Kuala Terengganu beach & “island”
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I was able to take some pictures on the beach near our home here in Kuala Terengganu (KT).
Beach Panorama
Kuala Terengganu "Island"
Message Mastery by Belal Khan
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, my good friend Belal Khan of Leechon Films fame has started (a while back, actually) a program called Message Mastery. You should get the full explanation from the website, but the basic gist of it is that it is a training seminar focused on developing masterful messages through the medium of video.
He’s released a few videos that are freely available that are samples of what the entire program entails. I found the one entitled “Three POWER Principles of Filmmaking” to be quite refreshing in how simple, yet effective, such techniques can be. Even more beneficial is that the tips he provides, while framed around the production of video media, are general enough to be beneficial in almost any context.
Give his site a check-out and leave some comments as he’s very keen on getting & responding-to feedback from his visitors & members of his program.
Disclaimer: Belal is just my friend - I am neither associated with Message Mastery nor am I enrolled in the program…yet.
Time Lapse Barrage
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been able to take an enormous amount of pictures during my stay here in Malaysia until now. And while the actual yield of shots with any value may be low, the sheer volume of photos means that I have plenty I would like to share.
The sheer amount of work to upload these and present them in anything close to an appealing way through WordPress has made me decide that I am going to seek an alternative method for disseminating the videos. I am hoping I can leverage my Gallery installation, in shaaʾ Allaah, but it’s support for alternative media types has not impressed me to date. And don’t even dare suggest that I use a Flash-based solution…
Read on for the feature presentation(s)! As usual, make sure to get a copy of the free-and-open-source VLC player if you don’t have it or another media player that can play Ogg Theora videos.
Panorama shots of Kuala Lumpur downtown
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulilllaah, there are some outstanding opportunities for views of the downtown Kuala Lumpur skyline from the roof of our apartment here. Some of the shots are clearer than others due to the conditions at the time I took theme. These are my first attempts, as well, so keep that in mind. Click the link to see them!
Blog now completely Creative Commons-licensed
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, after finding the wpLicense WordPress plugin on the Creative Commons website, I’ve been able to completely license all my work released through my blog under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license. This means such world-changing works as my essay on Social Networking & online projects, my tirade against anti-userism, a heart-warming story of love, loss, and & hard disks, the possible (at least, then) merger of Yahoo! & Google, natural sounds recorded with my H4, and many other things.
More time-lapse fun
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Okay, so I have an addiction. Here are some more time-lapse sequences I took this past weekend and Monday. I’m now dabbling with alternative frame rates and sizes, including, by “popular” request, HD resolution videos.
I’ve learned a few lessons from these sequences, and I’ll elaborate a bit more on each one.
ffmpeg from svn
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I have really been engrossed in using ffmpeg, one of the most amazing a/v command-line tools out there, for my various personal video projects. However, recently I was experiencing a recurring bug where I could not work with some specific codecs when either the input or the output file was on a particular drive (!). The drive in question happened to have only one FAT32 partition, so I suspect it may have had something to do with it, as using another drive for both input & output would generally work flawlessly. The particular action I was trying to perform was to encode a sequence of rather large JPEG files (3072×2304) into a single video file using the outstanding (but still somewhat experimental and/or unstable) FFV1 lossless codec.
So, I visited the ffmpeg website and looked at some of their bugs, but didn’t see anything related to this. Then, after seeing some of their pre-bug report checklist, I decided to check the version of ffmpeg I had on the system, and found it to be from March. So, I pulled-down a fresh copy of their trunk via subversion and ran configure & make (I did not run make install). Running the resulting ffmpeg binary from this compile run worked perfectly, alhamdulillaah.
The lesson is, if you’re running into a bug with either ffmpeg or any other package, then give a shot at running the latest code, if available. It may seem like common sense, but I had underestimated just how easy it would be. Surely, other packages may not work as simply, but it really was a piece of cake in this case. Now I guess I need to learn how to package RPMs so I can help out the Livna project to get this latest code into their repository, which I also understand is not simple task, as many other projects rely on ffmpeg…
Time-lapse photography with CHDK
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
As I’ve already alluded to in a previous post, I’ve been using the CHDK firmware supplement with my Canon PowerShot A550, which on it’s own is an outstanding camera, alhamdulillaah. This firmware add-on, though, really takes the cake!
One of the features made possible by CHDK is the ability to run scripts which take the enabled features of your camera and do interesting things with them. One such script enables one to take a sequence of images of a fixed interval over a period of time - i.e., time-lapse photography! So, over the past two days, I’ve gone-ahead and played with this feature a bit by just collecting images from my office window while I diligently “worked”.
CHDK - Unleash the POWER in your PowerShot
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been playing around with CHDK, which is a free firmware add-on (note: it does not require flashing your camera’s firmware) that enables a multitude of features on your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Canon PowerShot digital camera. In short, it’s amazing. I haven’t had enough time to truly “unleash the POWER” yet, but I’m already amazingly pleased with what I can do so far that I was unable to do prior to this.
