Tag Archives: Gimp

Reusing vintage footage for Cool Cavemen’s concert intro

Featured

Posted on by
2

The goal of that project was to illustrate a pre-recorded soundtrack. The latter being to Cool Cavemen what The Ecstasy of Gold is to Metallica: a piece that is played before each show and serve as concert intro.

It’s an original mockup of a radio broadcast, and a tribute to Classic 21 (ex “Radio 21″), the (best) Belgian radio station we used to listen to as teenagers, and still do.

Footage used to produce this video is public domain material found at archive.org. If you’re curious, the detailed list of all sources is available in the credits, at the end of the video.

As for my previous project, I have to warn you that it may not look as funny as for French-speaking audience. That being said, here is the final result:

The challenge of this project was to have video of people speaking in sync with the audio. I suffered a lot trying to make it as convincing as possible. If the final result is far from perfect, I find it to be believable enough for the amount of time I invested in.

As for the tools used to produce this video, I edited it in November with a development version of Kdenlive, under an Ubuntu 11.10. As usual, here is a screenshot of my timeline for reference:

The project is using Kdenlive’s “NTSC 29.97 fps” profile, which produce a 720×486 pixels stream with a pixel aspect ratio of 8/9 and a display aspect ratio of 4/3. I choose this profile as it was the closest to the original videos I downloaded from archive.org.

I composed the credits and title card in Gimp, and tried to mimic the style of that period. This mean approximative composition and abuse of typography:

To enhance the effect, I blurred everything and separated the text blocks in several layers. I then applied to each of them some random movements to add a parallax effect, thus getting closer to the look and feel produced by the imprecise optical process used in the early days of movie making.

Nichrome Preview (and Behind the Scene) video

Featured

Posted on by
4

Two months ago (October 8th) I shot a video for Cool Cavemen. I haven’t talked about it on this blog yet, let’s fix this right now:

The song is Nichrome, which is a brand new song that will be available on Cool Cavemen’s upcoming album (to be released in 2012). This is the first time Nichrome is made public. The video is only a preview of the song: it only contains the first 2 minutes and the audio track is a demo, not the final studio version.

Demos are used not only for reference, but also for rehearsals when a band member is missing. That’s the case in this video: there is no bass player, but his parts are played in all musician’s headphones. Shooting the video in this playback setup is a huge advantage for me, as it removes all issues related to audio/video synchronizations and tempo deviations.

I shot with my Canon EOS 7D (1080p, 23.976 fps, 1/50s shutter speed) and a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 wide open. I used this lens over my 8mm f/3.5 Fish-Eye to save the distorting effects of the latter for others projects.

Shades of magenta were produced by 2 PAR-56 LED cans (controlled in DMX with QLC). I did not initially planned to bring them, but they were lying in the trunk of my car and I never filmed them, so I took the opportunity. Unfortunately, as you can see in the video, the frequency of the PWM that is driving the LEDs is not high enough and generate ugly flickers.

ISO was set to auto as the lighting conditions were really messy. A quick test in the darkest area of the room showed me that ISOs were pushed too high, increasing the noise too much. I avoided this issue by mounting an HDV-Z96 LED light with its CTO diffuser filter, and carefully set its light level (around 60%):

According EXIF data, ISO did not get over 2500 with this method, and was measured at 5000 in the darkest place. Average seems to be around 600. But take these numbers with a big grain of salt as I have no better sources than the .THM preview files generated by the camera for each .MOV clip.

Meta-data also tells me that the white balance was set to auto at 2900K but I remember having set it manually to keep consist images colors. Always according EXIF, color profile was set to standard.

Finally, I created the title cards in Gimp and edited the video in Kdenlive (on Kubuntu 11.04):

And two weeks after releasing Nichrome’s preview video, I edited another one with all left-overs. Here are the outtakes (which may not be as funny to you as for a French-speaking person, sorry):

Lotus Notes’ Rich Text to MIME conversion error

Posted on by
4

Today I encountered a strange error while using Lotus Notes. I had a “Cannot convert Notes Rich Text message to MIME message” error:

This was triggered when I tried to move certain mails from one account to another. And to add insult to injury, this nasty and dangerous error will make you loose data.

