Graeme Taylor shot out the window of a train at 210 frames per second, reversing the usual trick of shooting and slowing down a high-speed object from a stationary spot; rather, he shot a stationary spot from a high-speed object. The effect is something like a mundane bullet-time, where the world has stopped so that no one can do anything much of anything. It's mesmerizing.
As Jason Kottke writes, "Wonderful illustration of the concept of frames of reference."
Both glides were filmed by sticking a - relatively cheap - digital camera out of the window of a train as it arrived at a station. The 'trick' is the camera collects images at a rate of 210 per second - but the film is played back at 30 frames per second. So, every seven seconds of footage that you watch corresponds to 1 real second. At least at the start, one real second is plenty of time for someone to move into, then out of, the camera's field of view, but isn't enough time for them to really do much: hence, the frozen effect. It breaks down towards the end not because I'm doing something clever with the frame rates (captured or replayed), but simply because the train was stopping! Thus, as it decelerated, any given person would be in view for longer, and have more time to point an arm, take a few steps along the platform, or maybe even notice me at the window. Any such action captured is still slowed down seven-fold during playback, just as with my usual static captures.
At least one other person has tried this before: Trey Ratcliff captured a station in Japan this way over a year ago, describing the effect as "Stuck in motion". He also mixes in other slow motion footage and its inverse, time lapse photography, in this gorgeous video, Heartbeats of Time.
Graeme Taylor shot out the window of a train at 210 frames per second, reversing the usual trick of shooting and slowing down a high-speed object from a stationary spot; rather, he shot a stationary spot from a high-speed object. The effect is something like a mundane bullet-time, where the world has stopped so that no one can do anything much of anything. It's mesmerizing.
As Jason Kottke writes, "Wonderful illustration of the concept of frames of reference."
Both glides were filmed by sticking a - relatively cheap - digital camera out of the window of a train as it arrived at a station. The 'trick' is the camera collects images at a rate of 210 per second - but the film is played back at 30 frames per second. So, every seven seconds of footage that you watch corresponds to 1 real second. At least at the start, one real second is plenty of time for someone to move into, then out of, the camera's field of view, but isn't enough time for them to really do much: hence, the frozen effect. It breaks down towards the end not because I'm doing something clever with the frame rates (captured or replayed), but simply because the train was stopping! Thus, as it decelerated, any given person would be in view for longer, and have more time to point an arm, take a few steps along the platform, or maybe even notice me at the window. Any such action captured is still slowed down seven-fold during playback, just as with my usual static captures.
At least one other person has tried this before: Trey Ratcliff captured a station in Japan this way over a year ago, describing the effect as "Stuck in motion". He also mixes in other slow motion footage and its inverse, time lapse photography, in this gorgeous video, Heartbeats of Time.
There’s no doubt that plain old YouTube can be tons of fun, but when you get bored of watching clips the traditional way, there are a ton of sites that can help enhance the experience.
Whether you want to view a video with a far-away friend, compare two clips, or find more interesting ways of browsing and sharing, there are plenty of options out there. The web community is known for creating hacks that improve your surfing experience; now we’ve dug into some of those tools and hacks built around YouTube.
Have a look through our 10 choices and let us know of any other YouTube mashups, hacks, or similar sites and services you’ve used. I would love to hear about them in the comments below.
This site features a super-simple premise. TubeReply will play a YouTube video over and over again, until you stop it or go mad — whichever happens first. Just enter the URL of the clip you want repeated and the site will do the rest.
DragonTape allows you to remix YouTube videos into a seamless mixtape. Search for the clips you want, drag and drop to set up the play order and then share the playlist with friends via an auto-generated URL, or embed it with the code provided.
This “mashup helper” exists “because you have better things to do than work.” You can use it to compare two videos, or have fun mashing together two patently unsuitable videos. Simply enter the two URLs, decide on your VJ name, and you’re off and away. You can share your video pairing via a generated URL.
SynchTube allows you to watch synchronized YouTube videos with up to 50 other people with a chat window along the side so you can IM about what’s happening. Setting up a “room” is easy. Just enter the URL(s) of the videos you want to watch and then share the URL with your group. We can imagine tons of uses for this service, but the sweetest one has got to be setting up some videos to watch “together” with a far-away partner.
Enter your choice of keywords into this site and it will create an infinite playlist based on them. Get ready for a seamless viewing experience based on as many keywords as you can imagine.
