Blender Video Editing: About the Tutorial Text
Here another screenshot from the Blender Video Editing tutorial where you can see more of the actual Quick Start tutorial text. If you want to learn how-to edit video with Blender this text will show you all the basics - inside the .blend file!
Click the image to see a larger version.
This is an interactive tutorial - all things in this .blend file have been arranged in a way that it will be fairly simple to learn all the basics in a very short period of time - no need to have a book or a web page open, you don’t even need video footage for the main part of the tutorial:
Learning the Basics With Colour Strips
All the basics like Navigation - Shorten/Extend - Moving A Clip - Snapping - Cut - Delete (including: selecting, dropping clips; frame counter, “Channels”) are shown with simple colour strips in the first part called “Editing/VSE Basics”- you can read and practise at the same time!
“Questions/Answers”
…is how the second part of the tutorial is called. Here the most common questions new users have when getting started with the Blender VSE are answered. (E.g.: How can I fade-in/fade-out video? How can I export video with sound? Etc.)
Blender VSE: De Facto Platform Independent NLE
This is one of the most interesting, maybe overlooked features of the Blender VSE: the same .blend file can be opened and edited on five different operating systems, e.g. on a Mac, a Windows PC or a laptop running Ubuntu - this is a de facto platform independent NLE! Try to do this with Final Cut Pro… And best of all: Blender is free and open-source - install it on as many PCs as your production requires - no need to buy any license for non-linear video editing (or SFX works). See all the new features the Blender VSE has since Blender 2.46, a good starting point for more information - also points out current limitations and workarounds - is the Using VSE page from the Blender Wiki.
In Three Steps to the Tutorial
1. Download the .blend file (depending on your browser/platform: simply click or right click and “Save As”)
2. Download Blender (you need the latest Blender 2.46 for this tutorial to make sense)
3. Double-click the .blend - the Quick Start tutorial text is inside the .blend: it will guide you through all the basics you need to get started with the Blender Video Sequence Editor!
Feedback…
…or suggestions for improving the tutorial always welcome.
Video Editing Preset: Quick Start Tutorial
Quick Start shows the very basics needed to quickly get started with the Blender Video Sequence Editor (VSE).
1) Download the Video Editing Preset .blend - Quick Start tutorial included (works without extra video files!)
2) Download Blender (in case you don’t have the latest Blender 2.46)
3) Double-click the .blend
Since Blender works under FreeBSD, Linux, OS X, Solaris and Windows the Blender VSE offers free and open-source video editing for almost any platform that an editor, video artist or company might be using. This means you could start working on your old iMac, send the .blend to your co-editor who has a Windows PC and once you get it back you could finish the project on your new Ubuntu workstation - the same .blend can be opened and edited on all platforms!
See all the new features that the Blender VSE offers since Blender 2.46. For more information, including some current limitations and workarounds, see the Blender Wiki: Using VSE.
2D Title Presets: Updated
1) Download the 2D Title Presets .blend - the tutorial (included) now begins with a few quick steps to get started in no time
2) Download Blender
3) Double-click the .blend
Tutorials = CC Licensed - Your Work = Yours!
Both .blends/tutorials are (now) distributed under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported) - however you may use these .blends as starting points for your own commercial Blender made projects! Simply remove the tutorial texts (and rename the .blend) before sharing your .blends with others. The license restrictions only apply to the tutorial text and the tutorial as such!
Your editing projects and titles are yours!
If you are an educator, teacher or trainer: you may use these .blends in your classes (e.g. film school, multimedia training etc.) as long as they are distributed in their original form (no changes made) and free of charge.
See the .blends and the CC license for details.
One reason for the restrictions: I plan to update the tutorials, maybe extend them and simply can not support multiple versions. Thanks for understanding.
Special Thanks
…to Paul from the final BUG for hosting the .blend files!
P2P Audiovisual Wiki: open-source animation June 08 update
With the June 08 update I am stepping down as the maintainer of the P2P Audiovisual Guide, I’ve been working on this project for the last two years and now need to focus on being productive with some of the tools we list. The June update features a small but fine selection of the best and most promising free and open-source animation tools (2D, 3D and code based animation) that could be of interest to both beginners and experienced animators: P2P Audiovisual Guide (scroll down for the June 08 update…)
Indie media links
A couple of weeks ago I already decided to stop updating another one of my online project, remixlinks.ning.com, one reason being that since the latest ning.com update it became clear that “older” apps like mine (I was an early adopter of the ning platform about three years ago) would not remain fully functional in the future without extra work on the app’s code - while I am now starting to look into Python scripting for my blender 3D works I am still far away from being a programmer and don’t want to spend time fixing my bookmarks app…
Both the P2P Audiovisual Wiki and remixlinks.ning.com feature selected (open-source) tools, sites and services that could be of interest to indie film makers, artists or researchers… I am still thinking about how-to organise my future online projects, I am not sure if the Wiki format is ideal for me, nor do I want to start using another web 2.0 service that might not function properly in a couple of years time or (like previously del.icio.us) sell out to a company that I don’t feel comfortable being with. Probably an open-source solution running on my own server will be what I’ll end up doing, but those are just plans for the time being…
End of a journey
In a way this is now the end of a virtual journey through the Wild West of (indie) online web services and projects for me that has been going on since about 2004: after surfing on del.icio.us waves for a couple of months I started my own link collection on del.icio.us, moved on to ourmedia.org (first as a user then as a moderator), started remixlinks.ning.com and for the last two years now helped building the P2P Foundation’s Wiki by writing/maintaining the P2P Audiovisual Guide. See this page for all my (other) online projects - for now I am putting all of them aside, including my indiworks channel that I probably will not update any more. The current video RSS feed solution via videobomb is far from ideal. Still, my indiworks channel/video RSS feed will be available as long as the videobomb service remains functional. Later this year, once I’ve found a satisfying solution for all my online projects, I plan to offer some sort of replacement for it. In any case: all my videos will of course remain available for download via the Internet Archive, I have no plans whatsoever to change that, the IA is the best and most reliable service of its kind that I’ve had the pleasure to use since I uploaded my first online video to their open-source movies section around autumn 2004. (Note that the download numbers on a video’s IA page only include the downloads made directly via the video’s page - those made via a link or a video RSS feed are not included…)
And now…?
