vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Tinkering

While I am actually on research leave today finds me in the new office. Yes, it is quieter here than at home, but the reason is that I’m getting a new hard drive put into the laptop today (500MB) as the existing drive is chockers, as a consequence slow, I suspect a bit unstable, and I just can’t do any video work since there’s no room to actually grab and compress what I need to be working on. Now that is a short job, but I haven’t done a back up using Time Machine for nearly a month so need to get that done first. Except Time Machine seemed to be caught in the eternal “preparing…” loop of hell, which usually means the last backup was interrupted so it is rebuilding all its tables. This can take hours. So in lieu of that I found a spare 1Gb drive, reformatted that and am doing a new backup of 180Gb of data to that, if only because I now have a progress bar of actual data being backed up so have some idea of how long it will take (a long time). So, instead of a quick drop off, pick up and restore, it’s going to be all day. That’s OK. I’ve started a complete rebuild of the vog site, as well as my online publication. The vog I’ve been remaking using Tinderbox, the archive of published work etc using Stacey. This takes a lot of time, but since all I”m really doing right now is watching a progress bar it’s a good opportunity to do some more on each. I like the idea of Stacey, it is very easy to use, doesn’t need a database to host it, and will be very easy to customise. Tinderbox requires a bit more time, but once you get it doing what you want it’s real easy to use, publish, export, and just maintain.

Now, my rationale for rebuilding the vog is pretty simple. First of all my online video work is spread across at least three sites, with duplication, mess, and frankly no ability to see the whole lot as a body of work. As someone who, in their middle age, is realising that my reputation is going to rely more on more on my video work, this is not a good thing. Now, I did buy a video specific theme and start to add material to a WordPress installation, but a) the theme is just too unattractive, and b) I still remain subject to other systems just a bit too much. When WordPress is upgraded, when plugins no longer work, or whatever, things just break (and not to mention just how clunky it is to add material). So Tinderbox lets me have it all on my laptop, can run it here, test, check, prototype and then just publish online. The format is XML, and I can work easily and quickly without being online, or without worrying that Dreamhost has burped. I can also easily design pages using plain vanilla HTML and CSS, and it will be trivial to use HTML 5 when I want to.

However, as I was busy tinkering with Stacey I saw there was an update. So install that, all is good, but ah ha! It now supports video. This is seriously impressive and useful and makes it a stunning simple tool for anyone that wants a video portfolio site. Of course I immediately went, hey, why don’t I use Stacey for my vog and not use Tinderbox. Yeah, that’s a few days work gone, but there’s a certain elegance to how it works and it’s real easy to add new material. So that moment, you know exactly what it is. A simultaneous pit of your stomach dread and anxiety of “oh, this would be better but what about all the cursor sweat so far?” and excitement of “hey, cool, a new system to play and tinker with and you know it probably will be better in the long run”. I sat with this for a bit, then backed off and remembered that one reason I’ve gone with Tinderbox for the vog is that I don’t want to get mucked around if code changes somewhere else. I might use Stacey for other things with video, but for the vog it is Tinderbox. I have control over the content, and I can also very easily do things (like add related videos, or videos from a year ago) that I just can’t in Stacey. So I’ll keep trying to finish my portfolio site in Stacey (writings and projects), and get more of the video into the new vog and get it online, even before all the material has been moved.

That’s pretty much been my first 4 hours today.

Bookmarks for November 25th through November 28th

These are my links for November 25th through November 28th:

• Student Organisation of Personal Data Stuff – Not quite the title but a paper about the strategies students use for personal info. management on servers provided by their universities.
• On Understanding the Relationship Between Recollection and Refinding – Published paper on the distinction between recollection and refinding. This is in a journal that publishes a lot of hypertext related comp. sci so assume it falls in that sort of domain. Looks at research and makes suggestions for new directions and tools.
• Designing Info Managemetn for Creative Practitioners – Published paper, from the abstract "This paper first explores information management by creative practitioners through a review of research related to the area. Two studies are then used to explore this area from different viewpoints." Looks interesting
• fragments for a vog – My own project using the Korsakow system to build a vog like work.
• rmnd» Blog Archive » My first K-film – Raymond, from the reasonably early days of the videoblogging list (Norwegian) with a good post about k-films and his first effort.
• skynoise » Nov Eyeball Snippets – Sean Healy with an updated list of VJ software with discussion. Comprehensive and detailed.

Bookmarks for November 19th through November 23rd

These are my links for November 19th through November 23rd:

• The Whale Hunt / A storytelling experiment / by Jonathan Harris – A flash interface that relies on photos taken during a whale hunt. Lots of interesting ideas in terms of presentation, interface and story structure versus experience. Sort of bit like stretch film in photos with extras…
• Video editing with open source tools | Digital Artists’ Handbook – Discussion and list of open source video editing and VJ tools, strong linux line up.
• I am Eleven - – What they are still calling a web documentary, though I guess unlike the earlier days they at least now have quite a bit of video invovled, this is a web site about kids that are 11. I don't get why it is called more than this, but there you go.
• 4.8.7 The video element — HTML5 – Detailed information about the video element in HTML5.
• Faculty Profile: Matt Soar – Reseacher come academic come practitioner at Concordia. Invovled in the renewal of the Korsakow project. Lots of very interesting things.

