Archive for the ‘video’ Category
HD Video Converter
A frustrating experience came my way a few months ago, when I was presented with footage from a Canon 5DII and a Canon 3Ti. This was a wedding shoot, and would be combined with footage from my Sony NX5U. The footage from the Canon looked amazing, but there was a problem. My editing software (Vegas Pro 9) would import the footage, but it would then promptly hang or crash. I tried several transcoding and conversion applications, including Cineform. The results ranged from audio that was out of sync, altered gamma, enormous files, and so on.
Then I ran across WinX HD Video Converter. The software accepted the footage from the Canons, and offered a wide range of output formats. The interface is intuitive, and there are a number of preset output options, each with it’s own preset bitrate and resolution settings and so on. You can of course opt to override the settings as desired. Several HD specific presets offer AVI, MP4, MOV and even a Youtube friendly HD preset. Conversions may be done in batch by adding multiple files.
Conversion speed with HD Video Converter was surprisingly quick, depending on the output format. Even at some of the highest quality presets with the “high quality engine” option ticked on, the conversion rate approached realtime on the Intel quadcore test machine. At lower resolutions, such as with the preset for “cell phone” it was actually faster than realtime. Botom line here was it turned a disaster into a successful editing session, and saved the project.
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Shaolin Jazz Video Contest
Combine the lyrics of Wu Tang Clan, and some classic jazz beats, and what do you get? You get Shaolin Jazz. This combination might seem unlikely, until you listen for yourself.
There’s still time to submit an entry to their video contest, and to contribute to this innovative project. Some nice prizes are will be offered to the winner, but this also looks like a good way to get your work noticed.
It seems that “new media” has begun to seep into every aspect of life. With an increase in the digitization and socialization of media, new media continues to break
ground and sometimes even change lives.
The term “new media” itself is extremely broad. For example, Lev Manovich, author of multiple books on new media and professor of Visual Arts at University of California, wrote an entire essay on the possible five characteristics of new media (http://ow.ly/7lnaZ), with an additional eight propositions. But because the general public is usually unaware of the technical side of the definition, a lot of people don’t realize that when they reference “new media” they’re actually referring to “social media.”
“Social media” narrows down the definition, and is exactly what it sounds like. Social media is what turns new media into an interactive dialogue.
The main players of social media include Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Where would the world be without these? We can say for certain that Ellie Kemper would never have been cast on The Office, and Justin Bieber would just be another kid with a bad haircut. But aside from individuals showcasing their talent in the entertainment business, social media has recently come into further use in the field of film and videography.
On October 31, 2011 YouTube announced that it’s crowdsourced documentary Life in a Day would be available to view for free on their website. Life in a Day is one of the first social media films, and truly a beautiful piece of art. In 2010, YouTube put out a call to it’s users to submit videos of their day on that upcoming July 24. They received over 80,000 clips from 192 nations totaling 4,500 hours of footage, all of which were submitted to YouTube itself. Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and his team of editors and researchers sifted through them and created a 94 minute movie which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27, 2011 with the premiere of the film streaming live on YouTube. The film features pieces of people’s day that day, including everything from a man drinking on a park bench in the early morning hours, to a boy and his father starting their day by paying tribute to their deceased mother/wife. This film takes the every day YouTube video and turns it into something beautiful and spectacular. It never loses it’s sense of communal contribution and creation, and moreover reminds you that you are never alone. A documentary about life itself and a great example of social media being turned into a work of art.
Some, however, are choosing to use social media to help fund their art. Eddy Terstall, a filmmaker in Holland recently used Twitter to help raise money for his upcoming film project. His idea was to create a quick films based on tweets by those who donated money to his project. A 10 euro donation got you a 10 second film based on your tweet. 20 euros got a 20 second tweet based film, etc. By the end of the donation period, he was able to raise 120K euros and successfully produce his film. http://ow.ly/7lv9D
New and social media continue to enhance film and videography, pushing it into the 21st century. What lies ahead for the digital age is still unknown, but the symbiotic relationship between new/social media and film seems to only get stronger. Those who embrace it might be able to find creative ways to fund their projects or possibly create a whole new genre of film, an unexplored frontier, giving a voice to the digital mass.
This article is a video production tip from The Michael Group, a company specializing in video production Chicago, written for the Pixelriffic blog.