After exploring (indie) online video distribution, researching free and open-source media creation tools, learning (and still learning…) blender for two years now and recently switching from OS X to Ubuntu the time has come for me to focus on the production side of things as well as finding a more satisfying way of presenting and distributing my work. I’ll keep (updating) this wordpress.com blog for a while to come, but plan to have a better (= more online video friendly) solution in place when the reorganisation of my online projects is done…
See you in Cyberspace!
The following text was originally written for a publication about online video to come out later this year. I was asked to make a series of changes that I just could not agree to and therefore took back my text. The integrity of my work means more to me than having it published in print.
I am aware that the text might come across as a bit extreme or seem strange to some - others just might find this particular style and energy interesting - I do and that’s why the text is the way it is. Sorry if you don’t like it, what I tried with this is to write down all of my thoughts about online video and the new medium itself - how I see film, video and storytelling developing into something new: the open video and story remix platform - an online “theme park theatre”.
I see a medium evolving from film and cinema, not as its replacement, but as “the next thing” - I believe that there will always be something like cinema - in one form or another - and this text is about that other form…
The Online Theme Park Theatre: an Open Video and Story Remix Platform
(1.0 version, 04.04.08; for this blog post, 20.06.08: three minor changes/corrections concerning the hyperlinks as well as bold highlighting for skimming the text and some underlining for layout/clarity reasons.)
The author likes to thank Till Alberts and Nicolai Gütermann for giving their valuable feedback and input to a first draft version of this text.
Introduction
This is a collection of thoughts about the collaborative possibilities that online video offers and a look at free solutions for setting up an independent online video remix platform powered by free software.
This is not a technical manual nor is it a detailed business plan - it is a “free idea”. Free as the air and in the sense of obvious.
This text is the introductory chapter to a book that has not been written yet. And, when thinking about it, you might agree that this would be a book where everyone just has to write their own version: the theme/story platform concept is about just that.
This is also a new look at the medium itself that we are dealing with - the medium that we simply refer to as “online video”.
A free idea for free stories
One of the biggest possibilities for online video lies in its collaborative potential. What we are witnessing today is the birth of a new medium: grainy, handheld phone cam YouTube videos watched on laptops instead of silent, static, b/w film projected onto a screen. But this time it all seems to happen so much faster - and there are two key differences: this time the tools needed for producing moving images are much more accessible, while all potential participants are connected via networks and channels of all kinds. It is this powerful combination that makes the web, seen as a platform, an extremely exiting place to be as a film maker: an open video and story remix platform, a “virtual theatre” - a new, mashed-up medium, a “killer app” for the web.
A little more than 100 years after film was born the aristocratic/monopolistic structures for the production and distribution of moving images (and media in general) are falling apart (we even have phone cams and online video editing solutions now…) and rising is a much more diverse, richer and powerful infrastructure for moving images creation. But video sharing platforms and media archives are only the beginning - just like when editing a video you first get all the footage in one place (on a media platform you upload it) and make a preselection while organising your work (on a media platform you label/tag the video). Once that is done you start with the actual, creative editing process…
In the video editing world “online” can mean two things (that have nothing to do with the World Wide Web as such): “available” (footage from a disconnected hard drive that is still part of the project you are working on is referred to as being “off-line” - it is not available). The other meaning: “online editing” (meaning you were first working with a lower quality copy of the video and now that the actual editing is done you replace the lower quality copy with its original master footage - you “on-line” it. Now, from an editor’s point of view and in the context of the World Wide Web, there is a third meaning to “online video”: video footage that is free and legally (or you just don’t care like the avant-garde has done for decades) available on the web for reuse (and for retransmission to the collective audiovisual information stream). If you connect all three meanings from above the unified definition for “online video” turns out to be “free available master (footage)”.
Editing is about structuring and a film editor can be seen as someone who is programming a series of moving images. As increasingly well connected internet users we have started conversations on a multitude of levels - e.g. by making a video, reacting in one way or another to a video we’ve seen. Reacting becomes remixing. Fake movie trailers, popular online in recent years, will most probably prove to be real movie trailers, in fact. The remix feature film is likely to be “coming soon to a browser (and portable media player) near you”. We’ve finally build ourselves repositories and networks that allow us to start realising so complex undertakings as the community made open-source feature length film. Example for a finished remix feature length documentary made by one single editor (with the Final Cut Pro files available for further remixing): “Panorama Ephemera” (2004) by Rick Prelinger - www.archive.org/details/panorama_ephemera2004.
How it works
Within a few years the world of blogs (the “blogosphere”) has established itself as a highly effective, alternative infrastructure for publishing and delivering news (open for anyone to participate, accessible for minorities and specialists of all kinds). Something very similar is happening right now with the world of moving images: the cinema of the future seems to crystallise itself to be an online video remix platform - open for anyone to participate, allowing the audience to interact with the content on a multitude of levels. An existing example is YouTube: you can make playlists, find clips that are related to others, react to a video by making and uploading your own video and allowing others to view and share it and to react to it again - YouTube really is a new kind of movie: a dynamic, interactive show with thousands of channels and millions of clips forming a part of the “free available master (footage).