You can link to a specific spot in a YouTube video by adding #t=MMmSSs (replace MM with minutes and SS with seconds) to the end of the URL, but Spilcd (and TubeChop below) take this concept a step further. Splicd lets you cut down a YouTube video by entering start time and finish time. You can then share your edited clip with a URL or embed it with the code supplied.
TubeChop shares exactly the same principle as Splicd. TubeChop, however, lets you make your edited selection by sliding a bar along a timeline. It’s worth an independent mention as some may prefer TubeChop’s visual editing process.
This unique little tool lets you create a “YouCube,” an interesting, if slightly offbeat way of sharing YouTube videos. Enter the six YouTube videos you want to appear on each side of the cube and it generates a spinning 3D cube of your videos that you can then name and share via a shortened URL.
MixTube is a great, simple tool that lets you easily create and share music playlists from YouTube videos just by adding the URLs to a list. This tool is tidy and useful for songs that you can only find on YouTube, such as mashups, live performances, and other user-generated content.
YouFlow offers an alternative and more attractive way to browse videos on YouTube. Enter your key words and a selection of results will be displayed in a cover flow-style layout that you can scroll through. You can choose to play multiple videos right from the results, something that is much more difficult to do with YouTube’s queues and playlists.
If the majority of YouTube comments depress you, then: a) You’re not alone, and b) There’s a solution. This browser bookmarklet offers a plain white or plain black background to view vids on. Simply install and then hit the “quietube” button after you press play on any YouTube video for some peaceful, troll-free viewing.
TestTube is YouTube’s “ideas incubator,” akin to Gmail Labs, where YouTube engineers and developers “test out recipes and concoctions that aren’t quite fully baked.” You can play around with a comment search, HTML5, the lite version of YouTube (Feather), a caption editor, music discovery features and more.
The new Apple TV is all about streaming online content, offering you direct access to the iTunes store as well as Netflix. However, chances are you have quite a bit of digital content on your hard drives as well, whether it be homemade vacation movies or TV show episodes you downloaded from BitTorrent (of course we are only talking about legal torrent downloads here).
No worries, you can play all of this content with your Apple TV as well — you just have to convert it to a supported video file format and then share it the proper way. Simply follow our how-to, and you’re gonna be able to watch all your videos on the Apple TV in no time.
Fist, you’re going to need software to convert your video files. There are a number of programs out there that do the trick, but none is as easy to use as the Miro Video Converter, which is available for free for Windows and OS X.
Miro Video Converter has a number of presets for popular devices, but there’s no distinct preset available for the Apple TV yet. Instead, you can just select the iPad as the device of your choice: the iPad and the Apple TV share a lot of the same hardware and software roots, and both devices support the same video codecs and resolutions. Make sure you also have the Send to iTunes option enabled. That way, you won’t have to manually import your videos to iTunes after converting them.
To actually convert your files, you simply drag and drop them one by one onto the Miro Converter application, and then press the Convert button. Then it’s time to wait: Video conversion can take a while, especially if you’re working with large HD files. A fast CPU can greatly improve results, but even on my current-gen Macbook Pro, I always seem to have enough time to make and enjoy a quick Espresso while I’m converting an entire movie.
Afterwards, your movie will automatically pop up in iTunes, ready to be shared with your Apple TV. To actually enable sharing, you need to go to Advanced > Turn On Home Sharing and sign in with your iTunes account. I know, it seems unnecessary, but bear with me.
Now you’ll have to go to your Apple TV and add the shared library — something that obviously only works if your computer remains up and running. To do so, you have to select Computers – Home Sharing on your Apple TV and turn on home sharing. Here, you need to enter your Apple ID one more time, and you can decide whether you want to also use that same ID for iTunes store rentals on the device.
Done? Great, because that’s it. Your iTunes share will now show up under the Computer menu item, and you’ll be able to stream local videos just as easy as any remote content.
Another bonus: You can even access your iPhoto library or any other folder on your computer via your Apple TV this way. Simply go to Advanced > Choose Photos To Share in iTunes and select either your entire iPhoto library or select albums, events or folders.
When NBC bought the (highly coveted?) rights to Walker, Texas Ranger, Conan devised a way to incorporate the western police drama into Late Night. How did he do it? With a giant lever, of course!
