Tag: video

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Radio Times

Radio

This post from NPR, Radio: The Port In The Storm, got me thinking about radio, and while I’m pretty well entrenched in the world of podcasts and my own music library, I do still love radio, and the interesting thing is, I think we’ve increased the amount of radio we listen to in our household this year.

Part of the rise of radio in our house might be due our dumping cable TV. We didn’t completely dump TV, as we still get the local channels, but it’s not that 500 channels (and nothing to watch) world we’re used to. We still use Netflix and Amazon, and we still record a few shows using an EyeTV Hybrid, but overall, our TV consumption is down, and our radio listening is up.

It’s mostly Radio Milwaukee and NPR, and the quality of both of those tends to outdo the TV we’d usually watch. It was just too easy to flip on the TV and let it play whatever… even with a laptop out and browsing/working, vapid television in the background isn’t that useful, and good radio is a better alternative.

I’d be interested to know if others who “cut the cord” ended up just replacing all their TV watching with online video alternatives, or if radio is taking some of their attention.

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Conforming Video

Slowing down video.

Now that I’m starting to shoot some video with the Nikon D3200, I wanted to try that old trick of shooting at 60fps and then changing the footage to 24fps for a bit of slow motion action. Now, you can’t just do this by slowing down the footage, you need to conform the footage. If you’ve got Final Cut Studio 7 you can use Cinema Tools to do it, and if you have Final Cut Pro X I guess it’s even easier, but let’s pretend you don’t have those, or you prefer open source… read on!

I couldn’t find a way to conform the footage using my old pal MPEG Streamclip, so I moved on to ffmpeg, and managed to find this bit on doing a conversion with a fixed number of frames.

Here’s what worked for me with two steps. There’s a way to do it all in one shot, but I’ve not got that to work yet. 

ffmpeg -i DSC_0031.mov 
  -f rawvideo 
  -b 50000000 
  -pix_fmt yuv420p 
  -vcodec rawvideo 
  -s 1280x720 
  -y DSC_0031.raw

So the first command above takes our original QuickTime file right from the camera (DSC_0031.mov) and creates a “raw” version of it we output as DSC_0031.raw (NOTE: In both examples the code should all be on one line. I’ve broken it up to multiple lines for readability. Make it one line!) 

ffmpeg -i DSC_0031.raw 
  -f rawvideo 
  -pix_fmt yuv420p 
  -sameq 
  -r 23.97 
  -s 1280x720  
  -y DSC_0031-24fps.mov

Once we have the DSC_0031.raw file complete, we run the second command and create a new file named DSC_0031-24fps.mov, which will now be at 24fps instead of the original 60fps. Note that we also specify the resolution (1280×720) and the frames per second (23.97). Obviously if you want other values, change those to something else.

So here’s the final video, shot at 60fps and played back at 24fps for just a little bit of slow motion. (With the RED ONE We can shoot at 120fps, but hey, a cheap DSLR doing 60fps isn’t too bad.)

One more thing on the video, it was shot with 3 camera angles, but only one camera. The trick here is to shoot the same sequence 3 times (yes, I drilled 3 boxes) with the camera in a different position each time. We do this all the time, sometimes you have to when it’s a one camera shoot, and sometimes it just works out based on the footage you’ve got.

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Art Jamboree [Time Lapse]

argh, blip.tv shut down… no video!

Wahoo! We had a good time at the Art Jamboree at City Hall… and I even wrote all about it on the Makerspace blog, so here is the video I created during the event…

I had a camera connected to my MacBook and ran a Processing sketch to capture still frames which I then compiled into this time lapse video. The sketch was (heavily) based on ASCII Video by Ben Fry. I changed the character set to spell out “Art Jamboree” and added in code to capture the still frames at an interval.

Enjoy!

