Category Archives: Media

Parent Category to TV, Movies, Print

Caustic & Null Device at the Wisconsin Union – July 6, 2011

Caustic and Null Device playing at the Wisconsin Union on the UW Campus in Madison, WI on July 6th, 2011. It was a free show on an open air stage right on lake Mendota.

Caustic – 666 On The Crucifix
Null Device – Triangular

I shot and edited this as practice to learn and get better at DSLR Video. I hope future ones are even better now that I have some direct experience.

View YouTube in H.264 with an Easy Bookmarklet

Rather recently people have figured out some ways to make YouTube display H.246 video on the site. That method is to add “&fmt=18” to the end of the URL. That works well, but wouldn’t it be better if it could be done with a simple click? For all those who don’t use addons like Greasemonkey or the like, a bookmarklet would be ideal.

Drag the following link up to your bookmarks bar:

YouTube H.264

Click on it when ever you are on a YouTube video page and want some H.264 goodness. Thanks go to Beermatt # for the code.

Update 4.18.08: Wow, the code in the script got eaten by my post, it is now fixed and does actually work.

A List of Cool Media I am Currently Consuming

Here is a list of some media I am regularly looking forward to consuming currently. I can’t stress enough how cool Skins is.

TV

Podcasts

Some Sort of Pun with the Word ‘Steady’

I made a steady cam rig thing! And it seems to work well! I was finding a lot of my footage from the shooting of the behind the scenes stuff of other people’s projects has been really wobbly and shaky. So I decided to try and make a steady cam rig like the one I had read about online a while back. The insurrections I used are by Johnny Lee. He says it costs $14, and mine cost around $12, so it really is rather cheap to make.

I had my brother drill the holes since he was around, and is a bit more handy than me. I used Plastic pipe where I could, but had to use a steel tee connector in the middle. Using plastic caps made it easier to drill into, and lighter. Along with being light, it is also cleaner. Steel pipes have oil all over them to help keep them from rusting.

I plan on using this all weekend as we finish up the filming of everyones movies.

Link: $14 Steadycam The Poor Mans Steadicam

Mole Money, Mole Problems.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv1OYcPPDnc

This video here was an idea I had while listening to this song from the Best of Bootie 2006 mix cd on the way home from school. It is a collection of some of the best mash-ups of that year. The song in question is: ‘The Money Song (Hard-Fi vs. Red Hot Chili Peppers vs. Flying Lizards vs. Abba vs. Jay-Z)’ by team9.

At one point, mis-heard lyrics jumped into my head, and I could not get them out. And then the idea of illustrating these lyrics to make an amusing video followed. So, after about 8 hours of work, some of it late in the night. I present Mole Money, Mole problems.

Special thanks goes to Tony for help with the whore. She would look more like a ‘dirty old grandma’ without him.

How to Get a YouTube video onto Your Verizon Phone

Today in class I figured out how to Get a YouTube video on a Verizon Cell Phone for Sam. I thought I would create a little tutorial for him, and others and place it on my site. So here it is.

Requirements for this specific tutorial:

Part one
Get the video from YouTube.

  1. Using safari go to the page for the video you want.
    A screenshot of a YouTube page
  2. Open up the activity monitor in Safari. (Command-Option-A)
  3. Find the file in the list that is the biggest. This should be the only file that is over 1mb in the list.
    A screenshot of a YouTube page
  4. Hold down option and double click the link in the list. This will download the file to your default download location. It will be named “get_video”.
  5. Go into the Finder and rename the file to something ending in flv.
    A screenshot of a YouTube page

Part Two
Convert the file to a format you can use on your phone.

  1. Open the newly renamed .flv file in Quicktime Player.
    A screenshot of a YouTube page
  2. Using the timeline select 29 seconds of the video you want to use. (I say 29 since the limit is 30 seconds, and just 1 frame extra over that limit will cause it to be too long. Thus 29 seconds keeps you safe.
  3. Copy this selection (Command C)
  4. Create a new player from the file menu (Command-N) and paste (Command-V) the video into it. Go to the end of the video and verify that the time is indeed 29 seconds or less.
  5. Choose export from the file menu. (Command-E)
  6. From the Export format menu select “3G”. And then click options.
    A screenshot of a YouTube page
  7. Now you need to set up the specs for the video. I found that the default bit-rates and formats worked on the phone I was doing this with, so I recommend using those. I also found that the newest version of Quicktime updated the 3G capabilities and formats. So if you are using a version below 7.4 the dialogs might look a bit different than mine.
  8. Select ‘3GP’ or ‘3GPP (Mobile MP4)’ (depending on your quicktime version) from the File format menu at the top of the 3G Export Settings dialog. This should in both cases set all the default settings needed to export. Below I have a screenshot of the settings just incase.
    A screenshot of a YouTube page
  9. Click OK and then Click Save. Once finished encoding you should have a video file ready to send to the phone.

Part Three
Send the video to the phone.

  1. Head over to https://picture.vzw.com/ and click “Send a Message” over on the left.
    A screenshot of a YouTube page
  2. Click ‘Upload Media’ located at the bottom of the left column of the interface.
  3. Follow the dialogs to pick your exported video and upload it.
  4. Once uploaded drag the preview of your video over to the area on the right and enter any text you want to send along with it. Click Preview & send.
  5. On the next dialog you will enter the number of the phone you are sending to and an optional additional text message.
  6. Click send and it should send.

Part Four
The disclaimers and notes.

  • This might work for sending to other carriers phones. You would have to test to see. It might be verizon only. And if that is the case there might be other services out there that let you send 3GP videos to phones on those carriers.
  • This will work with other settings and 3g2 videos. Though this depends on the phone you are sending to some can’t play all file types, or bit-rates. So play with increasing the bit-rates and sizes and 3g formats to see what works and what don’t. Remember the Verizon site limits the file size to 3mb. So you might be able to get some clips looking really good. You never know. I just don’t have any phones handy to test with.
  • There are other ways to get the FLV from YouTube. The method shown here is just a quick and easy one all Mac users can do. KeepVid.com is another way to download the FLV.
  • There are other ways to encode to 3g other than Quicktime with Quicktime Pro. I don’t know them off hand, but this will work with those too as long as the produced 3g videos are of the proper specs.
  • Remember there are fees related to messages and data on phones. So don’t go crazy with this unless you know what your rates are, or the rates of the person receiving the video.

I hope this tutorial is found to be useful in some way. Apologies if something is unclear. Ask in the comments and I might be able to help.
Remember that Perian is the only way you can open the FLV in Quicktime, and it needs ‘.flv’ at the end of the file to open it.