While Joanie was out of town last week, my two goals were to finish painting our middle bedroom (the nursery-to-be) and build the crib which had been sitting in a box for a while. In my spare time, I also learned the basics of iMovie and watched a documentary on Britpop. The culmination of all this: this video:
This entry was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2009 at 10:24 pm by Mike and is filed under Home Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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July 12th, 2009 at 11:27 pm
As I tweeted earlier, “Awesome! Looks like it’s easier than putting together a grill. And I love that it took longer to assemble the video than the crib.”
July 13th, 2009 at 3:25 am
Good work on both the crib and the video! I shudder tothink what the result would have been if the music documentary you had been watching was our favorite rockumentary instead. Imagining the pyrotechnics budget now!
July 13th, 2009 at 9:22 am
If it had been Spinal Tap, at the end of the video I would have zoomed out and the crib would have been 2″ tall!
It actually didn’t take more than about an hour to make the video, mainly because I didn’t know how to do anything with iMovie or GarageBand. And of the two, editing the music was the more time consuming part. Everything was shot on the D40 on a tripod, with a lot of timer usage.
July 13th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Yeah, the problem would have been you’d have a crib that was in danger of being trampled by a baby:)
A remote shutter would have been handy, I bet. Was it easy to synchronize the pictures with the beat? I’ve never tried anything so sophisticated with iMovie. Actually, what did you use Garage Band for? Clipping the music? iMovie does let you fade in and out at select parts of a music file (very kludgy, though).
July 13th, 2009 at 11:40 am
So basically all I had was the still photos — I dumped them into iMovie, threw in the title slides, and tinkered a little to see how long to make each slide to get a sort of stop-action effect. I had the movie done, THEN decided, “hey, this would be better with some music.” I had been listening to Elastica while putting the crib together, so played “Connection” and noticed that there were a couple of transitions (like the intro was 4 seconds long, then at 20 seconds it changed again to the bass-heavy part). So I edited the slide durations so they matched up to those (the title is 4 seconds long, and the next title slide ends at 20 seconds).
I didn’t actually try to match the beat of the song to the durations, it just worked out kinda close.
As for GarageBand, it has pretty good controls for editing and mixing tracks. So you’ll notice that just after the title slide about the broken part, there’s a jump to the last riff of the song, since I had to avoid the singing. In GarageBand, I put two copies of the song on separate tracks, then figured out where to clip and move them around. Then when you export it, it just puts the tracks together. The editing isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough, particularly if you don’t know the song.
It was fun to make and show — I put the video on my phone and had Joanie play it when I picked her up at the airport (she had no idea I was putting the crib together).
July 13th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Well, it turner out great. I think I deleted Garage Band one day when I realized that it’s library files were huge. Maybe that was a mistake. I think I have another slideshow project coming.
So I’m curious– is this post iPhone compatible? The video pluggin does not appear on either my Pre or on any PC which does not have Quicktime installed (obviously). I think the Pre could play quicktime files, but I can’t download the file to verify without QT Pro.
July 13th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Nope, not iPhone compatible either. This doesn’t seem to be an easy problem to solve:
— Hosting a quicktime-based video on your own site has the security, but isn’t iPhone compatible.
— Some video hosting sites (like Vimeo) offer good security (on a video-by-video basis, if I understand correctly), but aren’t iPhone compatible.
— Some sites are iPhone compatible, but don’t offer any security (like YouTube), or offer too much security (Flickr). I’d love to use Flickr if they had a little more granularity on security (topic for another post, but Flickr really sucks for sharing photos — the whole public/friends/family thing doesn’t work well at all).
Finally, you can just add GarageBand back from the iLife DVD, and can probably delete much of the library files — I don’t think I’m gonna be hooking up (or emulating) a synthesizer anytime soon.
July 13th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
You can always use Guest Passes to share photos &videos (and sets) with friends.
July 13th, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Obvious not secure at all, but what if you posted a link to the *.mov file? Would the iPhone then stream that? Maybe the Pre would too.
July 14th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Didn’t try the .mov file — I exported the video as a .mov, and it was 15 MB, which is a little bigger than can be useful. I tried the option to export “Movie to 3G,” and it creates a 500kb file that you can probably see here on your Pre (works on iPhone). You’ll notice that the quality sucks, and that it also messed up the aspect ratio (which is 16:9). I’ll figure it out — I’m sure there’s an export option that will work.
