Sintel Open Source Film
The new Sintel open movie teaser trailer is out. I recorded a short introduction to it for youtube, but I’ll only be posting the audio of the intro on this site because there is no point in ruining the quality of the trailer here. Actual trailer links in theora are right here:
Oh yeah and for the audio intro, it’s here as well…
Fire is rad!
I’ve fallen in love with Trent Reznor’s new band ‘How to Destroy Angels.’ It’s not necessarily Nine Inch Nails, but it’s not completely alien either. There is an obvious influence that I believe comes from his new wife and band vocalist Mariqueen Maandig ( seen left on fire. )
At first I was not quite feeling the sound. The combination of anyone elses voice with the Nine Inch Nails sound bothered me. But after hearing “The Spaces in Between” this girl is holding her own.
The new video is everywhere right now. YouTube and Vimeo have high definition videos. Their website is pretty bare but is updating all the time. Check out How To Destroy Angels website.
Patent Absurdity
OSNews had a story about the stupidity of MPEGLA’s absurd terms of service for video cameras that record to h264. This article started to get me thinking about another area of patent absurdity; the production codec.
On slower machines sometimes there is a semi lossless production codec used specifically for video editing. On of my favorites is DNxHD. I can not playback 1080p h264 video on my CoreDuo computer. After converting any high def video to DNxHD, I can edit the video and play it back without a problem.
This is the missing puzzle piece in the patent free video world. We have mjpeg that does very much what DNxHD does, but mjpeg suffers from color issues when compared to newer production codecs.
On a slightly off topic note, check out the short Documentary Patent Absurdity. It was created using only Linux and was supported by a grant from the Free Software Foundation and made possible by the Associate Membership of the Free Software Foundation. Though off topic, still seems relevant to our problem.
To compress or not to compress?
After reading a lengthy article of the damning effects of over producing. I felt the urge to see if compression could help me in developing the ‘catchy’ sound I want for my new video intro. When I used the compressor everything sounded brighter and louder, but my tone was lost.
I can see why so many want to compress the sound. For me, I feel as if I worked very hard to give my recordings a good tone and I don’t want to loose it.
A new build youtube-dl is out just in time. The new site of youtube launched last week and since the change I haven’t been able to use the build of youtube-dl that is available in the Ubuntu repository. If you go to bitbucket.org you can grab the newest build. Don’t forget to make the file executable. You can do that by typing:
sudo chmod +x youtube-dl
To run that application all you need to do is run:
youtube-dl -f 18 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IOt2v5aJZA
Of course replace the link I wrote with the link of the video you want to download. Installing this application on your machine is as simple as copying the script to your /usr/bin folder like so:
sudo cp youtube-dl /usr/bin/
That’s all for now, enjoy!
I’ve started a separate blog on my foray into Film Making the Open Source way. Here is a copy of the first Post:
“This is my new blog to chronicle my adventure into writing for film. I’ve always wanted to be a film maker, but writing has never been my strong point. So now I’m on a quest to learn all I can about screen writing and attempt to put an open source twist on the material.
Writing Tools:
I’ve gone over this problem several times. CelTx is designed from the ground up for script writing, but for some reason feels rather limiting. I don’t plan on giving up on CelTx, but I think that Gedit might be a better suited tool for me. I’m also fond of Gedit because the final files can be read in a standard web browser.
The Editing Software
For Open Film Making there are quite a few applications that will make Open Source film making possible. The first ( other than the script software ) is the Non-Liner Video Editor. There are several possible contenders but as of writing the most stable and robust is Kdenlive. Kdenlive is an editor but it also has some basic compositing tools built in. The compositing tools however are lacking. Some compositing alternatives include Cinecutie and Blender.
Open Shot and Pitivi have some potental, especially Open Shot. Open Shot has a much better compositor than Kdenlive, but Open Shot is missing a lot of very important features that we need for movie making.
The Theater/Forum
The first and probably most popular open forum on the Internet for videos and films is probably YouTube. YouTube really needs little introduction. However YouTube alone would not be in the spirit of Open Source. So the inclusion of Archive.org and Blip.tv are a must. Both sites my not be as well known as YouTube, but both sites allow free formats to be hosted.
So here we have it. My first foray into writing and I’m going to do it publicly.”
You can read more at my new blog.
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