Wayne D's Blog

The manager of the How to make a guitar pick from a credit card page at Mahalo.com decided that he would create a contest and offer a $10 prize for a video on how to make a guitar pick out of a credit card. I was hanging around the house and decided I would take a shot at it.

Here is the end result.

Making video is time consuming and hard work. I didn't have a tripod or any video lights at home so I rigged up a small set out of one of my dining room chairs. I decided that I'd shoot near the window to use the natural light to make up for the lack of proper lights. I usually shoot video downstairs which means I also had to hunt around and find the drivers and the capture software for my webcam and install it on the upstairs computer which was near the window. After the requires software was installed it took a bit of fiddling along with a piece of cardboard and some packaging tape to get the camera arranged and set up my backdrop. Here is a picture of my final set up.

I decided that I'd skip writing a script and move straight to recording. In my previous videos I've recorded straight through, doing multiple takes until I get one I like and not edit afterward. This means that I usually have to do 8-10 takes because of my verbal bobbles. These double as technical rehearsals and for this video I made it all the way through on the third try. When I played it back on the computer I recorded it on, disaster. The audio was about 2 seconds behind the video. I was using a windows machine so I downloaded avidemux a simple, cross platform video editing tool. I've never used Avidemux and after fiddling around with for a while I still wasn't happy with the results. I decided to bite the bullet, pull out the big guns and install Cinelerra. Cinelerra is a full featured non linear video editing tool for Linux. After I got Cinelerra installed I was unsuccessful getting it to import the video which was in wmv format. The version of Cinelerra that is available from the Centos repositories is not the latest version and I don't think it has all the latest import options. After fiddling around with it for too long, sometimes getting video and sometimes audio I finally came up with the proper incantation to pass to ffmpeg to get a file that Cinelerra was happy with. For anyone else who is having this problem here it is.

/usr/bin/ffmpeg -i pick_from_credit_card.wmv -f mpeg -s 640x480 -b 1200k -ar 44100 -qmax 2 pick_from_credit_card.mpg

After I successfully imported the video I begain climbing up the substantial learning curve for Cinelerra. I quickly realized that when played on my Linux machine there wasn't any mis-synchronization between the audio and the video but the video recording software had cut off the first couple of seconds of the recording. This made the fact that I had repeated "you need" a number of times when listing the required material list more obvious, at least to my ear. I had bobbled one statement near the end of the video. It was too late in the day to rerecord so I decided to fix the audio in Cinelerra. I quickly realized that inserting silence wasn't useful for masking the repetitive "You need"'s and had to learn how to copy the background noise instead.

Things I should have done to make the video better.

• Do a script, the time I spent on editing the sound would have been eliminated if I had written a script
• Shoot a second take, I could have used it to fix the place where my hands move out of frame.
• Watch the audio levels, they were cranked up too high and audio clips at some points probably because I was using the camera's built in microphone.
• Process the audio to remove the background noise.
• Use a tripod, it would have made setting things up so much easier.

When I heard Tyler Crowley from Mahalo.com speak earlier this year at Mesh 09 his point was that you can make good looking videos on the cheap. I think I've succeeded especially when compared to some of the other videos I've seen on Youtube.

Updated December 3rd 2009
Opera Mini Beta 2 was released yesterday and it fixes the irritating backspace bug deleting all the characters in a text entry box that was a problem on the Blackberry in beta 1.

Back at the end of December I wrote a post about Opera mini for the Blackberry. That was version 4.2 and though it addressed some of the problems with the built in Blackberry browser it still had some irritating features. One example, when filling in a text field on a web page it would switch away from the browser view to a text entry view. It was ok and better than the native Blackberry browser. Opera Mini 5 beta not only fixes that niggling issue but adds a whole pack of new features along with a slick new look and a more intuitive user interface.

Opera Mini 5 beta adds many of the features that we have grown used to on our desktop browser including tabbed browsing, navigation buttons, password management. The staring screen offers nine user selectable thumbnailed web pages that Opera refers to as speed dial which you can set to your favourite sites for easy and fast access. This newest version of Opera Mini also includes support for phones with with touch screens.

I've always recommended Blackberry owners install Opera mini, the addition of these new features and improved usability moves Opera mini 5 goes to the top of my must have apps to install on your Blackberry. I've made a short video highlighting some of the new features and embedded it below. Even though when I downloaded Opera Mini 5 beta opera warned me that it hadn't been tested on the Blackberry 8800. I haven't experienced any problems so far. One problem I have found is that when I enter text in a text entry box like the one at the top of the twitter.com page if you hit the delete key to correct an error all the characters in the text entry box are deleted one by one, very irritating, I hope Opera fixes it soon. (added Sept. 22nd)

To give Opera Mini 5 beta a try visit m.opera.com/next on your Blackberry or other smart phone to download it and give it a try. On the Blackberry it's a no risk proposition, the beta will install alongside your current Opera installation.

Freshbooks is a great solution for invoicing, If you need to invoice you should give Freshbooks a look. Freshbooks offers a 30 day money back guarantee, staged plans depending on the number of customers or a free account if your business is just starting out. Now onto the story.

