30 songs, 15 picked from 2011 Merry Xmash show Bootie did at DNA Lounge in San Francisco
Enjoy!
)
deinterlacing 2323 telecine video into fields for visual analysis
Having some challenging fun working on trying to deinterlace some toughie clips
from my brother’s upcoming feature film.
His camera recorded in 24fps (24000/1001 to you fellow geeks 
and smartly
did a “2323″ writing/stretching of it to 60i (60 half-frames).
After correcting back to 24fps progressive most of his clips, he’s found ~10-20%
are not able to be put back together visually properly even with CineTools
and manually specifying the “cadence” and sequence starting frames, etc…
I started with code that I wrote to take a small segment of a video
and split the interlaced frames into 1/2 height “fields” and then drop them
down to grayscale to compare them all to each other to find the best matches
(to verify the cadence is right and/or the fields aren’t “off by 1″, etc..)
It uses mplayer and ImageMagick (“convert” and “compare”) for pretty high-quality
extraction of frames from the source video into the 1/2 height “fields”.
So I just do about 0.3 seconds to get 10 frames, and thus 20 1/2 frame fields for analyzing.
It will output the best matches of frames. For example:
php lacer.php good.mov 0.5 0.8
I then extended it into a web page (screenshot above, where I’m left-shifting one field by 4 pixels for visual inspection)
PHP script <== try it out online! (source)
that uses some CSS cleverness (clip property is your BFF!) to interlace together a pair of fields.
It supports:
- field swapping (move one 1/2 image to be the 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc. lines — if it was
previously the 2nd, 4th, 6th, etc. lines) - left and right shifting a field
- pairing arbitrary fields
- showing a “raw” 60i telecined sequence
- showing the 60i sequence as a “deinterlaced” 24P sequence
my town, 1947 style!
Our amazing next door neighbor, Reenie Raschke, the super talented photographer has lovingly chronicled our town in a black-and-white pictorial called “My Town Montclair“.
We saw her present slides and background from her book last night at our local indie bookstore. She passed around this gem of an original 60+ year old newspaper showing our downtown as it was!
natively compiling ffmpeg, mplayer, mencoder on MacOS Lion (with x264!)
OK, I’ve revamped my script to compile these tools:
ffmpeg
ffrobe
qt-faststart
mplayer
mencoder
on MacOS Lion, using the heads of the trees, with direct encoding support for:
x264
vpx / WebM
http://archive.org/~tracey/downloads/macff.sh.txt
A nice recent update to ffmpeg is the ability to decode/read Apple ProRes, too!
camaro 0 to 60 test
2012 Camaro V6 Transformers Edition “Bumblebee”
Hunter and I had some fun out in the east east Bay and gorgeous farmland countryside seeing how my little ‘Bee can buzz!
Not super sophisticated Ms. Driver — but still lotsa fun and sorta exciting to poach a street for some two-camera iPhone pseudo-documentary…
Cute Scion IQ coming to states
Hunter and I hit the SF auto show before Thanksgiving.
Aside from the obvious super car perfections to like (eg: Ferrari 458 Italia) this was my favorite. I love little cutie-pie everything….
bitchn camaro
i um, got a new toy. it actually *is* the transformers special edition. so if i wake up early some morning and surprise it still in its crimefighting autobot mode…
domain change
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Double awesome art in financial district
I’ve loved this cute local art feature at my bart-to-bus stop
Captions are:
“I’m here to fix your car”
“But I don’t have a car!!”
and now it’s even more awesome with the tagged line over it
“Bankers took it”
Go #OccupyWallSt !
more books for Internet Archive!
My boss had the great idea for me to time-lapse record 48 hours of a book donation, cataloging, and moving event. It was held in one of the longest buildings at Fort Mason, San Francisco and wound up giving the Internet Archive over 125,000 *more books*!
drifting lotus elise on playstation
OK, this was harder than it looks to pull off, but after a lot of practicing, I finally got the hang of drifting corners with this car and managed to score big points on all four of the drifting zones.
silly fun in one of my favorite cars!
