All the video material was shot by Tomasito itself, with his Canon PowerShot SX200IS point-and-shoot camera. This camera produce 30fps 720p clips.

He came to me with all these .mov files, and the idea of combining them into a classical split-screen layout. He had no idea how to do this, so I accepted to help him with my technical knowledge.

I fired up my Kdenlive (v0.8 on Kubuntu 11.04) and in a matter of hours, the project was done. With source videos of 720p, I naturally chose 1080p as the final resolution. I kept the 30fps framerate to not alter the original time resolution.

The most boring part of the edit was the first step, in which we synced all clips together with the reference audio track. Here is how the timeline looked, with one track for each instrument:

We had to work around some annoying Kdenlive bugs, as it had some problems handling so much tracks in parallel. Fortunately these bugs were fixed in a matter of days with a new build of MLT.

Next step was to mark out the structure of the song. Tomasito placed blue markers along the timeline, and we cut all tracks following that structure. It resulted in a matrix of clips:

Then for each segment, we choose the 4 clips that we wanted to show and deleted the others:

Then I created 4 special tracks to which I applied a global positioning and scaling effect, to have each track fill one corner of the screen. We moved there all the clips we selected in the previous step, and cleaned up the timeline a bit:

At this stage the project was mostly done. It was just a matter of adding intro, outro and fade in/out to obtain our final video:

Tomasito basically did the whole editing of the project. And I have some evidences:

I just showed him how to manipulate Kdenlive timelines, and cut/move/paste clips, and he was absolutely autonomous in a matter of minutes. I just did the transitions, the title cards integration and the screen splitting. I’m not sure I deserve the title of editor for this project, but he still insisted to add me in the credits…

Of course split-screen is far from new and was done a million times before. But it’s a simple yet effective concept that require absolutely no investment (apart time). This also gave me the opportunity to play again with Kdenlive and assess its user-friendliness and edit capabilities on a real project. But at the end, it was just a great excuse to work with a friend on a little video project !

This video was taken during the biggest Cool Cavemen’s concert in 2009. We were playing at Gayant Expo (“largest french venue in the north of Paris” as they said in their commercial leaflets…). It was April 17th, during Cartel des Mines, a student festival organized by a group of engineering schools.

As the whole concert was filmed, I plan to release a new song every one or two weeks. I can’t promise a regular release cycle as I edit videos along the way. And of course, it also depends on my available free time…

By the way, this post also mark the opening of a section dedicated to my video projects. Currently it’s quite empty and brief, but I hope to populate it with more substantial stuff soon…

This was also an opportunity for me to rebuild old packages (Interreta Televidilo, Rugg and python-icalendar) for Mandriva 2008.0. For now there is no x86_64 version of the packages (including Amarok). I plan to do it later.

Update: Amarok was recompiled to include latest libgpod version (0.6.0).

Packages are downloadable from my RPM repository for i586 and x86_64 architecture and both build support SQLite, MySQL and Postgresql as database backend.

<?php

function renderTracks() {
  # Track list
  $track_list = array(
      "Track 1" => "cd-track-1"
    , "Track 2" => "cd-track-2"
    , "Track 3" => "cd-track-3"
    , "Track 4" => "cd-track-4"
    , "Track 5" => "cd-track-5"
    );
  # All variation of each track
  $track_format = array(
      ".mp3"  => "Mp3"
    , ".ogg"  => "Ogg/Vorbis"
    , ".flac" => "Flac"
    );
  # This is the list of all tracks which are always visible.
  $always_visible = array(1, 4);
  # Date and time when the "always_visible" tracks will be displayed.
  $start_date = mktime(18, 0, 0, 12, 1, 2006);
  # Delay between each track publication. Look at strtotime() manual for details.
  $delay = "+1 week";

  $today = mktime();
  $months = array(
       1 => "Janvier"
    ,  2 => "Février"
    ,  3 => "Mars"
    ,  4 => "Avril"
    ,  5 => "Mai"
    ,  6 => "Juin"
    ,  7 => "Juillet"
    ,  8 => "Août"
    ,  9 => "Septembre"
    , 10 => "Octobre"
    , 11 => "Novembre"
    , 12 => "Décembre"
  );

