The MPC Feed @ Washington College

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

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

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

What does an audio/video editor do who wants to make a song, but can’t play piano or drums? Here’s a stop motion approach to music composition that is pretty cool.

Tags: drums, music, piano, stop motion

Would you like to include a web-based tracking solution for your next project that can report your GPS coordinates from your cell phone? Do you want to do it for free? Here’s a great solution.

InstaMapper is a free application that you install on your phone, which continuously sends your GPS coordinates to their website, where they use the Google Maps API to generate a real time map of your location.  You can choose the refresh rate to balance accuracy with battery life in your phone.

This would be a great tool for someone who might be doing something like bicycle across the country to raise awareness of lung cancer and to encourage followers to quit smoking.  Whats more, they even have a Facebook app to embed the animated mapping software in your facebook account.

Tags: Facebook app, Free, Google Maps API, GPS, tracking

You’ve probably seen some incredible photos of a landscape with an intense lightning bolts streaking through the sky and wondered, “How do they do that?” Some photographers use devices such as light or sound activated triggers to snap their photos. In the case of lightning, a light trigger will trip when a bolt suddenly lights up the sky. If you’ve ever seen the photos of a bullet bursting through an apple or something similar, then you’ve probably seen the work of a sound trigger.

But what if you don’t have one of these fancy triggers, and would still like to photograph the night sky during a light storm? There’s a few DIY tricks you can use that can give you the same resulting photos with no additional equipment other than a tripod.

Your first step would be to change your camera’s setting to manual if possible. We don’t want it to auto expose for the night sky, because the camera’s light meter works in real time. Ideally, we’d know right when the lightning would strike, and use an incident meter to read the brightness of a bolt. But even if we could, this still wouldn’t be entirely accurate, because one bolt may be brighter than the next, and some bolts remain lit longer than others. So set your camera manually to a medium aperture, maybe F8 or so, and then experiment with your shutter speed to balance for exposure. If you are in a city or some place with a lot of ambient light, you are going to have shorter exposures, and remote rural areas will be a longer exposure.

Now that your Aperture and Shutter Speed are set, (but don’t hesitate to fine tune them throughout the session), it’s time to adjust that third setting that controls your exposure, your ISO setting. Many people would read in their manual that in low light conditions, you’d want to use a high ISO speed. This may be the case when you are doing other kinds of photography, but with my method of photographing lightning, you’ll be taking longer exposures, possibly several seconds per shot. If you use the higher ISO, the exposures will be shorter, but you’ll get a lot more digital noise in the photo. I’ve found that you are much better off using your camera’s lowest ISO setting, as if it’s a bright daylight shot. After all, when the lightning actually strikes, it is very bright for that instant. Note that this is a place where higher end DSLRs really shine over point and shoot cameras. The larger sensor size tends to produce less noise for long exposures.

With your camera’s 3 exposure controls all set, mount your camera on a sturdy tripod. If you can photograph from under a cover (inside a house out a window, or under a porch, etc) then you are less likely to have to run for cover if the storm heads your way. Sometimes the best shots come from being out away from everything where you have an uninhibited view of the scene. I’ve used umbrellas to keep the gear dry, sometimes shot from inside a car with the window rolled down (when the wind is blowing and keeping the rain out of the car). Use your best judgment, and don’t be the person in the paper the next day for standing out in an open field with a metal umbrella in your hand during a storm.

The last step is to fire your camera. Again and again and again. You never know when and where it will strike, so you’ll be taking a lot of pictures that are dark, but if you are taking a series of 10 second exposure photos, for example, as long as lightning strikes during that 10 seconds, you are in good shape. So be prepared to throw out most of the images where mother nature didn’t cooperate. By the way, lightning often looks more impressive in a photo than in real life, because if the lightning does multiple strikes or branches out very far, the camera doesn’t discern the beginning of the strike form the end. In your photo of that 10 second glimpse of the night, you’ll see everywhere the lightning was during that time frame.

Another tip, if you have any bright lights in the foreground (a building or street light, etc), then you might find that simply pressing the button to fire your camera is inducing some camera shake, which is seen with streaks from those lights (from the camera shifting). If you set your self timer to the lowest setting, usually 2 seconds or so, then you can trigger the shot, take your hands away, and have 2 seconds for everything to settle down before the photo clicks off.

So get out there, be safe, and get some great photos!

Tags: DIY, DSLR, lightning, MPC, night, Photography, Tutorial

Need to pull a public domain video from YouTube to edit into your next documentary? You can do this and tons of other online and offline conversions with the links found here:

http://shorterlink.com/?V7H7WP

Tags: , conversion, download, transcode, video file converters

Check out this cool visualization tool that uses Google the Maps and Google Earth API to see the latest Flickr posts in real time, and where in the world they are being posted. Very slick

Links: 

3D Google Earth + Flickr

2D Google Maps + Flickr

Tags: API, Earth, Flickr, Google, Maps, photos, realtime

Using infrared (IR) light pens and the Wii Remote, it is possible to create very low-cost multi-point interactive whiteboards and multi-point tablet displays. Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s5EvhHy7eQ

Tags: Hacks, open source, Video, Wii