November 2007 Archive

Posted by ryanjackson on Nov 30, 2007 in archive |

***Click on link above to see all of November 2007***

November 30, 2007

See a video about Loft Concerts where people
invite around 30 people into their home for a concert.

http://video.canada.com/VideoContent.aspx?35580&vc=1&popup=1

November 28, 2007

See a video of Ted Wright with his Van Herk guitar
amplifiers. Wright makes the amps from various junk and
calls them “Art that you can play”.

Van Herk Amplifiers

(20MBs. Wait to load.)

November 16, 2007

I setup a still camera in the catwalk of Rexall Place on Sunday
during the rodeo and had it automatically take a photo every
15-seconds for 80-hours.

The Result? A time lapse video that shows the rodeo cleanup and
hockey rink setup for the Edmonton Oil Kings.

Timelapse: Rodeo to Hockey from Ryan Jackson on Vimeo.

To make this video I mounted an old Canon 1D camera with a
Zenitar 16mm fisheye lens in the catwalk. I triggered the camera
with a
Pocketwizard MultiMax which is normally used for flashes or
remote cameras but has an interesting intervolometer feature.

I set the Pocketwizard to trigger the camera every 15-seconds.
Even with the JPEG size set to small, I still had to run back to
Rexall Place every 11-hours to swap memory cards as a 2GB CF card
would only hold about 2,500 photos.

The trick to making time lapse videos this way is to set your
camera in manual mode and meter for whatever your brightest exposure
will be. (i.e. when all the lights are on) If the ambient light gets
darker, your image will simply get darker too.

In the end I had over 15,000 images to deal with. I wrote a
Photoshop action to batch resize all the images to 400px wide (the
size of the video), then imported them all into Final Cut Pro. I set
the default image length to be 1-frame.

Each frame represents 15-seconds of real time so when the video
plays at 30-frames-per-second you are watching time pass at
450-times normal speed.

To keep the video around 5-minutes I had to cut out some boring
parts like when the ice was freezing or the lights were out.

The video really makes you appreciate the hard working staff at
Rexall Place for making the place a clean and enjoyable place to
watch hockey.

November 9, 2007