Amongst its amazing features includes the ability to save images to a RAW format, full control over shutter speed & exposure settings, fine-grained control over video quality settings, HDR photography, and an amazing BASIC-based scripting language that enables, among other things, time-lapse photography (examples in an upcoming post, in shaaʾ Allaah).
Expect myriad future posts relating to images & videos I’ve been able to capture with these new features, especially in combination with
Fedora 9 seeding stats
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Alhamdulillaah, I’m about to head out from work, and I’m going to have to disconnect my torrent seeds that have been running all day - at least until I get home, in shaaʾ Allaah. Here are the graphical bandwidth charts showing the stats of the seeds from all day.
Tapeless HD camcorders
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
I’ve been keeping my eye out for tapeless (e.g., hard drive or flash memory instead of tapes) HD camcorders for a while, because of the obvious flexibility of being able to transfer the recorded video directly rather than “recording” it via IEEE 1394 (i.e., “FireWwire”) - while an IEEE 1394 link is definitely fast, any tape-based camcorder usually only transfers the video at regular playing speeds by actually playing the video.
Having said that, here are a few that have caught my eye:
- http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/519149-REG/Sanyo_VPC_HD1000BK_Xacti_HD1000_HD_Camcorder.html
- http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/521864-REG/Panasonic_HDC_SD5BNDL_HDC_SD5_AVCHD_Digital_Camcorder.html
- http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/539291-REG/Canon_2708B001_VIXIA_HF_100_AVCHD_Flash.html
- http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/537788-REG/JVC_GZ_HD5_GZ_HD5_60GB_HD_Everio.html
- http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/537789-REG/JVC_GZ_HD6_GZ_HD6_120GB_HD_Everio.html
The important issue, of course, is how easy is it to work with the video once it’s recorded. Most of the video formats are MPEG-4-based, usually the controversial AVCHD. There are some advantages & disadvantages, of course, but ffmpeg really helps with most of the issues. I’ve been playing a lot with it (ffmpeg) this past week, and the sheer flexibility of it is astounding. I think the woes of multimedia flexibility under free operating systems is slowly going away, as even the GUI applications (avidemux, PiTiVi, Kino, etc.) are at a level of refinement I wouldn’t have expected.
Naturally, I am loath to use nonfree versus free solutions, so I am pleased to let you know that there are many free software codecs available through ffmpeg - that is the topic for another article, perhaps.
Obviously, there’s still a lot of work to be done, but I’m really excited to dive into open-source content creation!
Updated with relevant linking and a few spelling fixes.
Texas Dawah Convention 2007 Audio Project - overview
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
Introduction
Alhamdulillaah, a few months back, I successfully wrapped-up the audio recording & production project for the Texas Dawah Convention 2007. This was clearly one of the most ambitious projects in which I’ve been involved in my life, especially given the degree of responsibility I was given and the amount of work I had to do.
The project for me was a great learning experience on numerous fronts - management, business, technology, work ethic, and team work are amongst a few of them. If it weren’t for the great support I received from my partner & friend (I’ll only mention him if he wants me to - knowing him, he probably would prefer I don’t by default), then the work would have never happened and would have ended-up a terrible flop.
Please read on if you’re interested in knowing the history of how I became involved with this project, how it was executed, some of the challenges I faced during it, and finally, and a part of which I am very proud, how I completed almost exclusively using free (as in freedom) software, particular that which comes with Fedora.
DSLRs and RAW image format
Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem
A came across an interesting post, albeit a few years old, discussing the RAW image format on the Nikon N70. I came across that link while reading a post about Hack Week at Novell on the Planet GNOME blog aggregator. It piqued my interested because I have been looking at getting a DSLR camera for over a year now, but I’ve never settled on buying one mostly due to attempting to be prudent about my money.
Wordpress Gallery 2 plugin
Update: I’ve since deactivated the Wordpress Gallery 2 plugin. I am just keeping this post up for archival purposes.
For a while now I’ve been maintaining a media gallery, but I have not been giving it a lot of attention. Today, however, after upgrading to the latest version of my gallery software as well as having recently upgraded Wordpress likewise, I found the perfect opportunity to install a Wordpress plugin that combines these two outstanding pieces of software.
And with it, I am able to treat you to some shots of my mother’s flowers I took with my new Canon PowerShot A550. But more about that later. There are a lot of other features I can exploit as well, and I will explore those in due time. Enjoy!
PHP 5.2.1 upgrade + Gallery2 installation
The two aren’t really related, but they happened at the same time, so why not blog about both? I had been meaning to upgrade my server’s installation to the latest version of PHP for a while (well, about since I’d heard of the new release, to be precise). I’ve also wanted to install a web app that would be a great place to upload miscellanous files, mostly multimedia. Turns out Gallery2 is ideal for this. Continue Reading »