Let’s say you want to cut and paste a batch of 10 mails. Then that error occurs while Notes paste the 3rd message. It means you’ll loose the last 7 messages of your batch. Why ? The 10 messages will be removed from their original location on cutting, and the last 7 messages will be trapped in the copy buffer. Isn’t that a reasonable reason to hate Lotus Notes ?

Anyway. After several tests and experiments, I finally found the common property shared by all those reluctant messages. They all have inline images embedded in the body of the mail, like the one below:

In mail edit mode, you can get properties of these objects and get confirmation that they are inline images:

As you can see above, the edit mode lets you manipulate (cut, copy, paste, …) these embedded pictures. Let’s take advantage of this to fix our initial issue.

Here is my procedure to make these mails pass through the conversion error:

  1. In Notes’ edit mode, cut all inline pictures, one picture at a time;
  2. For each cutted picture, paste it as a new image in the image editor of your choice (Gimp did the trick for me);
  3. Save each image on your local disk;
  4. Now that all inline images are removed from the original mail, attach (but don’t paste) to it all the images you saved in the previous step;
  5. Finally, save mail modifications in Notes and you’ll be able to move the mail without the conversion error.

This is really dirty, and isn’t bearable past a few mails. But that’s the only solution I found so far. Of course if you have a superior/automated way to address this lame bug, I’ll be happy to hear that ! :)

How-to add a corner banner to a K2 WordPress theme’s style

Posted on by
2

In this post I will give you all the technical details to create a corner banner for the wordpress K2 theme. This solution is uninstrusive as it can be bundled with a K2 style without modifying the K2 core theme.

We will use the new hooks from the brand new K2 1.0RC6. So first, we have to create a functions.php file in our style directory (example: /wp-content/themes/k2/styles/my-style). Then add the following PHP code in it:

<?php

// Add HTML code required by our corner banner
function add_corner_banner() {
  ?>
  <a id="cornerbanner" href="http://coolcavemen.com/news/new-website-beta-released/" title="New website released as beta version !"></a>
  <?php
}

// Call add_corner_banner() method on each template_body_top hook
add_action(‘template_body_top’, ‘add_corner_banner’);

?>

This code tell K2 to replace the template_body_top hook define in all K2 pages, by the result of the add_corner_banner() PHP function. This function is coded to return the HTML code we need for the corner banner.

Then we need to add the following CSS code to our style (/wp-content/themes/k2/styles/my-style/my-style.css):

#cornerbanner {
  background: url("/wp-content/themes/k2/styles/my-style/corner-banner.png") no-repeat;
  display: block;
  height: 205px;
  width: 205px;
  position: absolute;
  top: 0;
  right: 0;
  z-index: 999;
  text-decoration: none;
}

This CSS code refer to the corner-banner.png which is a 205×205 px PNG image with an alpha channel to simulate shadows and fine transparency. Here is the Gimp xcf source file I used to generate it.

This CSS code is designed for a top right banner. If you need a top left banner, replace:

  right: 0;

by

  left: 0;

This also work for horizontal positioning:

  top: 0;

can be replaced by

  bottom: 0;

That’s all ! My solution is not supposed to work (and was not tested) with Internet Explorer as the latter is known to have terrible PNG transparency support. You can still apply fixes on my code using iepngfix, jquery or PNG8 images.

I’ve provided you with all the technical details to create a corner banner and add it to your K2 style seamlessly. It’s now up to you to adapt it to your needs. Be Creative ! Oh, and by the way, when you’ll change the banner PNG file, do not forget to update the CSS code with your image width and height.

Update: my friend QPX sent me an alternative banner made with photoshop: here is the ready-to-use PNG file and the photoshop source file.