Just like YouTube seemed like a far out vision only ten to fifteen years ago (remember the time when there was no internet and when no one had a mobile phone?) the cinema of the future might seem like an idealist’s dream today while in fact it is materialising already - in platforms such as YouTube. In the end it is likely to be some kind of open, social media network: the “online theme park theatre”. Core product of such a platform will be a cinematic presentation of a story that relates in a strong way to the theme that the platform is centred around. Since different themes attract different audiences, and different people develop different kinds of stories, a multitude of such platforms (possibly evolving as “genre platforms” and offering a multitude of theme centred, individual projects) will exist. At the same time these shows will also be screened in real world cinemas while digital distribution/projection will further help to democratise the new medium and bring high quality, content rich community produced projects to large mainstream audiences and their established viewing environments. And online you’ll be able to watch a movie in a virtual theatre (either alone or with many others) that you (can) create/interact with while you are watching. The stories you’ll see will have a life of their own, might first need to be developed over a longer period of time (just like e.g. Linux took about ten to fifteen years to mature into a mainstream product), but in the end these multimedia shows will turn out to be our generation’s online classics: myths, legends and stories with heroes and heroines from the new world. It also seems very likely that real world/online (story) worlds will melt into one another in unprecedented ways - which again is only reminiscent of one of the oldest movie themes we know: the exploration of that fine line between dream and reality.
Movies today are prepackaged dreams - movies of the future will be modular, dynamic and interactive dreams.
A visualised stream of thoughts
Online video allows creators to innovate, something a big Hollywood studio just can not afford because of ever exploding budgets - and the budgets themselves are just consequences of the attempts to fix with money what a special effect can’t buy: a good story. And so it became possible that simple stories - told from one person to another, by people gathering in groups, sitting around computer screens (our modern day fire places) - that these simple stories are now a serious competition for the industrial FX magician from Hollywood who lights very bright, very expensive fires that may look nice, but too often turn out to be illusions of fire places with no storyteller around.
In ten to fifteen years time we might already visit a (virtual online) theatre offering a 3D holographic experience and connecting tens of thousands of people at the same time - a bit like today’s “massively multiplayer online role-playing games” (MMORPGs) - people coming together in one place to experience a multimedia show that can be consumed, customised, contributed to, shared with others, remixed and retransmitted to another remix node in the network. The most effective way of realising this will be by using a totally open, non proprietary infrastructure without any kind of DRM or creativity restricting copyright laws.
But since this is a new medium we should not limit ourselves to think of it as a 90 minutes long experience…
Moving images are a visualisation of thoughts. And since the human mind likes stories we arrange those images into stories that can easily be shared and communicated: video is becoming a unifying language that almost everyone understands. Online video, our “free available master (footage)”, is a visualised stream of thoughts in an ongoing global conversation with feedback loops of all kinds - with each conversation a video stream gets better, smarter - like a programmer’s code evolving from a 0.1 beta version to the 1.0 final release - and all of this is happening while old media still tries to adapt, e.g. by suing its fans and costumers who try to integrate the static, old media content with the dynamic online one by sharing and remixing it!
Some tools and questions
Some of the tools needed for a meta platform like a virtual remix theatre already exist, others are just being built. We already have a couple of open-source movie projects (e.g.: “The Digital Tipping Point” - www.archive.org/details/digitaltippingpoint or “Big Buck Bunny” - www.bigbuckbunny.org) while a multitude of high-quality, free and open-source media production and distribution tools are flooding the market that was once dominated by commercial, closed-source, proprietary software from monopolists.
Some of the free and open-source tools (many, many more available) already in place are:
- on the content creation side:
Blender (3D modelling, animation, rendering, video post - www.blender.org), Gimp (image and photo manipulation - www.gimp.org), Inkscape (vector graphics editor - www.inkscape.org), Ardour (digital audio workstation - ardour.org), Kino (DV video editor - www.kinodv.org)
- on the distribution side:
Miro (internet TV and video player incl. BitTorrent support - www.getmiro.com), VLC (media player and streaming server - www.videolan.org), Songbird (media player and Mozilla based Browser - getsongbird.com), Plumi (Video CMS - blog.plumi.org), MediaWiki (Wikipedia’s Wikisoftware - www.mediawiki.org; for Wiki style video editing see: sourceforge.net/projects/kaltura), WordPress (blogging software - wordpress.org), Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora (patent/royalty free audio and video encoding - www.xiph.org), Croquet Consortium (creation and deployment of collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses - www.croquetproject.org).
Next to semi-open/closed platforms like YouTube - does not support Creative Commons licences (creativecommons.org) - there are CC licence friendly platforms like blip.tv (blip.tv) and the incredible non-profit Internet Archive (www.archive.org). Other sites like Ning (www.ning.com) let users create their own social networks including pre-built micro video sharing sites à la YouTube, free to use, CC licence friendly.
In the end not technology but the quality of the actual story that a virtual story park is centred around will make a project work. More helpful than any rules and how-tos for story development are simple questions - they always work! (Rules are too specific - questions are open, universal and lead to new questions…) So here a couple of questions for online storytellers and remix video producers:
Who is my/our audience? Who is/are my leading character(s)? What does he/she/they want? What forces are opposed to our hero’s goal? In the end, will our heroine get what she wants? What’s the story in one sentence? What’s the story in three sentences?
Note: possibly these question might seem “too simple” and not appear to be useful - in that case come back once you’ve started developing your project! Being able to answer those simple questions will give you a good foundation for developing a working, complex story - if answered well those are in fact rather hard questions! For more questions read Linda Seger’s classic “Making A Good Script Great”, for the eye-opening, mythological approach to storytelling read “The Writer’s Journey” by Christopher Vogler.
The next step
Now before proceeding please click to confirm:
Commercial Break To be Continued… The End
new flash video
two flash video conversions (320×240 and 640×480) have been added to the vivaldi rock page on the internet archive - the new 320×240 640×480 flash conversion is now also the one on the video’s blip.tv page.
