It’s also the first time I produce subtitles, since I found out about Subtitle Composer last week, which is a great and simple subtitling software for KDE. This software was so good that I basically added subtitles to all Cool Cavemen’s video on YouTube over the week-end. BTW, if you want to contribute to this effort and offer us translation of lyrics and subtitles, send me an email and I’ll help you.

I’ll try to produce detailed production notes in an upcoming article. So don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed of that blog to not miss it !

And finally, here are some stills from the video:

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.

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 !

Some days after shooting I sent my raw footages to the band, which decided to publish a preview of their song “Chicken Fighter” on YouTube. Here is the video:

They also released “Incoming” some days ago:

All of these were shots in 1080p at 23.976 fps with a shutter speed of 1/50. Lens was set to manual focus as usual, and stayed wide open at f/2.8, with optical stabilization (“VC” in Tamron’s jargon) on.

I think the white balance was set to tungsten. I don’t remember what was the ISO setting. Maybe set to automatic. I really don’t remember. Should have drink less. Either that or changing my video workflow. After all, keeping these .THM files is a good idea, as these contain the video metadatas that can’t be put in the .MOV files produced by Canon.

Finally, if the music is good, the sound is awful as it was captured without any special care, with the embedded camera microphone. Now I really have to invest money and time to upgrade my sound recording gear and skills. Canon EOS 7D‘s Automatic Gain Control (AGC) really starts to be limiting (pun intended)…

So here is my MIDI playground:

Nothing exceptionnal to see here. It’s just a bunch of dumb patches to control the color of the background screen and its intensity. The latter can be modulated by pulses with different profiles, and also by the sound captured by the MacBook‘s microphone. The source composition is downloadable.

Just for the sake of it, I’ve recorded a quick and dirty demo with my Canon 7D (set to 1080p, 25 fps and 1/50 shutter speed) and the fantastic Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8:

Here is the video, which I edited with Kdenlive:

The audio is sourced from Jamendo. It’s the track One Year written by Paolo Lunardi for his album Essential, and released under a Creative Common BY-SA v3.0 license (thus making my video subject to the same license).

First, make sure to use the latest stable Kdenlive stack for you system. For me, the Sunab’s alternative repository for Kubuntu 10.10 was the ultimate source:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kdenlive

The idea is to keep the version of Kdenlive installed above, and replace the pre-packaged MLT on our system with a custom development version of our choice.

But first, we’ll install all the libraries required to build MLT from sources:

sudo apt-get install libavdevice-dev libswscale-dev libvorbis-dev libsox-dev libsamplerate-dev frei0r-plugins-dev libdv-dev libavformat-dev libquicktime-dev libxml2-dev libsdl-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev

Let’s now remove the installed MLT. If we use apt-get or KPackageKit, this will remove Kdenlive. So we’ll use the following command to remove MLT while ignoring all the dependencies:

sudo dpkg --remove --force-depends libmlt2 libmlt++3 libmlt-data melt

At this point, and every time we try to use it, apt will complain of broken Kdenlive dependencies, and will try to remove it. This mean we can’t upgrade other packages on the system.

To avoid this issue, I tried to freeze the state in which Kdenlive and MLT are, by setting the hold flag on kdenlive, kdenlive-data, libmlt2, libmlt++3, libmlt-data and melt packages. I tried with both dpkg and aptitude, but unfortunately it doesn’t work as expected. So we’ll continue our hack anyway…

Let’s get MLT sources:

git clone git://mltframework.org/mlt.git

The command above will give you the latest development version. But if you target a particular revision (like commit 21a3f68 in my case), you have to use this additional command:

git checkout 21a3f68

We can now follow the procedure detailed in the Kdenlive manual:

cd mlt
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-gpl
make clean
make
sudo make install

That’s it ! Now you can launch Kdenlive, and if you run the wizard, you’ll see that the MLT version on your system is the latest:

Oh, and by the way, it fixed my problem with the crop filter !

Finally, if you want to revert the mess we created on the system, you have to remove the MLT we built in place:

sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/libmlt*
sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/mlt*
sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/pkgconfig/mlt*
sudo rm -rf /usr/include/mlt*
sudo rm -rf /usr/share/mlt*

I came with the list above by searching my system with the following command:

sudo find / -path "/home" -prune -or -iname "*mlt*" -print -or -iname "*melt*" -print

Then, we can let apt handle Kdenlive and MLT properly and get back to the pre-packaged binaries:

sudo apt-get remove kdenlive && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kdenlive

As you can see, it’s just my band‘s logo, subtly glowing (or breathing, as you wish). It’s a simple but effective animated stage backdrop. I haven’t used it in any of our concert, but next time a video projector is present on stage, I will !

As usual, here is the source composition, and a preview of the patch:

As for the last times, both Flame and Snow source compositions are available. Flame’s patch looks like this:

And here is Snow’s patch preview:

As usual, sources of this Sharp scan-lines composition are provided. And for information, its patch looks like this:

Again, you can download the Squared lava-lamp source, and here is preview of its patch:

Kaleidoscope #001 source is available, and its patch looks like this:

Again, here is Kaleidoscope #002 source, and a screenshot of its patch: