The MPC Feed @ Washington College

Yuri Arcurs from Crestock has produced some wonderful videos that show behind the scenes of his studio at Aarhus in Denmark. These videos show a lot of great insight to how he’s using his studio and his photography work flow, specifically in relation to his stock photography. Thanks to Yuri for sharing with the world!

The videos include:

• Stock Photography With Yuri Arcurs - On the Photo Shoot!
• Exclusive Teaser: Behind the Scenes with Stock Photographer Yuri Arcurs
• How to Choose, Instruct & Shooting With Models - Yuri Arcurs
• How to Instruct Your Models: Free pose, Smile & Freeze
• Yuri’s Favorite Photography Gadget: The Manfrotto Monopod
• How A Model Can Help The Photographer
• A Guided Tour in Yuri Arcurs’ Photo Studio
• Yuri Arcurs on Studio Essentials

Tags: Photography Tutorials, stock photography, Studio Photography

Beginning the week of January 26th, Instructional Technology will be offering professional support for campus technologies, multimedia and more via Open FLEX Lab Hours in both the Beck Instructional Lab and the MultimediaProduction Center. Beck’s Open Lab Hours (FLEX Lab) will remain the same and the MPC will be opening its doors for the campus community. If you need help with a computer related task or project, stop by to receive one-on-one help from the Instructional Technology staff of experts.

Open Lab Hours for Spring 2009 will be:

Beck:
Mondays 1:30 pm - 4:30 pm

MPC:
Tuesdays 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Wednesdays 11:00 am - 1:00 pm

If you have questions about any of the Open FLEX Lab Hours, please contact Nancy Cross, Brian Palmer or Nick Smerker. To find out who will be available during which hours, visit: mellon.washcoll.edu/staffprofiles.html

Tags: Help, JIT Training, Just-in-time, live support, MPC lab

The folks over at toxel.com have compiled a huge collection of free Photoshop goodies, everything from grunge, to floral, to human & vector.  Take a look!

Tags: Brushes, floral, Free, freebee, grunge, human, Photoshop, splatter, vector

Do you utilize YouTube to host videos you create and want to share with the world at the best quality?  Has someone else created a YouTube video, but you are only interested in a portion of it for your blog or website?    Here are 2 tips that help ensure your audience has a better YouTube expereince:

Tip 1. Forcing the browser to use the High Quality version of the video

You may notice just under the lower right coner of the video window, some videos have an option to “Watch In High Quality”.  By default, these videos will play as a 320×240 FLV file at 320Kb/s.  Check out this sample:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBGeNeofk0A

The user could click on this link to “Watch in High Quality” which will reload the video and play the MP4 version , which is 480×360 at  512Kb/s.  By adding &fmt=18 to the end of the URL, you’ll make the URL you share with others bring them right to the high quality version.  Here’s the same video in the High Quality view:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBGeNeofk0A&fmt=18

What else are you gaining besides increased video resolution?  The video is compressed with H.264 compression, so you get better video even at the same data rate.  You also go from a low fidelity mono audio feed to stereo @ 44.1Khz sample rate.

&fmt=6 increases the resolution from 320×240 to 448×336, Flash 7 video @ 900Kbps; audio @ 44.1KHz 96Kbps Mono CBR.

&fmt=18 increases the resolution to 480×360, H.264 video @ 512Kbps; audio @ 44.1KHz 128Kbps Stereo. Note, the bandwidth may be lower, but it’s utilizing a more efficient compression codec.

UPDATE: &fmt=22 increaes the resolution to 720p HD video if the source was uploaded at a high enough resolution.

Tip 2. Advancing the video to a specific playback point.  

If you evern wanted to link to a video in YouTube that was lengthy, but had a very interesting part partway through, there is a hack to allow you to begin playback at a precise time.  You can specify the minutes and seconds of the start time like this:

add #t=53s to the end of the URL to start at 53 seconds into it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBGeNeofk0A#t=53s

add #t=1m57s to the end of the video URL to start playback at 1 minute 57 seconds:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBGeNeofk0A#t=1m57s

Think of this as bookmarking your video clips!  Now you can link to a video, and have an index of the segments included, which link right to that precise moment!

Tags: 720p, high quality, tips & tricks, video bookmarking, video tutorial, YouTube Hacks

Having a variety of brushes in Photoshop gives you more options, and having them very high resolution will allow you to create designs that can be printed and used in large format.  Here are 75 collections of free brushes for you to choose from!

Tags: Brushes, creative inspiration, CS3, CS4, Design, High Rez, Photoshop, Resolution

Here are 10 bits of code that you can include in your PHP development to do some cool stuff.  Why program it from scratch when you can use these?!

Tags: code, PHP, programming, Web Development

Interested in experimenting with long exposure photography and painting with light?  This tutorial shows some tips and examples of what you can do with your DSLR, a tripod, and a few light sources.

Tags: light art, long exposures, painting with light, Photography

Soundsnap is the best platform to find and share free sound effects and loops- legally. It is a collection of original sounds made or recorded by its users, and not songs or sound FX found on commercial libraries or sample CD’s.

It was originally started by a small group of sound people from all over the world. Our common belief is that sounds and samples should be free for everyone to use in their projects, commercial or not.

Tags: free samples, legal, royalty free, sound effects

Not ready for criminal behavior, but still really into street art. Light writing, shown in this how-to video, is an urban art that doesn’t damage public (or private) property, so it’s totally legal. Learn how to do a new form of art called light writing or light graffiti by watching this instructional video. Using a camera set to a low shutter speed you can write graffiti in the air using streaks of light.

Tags: abstract art, dark, fine art, graffiti, light painting, light writing, lightwriting, long exposure, night, Photography

Chase Jarvis does it again, explaining how he executes a high speed photography production with post production composting to produce magical results.

Tags: Chase Jarvis, Compositing, High speed photography, Photoshop