  # Compute publishing date of each track
  $track_dates = array();
  $track_number = 0;
  $track_publish_queue_order = 0;
  $previous_queue_date = $start_date;
  $new_start_date = $start_date;
  foreach($track_list as $track_title => $track_file) {
    $track_number++;
    # Is the track always published ?
    if (in_array($track_number, $always_visible)) {
      # Set publishing date to the start date
      $track_dates[$track_number] = $start_date;
    } else {
      # Compute the publishing date of the track
      $track_publish_queue_order++;
      $new_publishing_date = strtotime($delay, $previous_queue_date);
      $track_dates[$track_number] = $new_publishing_date;
      $previous_queue_date = $new_publishing_date;
    }
    # Update the start date of the period when a track is considered "new"
    if (($new_start_date <= $track_dates[$track_number]) and
        ($track_dates[$track_number] <= $today)) {
      $new_start_date = $track_dates[$track_number];
    }
  }
  # The end of the "new" track period is always today
  $new_stop_date = $today;

  # HTML rendering of each track
  $track_number     = 0;
  $html_published   = "<table>";
  $html_unpublished = $html_published;
  foreach($track_list as $track_title => $track_file) {
    $track_number++;
    $new          = False;
    $published    = False;
    $track_date   = $track_dates[$track_number];
    $track_html   = '';
    $publish_date = '';
    # Is the track published ?
    if ($track_dates[$track_number] < $today) {
      $published = True;
    }
    # Is the track new ?
    if (($new_start_date <= $track_date) and
        ($track_date <= $new_stop_date)) {
      $new = True;
    }
    if ($new) {
      $track_html .= '<tr><td><b>NEW!</b> </td><td>';
    } else {
      $track_html .= '<tr><td></td><td>';
    }
    # Create a direct download link for each track format
    if ($published) {
      foreach($track_format as $format_ext => $format_name) {
        $track_html .= sprintf( '<a href="http://coolcavemen.com/%s%s">'
                              , $track_file
                              , $format_ext
                              );
        $track_html .= sprintf('%s</a> ', $format_name);
      }
    }
    if (! $published) $track_html .= '<span class="disabled">';
    $track_html .= '&mdash; ';
    # Show track as non-available, and print its release date
    if (! $published)
      $track_html .= sprintf( '<b>%s %s, %sh &raquo;</b> '
                            , date("j", $track_date)
                            , $months[(int) date("n", $track_date)]
                            , date("H", $track_date)
                            );
    $track_html .= sprintf('%s<br/>', $track_title);
    if (! $published) $track_html .= '</span>';
    $track_html .= '</td></tr>';
    if ($published) {
      $html_published .= $track_html;
    } else {
      $html_unpublished .= $track_html;
    }
  }
  return $html_published.'</table><hr/>'.$html_unpublished.'</table>';
}

?>

Of course this code doesn’t prevent someone to download the track if this person knows the exact URL. But having a bullet-proof system was not my priority: I had, at that time, to do something the quick and dirty way. So I give you this code as is it, without further explanations. This code is easy enough to let any rookie understand how it work.

Here is the final result, from the user point of view (and with additional aesthetic enhancements):

PS: If the code above contain formating errors (like bad html entities encoding, etc…), please look at the file which contain the original code or its colored html version.

This build, named amarok-1.4.4-3, is exactly the same as previous one (i.e. with SQLite, MySQL and Postgresql support). Don’t forget to update the libtunepimp package from my repository and use the 5.0 version.

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, SVG files are available in my document repository.

I’ve noticed that MusicBrainz features are broken in the default Amarok 1.4.3 which come with Mandriva 2007. Unfortunately, those features are still broken in this release. Sorry.

Jewel Cases are made of a part which hold the CD itself. This part is usually black and opaque and it remain visible on the left of the front side when the CD case is closed.

Sometimes this black strip is made of transparent polystyrene, which let you see the reverse of the back cover. You can use this to make some easthetic design. So I’ve created some templates in Inkscape, because all templates I found on the web didn’t taken care of that transparent strip.

You can download those templates as SVG files under the Creative Commons Attribution licence. Here is the direct link to the SVG versions of the templates. Below are PNG versions for convenience :

As requested by some peoples in my previous release, the MySQL support was missing. I’ve just added it for this 1.4.3 version. Please leave a comment to let me know if it work (or not), because I don’t use this feature myself.

As usual, take a look at previous release post and comments about Amarok if you experienced problems. There you will be able to get some tips.