Tag Archives: ubuntu

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.

How-to configure GRUB in (k)Ubuntu

Posted on by
Reply

Here is a little note to remind me how to customize GRUB the (k)Ubuntu way.

In fact the only important information I need to remember is the location of the file containing all GRUB options:

sudo vi /etc/default/grub

There I’ve lowered the GRUB_TIMEOUT option to 1 second to speed up the boot process (default was 10 seconds).

I also had some sound issues with the latest Karmic Koala’s kernel upgrade. So I’ve changed the GRUB_DEFAULT variable from 0 to 2. This tells GRUB to boot the third entry of the menu, which correspond to the kernel I was using before the bad upgrade. And be careful: you have to fix this index on each following kernel upgrade, because the given position is absolute and new kernels add their own entries at the top of the menu.

And finally, after all these changes, don’t forget to regenerate all the GRUB’s scripts with the following command:

sudo update-grub

dpkg, APT & Aptitude commands

Posted on by
4
  • List all installed packages:
    dpkg -l
  • List all recently installed packages:
    zcat -f /var/log/dpkg.log* | grep "\ install\ " | sort
  • Install a package from a lower-priority repository, like the backport repository:
    apt-get -t squeeze-backports install my-package
  • Force reinstallation of a package:
    apt-get -d --reinstall install my-package
dpkg --install --force-confmiss /var/cache/apt/archives/my-package.deb
  • Clean aptitude local cache:
    apt-get clean
  • Uninstall a package throughly (both program files and configuration):
    apt-get remove --purge my_package
  • Force removal of a package while ignoring all dependencies:
    dpkg --remove --force-depends libsomething
  • Remove orphaned pakages:
    deborphan | xargs apt-get -y remove --purge
  • Show the changelog of a package (here, the linux kernel of Ubuntu):
    aptitude changelog linux-generic
  • Which package contain a given file:
    apt-file search file_to_search
  • Get the list of files of a package:
    apt-file list package_name
  • Remove dpkg lock file:
    rm /var/lib/dpkg/lock
  • Hold a package with either dpkg or aptitude:
    echo "kdenlive hold" | dpkg --set-selections

    aptitude hold kdenlive
  • Unhold a package:
    echo "kdenlive install" | dpkg --set-selections

    aptitude unhold kdenlive
  • List holded packages:
    dpkg --get-selections | grep hold