Google Docs
For those of you out there that are not aware of the wealth of good stuff that is Google Docs, you should take a look. Especially those of you needing an inexpensive alternative to Microsoft Office. Some weeks back, Google added the ability to store and share videos as part of the Google Docs suite. Sure, there is of course Youtube, as well as countless other video sharing sites. What if you want to share your client’s video preview privately?
Google now allows sharing (both publicly and privately) of video files via Google Docs. A very simple interface, as per usual with Google, and one free Gig of storage space.
I have battled this problem with Vegas Pro 9E for weeks now. If you’ve stumbled across this post, I suspect you might be in the same boat too. I’ve tried countless “fixes” including the ever popular “reduce render threads to one” and “set preview ram to zero”. I even tried a solution using a tool to actually change a flag within the Vegas 9 .exe file. Not one of these solutions worked. By the way, my system still has plenty of memory free when the error occurs.
The music in this video isn’t my thing, but it might be yours. If not, you can always turn down the audio. If you’re having this particular problem, it’s worth your time to watch it.
Finally! For years, those of us with dual (triple?) monitors have yearned to have fullscreen playback of flash video on one monitor, while we continue to work on the other monitor. Until recently, when you enlarged the video to fullscreen on one monitor, clicking anywhere in the other monitor would return to the embedded web page version of the video. There were a couple of hacks to supposedly work around this, but they never worked for me.
As of the most recent version of Adobe flash player, this has finally been corrected. I just happened to noticed the update features, and fullscreen video on a second monitor was one of them. Hooray! This ends a long lived peeve I’ve had with the flash video player. Especially since embedded video is too small on high resolution monitors.
H.264
Did you buy a cheap consumer HD camera lately, like the FlipCam or the Kodak zi8? Good, those are cool. But you probably discovered that they’re NOT cool when it comes to editing the footage in FCP. Unfortunately, the .mp4 file and the H.264 QT file type that those cameras shoot are not supported by Apple’s Final Cut software. They’re compressed output formats and they simply don’t work well in FCP. Luckily, there’s a FREE solution to the problem: MPEG Streamclip, a 3rd party software that converts these files into more editing-friendly formats.
MPEG Streamclip is very stable and lets you trim clips down, so you only export the clips you want to use in your edit. Just go to File > Export to Quicktime. A new screen will come up with a list of compression types, quality, etc. To keep the quality as close as possible to the original recording select “Apple ProRes 422.” Apple has made a few variations to the ProRes family; Use ProRes 422(Proxy) or (LT) for smaller file sizes. Always make sure to slide quality to 100% and leave the rest of the settings untouched, including dimensions. Happy editing!
This article is a video production tip from Indigo Productions for Pixelriffic.
This is a second effort at a homebuilt teleprompter. My first one was pretty crude, and actually required a second tripod. This one uses a single tripod. I used some 1/2″ plywood, an 11×14 photo frame, a chunk of 1×4, and an old tripod head. The camera needed to be elevated, and I just happened to have this laying around. The key is the beam splitter glass purchased online. This is essentially the same as a two way mirror.
I was using an LCD computer monitor with the stand removed for the screen, attached to a laptop via a VGA cable. This worked well enough, but added to the clunklyness. The freeware prompter software I was using was somewhat buggy as well. I recently acquired an Apple iPad. Several teleprompter solutions are available for the iPad. I settled on one called Teleprompt+. The software works very well, and can actually be remotely controlled via an iPhone. It’s pretty much complete now, short of coming up with a better looking fabric shroud. Including the teleprompter glass, the whole rig was well under $100 in materials.
Click ..! Click..! Click..! Click..! Stitch… stitch…stitch..stitch. Aaarrrgh..! Well many of y’all might be aware of this process for creating panoramas, so I am not going to talk about that it here. This traditional process of making panoramas i.e. taking multiple images and stitching them involves lot of effort and time. While taking landscape panoramas might be relatively easy this way, making panoramas of a scene with lots of fast moving objects – the stitching can take hours to make it look seamless. And imagine the effort that would involve in a 360 degrees video – stitching frames seamlessly would be a nightmare…!
