Just uploaded a couple of old videos (formerly shown as videoblog entries here) to Flickr.

First impressions about Flickr’s new video capabilities:

• The 90 second limit is something I can understand for now, but which prevented me from posting some of my old videos (including my favourite one). If I do end up using Flickr to host my videos, though, I think I could make the 90 second limit work for me;

• Not being able to choose the thumbnail for the video (something which is coming soon, I think) is really annoying, especially if you make a small white-text-on-black-background intro as I usually do. I do hope this changes soon;

• From the two issues above I gather that Flickr isn’t really trying too hard to get into the full-fledged video hosting scene (as opposed to say YouTube), but rather they may be experimenting with making it easy for people to jot their mobile-phone videos down on the web. The thing is that here are already a couple (more?) good products out there that already do that, so let’s see how that pans out for them;

• The privacy and permission settings and controls already in place for photos also work on videos and that is a most welcome feature indeed!

This is just me joining the chorus of people complaining about Apple’s lock-in strategies on their products, so if you’re not into that stuff, please disregard this post and move on.

Last night I finished what I hope will be the last version of my January snow trip’s movie.

It took me hours to edit the thing and it is by far the most complex and time consuming edit I’ve ever made.

In the end I distilled some 60-70 minutes of footage to a 14 minutes, 45 seconds movie with the most amount of cuts I have ever made in my life (although yes, I’m nothing more than an amateur).

And now that I’ve done it and I’m almost at the point of burning the DVDs (right after I hex-edit the .IFO files for wide-screen correctness, oh well…) I feel that queasiness in the pit of my stomach that if I ever want to go back and re-cut any of the film I’m essentially dead in the water.

You see, for a number of reasons (including having started the editing phase during the event itself and having nothing but my trusty old iBook G3 with me), I’ve edited the video on iMovie and the soundtrack on Garage Band.
So what this means is that I can’t get anything remotely like an EDL out of it and ,as such, I can’t ever go back and get the project together again unless I keep the huge project files (and the footage I captured) and I keep it up-to-date to the most recent versions of iMovie.

Of course, had I done this on Final Cut, I’d be in the clear (as much as possible, anyway), but this way I just know that if my DVDs ever break, my movie, as I know it now, will essentially be gone.

And I just shudder at that prospect. Not that this is award-winning material, not by a long shot, but it really matters to me.

Oh well, yet another reason to upgrade my laptop to something that can run Final Cut, right? :-)

Technorati Tags: editing, mac, video

I’m back at Final Cut.

After reading some stuff on film editing it sure is a lot easier to figure the software out. I guess it is true that this is professional software and it is not that easy to just take it up and start editing away…

Anyway I took it up again because I have an event filmed from which I want to make a DVD and I had access to two tapes from different people, both of which had some kind of problems with it so even if I wanted to (and I didn’t) I couldn’t just cop out and use only one of them for the whole event. Consumer-grade mini-DV cameras absolutely suck in low-light conditions

So I just read through the FCP manual where it regards to creating, manipulating and editing multiclips and then after I had all of the clips synchronized into different angles of the same clip I just edited it like one would a live show with multiple cameras’ signals coming in. It just rocks!

Of course, manually synching different video feeds when you have no strong visual or audio clues (like a clacker for example, which I now do get the need for, by the way…) is a pain and the only thing that made it easier on me was that fortunately one of the persons filming the event left the camera on for the whole duration so I had a continuos video feed to synch up the other person’s interrupted footage.

All in all I haven’t finished editing everything yet but the main event clip (the only one which is multi-angle) is coming along quite nicely indeed, even if I do only have a rough edit so far.

Which reminds me: making rough edits with highly reduced resolution footage and then re-importing everything at full res just for the final edit and export is just great! The speed with which I can now work is amazing and then I’ll just have to do minor tweaks with the full resolution footage. Heaven! :-)

Technorati Tags: video, editing

Last weekend I went for a little walk in Parque das Nações and took my camcorder with me.

It’s been a long time since I posted any videos and, in fact, since I’ve done any video editing at all, even for my personal film projects.

So I decided that regardless of what I would capture I would make a videoblog of it.

Luckily there was a setup of a few musical instruments for people to experiment and play with with and, even if I didn’t get any decent footage of the instruments themselves (duh!) I did get to record some nice sounds from them to be the base of the whole video.

Here it is then, sights and sounds from Parque das Nações:

Click to view movie

Technorati Tags: lisboa, parque das nacoes, video

As is well known by now, most Portuguese forests are in flames from north to south.

