July 30, 2005

Progress report

Some other video has hit the upload server, but not the mirrors yet. Currently in the upload queue is an H264 version of the EFF talk, which exhibits a couple of artifacts early on but then settles down to utterly amazing quality. Unfortunately, VLC doesn’t seem to like the audio much – it plays, but with lots of distortion; QuickTime Player is fine.

I’d love to experiment more, but encoding H264 takes about ten times longer than MPEG4. My poor old Mac handles the latter a little better than real time, but that means encoding H264 isn’t even an overnight job – it runs on into the following afternoon. So, good as it looks, I’m afraid there won’t be very much more of it.

On the other hand, if anyone can walk me through encoding to Dirac I’d be delighted to give it a go. It looks like I’d have to patch and recompile ffmpeg to avoid a conversion from DV to some YUV frame format and all the attendant disk space nightmares; not sure how straightforward that is on Mac OS X?

Posted by jonathan at 1:33 PM

Background to the EFF video

File this under ‘DVD extras’ – Danny O’Brien has what amounts to a Director’s Commentary on the EFF video, giving some information about the people who asked questions. Errr… yeah, sorry, I wasn’t actually in the room at the time, which is why the camera doesn’t move. But at least we can hear you. Danny also notes the precise moment when the whole PledgeBank thing happens – download the video, see history in the making!

Posted by jonathan at 1:14 PM

July 29, 2005

Uploads!

OK, so my lashed-together FTP automation plain didn’t work, but nevertheless the ‘Where’s the British EFF?’ session is now up. In the upload queue are Danny O’Brien, Ted Nelson, and Ben Metcalfe.

The only thing is… I’m not going to point you to the files here. Not yet, anyway. Wait until there are mirrors up – keep checking here for the master list.

Posted by jonathan at 10:42 AM

Note to self

When yanking a FireWire cable in the middle of a significant network render, be absolutely certain it’s the right one. Then check again anyway. [sigh]

On the other hand: compression underway for the first tranche of video. After a ridiculous amount of drive shuffling, this now includes the session in which the ‘whatever-it’s-eventually-called-we’ll-still-refer-to-it-as-the-British-EFF’ was born. Apparently, were I to lift my gaze from the day job and Final Cut I’d notice that there’s a modicum of buzz about it, or something.

Expect uploads to be confirmed in the morning (heaven knows if my lashed-together automation will work overnight…); you’ll have to poke around for links until mirrors are up.

Posted by jonathan at 2:17 AM

July 26, 2005

Nine tapes in

100Gb or so of media is sloshing around in the Mac, all nicely multicamera-matched so I can vision mix in a single pass. In theory. I haven’t played with this bit of Final Cut 5 before (it’s new), so we’ll see how it goes. Before I can queue for compression there’s also the issue of rendering titles and captions, come to think of it. Eek, lots to do.

Something I need to get around, however, is that basically none of us seem to understand copyright. ‘Yes, you’re welcome to use my presentation under any Creative Commons license,’ say the speakers, and behind-the-scenes we’ve been having a discussion about whether we should pick a derivative-works-permitted license or not. But all of that goes clean out of the window when the speakers play chunks of broadcast TV and – get this – a Hollywood movie during their talks. Oh, as they say, shit.

I suspect the presentation itself constituted an unlicensed public performance, though it’s highly unlikely anybody will strop about it. Publishing to the web, however… oh bother. Luckily, the cameras in that auditorium are framed slightly oddly, so I think I can cut around it and simply not show the clips. If not, I’ll have to cut out that section of the talk.

There’s a wider issue here, but I’ll blog about that elsewhere.

Posted by jonathan at 1:06 PM | Comments (3)

July 25, 2005

ObFirstPost!

2:35am – I’ve finally made it back to Glasgow after leaving Stoke Newington something like 13 hours ago. Don’t ask. Just, don’t ask.

I now have 27 tapes of footage from OpenTech 2005 to ‘do something with.’ I’ll update here as I make progress through the week… meanwhile, note that the central OpenTech recordings page is here. Audio from the main theatre is already up, which is something I’d love to take credit for but sadly can’t.

Posted by jonathan at 2:35 AM | TrackBack (0)