*** still for an optimal viewing experience downloading of the medium resolution or even better the high resolution version is recommended! *** (or who would want to go to an art gallery and only get to see cheap photocopies of the paintings…?!) also try to adjust your sound (settings) accordingly before watching… thank you! ***
vivaldi rock (2008, 4:13, visual music video)
sketches
when working on a video like vivaldi rock i make a lot of tests - here are some of my digital sketches: test renders and design tests made during the production. they appear in chronological order (left to right, top to bottom) and give a bit of an idea of how the project evolved from the creator’s point of view - not everything might be perfect here, but it could be interesting to see what kind of ideas made it into the final animation and what was left out…
note that the final design for the visuals is of course heavily inspired by existing (2d graphic) design from the 60’s and 70’s of the last century - vivaldi rock is among other things a personal homage to a somewhat demanding yet fascinating colour combination that those who grew up in the 1970’s might never (be able to) forget…
click to see larger versions - file names = descriptions… (you can click the images once more on their individual pages to see them in full size!)
visit the vivaldi rock page on the internet archive for all permanent download links (as in previous blog post)
as you might notice there is something missing from the series of images above… what about the ending…? watch the video to find out!
vivaldi rock is a 3d visual music video (4:13)
made with blender
download (”save as”):
h.264/mpeg-4 - tested in quicktime and the free and open-source vlc
(640 x 480): high res (212 mb) - medium res (115 mb)
(320 x 240): small low res (55 mb)
or
watch (flash video on blip.tv)
*** note that the current blip.tv flash video conversion is not optimal for this video. until a solution is found downloading of at least the medium res (115 mb) version is recommended for an optimal viewing experience when watching the video (full screen) - thank you! ***
published under a creative commons by-nc-sa license
Blender 2.46 has been released yesterday (download from here) and one of the many changes worth mentioning are the updates to the Sequencer (video editing). This is such an elegant, minimal and yet powerful NLE…! To my knowledge there is no other video editing software, be it open-source like blender or a commercial solution, that runs on that many platforms (blender works under Linux, OS X, Windows, Solaris and OpenBSD and .blend files are 100% compatible across all of these platforms!).
There sure are some limitations, but after a first couple of tests and playing around with the 2.46 release candidate in the last couple of days I can only repeat that I am very impressed by the blender NLE. It has so much potential… Just don’t make the mistake of underestimating its capabilities when only quickly looking at the “Sequence” preset that blender offers by default. Read about it in the blender Wiki. There is room for improvement when it comes to certain workflows, but in a way this is also another strength of the blender NLE: it provides you with all the basics you need for non-linear video editing and lets you configure the tool in ways that are just not possible with traditional NLEs - since blender is of course a 3D application you can load 3D scenes directly (!) into the NLE or find a workflow where you combine the NLE with the Compositing Nodes.
I think with this update the blender VSE is now more than ready for wider, commercial use for (short) lengths video post production: it is free, open-source and runs on virtually any platform a production company might be using - no licensing fees have to be paid to anyone and if you need to make changes to the application, like adding a feature, you can always do it - it’s open-source! One reason why blender is growing so quickly is because individuals as well as companies constantly improve its (3D) capabilities and give code back to the project: so basically a small investment that one company makes can be shared with all others and instead of just getting one new feature you might get as many as in this latest 2.46 release - giving away something in the open-source world means getting more in return in the long run - everyone wins (except for a few big companies that have monopoly like power in the NLE world).
BTW, if anyone reading this is wondering about vivaldi rock: I was waiting for the new blender and I am rendering (again) now… There is still one technical issue that I have to solve, I was hoping there would be a fix for it in the new blender version but it looks like I have to try a workaround for now. More about that once the video is online… (If you don’t know: instead of checking back if the video is online already you can also simply subscribe to my video RSS feed: just (right) click/Copy Link Location and paste it in e.g. iTunes under Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast…: the video will then be downloaded automatically for you once I’ve posted it!)
a short teaser for my upcoming blender made 3d animation - the visual music video vivaldi rock
or
(”save as”)
*) wordpress.com does not support flash video from blip.tv
Sometime good things come to an end
I’ve made up my mind (final reason) to phase out all Apple products from my production pipeline: OS X, Final Cut Express and GarageBand (FCE 2.0.2 is now unusable, GarageBand 1.1 very close to unusable under Leopard).
I was thinking of investing in the Final Cut Studio package and new Apple hardware, but I really dislike Leopard, I dislike the way Apple treats its decade long customers, how they cheated me by selling me a buggy product like Leopard and made me loose valuable time (and money) by making me figure out on my own that Leopard never was ready for prime time on the PPC. This was most dishonest… Before that Apple had sold me a very noise iMac G5 - since bitten by Leopard I like to call it “my little Hoover” (Apple: ever tried sound editing…?).
That’s just it, folks! This is a goodbye from a platform I loved and promoted passionately (just ask any of my friends) over the course of many many years - I even made a bet with one of my best friends when things looked really bad for Apple in the mid-90’s. My friend said Apple would not make it, I was sure they would get their mainstream success sooner or later. My friend now ows me an apple, a McIntosh to be precise… Well, next time I see him I let him know that he may keep the wager - I have no more interest in it.
This was not an easy decision, but looking back Leopard was really the final reason. I had thought about alternatives for quite a while, but Ubuntu seemed not ready and I wanted to wait and see what Apple offers with Leopard: I was hoping it would be awesome and give me a good excuse to stick with the Apple ecosystem, the polished interface, its easy of use…
You can’t always get what you want
I let the Rolling Stones say this one for me:
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need
I wanted OS X and FCP but what I need is Ubuntu and a set of free and open-source apps that will allow me to replace the Final Cut Pro product line step by step over the coming months, possibly years: I am aware that today there is no finished open-source solution to FCP (we were introduced to Cinelerra at the TOSMI training last spring and unfortunately I was not convinced by what I saw, but I will have another look at it within the next couple of months).
