Blodget’s Blog

How to find the hexadecimal numbers of a color using GIMP (the free image editing software). You can see the original file on Blip.tv.

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You can embed a nice show player from Blip.tv. Below is a sample.

I like the quality of the full screen mode. You can see the movie on Blip.tv to see how it differs from the embedded version. The embedded version uses the Quicktime .mov file. The one on Blip.tv uses a Flash file.

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This is a short recording made with the new free video streaming service ustream.tv. You can serve up live video or you can record a clip and embed it on a page as I did here.

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Today I experimented with getting a Flash FLV movie playlist to work. My brother, Bob, gave me access to his excellent dulcimer tutorial Quicktime movies. I converted four of his movies to FLV and created a test page which uses a XML playlist and Javascript to display and control all the movies. I like the way that you can do all this on a single page. In the Quicktime version you have to have a page for each movie. You can start and stop clips, jump forward and back between clips, and even jump to points within a clip (think chapter stops). This is a very powerful set of features for combining movies.

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This is way cool. DreamHost.com (my hosting service) now offers a free way to convert Quicktime and other video file formats to FLV. They also offer a way to easily embed the video in a blog posting like this one. Here’s a sample.

Read Michael D. Pollock’s excellent article to learn more about how to add a FLV to your WordPress blog.

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I discovered Google Sketchup about a week ago and I had a little time this weekend to learn how to use it. I wanted to make a copy stand with two photoflood lights, a camera on a tripod, and an easel with a drawing on it. I imported some basic models, but I couldn’t find a photoflood light so I made one by cutting a sphere in half and tacking on a cylander in the back and placing a lightbulb in the center. I thought it would be neat to do a fly-by animation. The free version of Sketchup does not have an animation feature. So, I placed the model in Google Earth and used SnapZ Pro to do a screen capture as I manually zoomed in and out. I edited the movie in iMovie and converted it to Flash with the Flash Video encoder.

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Today I made a how-to video about using a Flickr photo in a blog post. This is really the easiest way to add a photo to a message. This type of movie is called a screencast because you capture what you do on your computer’s screen. I used SnapZ Pro to capture a movie of what I was doing in Flickr on my MacBook. I also used Omni Dazzle to circle things on the screen as I made the recording. I recorded my voice using the MacBook’s built-in microphone. I saved the movie using the Animation codec at 15 fps. I then Imported the movie to iMovie and added a title and closing credit and some sound effects and transitions. I exported the movie as an avi file and then converted the avi to flv using ffmpegX. I then uploaded everything to my blodget.net server and used the Wimpy WASP player to show the flv file on a web page. The final flv movie is about 4 minutes long and is about 8.3 Mb. See Flickr Photos in Your Blog.

A very special thank you to Don McAllister and his wonderful Screencastsonline.com website for information on how to produce a screencast including links to all the tools he uses. Be sure to see his Behind the Scenes screencast.

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This is a recording of a 3-way video conversation. It was recorded live in iChat AV on a MacBook using the latest version of SnapZ Pro which now works on Intel Macs. The program lets you record any audio that plays on your Mac (so called Mac Audio) as well as audio from the built-in mic or the audio input. I chose to record both the Mac Audio and the built-in mic. Bob and Dad are on Macs running OS 10.4.7 and the latest iChat AV and we are all on broadband cable connections. I saved the video using Sorenson 3 for video compression and I chose 22 kHz, with no compression for the audio. This original file was about 8 Mb. I uploaded it to Vimeo.com to convert it to a Flash movie and discovered that my voice, which was recorded with the built-in microphone did not play back in the Flash movie. I guess Flash does not support 2 tracks of audio like QuickTime does. So I used QuickTime Pro to export each track as an AIFF file and used Audacity to combine the two into a single mono track. I then used Quicktime Pro to delete the two existing audio tracks in a copy of the original movie and then pasted in the mono track. I saved this version using H.264 video compression at 12 frames per second and Linear PCM 22 kHz mono audio compression. This brought the file size down to 3.9 Mb instead of 8 and when I uploaded it to Vimeo.com, the audio played fine in the Flash movie. The final Flash movie file is 2 Mb and is about 1 minute long. I downloaded the Flash file to my computer and uploaded it to the Blodget.net server on DreamHost.com. I am again using the iFrame tag to embed the Flash player in this blog post.

Update: I also uploaded a QuickTime version so you can see it at the original size (481 x 298 pixels instead of 320 x 240). This file is 4.5 Mb Sorenson 3 video at 15 frames per second, using Linear PCM 22 kHz audio compression.

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