a looking-glass book

child's play II

more children making fun of old video games

im still laughing at the last line:
'and you guys back then were ok with this?'
(kid talking about having to start over once you die in galaga)

...

i want to apologize publicly to anyone i might have let down, offended or been a jerk to this semester. i have spent the semester reeling from health issues that literally consumed my life from march until august of this year. i have spent the semester trying to catch up, recover and reevaluate all at once.

i have tried my hardest not to use my health (or mental state as a result of my complications) as an excuse in school. i worry that it is a cop-out, that using it only slows my recovery back to where i need to be.

but the truth is that i spent a good deal of semester overwhelmed and depressed. it might sound overdramatic, but realizing i truly almost died while in the hospital impacted my ability to concentrate on a lot of things for many weeks this semester.

in the past several weeks, i have spoken to a lot of people. and this past 8 months has not just been shitty for me. i have to use at least 2 hands to count all the people, just within the department, who have suffered personal loss or familial crisises.

we are not a large department and yet at least a quarter of us have been forced to deal with some really serious things in our personal lives recently.

i am not trying to speak for others.

but i believe many of us have been on edge at some point this semester. and sadly, i believe these outside tensions have been reflected invisibly in the way we have treated each other and our work.

i want to apologize to all of you who have had to put up with me in a less than pleasant way.
i want to send out sympathy to those of you who have (and are still) dealing with personal complications.
and i want to hope that we may all return to school in january, refreshed and renewed; our problems overcome.

i hope that we can all communicate more openly next semester - the successful completition of our thesis projects depends on an open and constructive environment for all those involved.

(i worry that these tensions impacted the department negatively this semester and i believe it is a trend, if we are all to succeed, that cannot continue. i think that this is only possible with more open communication involving everyone [fac and student alike] in the department and with more support and less anger and competition creatively. we are all going to slip somehow, sometime. i hope that we can carry each other through rather than condemn when this happens. i need all of you; i count on all of you, just as i hope you all need and can count on me.)

again, i hope everyone gets the relaxation and peace of mind they need and i look forward to working with all of you in the coming year.

(i will continue to post progress on the blog over the break, but i expect updates to come more slowly, both because i will be on dialup and because the majority of my work will be movies too big to easily upload.)

javascript controls of a quicktime movie (update again)

more things learned about the stupid workings of quicktime.
im adding a few more movies into the db for the presentation tomorrow.

what has this taught me?

1. the formular i described yesterday holds up for a movie that is 1:26 long. so youre safe at least for movies of an hour and a half.

2. that compressor is a funky thing. i used to try and squeeze these long qt files (1.78 gig) down to something more usable. it looks like mpg4, 160x120, stereo, 16kHz is passable. it took said movie and shrunk it to 131 meg. add in that it made it progressive and suddenly the wait isnt too bad for an hour and a half of video - esp since you arent reloading it all the time now.

3. but the funkiness of compressor? oh yes.
thats when you encode these files (or save them from mp4 to mov inside of qt) that this magical 'rate' changes. normally, the movie has this magical rate of 600. (see yesterdays post for info on that.)
but then, during some of this conversion, it seems the rate jumps up to 1500. i cant find any setting for this, i cant change it or access it at all. but yet, my movies were back to misbehaving until i changed the rate from 600 to 1500. thanks again qt - this is a really great feature.

javascript controls of a quicktime movie (update)

so at first i thought i was just dumb. this is common to me on some level (see: will telling me i inhabit a special place in stupid space today).

but even after seeing that video was controlled by setting an int of second times framerate, i couldnt make the movie jump to the correct point.

this was a problem. for wed, i could put the iframe back in, but thats no good. i dont want to reload the movie every time. and i especially want to be able to scrub. (starttime being set in the embed tag literally makes the movie start from there, no matter where you drag the slider.)

so its an issue.

after poking around for hours and hours, i found a page on apple (who has convienently removed the section on scripting quicktime controls from their site) that states this is not how you set the time int.

instead, movies are set by seconds times 600. this constant rate of 600 seems totally arbitrary. and i had computed this already last night by trial and error.

the great part is that seconds times 600 works great for small movies. but on one of my test movies, which is 26 minutes long, it starts slipping frames around 8 or 10 minutes in.