Fragments Progress

So, been experimenting with fragments. Have added some more material, removed the text over the preview images (much better), and tried different compression options within Korsakow. At the moment I’m using the highest quality H.264 compression, but quite a few people have video that stutters (though it doesn’t happen for me, which is odd since the server is in the States), so have tried lower bit rates. The flv settings all generate horrible video. Even the highest setting, which produces larger files than the best H.264, is not nearly as sharp as H.264, while the next quality down has some clips where the pixellation is closer to the more experimental low res video that I do. I think the next steps in experimenting will be to move the preview windows around. At the moment they get populated sequentially, the first n, then the next n, and so on. But this is just a bit too much. I think if I moved them so that 3 got populated, but not in a row, then more, again not in a row, that things would look better. The only downside which might be a real breaker is that I can’t change the layout for each request, so whatever the pattern is it will be the same for every screen. It might just end up looking silly. I’ve also started adding duration information for the clips, though I’m not happy with how it appears, and have also started trying to limit the number of previews displayed for each keyword search, so that if a keyword has 20 matches it does not fill all the preview windows below the main video panel but will only fill, say 4, so that other keyword searches can populate the rest of the previews. This helps keep access to the library quite open and leaves room for the novel (and means you generally don’t get 10 preview images of just children).

Bookmarks for November 19th from 12:03 to 12:05

These are my links for November 19th from 12:03 to 12:05:

• Internet as Playground and Factory :: Intro – Trebor's big conference on Web 2 and labour. Been a lot of blog posts documenting it, twitter, etc. Probably a landmark conference for theorising labour and Web 2/social web.
• YouTube – melhack – Pingo – Informal presentation from melhack about iPhone app that combines affect with place.
• litl :: software – This is a seriously cool laptop and OS. If I had my research budget left would get one in a flash.
• Xtranormal | Text-to-Movie – PC only software, not certain but I think it has animation style templates (eg 2 actors) in specifc settings that you then use to make a movie with. I'm assuming you get to produce narrative text, and there's some sort of clip library for each template. Sort of lego movies.
• THE MATERIAL POEM : non-generic productions – PDF and book of material writing from Australian stalwarts.

Working Method

For those who may be interested in how I go about adding and making content for fragments. After I built the first version it is easy to keep adding new content. In this way I’m not treating the Korsakow System as a tool for making a single whole work, but more like a blog project where material is continually being added. To do this I do the usual shooting and editing, compress it down to a pretty high quality h.264 QT file, make a thumbnail graphic, and then add the thumbnail and the video to the Korsakow project. Add keywords to define the clip, keywords that the clip should search for, write any text I want associated with the clip, save the project and export. Korsakow is pretty smart when it comes to export so you have the option of only having to encode/transcode new material, so by choosing this it only transcode the new added video. Then I can use a FTP client that has synchronisation to just sync the local copy of the files to the server, and since it is sycning it only uploads the new material. This makes things pretty fast, and so it is viable to use for ongoing projects.

Fragments From a Vog

Fragments is my first proper sketch using the Korsakow System. It contains twenty six short sequences, and I’ve designed the interface to show ten links at a time. The relations between shots are all defined by keywords (13 of them), which is a lot of keywords but I’m intending to develop this as a structure that I can keep adding content to, so that it is less than a closed Korsakow film (what is now being called a K-film) than a structure I can use to keep adding material to. This particular iteration I think I will move, and just keep, as it is likely I’ll use this tool for teaching in 2010 and this early version will be useful for teaching purposes.

There is a main clip that plays, and then while it plays a keyword search is performed which finds matching clips. The preview images for these matching clips are shown below the main clip. When you click on one of these this becomes the main clip, and it in turn then provides matching preview images below.

Now, for this project all clips have been defined to have 2 lives, which means they can be played twice then after that they cannot appear in any search results (the images that appear under the main window are the result of keyword searches). This means you don’t get too stuck in the same content continually reappearing, but it also means you can return to something – not necessarily because it interests you but because the second time you go there you can then choose to go somewhere else again. This is an incredibly important point that very few people seem to grok it, and is why efforts a choose your own adventure structures miss the point. In multilinear narratives if I can never return to the same fragment, in other words if every episode I come to is new, then how would I ever know a) that my choices actually matter, and b) what the pattern/s is/are? Hence by having each clip with 2 lives there is a chance to return, to start to see the contours of connection, but also it means the work diminishes as you watch since simply viewing clips twice means they disappear from the work.

In addition, each clip has several keywords that it searches for. These do not all happen at the same time. The first keyword is searched for, and then at 2 seconds the next, and any subsequent terms are searched at 6, 8 and 10 seconds (and so on). This means as the clip plays material appears below, not all at once, but quickly enough that you have a pretty good idea, pretty quickly, of what else there is.