What I plan to do now:
• document all free and open-source alternatives that seem attractive for high-end film- and video editing
• research, describe (write tutorials) and link to workflows and solutions in regards to open-source non-linear video editing and help bringing it to the mainstream
• help designing and developing (by giving feedback, discussing, bug testing) a free and open-source NLE of my choice
• discuss the possibility (and usefulness?!) of setting up a non-profit fund where film- and video editors worldwide can (if they wish anonymously) donate money to speed up the development of a fully featured, open-source alternative to Final Cut Pro
The last point will be a long term project, right now I’d say that the best existing open-source solutions seem about three to five years away from being able to compete on a feature-by-feature basis with FCP. But: I believe it is possible to start phasing out FCP of your production pipeline right now - read on for more!
“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity”
… is my favourite Albert Einstein quote. So what opportunities brings me the fact that I am getting rid of Apple in favour of a free and open-source non-linear editing solution…?
• cheaper, more customisable and expandable hardware (ever bought RAM from Apple…?)
• a free and open-source operating system (I’ll probably go for Ubuntu) that is being developed and tested in all possible openness (so it’s less likely to have a wild leopard bite you in the neck when you just don’t expect it)
• a wide range of high end free and open-source audio, video and 3D applications that can be customised in ways that closed-source commercial products like Apple’s Final Cut Pro just can’t be due to their closed-source nature
• the certainty that all my investments (bug reports, how-tos, donations, …) end up in a product that will always be available free of charge for me, for others and for future generations
• total independence from a multinational corporation like Apple that currently can decrease my productivity by selling me buggy software while being totally dishonest about possible shortcomings of their product
• support of an emerging Linux PC hardware market that brings cool design and usability to the former “beige boxes” world - this will further help with the adoption of Linux and speed up the process of frustrated Apple users like me migrating to the free software world
• Apple will have to try much harder to satisfy its user base and start innovating (instead of decorating) - competition is good for users on both sides
• I will be forced to learn new software and will have to solve problems along the way - perfect for improving my skills, deepening my knowledge
A start
Last summer the offline editing for my Blender made 3D animation Visual Machine no. 1 was done with Final Cut Express and it was onlined with the Blender NLE. Once I’ve got my PC hardware together and the latest Ubuntu is installed and configured, I’ll try using Kino for offline editing. I’ll keep testing workflows involving the Blender NLE (for onlining, possibly also for the actual editing). There are a couple of limitations you have to work around when doing this, but as I learn more about them I’ll be able to develop strategies and tools to overcome those limitations - one idea is to use (Python) scripts for automating certain cumbersome workflows - once tested those scripts could be shared in a handy library with the free software editing community and will allow:
• a highly optimised workflow within a particular app like Blender that currently might lack certain non-linear editing features
• the creation of a user friendly trans-apps workflow e.g. for combining the best of Kino with the best of Blender to have one package (incl. documentation) that can be distributed and promoted to e.g. Final Cut Pro users
I have done a bit of research already over the last two years while working on the P2P Audiovisual Guide and when collecting links for my remixlinks project. Now I have to figure out the whole thing in all its details, make tests, find solutions that work for me. But since my main project currently is a 3D animation and after that another one is already waiting, I will have to make this switch from the Apple to the Linux world in a series of smaller steps. Maybe by the end of the year I’ll have a first (set of) workflow(s) that I successfully tested and can recommend for production use - or maybe I will just be surprised by finding out what others already have in place and things will go much faster…?
Conclusion
I never really thought I’d come to this, but Apple messed up things with Leopard in an extreme kind of way (it’s not quite as bad as Vista seems to be, but for sure it feels like a Vista light) - and since Apple is not willing to listen (final reason) I have now come to the conclusion that it would be limiting or even foolish (and at least lazy) - to further rely on Apple when it comes to non-linear video editing.
Here a couple of search queries that my readers used in the last two days to find my iMac/Leopard blog entries (WordPress shows me those queries - without any other personal info attached to it (!) - on the admin page.)
I see very similar search queries every day.
No further comment…
my imac fan is too loud
imac fan noise leopard
“is an application which was downloaded”
mac os x 10.5 leopard is an application
jfif preview os x
turn off “is an application which was do
After maybe 30 min. this post on the Apple forum that I just made got removed. Now I know why I felt like making a screen-shot…! *Update, 05.04.08: to be precise the first “screen-shot” is a .pdf made via “Save as PDF”, the second one is a real screen-shot. You can see the URL on top of the .pdf one: it is the same as on the other one…! - And my forum message is still off-line today, so I take this as Apple’s answer to my question about if they can fix these problems. Not good.*
My forum’s message URL currently says:
“Error: you do not have permission to view the requested forum or category.”
(Note: the first screen-shot was made with the current Firefox Beta, the second one with Safari.)
Looks like someone from the PR department at Apple is trying to censor me?! Well done, Apple! This is the internet, people do talk about these things…! (And I am sure I will share this story with my dear Apple Final Cut Pro User Groups colleagues!) And this is the text that someone from the Apple forums just removed - I believe it was an appropriate and tasteful posting for the “Using your iMac G5″ forum at discussions.apple.com - Apple seems to think differently…
Dear Apple: fix Leopard + iMac G5 (fan noise, sleep problems, bugs, …)!
Dear Apple,
in case you want to keep me as a costumer I ask you to quickly fix all the current issues with Leopard and G5 iMacs. My iMac has become almost unusable since I upgraded (slow, excessive fan noise, narcoleptic condition aka sleep problems and of course the long list of Leopard bugs that made this the worst upgrade since I started using Macs back at System 7). Read my full blog entry - not very flattering - here: “Leopard is killing my iMac - next stop Ubuntu…?” http://indiworks.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/leopard-is-killing-my-imac-next-stop-ubuntu/
I’d like to be able to continue using Macs and stay on this platform, but if 10.5.3 does not fix the main issues (and 10.5.x all the others in due time) I am forced to downgrade/upgrade back to 10.3.9 - and then I don’t think I will be investing in Apple hardware again.