We’re moving toward a family website that will be password protected for access, but once there, everything will be open (based on Joanie’s photo site).
As for flickr, it’s great for sharing with people who are flickr members, but it’s really just not a good site for sharing photos with non-members. What would solve my problem is to have a guess pass for collections — so that you can just put whatever sets you want to share more publicly into that collection, and be done with it. I could, for example, create a baby photo collection, and create 1 guest pass that I could give to people and they’d be able to see any photos that are in there. They wouldn’t have to become a member, and none of this having to create a new, separate guest pass for each set.
But there’s no guest pass for collections (at least according to the help forums). The alternative is to do the same thing, but with one gigantic set, which could get pretty cumbersome.
July 14th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Yeah, the 3gp file streams fine after clicking the link, albeit at pretty low quality. 3gp is the format used by camera phone MMS, which I think tops off at 176 pixels wide or some crap like that. Sounds fine, though 🙂
Your idea about a DMZ on Flickr is pretty interesting in theory, but in practice, I found that people won’t go and check it on a regular basis. I used to have something similar in Orb– a photo folder that was assigned a publically accessible link, where I would add additional folders as I archived new photos. People only followed the link right after I emailed it, then wouldn’t go back on their own. It works out better to make a new set every month, and send out an email with that new link, in which case, Flickr’s guest pass works just as well. The downside with Flickr’s system is that non-Members then have to maintain a collection of guest pass links if they ever want to go back to older sets.
July 14th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
The keeping track of a pile of guest pass links is what I’m trying to avoid. That’s what I think the “collection guest pass” would avoid.
We’re putting together a password-protected blog, and want to put the photos somewhere (either on that server or on flickr) and link to them. We’ll of course have the blog itself and RSS, and will allow people to subscribe by email for notification of new posts (since we have relatives and friends who aren’t web savvy enough for RSS, and wouldn’t think to check back, as you said).
We may or may not use flickr, and may use it in combination with local files on the blog. We don’t know yet.
Still tossing around ideas…
July 14th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
I quoted Mike in the Flickr Ideas topic on the subject. No idea why Flickr hasn’t enabled guest passes for collections, it’s much requested and there’s little downside. Being able to email the same collection guestpass each time would simplify things tremendously.
You can (or at least could) share ALL your photos that were friends or family only w/ a guest pass. But that may not work well either.
July 14th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
So Mike, if you’re hosting your own blog, you could put a collection of guest pass links there. Heck, use the flickr thumbnails on the page and it’ll work just like the Collections guest pass that you are requesting. I’m sure you have more ambitious plans than that.
Have you guys used Kodak Gallery? It seems to me that their strategy makes so much more sense to the casual user. They create an account, but then whenever anyone shares some photos with them, the album gets added to their collection, so there’s only one place they go to see all the photos anyone has ever shared with them. If my mom wants to go back to see a flickr set i sent her 3 days ago, it’s impossible for her to find the email again.
Speaking of which, has anyone done any research lately on digital photo frames? One think I’ve always wanted to get my parents was a wireless frame that would tap into a flickr set via RSS, and update in real time. I know they make them, but they’ve always seemed to be priced a little out of reach.
July 15th, 2009 at 11:02 am
Bump! No discussion re: my digital picture frame question? That’s it, I’m going to post this question on gdgt! Maybe some of my friends there will chime in!
July 15th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
I don’t keep up with the digital picture frame world, hopefully all your gdgt friends can give you some tips. My only tip — steer clear of Ceiva! But you already knew that.
July 15th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
I actually just tried to pose the question on gdgt as an experiment, and there really doesn’t seem to be a place for it. The discussion topics are broadly categorized between product, company, term, or gdgt, and new posts HAVE to fit in one of the existing categories. Under Term, I tried “digital photo frame” and some variants, but I couldn’t find a match, and the site won’t let me post unless I can “select a glossary that already exists,” whatever that means.
Oh well, guess I’m back to hanging out here with you guys :).
July 19th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Nice! I love the video. You’ve got to keep this and show it to your kid after s/he’s older – I’m sure s/he’ll get a big kick out of it!