tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8011508850771475592012-01-27T20:56:08.628ZAdventures in Sound and VisionPhil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.comBlogger301100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-11069474221574714562012-01-07T12:29:00.007Z2012-01-07T12:42:56.639Z

Genie and I filmed this video of Debbie Dobson last Autumn (2011). Finally, after a busy few months, I found the time to edit the footage and upload the final cut to our YouTube channel (Ivy Cottage Industries). The music is by Tracing Arcs.Enjoy!

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-2530168945065654252011-10-25T10:03:00.006+01:002011-10-25T10:24:04.106+01:00

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

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-20589302219687140652011-09-19T10:35:00.000+01:002011-10-25T10:54:30.860+01:00

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!

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-58450980070302066532011-09-03T12:56:00.006+01:002011-10-25T10:55:49.499+01:00

New projectI'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 YouTubeI'm still filming at Standard Definition 4:3. After editing

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-16154909428961255142011-08-15T14:53:00.008+01:002011-08-15T15:09:06.676+01:00

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.

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-16238105034809116772011-07-23T15:05:00.004+01:002011-07-23T15:14:41.552+01:00

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

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-58477091948797491542011-06-28T15:52:00.033+01:002011-06-29T11:34:20.322+01:00

Olive Grove, ZakynthosThe 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

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-17163211500618037172011-06-13T20:40:00.014+01:002011-06-13T22:25:50.189+01:00

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

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-11233279231830316072011-06-11T18:41:00.012+01:002011-06-11T19:41:13.242+01:00

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

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-55652255758413855642011-06-11T18:02:00.006+01:002011-06-11T18:21:29.749+01:00

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

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-58860529623421487472011-05-13T18:06:00.016+01:002011-05-13T19:25:48.894+01:00

Use a tripodThe 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

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-85908945871680199022011-05-11T13:30:00.001+01:002011-05-10T19:26:08.876+01:00

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

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-34039464900474305502011-05-10T10:55:00.041+01:002011-05-10T19:25:19.322+01:00

The Canon XL1 – my favourite video cameraI 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

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-48907949951418901482011-03-18T15:03:00.019Z2011-04-04T12:45:59.716+01:00

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

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-81391713267787325012011-03-15T16:28:00.015Z2011-03-15T16:56:41.904Z

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 cubesDeco gradient cubesOp art cubesOp art cubes with gradients

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-25298561573552761592011-02-15T15:13:00.018Z2011-03-19T18:42:13.692Z

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

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-86881624669998097112011-02-08T11:04:00.050Z2011-03-19T18:36:45.572Z

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

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-21018284078573889792010-11-01T15:19:00.039Z2011-02-08T16:59:04.469Z

Poor LayoutRecently I was asked by a local artist to look at her website and tell her why nobody could find it in Google. Here was a website that felt wrong even before I checked out the source code. It was a fixed-size design which was centred horizontally but not vertically – an early sign of laziness on the part of the designer. But that was nothing compared to what I was about to uncover.No

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-8355327004295331592010-09-07T10:34:00.007+01:002010-12-06T15:45:46.623Z

What is the Three-Click Rule?The Three-Click Rule applies to all multimedia presentations, including websites, DVD-video menus, CD-ROM productions, Enhanced CD productions, computer games, and any other interactive project you can imagine which needs some kind of navigation.If you can't navigate from any part of your presentation to any other part within three clicks of the mouse button you have

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-36958129831215709962010-08-09T16:18:00.002+01:002010-12-06T15:46:46.907Z

I've often been asked by clients what I mean when I say that I expect all texts to be supplied in RTF format.I'm not a typist, and my quotes don't include the time it would take for retyping printed text. I could employ a typist, of course, but so long as texts created on your computer are saved as RTF (Rich Text Format) files, they can be opened in any other text-editing program (on Macs as

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-30217701667202188592010-07-13T19:51:00.006+01:002010-11-01T18:23:08.687Z

