Videos for October

On YouTube there are two new videos by yours truly, aided and abetted by Genie Dee and Fran Kappelle. The first is another video in the Perthshire Artists series, this time featuring Woodturner-Photographer Angus Clyne. Genie helped out on one of the cameras.

The second video – Recovery – includes footage of a full moon rising over Birnam (speeded up), screenshots of synchronised oscilloscopes and an outdoor night shot which I filmed during a recent visit to Ramsgate, home of Tracing Arcs, and footage supplied at my request by Tracing Arcs singer Fran Kappelle. Oh yes, with music by Tracing Arcs.

We think they're fab!

Perthshire Artists – Nigel Ross

I recently uploaded to YouTube the second in my Perthshire Artists series of videos. This one features wood sculptor Nigel Ross. His large-scale meditative pieces belie the very arduous task of carving the massive tree trunks he works with.

Genie and I love Nigel's work and for this video Genie was able to help out with one of the cameras. Enjoy!

Perthshire Artists – Luisa Ramazzotti

New project

I've recently embarked on a new video project which is a series of short movies about artists in Perthshire. The first one (below) went online just in time for this year's Perthshire Open Studios event. There's one more in the can and I'm currently arranging for more shoots with the artists concerned.

Current method for YouTube

I'm still filming at Standard Definition 4:3. After editing in Final Cut Pro I now export to Film Academy format (2048x1536 pixels) with no compression. I then use QuickTime Pro to export from the Film Academy version at 1048x786 pixels using H.264 compression. After that I'm at the mercy of YouTube like everyone else.

My first attempt to upload this movie to YouTube failed after a few hours, but I was lucky the second time around. The process took about 12 hours – probably par for the course with a file weighing in at just over 1GB and a maximum bandwidth of 2MB. I noticed that some compression artifacts had crept in towards the end of the movie, but after watching it a couple of times decided that I rather liked it.

More Encounters With Time

The Perthshire Visual Arts Forum website has been updated recently with more information about the current exhibition, Encounters With Time. This exhibition, which includes my One-Minute Wonders videos, is on at Threshold Artspace, Perth Theatre, until Friday, October 14th, 2011.

Sound and Vision – Pebbles and Weed

I've just finished editing a new music video and put it on YouTube. It's for the band Tracing Arcs, one member of which, Paul H. Addie, I have known for many years. Paul and I played in bands together in London back in the eighties, when Paul was drumming. These days he's more involved with keyboards and programming, shaping the soundscapes which accompany Fran Kapelle's other-worldly vocals.

It's a real joy for me to work with such groovy sounds. The first time I heard this track (it's from the remix album Eye See You Too) I was already watching scenes from the video in my mind's eye. I have a terrible memory for names and numbers, my mind preferring to remember faces and places, and listening to Pebbles & Weed I knew I already had much of the footage I'd need to make a "chill-out" music video.

But where would I find a deserted pebbled beach to tie the whole thing together? Genie remembered a brief visit to St Cyrus, and thought that maybe she had seen pebbles there. So we drove to St Cyrus last Friday and sure enough the beach was deserted and there were pebbles aplenty. Not only could I shoot shiny wet pebbles but also seaweed, driftwood and sand fleas. Even the sun made an appearance.

So here it is – my latest music video. I hope you enjoy watching it. You'll love the sounds and will no doubt want to download the entire album. It's a FREE download, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Watch and see...

One-Minute Wonders #1–6

Olive Grove, Zakynthos

The One-Minute Wonders movies I shot at Zakynthos (the Greek island) back in October 2010 are now on show at Perth Theatre as part of the Encounters II: With Time exhibition.

Time is subjective and the way we experience time depends upon how much seems to be happening. These six one-minute movies have no soundtrack at the exhibition. I purposely stripped out the audio tracks hoping to fool people into thinking that the movies were still photographic images, as there's very little action except for the slight movement of leaves and grasses and the occasional flying insect, and I didn't want the soundtrack to give the show away, particularly as I'd gone to the trouble of presenting the movies in a digital frame which looks at first glance like a traditional picture frame.

This version of all six one-minute movies has acquired a soundtrack which I recorded at the official opening on Sunday 26th June. It's as if the movies have acquired the sound through experience.

There are now three layers of time – the time at which the footage was taken (October 2010), the exhibition opening time as represented by the new soundtrack (June 2011), and the timeline of the online viewer.

Related Posts

On this Blog

Encounters With Time;
Adventures with a digital frame.

