ARJ » Video

Hurtigruten

alexarje — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:07:39 +0000

One of the more bizarre TV programs ever may be the current screening of Hurtigruten by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK. Following the success of the screening of the train ride from Bergen to Oslo, they are now filming the entire (5+ days) journey of the boat trip from Bergen to Kirkenes.

Here is some info on how and why they are doing this, or you can just follow the journey live here. All the material will be available with a CC license after the journey, which opens up for some creative use of all the footage.

Sonification of Traveling Landscapes

alexarje — Thu, 15 May 2008 08:22:04 +0000

I just heard a talk called “Real-Time Synaesthetic Sonification of Traveling Landscapes” (PDF) by Tim Pohle and Peter Knees from the Department of Computational Perception (great name!) in Linz. They have made an application creating music from a moving video camera. The implementation is based on grabbing a one pixel wide column from the video, plotting these columns and sonifying the image. Interestingly enough, the images they get out (see below) of this are very close to the motiongrams and videograms I have been working on.

GeoVision MPEG4 Codec

alexarje — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:48:20 +0000

I recently received a video file with some material I am supposed to analyse. The problem was that I couldn’t figure out what type of codec was used. VLC told me that it uses a codec called GMP4. After some research I have found that this means an MPEG-4 codec developed by GeoVision. I have found a windows version of this codec, but nothing for OS X. If anyone has any ideas, please shout out.

Flash Movie Conversion on OS X

alexarje — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 15:12:38 +0000

Looking for a solution to make flash movies on OS X, I came across this nice tutorial based on FFMPEGX. In terms of video quality I prefer to create videos with H.264 compression using MPEG Streamclip, but since flash seems to be the de facto standard on the web these days I will try to use this for an upcoming project.

Video broadcasting

alexarje — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 12:45:57 +0000

Vegard mentioned QuickTime Broadcaster in a blog entry yesterday. While QT broadcaster is certainly easy to set up and use, I have found it even easier to use some of the video broadcasting solutions in Max/MSP/Jitter. The jit.qt.broadcast object allows for QT streaming, but I have found the jit.broadcast object using RTSP to be somewhat more stable. Using Jitter also opens for all sorts of image manipulation, text overlays etc. as we are used to in the Max/MSP world.

Below is a snapshot from the help file of jit.broadcast. Getting started broadcasting video is as easy as clicking on a couple of buttons.

Choosing the Right Video Format

alexarje — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 10:36:04 +0000

The discussion about video standards for live processing has been summarised as:

Codec: Motion JPEG (for interlaced footage) or Photo JPEG.

Compression ratio/quality: Quality 80 is a decent baseline for JPEG, though you can crank as high as 97 to improve quality.

Keyframes: Encode a keyframe on every frame so it’s ‘scratch-ready’.

Alpha channels: For video containing alpha channels, PNG is the format of choice.

Sounds like more or less the same conclusion that has been reached in the Jitter forum, when this question comes up there once in a while.

Optical Illusions and Visual Phenomena

alexarje — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 18:17:53 +0000

Talking about optical illusions, here’s a bunch of them. Great that many of them are made as javascripts so that the effects can be changed.

[ youtube=http://youtube.com/w/?v=_dIya1aJJKA]

Sony HDR-SR1

alexarje — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 21:12:45 +0000

An interesting review of the new Sony HDR-SR1 HDD based HD video camera. Except for the fact that there are no decent video software to edit this type of video format, and the lack of support for OS X, this looks like a great camera.

Moving towards HDD video cameras

alexarje — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 12:12:03 +0000

I have been using the JVC Everio GZMC500, one of the first hard drive based video cameras with a decent price tag and ok features, for more than half a year and my general impressions are very positive.

Positive things:

No tapes!!!
3CCD, excellent for recording in dark concert/lecture halls
Very small and handy

Negative things:

No microphone/line input (this was a major drawback with this model, but luckily the built-in stereo microphone is not too bad…)
Storing files in an MPEG-2 format which is probably good for writing directly to DVD, but a hazzle to work with on a computer (at least Macs) since they have to be re-encoded to something that is more easily playable in QuickTime. Particularly annoying is that 16:9 recordings are oded in 4:3, so they also need to be rescaled. As I have written about earlier, I use MPEG Streamclip for this, and am quite happy with the results I get when encoding to H.264 at 65%, 720×405 pixels and 192 kbps AAC sound.
Only 4 GB storage on Compact Flash cards. Sure, it is possible to buy more cards, but they are rather expensive, and you need many of them if it should really help. The cheaper JVC models had 30 GB hard drives, which would have been nice, but they didn’t have 3CCD.

Now I see that JVC has released the Everio GZ-MG505, keeping all the qualities from the MG500, and adding a mic/line input and a 30 GB disk. It seems like this is the year when tape-based cameras will finally be succeeded by HDD-cameras, as all the big manufacturers keep releasing new models, so I think I’ll wait a little longer before I upgrade.

Lasse – Hyperactive

alexarje — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 10:35:37 +0000

Lasse – Hyperactive is a very simple and low-cost videomusic production, but also very powerful and funny.