What's Wrong with my Sounds?I'm quite happy listening to my CDs, but would much rather be listening to DVD-Audio (DVD-A).Back in 1999 when I was studying to be a multimedia engineer there was a lot of enthusiasm for the new DVD-A format, and for good reason. CD-quality audio is delivered by sampling and reproducing sounds at a bit-depth of 16 bits (that's the amount of data recorded per single

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-48331894159209791432010-07-13T13:44:00.016+01:002010-11-01T18:23:35.819Z

What's Wrong with this Picture?I cropped the image above to the aspect ratio 16:9, which is fine, I think, for a small still image. But what if the image was projected onto a wall and was 6 metres wide? And what about this crop (2.39:1)?The image above is cropped to one of the more common aspect ratios now being used by the movie industry, and it's getting rather abstract, don't you think?

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-51176153415149223022010-07-12T18:58:00.005+01:002010-07-12T20:26:48.822+01:00

Yesterday evening I arrived home from a weekend at the Scottish Healing Centre to find several messages on the telephone answering machine from my wife Genie. She's in Holland at the moment and I'd forgotten to mention that I'd be out for the weekend. Picking up the phone all I could hear was loud static. I fiddled with the leads and then tried plugging the unit directly into the telephone socket

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-82458865719971757212010-06-30T15:34:00.001+01:002010-11-01T18:24:24.360Z

Stranger in a Strange LandTwelve years ago I was unemployed and living in Holland, having been made redundant from a fine job editing online biomedical journals for a well known multinational science publisher. I'd worked for 16 years in advertising and publishing, in London and in Amsterdam, but my real love had always been mucking around with computers, making music, videos, graphics, games,

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-12740559005253817142010-05-30T14:45:00.002+01:002010-05-30T15:14:45.600+01:00

Sound travels more readily through solids than it does through air, as demonstrated in old Western movies by the fellow with his ear to the railway track giving advance notice of oncoming trains. This has practical implications when soundproofing a room.Air is actually the best insulator of sound, so if we're concerned about external sound getting into the studio or our own sounds leaking out, we

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-24559102852821433932010-05-27T12:13:00.005+01:002010-05-27T12:35:17.305+01:00

Bearing in mind that sound is made up of travelling compression waves, let's look again at our sine wave model, in which the horizontal axis represents time.The speed at which sound travels through air is a constant, 343 m/s at 20°C and at sea level, although this value varies slightly according to altitude and temperature.Let λ be the wavelength (in metres),let f be the sound frequency (full

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-70214827936397480382010-04-29T16:09:00.013+01:002010-04-30T11:29:42.971+01:00

Sound is made up of travelling compression waves, or oscillations in pressure.Acoustics is the scientific study of sound.Audio is sound within the frequency range which can be heard by human beings, which is generally considered to be between 12 Hz (Hertz: cycles per second) and 20,000 Hz (or 20 kHz). It's this audible range of sound frequencies that I'll be concerned with here.We experience the

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-64515067076609241402010-04-21T16:34:00.005+01:002010-04-21T17:10:38.006+01:00

I'm often asked which web browser I use for my work and usually answer, all of them. I want the web pages I make to look and behave the same in all current browsers, so I use them all to test my work.Although I use Macs for production work, I do have a PC laptop running various versions of Internet Explorer (IE) which I also use for testing. This shouldn't be necessary but IE was never truly

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-10250592003197974332010-03-10T11:35:00.014Z2010-11-01T19:16:06.995Z

What Makes a Good Website?A well designed website can be standards compliant and affordable. What constitutes good design is debatable, but when designing for the web there are guidelines which designers ignore at their risk.Text should be easy to read. This means starting with a reasonable font size and using text columns which are not too wide to scan – the eye tires quickly from reading long

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-801150885077147559.post-86826607127504644562010-02-10T13:27:00.008Z2010-11-01T18:30:18.810Z

When people ask me what I do for a living, I usually answer "I'm a multimedia engineer" and watch their eyes glaze over. Further attempts to explain what I do are usually met with more blank looks and a change in the subject of conversation. I persevere.The media in the word multimedia are audio, video, text, graphics and photographic images. A multimedia engineer brings these elements together

Phil Brammerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15554829702482614267noreply@blogger.com1