Posted last year about the re-launch of UbuWeb, a 100% free repository of avant-garde and conceptual audio and video — concrete poetry, experimental sound works, obscure video. Now the site has “converted all of its rare and out-of-print film & video holdings to on-demand streaming formats a la YouTube … We offer over 300 films & videos from artists such as Vito Acconci, Pipilotti Rist, Jean Genet, The Cinema of Transgression, Richard Foreman, Shuji Terayama, Jack Smith, Carolee Schneeman, John Lennon and hundreds more.”

Unfortunately they don’t offer an “embed this video” option like YouTube does, but no matter – UbuWeb is performing an incredible service by presenting the content. Not all of it is great, but all of it is appreciated.

Thanks Jan Fex

Music: Steve Earle :: Ellis Unit One
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Democracy TV

No, it’s not Al Gore’s newest cable channel. Democracy is a free, cross-platform internet TV player built on top of the VLC client, which ignores DRM and plays “anything it can get its paws on.” The development model and site is clearly based on the success of Firefox (getfirefox.com/getdemocracy.com, similar design). BitTorrent is built right in, so anyone can host an internet TV channel of their own without going broke over bandwidth.

Boing-Boing: The 0.9 release can tune in over 600 free channels being published by creative people all over the world. 0.9 adds support for Flash video, and comes (partially) translated into 30+ languages. It also supports drag-and-drop for individual video files, making it the only video player you need on your desktop.

The project comes out of the Participatory Culture Foundation, which aims to snatch TV itself from the hands of the man. Haven’t tried it yet, but Democracy appears to be well-polished even before 1.0, and is purportedly super easy to use, which is critical for those who don’t want to geek around with shadowy sites and BitTorrent clients.

Ironically / coincidentally, for hours now the front of the iTunes Music Store has displayed nothing but a black screen splashed with white words: “It’s Showtime,” which suggests a major change coming sometime today. Internet TV is starting to matter.

Music: Jonathan Richman :: True Love is Not Nice
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No

In the early 80s, some friends and I became obsessed with cartoon character Nancy and her pal Sluggo. Or, more specifically, obsessed with the zen simplicity (or was it idiocy? no, it was definitely sublime genius) of artist Ernie Bushmiller. Buddhism and psychedelia have always bubbled as background interests. These days I’m into ukulele.

Glyph Jockey created this video based on what Mark Frauenfelder calls the the greatest Nancy panel ever drawn (the posting of which inspired one feller to get a tatoo of the same panel).

Gabby Pahinui soundtrack, words by Alan Watts. This one is for you, rinchen.

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Soul Train

One of the things I loved about Soul Train was the fact that they had actual train tracks running right down the middle of the dance floor and up the wall. Here, grooving with the Isley Brothers.

I was probably about 7 or 8 years old during this era of Soul Train, and the whole thing was just mystifying to me. Made me think grown-ups had a secret, separate world where they went to have strange kinds of fun when they weren’t busy taking care of us.

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Pollywogs

When I was young, Dad used to tell the story of the first time he crossed the International Date Line with the Coast Guard, aboard the U.S.S. Chautauqua. Sailors who had never crossed before were called “pollywogs” and had to go through what amounts to a hazing ritual, though they didn’t call it that.

Pollywogs would have to climb through a bag of ship’s garbage, have their faces pushed into another man’s belly covered in used motor oil from the engine room, get sprayed with fire hoses while trying to retrieve their clothes, and become the slave of a “shellback” for a day (a shellback being a sailor who had crossed the IDL before). Officers were not exempt.

Dad and I recently had hours of old 8mm and Super8 family film digitized, and have been working on a DVD, preserving a bunch of family footage before the film completely rots. Amazingly, he had an 8mm camera on board with him during a 1957 crossing, and shot several minutes of footage. Decided this would be a good opportunity to experiment with YouTube, and loaded up the clip.


Pollywogs from Scot Hacker on Vimeo.

The military has cracked down on hazing rituals quite a bit over the decades; I wonder how much of this kind of thing still goes on.

Note: This clip was hosted on YouTube for more than a year, then was mysteriously removed from the service for “Terms of Service” violation. I was never informed about the removal, and all attempts to reach YouTube for an explanation went unanswered. Since there is positively no copyright violation involved in the clip, I have to assume that it was removed after complaints from one or more viewers. My suspicion is that complaints may have come from military personnel not wanting to see the Coast Guard shown in a bad light; but that’s conjecture. Let’s hope it has better luck on Vimeo.

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Photosynth

Some very cool stuff going on in Microsoft labs. Photosynth is an image browser from another dimension. Give it a giant pile of photos shot from anywhere within a single location (a beach, a museum…) and it will intelligently find edges, determine positions, and stitch together images into a massive 3-D soup of relationships through which users can surf, zoom, spin, dig and dive. No human intervention or tagging needed to build the relationships. Watching the demo, I’m wondering how much CPU it takes to burrow through an environment like this at reasonable speed, or how long it took to calculate the stitching (even creating high-quality QuickTime VR movies can take all night, and this is way beyond anything QTVR is capable of).

Demo is in WMV format (of course). I’ve been appreciating the Flip4Mac module that allows QuickTime to play WMV content.

Music: Marais & Miranda :: What Is A Mammal?

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