Return to Alma Mater
I returned to Cornell, my college home of five years, for the first time in just over 15 years!
Got to visit with my prof/mentor and he gave me a great tour of the update campus and the changes and new architecture/buildings.
We also got to take a nice long hike around the breathtaking gorge/park near my prof/mentor’s house:
Spending about two days on campus, a few things really struck me:
- After all this time, so much was the same and was so intimately familiar, like burned into my brain. So, walking around Collegetown, campus, the Engineering & Arts Quads, eating lunch at the Hotel School, reading The Cornell Daily Sun, etc. — all of that felt like I was back in school. The feeling was really eerie and totally unexpected!
- Distances, physical and mental, felt smaller — I thought it was 20 minutes to walk across campus, but everything’s a bunch closer than I remembered it.
- Everyone is on laptops & smartphones — and it’s campus-wide open wifi. I don’t know <b>how</b> kids pay attention in Electricity & Magnetism with a twitter feed rolling…
- Everyone is so young! Given the fact it was only ~3rd week into classes, many of them *were* just out of high school. The energy, optimism, and hustle was palpable and easy to feel/ride… Ah, youth!
- (Speaking of which) Although I hear weed is de rigueur in college now, I saw 0 evidence of it there (kinda relieving — esp. if you gonna pay that kinda $ to learn). Only clear-eyed, sharp, hustling kids did I see.
- The Engineering Quad has a brilliant new building, Duffield Hall, straddling the corners and joining two prior ho-hum old halls. So now students have an enormously large open enclosed light-filled space with tables, chairs, cafes, and wifi — perfect in-between classes and for informal meetups while FB strategizing your weekend party scene (or more likely study!) Yay, Geeks get some nice Goodies, too! I spent a lot of time here and even saw my second-favorite professor and other profs having a (presumably) informal lunch together.
bloviate
the most awesome word in the world — at least right now
bloviate
i wish i had that in a spelling bee!
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mole rolls to freedom
hunter and i were biking the other day parallel to the caldecott tunnel / 24, and were horrified to see a mole, midday, just rolling over and over again down the hill/pavement. we think maybe a huge rainstorm drove it out and it got lost trying to not drown on the road. they are **ALL HANDS**, no limbs! poor thing was made to dig/swim only, not walk/run.
after picking up the panicked little thing, we gently tossed it into dirt, but it looked just unhappy. intuition kicked in and seemed like the soil was too hard so found some damper stuff to move it to. presto! in seconds our little dirt scuba diver was self-buried in moist topsoil and happy. hunter points out “bird food…” but it’s a warm and furry mammal creature!!
natively compiling ffmpeg, x264, mplayer on mac (with builtin x264 and webm encoding)
i’m very pleased that after years of hacks here and there, all three heads of the current codebases pretty well build natively on mac (snow leopard) for
- x264
- ffmpeg
- mplayer
here, i’m making sure that i compile in static version of libvpx (Webm) and libx264 (h.264) video packages so that the ffmpeg can easily make hiqh quality h.246 and webm transcoded videos.
http://archive.org/~tracey/downloads/macff.sh
So we can make nice (2 pass video) ~768 kb/sec 640×480 derivatives like so (alter “-r ” as appropriate):
# make WebM
ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec webm -fpre libvpx-360p.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 1 -an tmp.webm
ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec webm -fpre libvpx-360p.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 2 -acodec libvorbis -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 44100 tmp.webm
mv tmp.webm 'camels.webm'
# make h.264
ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 1 -an tmp.mp4
ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 2 -acodec aac -strict experimental -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 44100 tmp.mp4
qt-faststart tmp.mp4 'camels.mp4'
our preset files:
http://archive.org/~tracey/downloads/libvpx-360p.ffpreset
http://archive.org/~tracey/downloads/libx264-IA.ffpreset
Nice things about the h.264 derivative:
- plays on all iphones and ipads
- browser video tag and/or flash plugin compatible
- starts immediately, seeks immediately even before entire video is downloaded
hope this may be useful!