I was sincerely hoping that Leopard would fix my iMac’s G5 fan noise problem and as we all know those problems just got worse.
This might be the end of a long and wonderful friendship - when one side does not keep its promises (deliver high quality soft- and hardware) why should I stick with you…? I feel cheated - so far. Apple, can you still deliver…? If so: show me! Now…
And Apple: here the link of the day for you. Long live free and open-source software!
Leopard is a real beast
I’ve been using Macs since System 7 and my Powerbook (145B) that I bought in the mid 90’s still works and is my back-up solution for working (with text) if nothing else is available. I’ve recommended Macs to everyone over the years who had computer problems and probably convinced quite a few people to make the switch to a Mac.
Three years ago I got an iMac G5 and it’s a beautiful machine to look at and I enjoy working with it - but it has one major design flaw: its fans. They can be very - very loud. The newer iMacs don’t have that problem, but this does not help me. Last November I upgraded from Panther (OS X 10.3.9) to Leopard (OS X 10.5) and was hoping the fan problems would go away. I was wrong - it got worse:
It seems that Leopard (and possibly to a certain degree also Tiger) was not made or optimised to run on PPC hardware, from looking at forums I see that quite a few people have exactly the same problem as I have: the iMac going to sleep all of a sudden while you are working - just like that! Recently it kept dozing off while I was repairing permissions (another Leopard bug: this can take very long). I had to force quit the permission repair process and ignore a warning that this could destroy data…
Right now I am rendering a last test version of my latest Blender made 3D animation and have to work with “automatic” processor power (significantly slower than “highest”) to prevent the iMac from constantly going into sleep mode (”reduced” seems broken altogether under Leopard, this was the option I had to use under Panther for listening to music because of the iMac’s ever modulating, Tinnitus-like high-pitched fan noise). (BTW: I’ve already zapped the PRAM, reset the SMU and checked that the power cable is plugged in correctly. Also a couple of weeks ago the mainboard had to be changed (did Leopard break it?) - so I don’t think my iMac’s new narcoleptic condition is a hardware problem.) What this now all means for me is that rendering times have doubled - because of Leopard! Wow.
What to do? I am now looking at all the options. Maybe Apple releases a 10.5.3 update in the next couple of days and all my problems will go away. This would be very cool but I am not very hopeful. Once I’m done with my current 3D project I’ll probably have to downgrade (or is it upgrade?) back to Panther.
Leopard with Vista qualities…?
is now a default warning. I just could not believe that Apple would do such a nonsense. I should have read it as a warning sign that there is something wrong with the OS… While you can turn off this message there is another one that you can’t turn off (at least not easily and not globally):
There is no option to turn off that most annoying warning message!
Why this is really bad: recently I saved a few cool scans from the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive and wanted to open them: but Apple’s Preview does not recognise the .jfif extension (!). While the much better NicePlayer can open them Leopard gets in the way with its vistaesque question:
Yes, OS X thinks that JPEG File Interchange Format (JFIF) files are an application! But it gets worse: when you try to open multiple .jfif images at the same time (that you previously drag-droped/saved from Firefox to the desktop) you have to open them one by one and for each of them confirm with a mouse click (hitting return is not an option) that you really want to open “an application which was downloaded from the Internet“! Or you could manually rename all of the files to .jpeg so that Preview can handle them… In any case it now can take a minute or two to open a bunch of new .jfif image files on my iMac. What a mess…!
This is only one of many examples where Leopard gets in the way of my productivity. Here two more highlights:
I use the Stickies app a lot. But in Leopard there is no way to turn off spell checking permanently for the Stickies and I absolutely dislike that ugly red underline for what the spell checker thinks is a misspelled word. The problem is that you can only can turn off spell checking for each single Stickies note individually - and next time you open the app you have to do it all over again - for each note you happen to use! You’d better not have 20 or more notes like me and are used to type in German without making use of capital letters (as would be the correct way of spelling certain words): not only can you not turn off the automatic spell checking (there is not even a shortcut for doing it with the note by note method) but also the Apple spellchecker does not have an option for ignoring capital letter misspellings…
But even worse than that is Spotlight: there are certain things (like my Firefox bookmarks.html or the StickiesDatabase file) that Spotlight just does not find (I’ve tried reindexing, cleaning all sorts of cache files…). The old Apple search might have taken a moment to come up with results, but it always worked and was easy to use. Spotlight just does not find certain files, offers a set of very confusing and for me useless options and in the end is slower than the old search because it tries to update search results in realtime while I’m typing and my iMac is just not fast enough for that.
To make a long story short: Leopard is not an elegant, not a user friendly operating system but at this point (10.5.2) a very buggy commercial beta release with many features that I just do not want but can not turn off (e.g. Stacks, which looks like a cheap rip-off of this cool technology). At the same time it is incompatible with Apple’s own Final Cut Express 2.x (that I bought only three years ago with the iMac) while other, non Apple software - older than three years - still just works…
So what happened? Why did Apple release Leopard so early? What does it mean for me as a consumer in regards to future Apple products? And most important: can I still trust Apple…?
I will soon be needing a more powerful computer for my next 3D projects. But should I buy another Apple product after the iMac G5 fan noise saga…? My main problem is that I also need a good NLE and Apple’s Final Cut Pro (while not ideal or really modern any more) is still the best choice in terms of money for value (there are open-source alternatives but none of them offers the full spectrum of features and ease of use that FCP has). But: if I buy the Final Cut Studio package now is it going to work on Apple’s latest OS offering in three years time…? Or will it be incompatible just like Final Cut Express 2.x is today with Leopard…? I do not think I should be forced to buy new hard- and software every three years - and who knows if I will always be able to afford it…? What I want is a more permanent solution. I need quality equipment. Something I can rely on. Something that “just works”. I’ve had enough of beta products like my fan noise challenged iMac G5 or beta products from other vendors like my super buggy Sony Ericsson mobile phone that I still have but avoid to use whenever I can (I got that one before the Sony rootkit fiasco - I have not bought any Sony product since).