this isnt good.

so i keep digging all day, trying to figure out whats going on.

i never find anything, so i go back to the drawing board and decide to compute the error into my function. another nice chunk of time and i have figured out the function you really want to jump in a movie.

this has been tested up to a movie 56 minutes long, it might change once i start testing longer files.

but the function looks like this (where timer is seconds, in an int, of the distance from the beginning you want to skip to):

function startmovie(timer) {
timer = timer * 600;

//to correct for error, add 1 frame every 400 seconds of video
timer = Math.round(timer + ((timer / 240000)*60));

document.screen.SetTime(timer);
}

now dont tell me that the math line isnt hot. i mean, thats some sexy math to tweak something that is just horribly designed. well done.

javascript controls of a quicktime movie

there might be nothing better in the world than finding little documented features in programs.

several weeks ago, i found some links and info for the embed tag with quicktime. ive kept looking for info as i have been developing.

i have iframes right now nested three deep and every time you wanted to skip around in the movie, you had to reload the iframe to set a new 'starttime' in the embed tag.

until today that is.

using google for a long time, i found several pages that continued to spoonfeed info on controlling qt through js. most of these (for some reason) referenced qt4.1, so that was encouraging. maybe.

at any rate, i found one page on ken villines site and one on another site.

a quick page showed that you can control jumping around a movie file with js. so i get to rip out that second iframe and hold my movie in the same frame as my stills. this is great news programatically, but even better it means you only have to load the movie once. thats a fantastic performance boost and exactly the solution i wanted.

i just cant believe this kind of thing isnt better documented.

(oh, the function i wanted looks like this: javascript:document.nameofmovie.SetTime(22000) where 22000 somehow translates to 22 seconds. since im not dealing with frames, this is cakewalk for me to implement. in fact, i was already passing the timecode to the iframe, so its just a matter of pointing it within the document instead of through a querystring.)

***

and if i could read (from the second link above, but way up on the page):

movname.SetTime(time) For .mov files time is indicated by number of frames- for example for a 6 frame per second movie setTime(30) would take it to 30th frame or 5 seconds. For sound the time is indicated in miliseconds - for example, 22000 (22x1000) would take it to 22th second. ** note this setting is different than the hour:minute:second:frame notation used in the embed tag.

another subtle use of camera phones

from my sister:

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/nyc/49535417.html

its not that exciting. except that its humorous.
people taking pictures of other people, asking for karma to catch up with them.

i cant help but try to imagine 'iam' with things like this. screengrabs for missed connections, anger management and picking out portraits of 'interesting people'.

its just fun to see what people take pictures of and how they use them.

image dump

a 'quick' 30 minutes of image dumping and i have learned the following:

a 54 minute movie, with every frame dumped is a mess. it took over 30 minutes, when i killed it.

i suppose i could have let it finish, but it was unhappy. it had dumped over 65,000 images at that point, taking up almost 700 megs.

this is for less than 1 hour of footage, so obviously this isn't the ideal path to pursue. not that the math i did previously didnt support this. but now i have tried it and have found it to be something to avoid.

i have other things to get done by thurs for the presentation, but this is one of those 'this could be a cool thing' if i could work out the details. so i will keep playing on the side and seeing what i come up with.

im still trying to figure out a solution.

dynamic imaging

had a few talks about this in the last few days. i think i nailed the pieces im building right now, so im starting to think about plugins.

go with this for a moment:

i want to display thumnbails in some different dynamic ways. the ways dont matter.

but if quickly gets complicated.
because when you shoot 30 frames a second, thats a little over 100,000 still frames an hour. which is great, because i want to shoot a good 4, 6, 8 hours of footage a day. so thats somewhere around half a million shots a day.

and im still talking about at least 50 days of shooting.

that would be 25 million images.

thats a lot of images. thats too many images.
storage is an issue. filesystem support is an issue.

does anyone have any ideas how to overcome this?
do i dump 15 frames a second and let the other half disappear [as stills, they will still obviously be in the video]? do i find more clever ways to pull them out using user feedback? do i hope for sensors in the future (ala sensecam) that will recognize the good ones (but what makes good)?

25 million images.
50 million images.

i cant even imagine.