On BAD info

Exhibition Opening by Genie Dee;
Encounters With Time by Fanny Christie.

Encounters With Time

I'm happy to report that my first "one-minute wonders" video series (olive grove 1–6) will be exhibited at Threshold Artspace, Perth Theatre, from 26th June—14th October, as part of the Encounters With Time exhibition.

Encounters With Time features works by 24 members of Perthshire Visual Arts Forum selected by Maria Devaney, Senior Curator at Perth Museum and Art Gallery, and Guest Curator of this exhibition.

Other works on show include those by Aileen Stackhouse, Alison Leeper, Anita Hutchison, Ann Coomber, Charmian Pollok, Clare Yarrington, Claudia Wegner, Darienne Tosh, Douglas McBride, Genie Dee, Jackie Smith, Katy Galbraith, Kay Hood, Kyra Clegg, Lesley Mcdermott, Lorna Radbourne, Malize McBride, Mary Golden, Marysa Lachowicz, Rosemary Bassett, Su Grierson, Tricia Anderson, and Bruce Shaw.

At the opening (or shortly thereafter) I'll be recording the ambient sound in the exhibition space and this will become the soundtrack for a new version of my "one-minute wonders 1–6" which will be posted on YouTube.

Here's one of those "one-minute wonders" with no soundtrack, pretty much as it will appear at the exhibition (along with its five siblings):



For more information, visit Threshold Artspace
and Perthshire Visual Arts Forum

Coming to terms with the death of a close friend

When my friend Gordon McNeill-Wilkie passed on, I had a sense of unreality. How could this great man have left us so soon? He was 50 years old. He was my Reiki master and teacher. We'd worked together very closely as dry-stane dykers, I'd assisted him on courses he gave in advanced healing techniques and psychic self-defence, and now he was gone.

Both Gordon's partner and his ex-wife had asked if I had any footage of Gordon, and I remembered that Genie had shot some footage of the two of us back in the winter of 2007 while we were demolishing and rebuilding a retaining wall out at Enochdhu.

Editing Genie's 50 minutes of footage, taken as a means for her to learn the workings of the video camera, was rather arduous. Not that the footage was bad, but rather the experience of seeing it again was not an easy thing for me. When you are editing a movie like this you watch certain scenes over and over again, and it was a couple of days before I started to feel good about what I was doing.

In the end it was a healing process for me, and I am happy with the result. This is how I want to remember my friend, and I know that many of those who knew Gordon feel the same way.

Adventures with spam

I've had a very frustrating week. I have two videos that need editing but have been distracted by a spam attack on our community website, BAD info.

This WordPress-powered blog had been running without a glitch until last Thursday when I suddenly started to receive email notifications of new subscribers. Hundreds of them. Every day. They were all spammers, sorry, "marketers".

The bots are easily identified and removed from the equation as there's no user device. Known spammers are also easily excluded using the various plug-ins available for WordPress.

I've ended up removing the "Join us and subscribe" widget altogether, and am asking new contributors to email me so I can set up their user accounts myself.

Yet new spammers are still managing to register. I must be missing something here.

Rats!

Shooting video for online delivery

Use a tripod

The best advice I can give is to use a tripod whenever possible if you are shooting video footage intended for online delivery. The compressed movie will have a much smaller file size and therefore a lower datarate (faster download) than a similar movie which uses footage shot with a hand-held camera.

Why is this? Codecs (compression/decompression formats) compare adjacent frames in your movie and the less difference there is between frames the more effective will be the compression. Footage shot using a tripod will have objects which remain in the same place and retain their colour information (barring extreme changes in light conditions) and the background will remain pretty much the same across the frames. The codec will use occasional key frames to take care of these similarities and for the frames in between will only have to compress the differences – the objects that move or change. With footage shot from a hand-held camera practically every pixel of every single frame will be different due to camera movement and this will result in a higher datarate.

If you are using a tripod you might also consider moving the camera/tripod well away from the scene you are shooting and using optical zoom. Once you've established your point of view, zoom right in on the main object of the shot and manually focus on it. Then zoom out slightly to your desired frame composition and you should notice that objects behind and in front of your focus of attention are slightly blurred. If you like this effect then you have the added bonus of shooting footage which will compress even better.