True world domination: be humble and D.I.Y.
To me it now looks like we’ve reached a point where the quality of commercial (consumer) hard- and software from big companies is just not acceptable any more. (Faster and faster product development cycles to keep the cash machine working while only beta products are thrown to the market.)
Maybe small, local businesses selling open-source hardware is the answer…? Or just 3D printing your own, online community developed hardware…! But it’s just not quite there yet…
This is also something the open-source movement should always remember when looking at the mistakes that companies like Apple make:
Do not release software (without the beta label) before it has been thoroughly bug tested. Buggy products can anger your most faithful, decade-long fans and customers up to the point where they are so enervated that they will switch to alternatives sooner or later.
E.g. I don’t use the VLC that often any more: under Panther it kept crashing whenever I tried to close it and under Leopard the better solution often is to use the NicePlayer and having Perian installed - I just can’t see that stupid warning message any more that pops up every time the VLC can’t keep up with playing back a particular file (the NicePlayer also allows you to go back and forth frame by frame and the VLC at this point unfortunately does not support the TARGA (.tga) image file format that is a very useful standard in the 3D world).
True world domination will only work if you remain humble, deliver high-quality products and are honest about possible shortcomings of your offerings.
Stuck in the middle
After Installing Leopard back in November I also wanted to install Ubuntu on my iMac but in the end had to give up: there is no more official support from Canonical for the PPC platform and while the Ubuntu live CD worked well enough I could not “shrink” my OS X partition with GParted (this is necessary before going ahead with the actual Ubuntu installation for a dual boot set-up) - GParted just kept crashing and neither the Ubuntu community forum nor the GParted forum had a solution for this problem.
I could of course now get rid of OS X altogether and just install Ubuntu, but then I would also be stuck with an old Ubuntu version while not knowing if it really works well in the long run on my noisy iMac. So it looks like I will soon be stuck with an older (but at least very reliable) Mac OS (10.3.9) for the time being. Leopard most probably is not an option for me and dual-booting OS X/Ubuntu seems not doable without being a Linux ueber-geek.
Conclusion: this is a transition period - commercial solutions like Apple hardware and OS X might not live up to the promise and and open-source alternatives might not always work (yet).
Next stop Ubuntu…?
While the shiny new Macs from my local Apple store sure look very nice I feel less tempted than ever to invest in an Apple product again - the € 129.- I paid for Leopard back in November look like a bargain compared to the time I lost trying to be productive with it. I now might end up buying non Apple hardware and installing the latest Ubuntu release once it becomes available later this spring.
It’s been a while since I recommended buying a Mac to a friend and I don’t know when I’ll be able to do this again. But:
I certainly can not recommend Apple’s Leopard (tested up to 10.5.2). Think twice about “upgrading” (specially if you are on a PPC) and better don’t do it at all if you are using a PPC iMac!
This apple looked really nice, but unfortunately it was picked way too soon and now leaves me with a very - very sour aftertaste. The good thing: there are alternatives and they seem more attractive than ever to me.
Theory, moving images
I was a bit surprised about the theoretical focus of the conference and had expected to see more visual works and examples. But I am also a very visual person and in general find it hard to listen to people talking especially if what they say is rather abstract - I like to get something concrete out of it, results, consequences of the analysis, maybe what it now all means for my own work. I think this is what I missed (or maybe did not get) from some of the theoretical presentations, as interesting as they were.
Old school word
I never liked the word “amateur”, I always thought that it sounded too old fashioned and, depending on who is using it, either has a submissive or insulting meaning attached to it.
There was a time before MiniDV when the best/cheapest option a low-budget indie video production had was to shoot on Hi8. Once the movie was cut a copy for a potential buyer was made onto Betacam SP and if you were lucky a smaller TV station would buy it. But most of the time you were told that your tape was not up to a certain technical standard (since it had been shot with “amateur” equipment). The “amateur” video argument was of course only a pretext to get rid of the indie competition, TV stations never had a problem with their own shows that featured funny cats and cute babies home videos.
There were a couple of instances at the conference where I thought that “amateur” was used in similar ways as TV stations had once used it - the arguments are always the same and it is the attempt to defend an exclusive position or monopoly.
Money was never good at measuring the quality of a product - the best things in life are free and some of what the online indie/experimental/art film and video scene offers is so much more inspired than what the so called professional content media industry delivers on TV and sadly also to the cinemas.
Differences between DRM and exclusivity?
Another thing that quite surprised me at the conference was to hear that there seem to be artists who don’t want to share their works online, specially on YouTube, because they feel this would misrepresent them, kind of take away an aura of exclusivity.
There are good reasons for not wanting to share your work on YouTube (e.g. their Terms of Use or because you prefer other solutions like Show in a Box).
But why feel threatened by being on the same platform with thousands of other creative minds? Why limit access to your work (via passwords etc.) if it is available for free anyway?
How different is this position from the mainstream entertainment industry that out of fear of loosing control is limiting the distribution of their media with DRM?
If you have been a successful video artist you can still be a successful online video artist! The avant-garde is called that way because it is forward thinking. But wanting to limit access to your work, wanting to retain exclusivity is so backwards thinking that it hurts. Why not let the world see what you have to offer? Why fear the YouTube competition…? What can you really loose…?
YouTube as a movie
I see YouTube as a huge, interactive movie. Like a mixture of a Wikipedia for moving images (licensing issues and the YouTube TOS aside) and a free on demand video library: there seems to be no moment that a human can go through in the course of life that is not in some way represented on YouTube. As a viewer you can combine these moments and generate your own feature length movie - if you feel something is missing or think you have a better version of a moment you can always upload it. And of course there are the prebuilt movies (short movies or longer ones posted in multiple parts).