Panoramic photography has been a niche area in photography so far. I have often seen realtors shooting 360 panoramas of their properties and landscape panoramic photographers but not much in sports or people photography. With 360 degree cameras likes the Sony bloggie, Sony TX1 (~250 degrees panoramas), GoPano+ optics(complete 360 degress) etc the panoramaic photography scene seems to be catching up. Creating panoramas for live events, action sports photography, photo-journalism, commericals and for that matter anything is very easy with these technologies- the applications are endless. The best part of these panoramas is the interactivity it offers to the viewer – the user typically ends up watching the same scene more than once to get a different perspective everytime. CNN a while back reported the Haiti earthquake in 360
Most of the technologies either involve a multi headed cameras OR have a glass optic which can be mounted on a camera. The later is much cheaper than the multi head camera approach(you may check Immersive Media website for a multi headed camera). There are many companies in market which sell these glass optics – GoPano, 0-360, Egg Solution, Remote reality. These optics also come with a software which help you to “unwarp” the images you get from the camera.
Typically these glass optics can be mounted on any camera you have. Grab the images and import it in the software – Click and voila…! You have a one shot zero stitched panoramic image. You could also create 360 videos with a similar setup.
The images below didn’t take more than a minute, NO KIDDING, it was that easy – Click and “unwarp”. The software will create a interactive panorama like the one below.
Thats me and my girlfriend Pallavi in the panorama at Coopers Rock, West Virginia country side.
Drag your mouse in the scene and use Control/Shift keys for zooming in and out.
SomeFunAtCoopersRock360
The equipment I used to create this One shot-0 stitch panorama:
1. Canon 7D (you can use any camera)
2. GoPano Optic and the software sold by Eyesee360.
I am not done yet people- With the same optic, and any video camera you make your own 360 video like the one below/or the CNN haiti 360 video you saw above
Many readers in my previous article argued that you dont need a 500$ seperate lens/optic for making panoramic images like these. But a few photographers agreed to the fact that in certain situations where you would like to capture a panorama at that very instant – you can not use the traditional approach. Also think of making a 360 video -not many of us are familiar of stitching videos. Or are you? 
The market for 360 videos seem to be catching up lately. There are different technologies which can help you make your own 360 vide0.( Immersive medias multicamera approach or EyeSee360 glass optic)..I work for EyeSee360 and hence I dont want to brag about our product or technology. But all I can say is, our stuff is better(if not anything definitely cheaper)
You could also create 360 videos using the optic like these -
Thats me and my room mate Mehta in his car. Again I used the same setup to record this video. You can watch the same video in an special 360 videoplayer called VideoWarp player available freely on the internet.
This small video I made, would help you get a better understanding how these can optics fit on your camera
Currently these optics cost around ~500 USD and I am waiting for the eyesee360s cheaper optics (~100USD) scheduled to go on sale sometime late this year.
About the photographer:
Amey Kanade is part-time photographer working with Enduring Tribute Photography. He likes photographing people, CD covers, weddings, travel and more recently 360 photography/videography.
His pictures have been published on NYtimes, Music CD covers, photography artciles on and off. He also works as a engineer/photographer with EyeSee360, Pittsburgh which manufactures optics for 360 video/image capture. Currently he’s also working on building platforms for hosting panoramic photographs/videos and making this technology more popular amongst casual photographers.
You can “like”/contact him on his facebook page
A Postage Stamp
This is something that has been bugging me more and more these days. It really came to a head when I was trying to view a sample video from a fairly major effects plugin provider. Unfortunately, the embedded video was so teensy, it wasn’t big enough to get any real impression of what the effect plugin was really doing. Yes, I could click the “fullscreen” button, but on my 28″ monitor, it looked like an 8 bit video game. And this is a company who should know better.
The fact is, the trend towards larger monitors has been with us for some time. The old 320X240 typical standard for embedded video is scarcely larger than a postage stamp at the resolution of a large monitor. There is no reason for video less than 640X480 in the case of a 4X3 example, or at the very minimum, 640X360 for a widescreen video. This is the bare minimum in my humble opinion. Another thing I can’t stress enough, is that you can always, and you should, upload higher resolution video clips, and then let your player, or Youtube, scale them down as needed.
Yes, I know there are some out there still using a 12 inch monitor at 640X480 total resolution, but no good ever came from catering to the least common denominator!