Hand-held

Most movies are of course a combination of hand-held and tripod-mounted shots, and there are times when a hand-held video camera is the only option. You can reduce unwanted camera movement by zooming right out. Zooming in will only exaggerate camera movement so you should instead move towards the action you are shooting and leave the zoom out altogether. In a well lit scene practically everything should be in focus. My wife Genie followed this advice when shooting her first movie which you will find below.

Adventures with a digital frame

So you think you're a videographer…

I thought I knew all I needed to know about compressing movies. CD-ROM, DVD-video, online streaming? No problem. Then about a month ago I bought a digital frame (15" Living Images) from Digital Frames Direct (DFD) in order to show some short films at an upcoming exhibition, and I ran into problems.

I'm a Mac user and use Final Cut Pro (FCP) for editing. FCP can export any type of movie I like, using whichever codec (compression-decompression format) that seems appropriate. My new digital frame is supposed to display videos in "either the mpeg 1,2,4 format or AVI/divx format" according to DFD's short (seven-sentence) document "Converting videos". A doddle, I thought.

After hours of exporting batches of test movies from FCP and trying them out on the digital frame I started to wonder whether it could indeed display movies in any shape or form.

Back to DFD's "Converting videos" document:

"You can use many programmes but one of the easiest and the one we used is Xilisoft which you can download here."

Normally I only use my Dell laptop for checking that my projects work the same on a PC as they do on my Mac, but I downloaded the free version of Xilisoft's video converter to my PC laptop out of curiosity. The only limit to the free version is that movies can't exceed 3 minutes, but as the movies I was hoping to exhibit were "one-minute wonders" I could give it a go.

The first test movies I exported using Xilisoft's video converter wouldn't play on the digital frame. Then I had a wee epiphany. I'd been exporting movies at a size of 1024x768 pixels, the supposed resolution of the digital frame, and at 768x576 pixels, thinking that datarate might have been the problem. But what if the frame was using oblong pixels like a TV screen rather than the square pixels you get on a computer monitor? Was it expecting DV-footage resolution?

I tried Xilisoft's standard MP4 codec at 720x576 pixels but with its aspect ratio set to 4:3. Lo and behold, a format that the digital frame can display. Not only that, but by tweaking the datarate to "3500 kbits/s" in the program I ended up with a quite acceptable result playing back at around 2525 kbits/s.

And here's a preview of my "one-minute wonders" series:

Video for multimedia engineers

The Canon XL1 – my favourite video camera

I bought this Canon XL1 about six years ago on eBay, having sold my Fender Jazz bass and Stratocaster, both of which had been collecting dust in the studio. It was already a bit of an antique when I bought it, but this video camera has a fantastic zoom lens and records broadcast-quality footage.


After years of intensive use my footage had started to display digital noise (intermittent blocks of colour in the recordings) and the usual head-cleaning solution failed to solve the problem. It was time for a service!

The only Canon-approved photographic engineers in Scotland are A. J. Johnstone & Co Ltd in Glasgow, and although it took a month from delivering the camera to getting the call to say it was ready to collect, I've just put it through its paces and my Canon XL1 is now squeaky clean. The service cost £153.60 (including VAT at 20%) which I find quite reasonable considering the work involved: dismantling to overhaul and service, resetting and aligning the deck assembly, cleaning contaminated tape paths and guides, followed by a systems check and test.

If you are using a mini-DV-format camera for your footage and think it may be ready for a service, please check the following before laying out your cash.

Check list

Does the footage look okay when played back in-camera? If so, check the leads you are using for video capture. Firewire (IEEE 1394) leads are easily damaged, so try another lead. If you are capturing to an external hard-drive also check that it isn't at the end of a daisy chain. There's a limit to the number (length) of Firewire leads you can use for video capture and digital noise will be introduced if you exceed the limit. I don't know what the limit is but have certainly experienced noise during capture which was solved by connecting the hard-drive in question directly to the computer.

If your footage does look blocky in-camera then try using a tape-head cleaner. It may save you paying for an unnecessary service.

One thing I'd advise strongly against is dismantling your video camera in order to clean it yourself. If you don't know what you're doing and/or can't do it in a dust-free environment you will probably be doing more harm than good.

SVG community website

Some of my SVG work has found a good home on a website specifically designed for the growing SVG community: SVG Elves. This work is published under the Creative Commons 0 license – "share and share-alike". I hope that my fellow W3C SVG course participants will follow suit and share some of the fantastic work they did during the course. It's early days yet, but I think that this site will be an excellent way to keep in touch and to be inspired by other people's work.