The Walker, Texas Ranger lever is a magical thing. You can pull it any time — day or night — and view a 15-second clip of Chuck Norris's goateed brilliance as he deals with bear traps, fist fights, headbutts, unopened parachutes...well, just watch.
With the year fast drawing to a close I have once again made use of Animoto.com to edit together some of my favourite family photos of 2008. The music is “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz.
The Office has long been Marlain and myself favourite comedy shows, here is collection of some of our favourite moments involving Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) and Dwight Shrute (Rainn Wilson).
It doesn't matter if you have the 20GB, 60GB, or even the new 80GB PlayStation 3 -- you can always use more storage space. All that available hard-disk space quickly disappears once you start downloading games, demos, and HD videos. Fortunately, Sony has designed the PS3 to allow console owners to perform their own hard-drive upgrades. You can go out and select your own hard drive instead of being forced to buy an official first-party hard-disk accessory. However, giving console owners that freedom means that aspiring upgraders will need to know how to select the right hard-drive upgrade and the proper installation technique.
Hard-disk manufacturer Seagate supplied us with a 160GB Momentus 5400.3 for our upgrade.
The first step to replacing the hard disk is going to the store or visiting an online retailer to pick up a new hard disk. The PS3 is compatible with just about any 2.5-inch SATA notebook hard disk. Both 5400-RPM and 7200-RPM drives should work fine. The physical size of the hard disk is important because it has to fit the PS3's 2.5-inch drive tray. As far as storage capacity goes, it doesn't make sense to go through the trouble of upgrading unless you go big: We're talking 120GB, 160GB, or even 250GB.
Once you have your upgrade drive, the next step is to back up the data on your current PS3 hard drive to an external storage unit. You can skip this step if you aren't attached to your music, videos, and game saves, but most of us will probably want to save all that information. The PS3 has a built-in software backup utility that can copy the PS3's hard-drive contents to an external storage device, such as a USB thumb drive or a memory stick. The removable storage device must use the FAT32 file system in order for the PS3 to recognise it. If you have an external hard drive that's formatted in NTFS, you can use the Disk Management utility in Windows to reformat the drive, but you'll need to create partitions on large external hard drives because Windows can only do FAT32 on drives 32GB or smaller.
Save your data using the PS3's backup utility.
If your storage device isn't large enough to handle a full system backup, you can selectively copy data over through the various music, photo, and game menus in the XMB. Your PlayStation Network login and system settings will remain safe on the system during the entire process. After you have your data safely backed up, you can move on to the actual hard-drive swap.
You will need a Phillips-head screwdriver to complete this part of the installation process. The PS3 owner's manual also includes step-by-step details on how to replace the hard drive, in case you need more instructions.
Turn off and unplug the system. Remove the plastic HD side-panel, and remove the blue screw.
Open the metal latch, move the drive tray to the right, and slide out the drive.
Remove the four screws that hold the hard drive to the tray. Use a screwdriver that fits snugly because the screws are extremely tight and easy to strip.
Swap in the new drive, and replace the screws.
Put the drive tray back into the system and slide it into place. Then replace the blue screw and snap the side panel back onto the system.
Turn on the console and let the system format the new drive. Then load up the PS3 backup utility to restore data from your external storage device back onto the PS3 hard drive.
At this point you should have a newly upgraded PS3 and the leftover hard drive. You could try selling the old drive, but small-capacity used drives might not fetch enough money to be worth the hassle of finding a buyer. If you still want to make the drive useful, you can buy an external drive enclosure to make it into a portable storage device.
So once again I have used of my favourite editing tools Animoto to edit our holiday photos. The pictures were taken at the Chinese Garden in Toowoomba, the swimming pool at our resort in Noosaville, and at the Australian Zoo in Beerwah.
The music for the video is Beautiful Reasons by Zach Gill which is available for download here.
Please Note - As this is a high resolution video it may be necessary to press the pause button and allow the video to buffer before playing.
To view the regular photo gallery click here.
With equal parts humor and heart, Carnegie Mellon professor and alumnus Randy Pausch delivered a one-of-a-kind last lecture that moved an overflow crowd at the university — and went on to move audiences around the globe.
Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 - July 25, 2008) gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving presentation, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.
Randy died July 25 of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 47. Randy's family is planning a private burial. A campus memorial service is being planned and details will be announced at a later date.