I have applied some simple text to each of the preview images and also to the clips. They’re deliberately vague, poetic, suggestive and evocative. For me. It’s a personal work, hook into it as you can since I figure if you begin to do it well then some bits begin to work. I guess I think of it as like song lyrics. Technically it is white text and for quite a few of the overlays over the preview images you can’t read them because the images are too light. I did try a few options but they all looked pretty bad so for now this will have to do, though I might just drop them in a future version since they aren’t actually doing a whole lot.

In Korsakow you can nominate a clip to be the first, you can even nominate several and it will choose one, but for this project what it opens with is randomly selected from the clip library. There’s no specific logic behind this beyond that there isn’t any clip that needs or should be seen before any other.

Now, things I haven’t decided upon yet. Metadata for each shot. Do I make it more blog like and include a specific date? Since there is no playhead progress bar with the videos should I also include duration, even perhaps file size? (Personally I do find it frustrating when you don’t know how long a sequence will run for, so I will probably add duration.)

Korsakow System

Have returned to playing around in Florian’s database film engine, aka Korsakow System. It has been completely rebuilt (in Java as far as I know) so was quite a shock when I launched it. However the interface, once over the initial surprise, is actually easier to use and understand than the earlier iterations of the project. So, I’ve put in a few videos, some thumbnails and started making connections. What I’m looking to do is to find a system that lets me easily do something with all the little bits of video I have. Video is now a snapshot medium. Free to make and nearly free to distribute, and so we all have lots of it. But while we have sites like 12second.tv, and flickr’s support for video, we don’t really have a good way take all these little bits and do something more interesting than galleries and ‘sets’ with them. So I’m interested in seeing if I can use the Korsakow System as a way to publish these fragments, but also connect them in associative, non linear ways, as I would in a decent hypertext system.

So, I’ve added clips. Each clip will have the year as a key tag (these tags are the text strings that you define for clips, the system lets you say what tags are attached to a clip, and then conducts searches for specified text strings) and a couple of other key words. Then each clip searches for at least one associated key word, and then at 1, 2, and 3 seconds it will also search for clips from the previous year, this year, and next year. I had originally only searched on year, but it was quickly apparent that some of the connections made were too disjunctive, so I’m hoping in this way things will be more poetic. Having had a quick run through of this the issue is that you get caught up a bit too easily into the one thematic group, so I need to do a bit of tweaking there, perhaps adding a random link for the third link.

One problem I’ve found is it looks like I need to maintain a media library of all that I put into the engine locally. I built the first iteration, exported to the web, deleted the thumbnails I’d created only to then find I can’t export because it can’t locate the media. So I rebuilt the prototype from scratch, putting media in appropriate places first. The workflow is pretty easy, compress and edit (or edit and compress), get a thumbnail, add both to the system, tag, export. The only issue is that media assets are shown in a single scrolling view so if I use this for all the material there will be hundreds, so I will need a naming convention to be able to find things, and also I expect I might run into some problems if I end up with thousands of clips in there. Or I’ll just go crazy trying to find them. UPDATE: you can have folders in the the media window, that is very very good.

So, rebuilt, and this time themed things a bit more strongly, but also providing links between some clouds by including antonyms. So for example if there is a tag for country and a tag city, then for a country clip I include the possibility of searching for city, and vice versa.

Backups

Thought I’d try out some of the online backup services out there. They backup for you, offer decent recovery options, and are cheap. For example CrashPlan will let me back up all the family’s computers for USD100 a year. Backblaze seemed to integrate nicely into the System Preferences and of course there’s dropbox (which sent out a promo email recently promising more services real soon). So, trialled a couple over a couple of hours to get an idea, until I realised that with 100+Gb to backup any traffic back out of my ISP account is billed, and with 20Gb a month, well, it just is not doable. Given that most of the world actually pays for capped bandwidth (outside of the US) presumably these businesses really only work within the US. Or have I got this wrong?

Small Experiment

I think I’m about to do a little prototype in tumblr for a research project. It is a large project with sub projects, but what we need is a simple way to document the project. Now we could go off and build something in drupal or WordPress or some other CMS but this often involves quite a lot of overhead in terms of development and so on. We need something lightweight, simple to use and quick.

So I got to thinking about using Tumblr. But the experimental part is via RSS. Some of the project members already have blogs, flickr accounts and the like. So rather than build yet another place where you have to log in and add content, I thought what if we just let people put stuff where ever and through RSS and a specific tag just aggregate it via Tumblr? So any photos that go onto Flickr, or blog posts, etc, can just be pulled in. Now, the next step is a) do we just nominate a tag that no one else is likely to use and I just subscribe to that tag in a small number of services (eg delicious, flickr, blip), or will I need to do something else? For the simpler plan to work I’ll need people to tag blog posts (for example) via delicious, but that isn’t really a big deal, is it?