YouTube is a unique, collective visual oeuvre created by its millions of users and the community features (comments, playlists, subscribers) empower the users to communicate on all kinds of levels, in all kinds of ways.
Did I hear people say at the conference that cinema was this collective experience and that online video is something for lonely people…? How often do you actually talk to the other people in the audience when you go to the cinema…? Yes, it is special to sit in a big theatre with a large audience, but the “lonely argument” is not true at all for online video - it is however true for TV.
YouTube is everything you want it to be. If you want to prove that there is “only” pirated content on YouTube you can quickly come up with a series of examples. But you could also prove that there are “only” funny cat videos. Or artistically remarkable works.
Also I can’t share the view that video artists don’t use YouTube. Some of the best works I have seen in recent years I have seen on YouTube.
My YouTube “favourites”
Since none of the three videos that I submitted as a favourite made it to the selection we saw on the last day of the conference here those videos - all remix works that would not exist if their makers had taken copyright laws seriously:
Make sure to watch the Zidane Headbutt Remix! I think this one is close to genius and should keep even the most hardcore film/media/culture theorist entertained…
Cillit Bang - JAKAZiD ft Barry Scott [Nukleuz]
Zidane Headbutt Remix!
power to the people vs give peace a chance
All in all: informative and inspiring
The Video Vortex Conference 2008 was a bit different from what I had expected but I still found it quite informative, inspiring and enjoyed meeting and talking to a couple of very interesting people.
Last but not least: a big thank you to all the organisers of the conference and Seth Keen who moderated the panel that I had the opportunity to be a part of.
Text of my presentation at the conference incl. all links and a few additions (27.01.08 - note that in my presentation the part about copyright was much shorter and did not include some of the arguments I mention in this text version!):
• As a film maker I am now more interested in online video than traditional (contemporary) cinema (and of course TV).
• (video shown) Indiworks Channel (2007, 1 min.): a trailer for my work. While I also uploaded this to the non-profit Internet Archive this link goes to the trailer’s page on my blip.tv account - blip.tv, which focuses on shows, is a good alternative to YouTube because they support Creative Commons licenses, have pretty good Flash Video (seems better than the one on YouTube) and offer the optional download of the uploaded video file.
Think about making a trailer that represents your own work…!
• Have a blog (mine is of course this one right here). If you are new to blogging a commercial solution like Google’s Blogger might be easiest to get started with. I would like to be able to recommend the open-source WordPress (since end of last year Movable Type is also open-source), but so far for me WordPress has too often been a frustrating experience: I find the admin interface inconsistent and confusing and for some strange reason the blog editor is too buggy to be really useful for more than just very basic text editing. My workaround solution for publishing to my worpress.com blog: the Firefox extension Scribefire.
Note that the free blogging host wordpress.com works slightly differently than if you were to install WordPress (the software) on your own server - some limitations that I encounter on wordpress.com (embedding of Flash Video from blip.tv or the Internet Archive not supported for security reasons) are possible if you have WordPress running on your own server. I find it unfortunate that wordpress.com has this limitation because it sheds a bit of a bad light on WordPress itself…
• What I showed next at the conference might have appeared a bit too simple for some to be worth demonstrating, yet I think this is a key concept you should be familiar with if you want to distribute your own works online:
How-to make your own channel (creating your own video RSS feed):
(There are of course other ways of doing this, here one very simple method.)
- Upload your video - if you are willing to share your work (free, non commercial distribution) you can upload it to the Internet Archive’s Open Source Video (Movie) section (upload works via ftp, just follow the instructions).
Example for an uploaded video’s page on the IA (my own video): At the Open-Source Pond. Like on blip.tv I choose to use a Creative Commons licence for publishing my work, in this case the license allows you to remix the video for non-commercial purposes.
- Once the video is uploaded I go to my Video Bomb account and add it to have it appear on my submitted videos page (basically a playlist): on top of the page there is the orange RSS feed icon and the video I added is now in my feed (= channel).
Now you can advertise your feed (the URL connected to the orange RSS feed icon) on your blog and your fans can subscribe to your videos. This works in any feed aggregator like e.g. iTunes (”Advanced” > “Subscribe to Podcast…”) or the open-source Miro (from the Participatory Culture Foundation, they are also the ones behind Video Bomb).
Check out Miro, it’s not perfect yet (feels too slow on some systems, for Flash Video on the Mac you will need at least OS X 10.4), but together with the IA’s open-source movie section and blip.tv this is one of the best tools for independent online video and movie distribution.
Make sure to submit your own feed to the official Miro Guide. You can also submit your feed to the iTunes podcast directory, but there will be one little extra requirement for doing this: even if you never intend to use it on the iTunes store, participatory culture à la Apple is only meant for those who own a credit card…
• For me online (RSS) film and video distribution is a dream come true: it was never this easy to get your work out to a world wide audience!
Example for online film distribution (my own movie): Vincent (44 min., ‘96/’03). I see this is a slow but long term distribution. In the first year I had about 300 downloads, in the second year 1500. No idea yet what I’ll have at the end of December 2008 but I’ve had more downloads in two years than there were guests at the premiere.
• (video shown) E.T vs T2 (2006, 1 min., 19 sec.): a trailer mash-up by digital_kevin, his blog is a document of the real digital revolution between spring ‘05 and winter ‘06 (scroll down to the first blog entry to find a link to the .pdf file/archive of the first offline part of the blog).
I showed E.T vs T2 as an example for the absurdity that I think is traditional copyright. This video, while in my view a visual discussion and possibly more to the point than a written analysis could ever be, might be illegal to produce, distribute and posses (and all of that at least in a let’s say possible 20 or 30 min. version…).