(You can also see the video at blip.tv)

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Static in the Video Age

Xmas means many things, and one of the things it means is that we watch It’s a Wonderful Life, and for years it meant we put in the old VHS tape that the wife has and let it roll. Last year I ended up getting a VCR out of the closet on Christmas Day and connecting it to the old HDTV and watching it in all its glory.

This year I got as far as getting out the VCR, and before finding all the right cables, I figure I’d check if there was another option.

Netflix

The first thing I did was turn on the Wii and checked Netflix. It’s a Wonderful Life is not available for streaming, so that was a dead end.

I should also note that as much as I’m a technology nerd, I’m not a digital video consumption nerd. In the last few months I’ve watched about 200 episodes of Star Trek on my MacBook (usually while working in the office) but we don’t have a Blu-ray player or an Apple TV, and I’m the furthest thing from a home theater snob. I’d rather buy a DVD I can rip than rent videos online with limited usage and silly restrictions. I’m not a pirate, but I like to choose how I can use the media I buy. (All the music I ever bought from the iTunes store had the DRM stripped from it before I added it to my library.)

iTunes

Netflix would have been the easy option, since I’ve already got a streaming account, but since it wasn’t available, I moved on to iTunes. It’s a Wonderful Life is available on iTunes, but the last time I checked on iTunes video rental, there were all sorts of crazy restrictions I didn’t want to deal with, so I never seriously looked at it.

I probably would have paid $2.99 to rent it so we could watch it immediately, but the options seemed to be $17.99 to buy the “HD” version, or $9.99 to buy the “non-HD” version. (It wasn’t filmed in HD, so HD, bah, whatever.) I thought about the lock-in to the Apple/iTunes ecosystem and figured it might be worth checking if Amazon had a better option…

Amazon

Well, I don’t know if the Amazon option was better, but the film was available for $9.99, the same price as the “non-HD” version on iTunes. At this point I didn’t feel like doing a comparative analysis of the various online video rental systems and just went with Amazon, assuming it would be more open than Apple. There was a link or two about downloading, so I figured that was a good thing, and with one click, I bought it.

I ended up streaming it so we could just watch is ASAP, and we did, and the quality was good (well, better than an old VHS tape anyway!) and it all just worked.

After the movie I wanted to check on the downloadability, and discovered that Amazon has a player that is only available on Windows. Bloody Hell, what is this, 1999?

They also have a list of 350+ Amazon Instant Video Compatible Devices… none of which I own. The Roku player is on the list, and I considered getting one a few years ago, but after Netflix became available for the Wii, I forgot about it. I tend to use the Wii or my MacBook for most of the video streaming we do, so I never thought I needed a dedicated device.

So now I’ve got a video I own through Amazon, that I can’t download, but can stream. I’ve probably been an Amazon customer for 15 years, so I guess I should trust them, but It’s a Wonderful Life is over 60 years old. Will I be able to watch it 30 years from now? Should I even worry about such things? While buying music online went from a DRM mess to a more open world, I don’t know that video will go the same way… And yes, there is the pirating option, but personally I’m not a fan of that approach. Blame it on my desire to see things move towards openness.

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Unacceptable, Netflix!

No Depth of Field!

No Depth of Field!

No Depth of Field!

Dear Reed Hastings,

I am a pretty forgiving guy… I mean, I can forgive a lot of things… but this is unacceptable!

The lack of attention to the shots in your latest video are terrible. Who the hell shot this!? Did they really think a T-stop of 16 (or was it 18) was the best idea? I mean, sure, you are shooting outside, and maybe you didn’t have any ND filters handy, but come on!!! To put it in other words, “I find your lack of depth-of-field disturbing.”

I’m not saying everything needs to be shot at 1.3. I dunno… maybe you were going for some sort of “low-budget video” look or something, to be more like the common people of YouTube or something. Either way, I was completely disappointed in the video. Besides the technical issues, the characters were not exactly likeable.

I recommend sending this back to the writers for some tweaks, as well as hiring a new cinematographer.

Your truly, Netflix Customer and Film Critic, raster