I first met Rayanne from Freshbooks.com when I took a chance to Tweetup with Tara Hunt. As a result I ended up following Rayanne on Twitter which led to me reading a tweet from her about Freshbook's 5th birthday party in High Park. High Park is on the way from Interactive Sports offices in Vaughan to the Rogers Centre where the Argonauts and the Argonotes play so I have driven by it many times but never actually been to the park. The Freshbash afford me the excuse the visit High Park and take advantage of Freshbook's offer of some free food. The Argonotes connection becomes important because shortly ater I arrived I noticed Grace. At least I thought it was Grace, one of the flute player from the Argonotes, an enthusiastic football fan and as I am soon to discover a support rockstar at Freshbooks. She didn't appear to recognize me since I wasn't wearing a blue football jersey and carrying a saxophone. I think she was too shy to ask the old guy in the white shirt whether he hung out with a rag tag band like the Argonotes. I wasn't too shy and found that she was as surprised to see me as I was to see her.

What followed was a whirlwind of shaved ice, burgers,hot dogs, salads, a caricature artist, a monster 1.5 metre eggplant that was just there and a great cake, There were also bees hanging around everyone which necessitated shaking your pop can to make sure there wasn't a bee inside before drinking from it. There were tug of war, sack, three legged and wheelbarrow races and at the end of the night a gift bag with a snazzy Freshbooks T-shirt, a tube of Freshbubbles, a candy necklace, Popeye cand sticks and a Ring Pop that my youngest son wanted to appropriate when I brought it home.

Along the way i had to explain multiple times how I wasn't a Freshbooks customer but instead a hanger on who knew a couple of Freshbookers and had come to shmooze. The Freshbooks customers who were there were over the top in their enthusiastic support of Freshbooks and how it made invoicing simple and easy. Invoicing is a necessary evil for all businesses but when a business can use Freshbooks and take the time they would have spent on invoicing and either bill it or use it to grow their business it's not hard to understand why they love Freshbooks so much.

A few days later I wore my Freshbooks T-shirt into my local St. Loius Wings and Ribs, on the customers saw it and asked me whether I knew Mike McDerment, one of the Freshbook founders. I sheepishly admitted that though I had probably talked to him at the party I wasn't really sure. We chatted for a few minutes and he ended the conversation with a remark something like "They have created quite a unique culture there at Freshboks", I couldn't agree more, Freshbooks is smart, fun people with a great product.

Showing off Freshbooks swag on 12seconds.tv

I just saw an ad for Roger's internet where they tout the "fastest internet". My question for Roger's is, Why tout how fast your Internet is when they cap my traffic at 60 GB a month? I don't need fast because if I take advantage of it I'm sure to hit my cap. The only reason Rogers can offer the "fastest Internet" is because they set their transfer levels artificially low. They try to pretend that this is to protect their network from heavy users but the real reason is to protect their cable business.

This month I had to tell my kids not to use the internet because we were on track to busting through the cap about two weeks through the month. It wasn't because of bit torrent it was because my kids started to use the internet to watch streaming video. Watching streaming video threatens Rogers cable business so that last thing they want people to do is to get used to watching their video online. Why don't most sporting events stream live in Canada? TSN would rather you watch it on TV, Why no Hulu in Canada? The media companies want to maintain their cable revenues.

My plan is to ditch cable TV entirely and use the money I save, which is currently larger than my cable internet bill, to play for my families internet overages. I'll get over the air broadcasts for the network shows I want to watch and though I will miss some of the specialty channels they just aren't worth keeping cable for. To bad Rogers doesn't offer a la carte pricing. The days of ripping off consumers with overpriced bundles can't last forever.

(updated Aug. 24th with sample video and additions marked below)

Until WebcamStudio came along Linux webcam users could only look longingly at the neat effects available to Windows users with WebcamMax. Even if you don't have a webcam you can use the desktop capture functionality to help with how to videos. WebcamStudio for Linux can also play video and be used as a budget switcher either to make your own videos or stream to Ustream.com or another one of the online video services if you have the vloopback module installed in your system. The vloopback module is a handy tool and is included with the Webcamstudio release.

This program shows lots of potential but is still a work in progress. It's written in java and on my Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz machine it wasn't very responsive especially when I had the webcam and the screen capture active. The text overlays in version 0.43 which is what I downloaded and the previous which I also downloaded, wouldn't change size no matter which font or size I selected. The animation and faces files disappeared from the project website before I got around to downloading and trying them. Whenever I try to play a movie as an input I get a Gstreamer error. I suspect this is because Centos 5 doesn't run the latest and greatest version of Gstreamer. I was going to do a short demo video but the audio capture on my PC has crapped out yet again. I'm not sure if it's the old Soundblaster Audigy sound card I have installed or something that gets goofed up in the ALSA subsystem but occasionally the analog audio capture stops working and no amount of fiddling with mixer setting will get it going again. I tried doing a video with the mic on the webcam but it dropped out after only a few seconds of recording, generally when I started the webcam capture. I resolved this by switching to saving the video as a 320x240 avi instead of 640x480. The documentation that comes with is minimalist at best. Sound synchronization can be done using the pulse audio server which I haven't got running as of yet. That and the irritating tendency of ALSA to rearrange devices based on what's plugged in at boot time makes me want to pull what little hair I have left out. Linux audio can be very frustrating at times.

If I haven't scared you away I'd be interested in hearing your experiences with WebcamStudio for GNU/Linux. Go ahead, I dare you.