As well as showing SVG examples, the SVG Elves website offers tutorials, code snippets, articles, and links to useful SVG resources, so if you're a complete novice, this is a good place to start.

Professor David Dailey and I have agreed to collaborate on some projects – we share a passion for optical art – and I expect the fruits of our collaboration eventually to show up on the SVG Elves website. Watch this space...

Finally, here's another example of SVG I produced during the course. This one incorporates a repeated JPEG image, text used as a mask, and a drop-shadow effect. Clicking on the JPEG (crop) below you can see how its SVG source file looks in your browser. Some browsers (such as Safari) still choke on the drop-shadow effect and display the shadow as a grey block.

Scalable Vector Graphics for IE9

My Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) course is over and I'd like to share with you a few more of the images I created during the course. These images are all PNGs.





Point your standards-compliant browser (including the just-released IE9 !!!) at the links below to see the full-screen SVG versions in all their glory:
Simple cubes
Deco gradient cubes
Op art cubes
Op art cubes with gradients

Misadventures with old laptops

I borrowed my wife Genie's PowerBook G4 laptop for the duration of my current stay in Holland. I wanted to keep up with the SVG course I'm following online, and expected at least one article to come in that would need approval for publishing on our community website BAD info. The PowerBook is lightweight (15" screen) and I knew I'd be able to get online easily enough, so before I set off I loaded it with all the apps and working files I was likely to need...

This morning I connected Genie's laptop to a friend's network in Bussum and logged on to the W3C Courses site to check my homework for the week. Then I realised Genie hadn't installed Opera. Opera seems to offer the best browser support for SVG at the moment and I figured I'd better download it. But Opera no longer supports OSX 10.4 or pre-Intel machines. So I tried Chrome: Intel only, OSX 10.5 or later. I was able to upgrade to the latest version of Firefox but then got the message that I'd need to upgrade the Flash plug-in for security purposes. And then I found out that Adobe are no longer supporting the Flash plug-in for this machine. Ouch!

Tomorrow I'll try the PC route – there's a recent machine running Windows 7 upstairs. I'll download the ASV plug-in for Internet Explorer (for which Adobe has offered no support for years) and hope that it runs as well as it does on my Dell laptop at home. But I'm well outside my comfort zone here, and am starting to miss my 8-core Mac Pro.

Anyway, I'll leave you with something I made earlier. Genie likes this one, so I thought I'd put it online. For Genie.


The PNG file embedded above is 29.16 kB, but its source file (SVG) is less than 3 kB.

Scalable Vector Graphics

For the past few weeks I've been busy with an online course in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) given by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It's the first formal course I've followed since 2004 when I returned to CMM in Amsterdam (where I'd studied for my multimedia engineer diploma) for a follow-up course in DVD authoring.

I'm having great fun and would recommend this SVG course to anyone experienced in programming for the web. The course work is well structured and Professor David Dailey gives encouraging feedback on submitted homework. In short, the online experience is a real joy.

Emerging Language

SVG is an emerging XML-based language which is already well supported by most browsers, although Microsoft are still playing catch-up and are promising limited support for SVG with Internet Explorer (IE) 9. Current IE users can still enjoy SVG graphics and animations by installing the Adobe SVG Viewer (ASV), which is a wee plug-in for IE, and despite the fact that it's no longer supported by Adobe, it still works.

SVG Examples

The image above is an embedded PNG (portable network graphics) file made in Photoshop from an SVG file I made during the course. It is 5.055 kB in size, which is rather small and therefore a quick download, but compared to the SVG source file, which weighs in at 1,337 bytes (just over a kilobyte=1024 bytes), this embedded bitmap image is about 5 times too big!

What is more, the image above will break up when magnified in your browser, but the tiny SVG source file will allow magnification without distortion as it is a vector graphics file. If you are using Safari, Opera, Chrome, Firefox, or IE+ASV, point your browser at the hand-coded SVG file (opens in a new browser window): Op Art 2 - squares

And here's another PNG I made from a file I originally coded in SVG.


As this image is more complex than the first, it comes as no surprise that its embedded PNG file is rather large (49.42 kB) in comparison. The SVG source file, however, which includes animation (for all but Firefox), is only 3,346 bytes (just over 3 kB)!

My SVG course continues for another couple of weeks during which we'll be getting more into JavaScript/SMIL animation. For part of this time I'm hoping to follow the course from a laptop in Holland, which highlights the great advantage in following such a course online.