Right now there’s a huge fire in Figueira da Foz, near Coimbra and Melo has filmed some CanadAir planes who are up there fighting the fires, refilling their water tanks in the river right by his office.

So far there were no accidents despite their flying insanely close to the bridge, although Melo tells me that when they started coming in 5 at a time there were some acrobatics in order to avoid each other…

He put up the videos straight from his still digital camera and I took them and stitched them together in this little film for easier consumption.

Click to view movie

By the way, if you ever need to edit MPEG1 Muxed footage filmed by a still digital you will have trouble getting the sound out of it.

The best way I found to do that was to use the fabulous MPEG streamclip software to export the clip to DV format and take it from there.

Technorati Tags: Fire-fighting, Plane

Vinyl records are a big part of my youth.

I’m not, by any means, a vinyl fanatic, defending it’s superior sound quality over digital media as many do. In fact I’m quite a digital-media kind of person myself, as should be quite apparent from my weblog and my activities.

No, what drives my fondness for vinyl records is the memory of countless hours spent listening to them.

Cleaning them from dust before playing them, cueing the head on the track I wanted to listen to with great care, getting up every half-hour or so to turn the record over or to put a new one playing…

There was a time when all that was as familiar and a “matter-of-fact” kind of activity as putting on a CD nowadays.

Of course today I know of a lot of (very young) people who don’t know what a “record” is, much less an LP. Even more people know of records, but only as that media some DJs use and have never actually touched one. It’s fun to be an old geezer like that!

Anyway, I decided to put on some of my old records (yes, I do have an operational turn-table and it is really connected to my stereo) and make a video of it.

Don’t you just love the enthralling effect of a spinning vinyl record?

Click to view movie

P.S.- This file is hosted on the Internet Archive servers, under my “Our Media” account. It is a test of using a third-party, “forever there” hosting service for large files. Let’s see how well that goes. If it does not go well I still have Google Video as an alternative.

Technorati Tags: vinyl, record

After being cooped up at home with the flu for 3 days I wanted to get a new video out but didn’t really have any new footage. So I just scrounged around on my tapes for some bits I hadn’t used yet and threw some of them together to make a short story (if I can call it that).

These are pieces of random footage I recorded on several days for the past two-three weeks.

Click to view movie

I spent last weekend in Algarve, at the beach, with my family and when we drove back, Sunday evening, Tuxa was tired and not feeling hungry at all (we eat way too much whenever we are with the full gang in Algarve) :-) and so she went straight to bed.

I, on the other hand, wasn’t all that tired and didn’t feel like going to bed on an empty stomach, so I decided to have a light supper.

Toast and some freshly boiled tea for the stomach and the newly started “Pattern Recognition” for the “little gray cells” (I wonder how many people will actually get this reference…)

This is the setting (and a perfect excuse) for some more experimenting with video editing in the videoblogging format. This time around I have fun with extreme cutting.

This was actually a 18+ minute shoot without interruptions and trimming it down to the 3 minute-something which it ended up with, while trying to make it interesting and somewhat funny was a really interesting task.

It was a fiercely windy night and you can hear it, especially towards the end of the video. I also decided not to add any music or sound effects at all and it shows the poor quality of the built-in mic. No surprises there, of course, but I still think it is rather passable.

Click to view movie

The title may be a bit misleading…

I wanted to try out the video camera’s night mode and decided the best way to do it was to just use whatever subjects I had around me in the house at the moment.

I was in the office and my main bookshelf is there. I love reading and I love books, so there was plenty of opportunity to film there…

So there you have it.

Click to view movie

One of the things I like best about living where I live and working where I work right now is the fact that I have to drive to work and I am able to do it via a route that follows along the coast-line for the majority of the way.

I love the sea and I’ve always been near it. I guess I’ve been lucky. So my rides to work and back from work are something I deeply enjoy and never stop to cherish.

Someday this might well change so I figured this would be a good opportunity to make a small video about some of the beaches I pass on my way to work and the sights I see.

The road I take is called “Marginal” and it goes all the way from Cascais to Cruz Quebrada (or very near it, I’m not exactly sure where that road ends and the next one begins). For the most part it follows the sea into the river Tejo’s estuary and although I get on the road nearly half way there (in Parede) I still get to have the company of the sea for quite some time.

This, then, is an experiment in video making, editing, and videoblogging in general.

Click to view movie