I had a few ideas for a costume, but in the end, I decided to get political.

Photoshop + Printer + Wilton t shirt iron-on paper = political message

See you at the big party in West Hollywood! Happy Halloween!

A quickie cell phone shot of the shirt in action, which already got me some dirty looks from the old white people at CostCo. Seriously, people. Ease up with the racism!

UPDATE: Hi all you LAist readers! Don’t crash my little server. Enjoy the blog!

mtvmusic.com.

MTV has launched a “Hulu” like web site, that is streaming thousands of videos. Good idea. A bit late to the game, and a bit sad that the quality leaves a lot to be desired (I have a TV - I want to see music videos on the damn TV!), but good for them.

Bad for Mac users, though.

Even if you have the latest Safari, Flash, and OS, you will not get these videos playing…unless you have a friendly web blogger help you.

Let’s look at the base URL of a music video:

http://www.mtvmusic.com/video/?id=55086

Nicely design page, with a big black viewing area…that plays nothing. Now, if you read the source code, you see the following “Embed” tag code:

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:uma:video:mtvmusic.com:55086

Wow. Full screen pixelated hell. Advice: reduce the size of your web browser window to improve the video quality.

Now, let’s put 2 + 2 together, and get a proper result (for the slow people out there, we are looking for “4″).

Each video has a unique number assigned to it (in this case: 55086). As we can’t get the base page to play the video, we alter the following URL:

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:uma:video:mtvmusic.com:

Paste that URL into your browser window, then at the end of that URL, type the unique number you got from the mtvmusic web site, and hit enter. Viola! We have playing music videos!

(html code rant)
Now, why do we have to go through this hell? The “web 2.0″ people at MTV decided to put the videos onto each web page only using the HTML tag “Embed”. The problem? To properly embed media, you need to use the “Object” tag *AND* the “Embed” tag, or else certain web browsers (ones that are picky about things like valid code) don’t work.

A quick web lesson on Object vs Embed

Results 1 - 20 of about 11,800,000 for object vs embed. (0.18 seconds)….ugh!

Don’t even get me started on the people who insist that “web site” is one word! ARGH!

While doing my daily job on my Macbook Pro, I have other Macs running other tasks. I have a G4/400 (with a boosted processor) that captures and archives audio DAT tapes all day, and my G4/867 captures video.

I am starting what will be a very long task of mastering and archiving a literal load (over 1000) VHS tapes.

I finally got the set up worked out:

Mitsubishi VHS -> Videonics Processor Plus analog “video mixer” -> Datavideo Time Base Corrector (TBC-1000) -> Sony DVMC-DA2 DV media converter box -> Final Cut Pro.

(wow - that took long even to type…)

I am choosing to correct some of the brightness, color and contrast issues in the analog stage, before the signal gets digitized, purely to save any further artifacts on the resulting DV25 NTSC video file. I ran tests, and doing it this way did make a cleaner looking file.

The results? Wow. I uploaded a video for reference. The audio is a straight pass, and the video is done in your typical “crap on the left, badass on the right” split screen effect. Excuse the interlaced look of the video. I didn’t bother to do anything about that for this quickie web video file.

Get your QuickTime ready, here comes the m4v file…

Sex Pistols - “God Save The Queen”
Live at the Winterland Ballroom, January 14th, 1978
(sourced from an old Warner promo VHS tape - 1st gen)

The long wait is almost over…

Depeche Mode held a press conference on October 6th, to announce their new upcoming tour.

While I was expecting to receive a DVD of the press conference soon after the live webcast, I still had the idea of recording the web feed. This turned out to be a good idea.

The DVD I received, while looking FAR better than the webcast (as one would expect), I encountered a small issue: HIGHLY distorted audio!

I have spent the entire weekend, trying to get this audio fixed up. I exported the DVD audio, and the webcast audio, and spent an hour substituting distorted words. The replaced audio turned out fine, and stayed in perfect sync with the original audio. Everything seemed fine.

Bringing the audio back into Final Cut Pro, the audio ended about a minute faster than the master. Even the original video’s audio track, when reimported, was faster! ARGH! Every parameter was set right (48k, 25 FPS, et cetera), but the files would not sync. DAMN DAMN DAMN!!!!

As a last ditch effort, I tried the most unlikely program: QuickTime Pro. Shockingly, the expensive software had epic failure, yet QuickTime Pro generated a perfect file. *shaking head* Why did I spend all this money on programs that can’t even keep sync!?!

For those who might encounter this, here what I did:

* Take the original video, and File:Export the video, making sure to take off the audio track completely.
* Open the re-edited audio file, Select All, and Copy the audio. Close that file.
* Open the newly exported video, and go to Edit:Add To Video.
* Save to a new file. Done. In sync. Perfect.

GRRRR!!!!!

Nothing like wasting a weekend.

For those DM fans waiting for the video, the entire press conference (minus “the snippets”) will be on YouTube as soon as I:

* Break the 45 minute press conference into five chunks, with titles.
* Compress the five chunks to high quality MP4 video files
* Upload the large files to YouTube.

In other words, if you want to watch the press conference again, you can either watch the LiveNation feed on depeche mode dot com, or one of the poor quality webcast rips that fans have thrown on YouTube.

I am also playing with a “highlights reel”, so you don’t have to sit through 45 minutes for the best parts of the press conference.

Back to work…

In my never ending quest to make my apartment look more like a proper apartment, and less like a public storage facility, I scrapped a few more Ikea Billy racks, and replaced them with Hopen dressers (like you have seen previously on the blog). Clearing out five Billy racks, and then hauling them around the apartment (and most into the garage) was already a fun exploration into the bruising of muscles, but managing to cut my arm open on the one rack with the glass door was a true achievement.

I decided to hook up my camcorder directly to one of my laptops, and tapelessly record the assembly. It turned into a fun little time-lapse video.

As I was already sore from moving the Billy racks around, I got a bit lazy on holding the nails, as you will see. I swear, I have never seen a nail do that before. I hit it, and it didn’t get mangled, it took off! You’ll see my look in the video as I heard the nail go “pew”, and embed itself into a pile of crap across the room. Fun!

One computer capturing in a DAT tape. Another capturing in an old TV VHS tape, and one of my laptops capturing 90 minutes of assembly fun. Just another day at BRAT Productions.