Luke Battling Darth -- ASCII!

luke battling darth
famous painting by ralph mcquarrie
to ascii by “jp2a” pkg and de pooh

Enjoy!

His camera recorded in 24fps (24000/1001 to you fellow geeks and smartly
did a “2323″ writing/stretching of it to 60i (60 half-frames).
After correcting back to 24fps progressive most of his clips, he’s found ~10-20%
are not able to be put back together visually properly even with CineTools
and manually specifying the “cadence” and sequence starting frames, etc…

I started with code that I wrote to take a small segment of a video
and split the interlaced frames into 1/2 height “fields” and then drop them
down to grayscale to compare them all to each other to find the best matches
(to verify the cadence is right and/or the fields aren’t “off by 1″, etc..)

It uses mplayer and ImageMagick (“convert” and “compare”) for pretty high-quality
extraction of frames from the source video into the 1/2 height “fields”.

So I just do about 0.3 seconds to get 10 frames, and thus 20 1/2 frame fields for analyzing.
It will output the best matches of frames. For example:

php lacer.php good.mov 0.5 0.8


I then extended it into a web page (screenshot above, where I’m left-shifting one field by 4 pixels for visual inspection)
PHP script <== try it out online! (source)
that uses some CSS cleverness (clip property is your BFF!) to interlace together a pair of fields.
It supports:

• field swapping (move one 1/2 image to be the 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc. lines — if it was
  previously the 2nd, 4th, 6th, etc. lines)
• left and right shifting a field
• pairing arbitrary fields
• showing a “raw” 60i telecined sequence
• showing the 60i sequence as a “deinterlaced” 24P sequence

We saw her present slides and background from her book last night at our local indie bookstore. She passed around this gem of an original 60+ year old newspaper showing our downtown as it was!

on MacOS Lion, using the heads of the trees, with direct encoding support for:
x264
vpx / WebM

http://www.archive.org/~tracey/downloads/macff.sh.txt

A nice recent update to ffmpeg is the ability to decode/read Apple ProRes, too!

Hunter and I had some fun out in the east east Bay and gorgeous farmland countryside seeing how my little ‘Bee can buzz!

Not super sophisticated Ms. Driver — but still lotsa fun and sorta exciting to poach a street for some two-camera iPhone pseudo-documentary…

dumbbunny.org ==> dePooh.com

Should be a fun Halloween!

(they don’t come in black, as pictured

silly fun in one of my favorite cars!

Got to visit with my prof/mentor and he gave me a great tour of the update campus and the changes and new architecture/buildings.

We also got to take a nice long hike around the breathtaking gorge/park near my prof/mentor’s house:

Spending about two days on campus, a few things really struck me:

• After all this time, so much was the same and was so intimately familiar, like burned into my brain.  So, walking around Collegetown, campus, the Engineering & Arts Quads, eating lunch at the Hotel School, reading The Cornell Daily Sun, etc. — all of that felt like I was back in school.  The feeling was really eerie and totally unexpected!
• Distances, physical and mental, felt smaller — I thought it was 20 minutes to walk across campus, but everything’s a bunch closer than I remembered it.
• Everyone is on laptops & smartphones — and it’s campus-wide open wifi.  I don’t know <b>how</b> kids pay attention in Electricity & Magnetism with a twitter feed rolling…
• Everyone is so young!  Given the fact it was only ~3rd week into classes, many of them *were* just out of high school.  The energy, optimism, and hustle was palpable and easy to feel/ride…   Ah, youth!
• (Speaking of which) Although I hear weed is de rigueur in college now, I saw 0 evidence of it there (kinda relieving — esp. if you gonna pay that kinda $ to learn).  Only clear-eyed, sharp, hustling kids did I see.
• The Engineering Quad has a brilliant new building, Duffield Hall, straddling the corners and joining two prior ho-hum old halls.  So now students have an enormously large open enclosed light-filled space with tables, chairs, cafes, and wifi — perfect in-between classes and for informal meetups while FB strategizing your weekend party scene (or more likely study!)  Yay, Geeks get some nice Goodies, too!   I spent a lot of time here and even saw my second-favorite professor and other profs having a (presumably) informal lunch together.

after picking up the panicked little thing, we gently tossed it into dirt, but it looked just unhappy. intuition kicked in and seemed like the soil was too hard so found some damper stuff to move it to. presto! in seconds our little dirt scuba diver was self-buried in moist topsoil and happy. hunter points out “bird food…” but it’s a warm and furry mammal creature!!

• x264
• ffmpeg
• mplayer

here, i’m making sure that i compile in static version of libvpx (Webm) and libx264 (h.264) video packages so that the ffmpeg can easily make hiqh quality h.246 and webm transcoded videos.

http://www.archive.org/~tracey/downloads/macff.sh

So we can make nice (2 pass video) ~768 kb/sec 640×480 derivatives like so (alter “-r ” as appropriate):

# make WebM
ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec webm -fpre libvpx-360p.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 1 -an tmp.webm


ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec webm -fpre libvpx-360p.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 2 -acodec libvorbis -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 44100 tmp.webm


mv tmp.webm 'camels.webm'

# make h.264

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 1 -an tmp.mp4


ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 2 -acodec aac -strict experimental -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 44100 tmp.mp4


qt-faststart tmp.mp4 'camels.mp4'


our preset files:
http://www.archive.org/~tracey/downloads/libvpx-360p.ffpreset
http://www.archive.org/~tracey/downloads/libx264-IA.ffpreset

Nice things about the h.264 derivative:

• plays on all iphones and ipads
• browser video tag and/or flash plugin compatible
• starts immediately, seeks immediately even before entire video is downloaded

hope this may be useful!

Yes We Can!

russ and i without our normal masks

We had a blast watching our favorite film Monday night at our new “work theatre” (as opposed to “home”) and my new accurate prop replica pieces came in for the event!

This features great music from Hunter!

The camera weight and size meant it couldn’t go up train hills or tight spaces, so it was a flat track with “elbow room”.

Choo choo!

I’ve added a carbon hood, racing rear spoiler, custom wheels, weight reductions, and engine tunings to bring it to something crazy like peak 650 horsepower. Really fun to personalize it a bit! The replays are fun — especially when you do spectacular crashes and jumps. You can customize the pictures from all sorts of different camera angles. Virtual reality, indeed!

Bali is culturally fascinating — full of very happy and cooperative people unlike any place I’ve seen. Here are some interesting tidbits/observances:

Bali is an amazing isolated place whose people typically lives communally and is based off of the agriculture of rice. Despite being part of Islamic Indonesia, the vast majority (70%+) of the people are Hindu (with a mix of Animism from Bali’s indigenous roots).

We saw everything we could, ate their amazing food, and tried to soak up as much Balinese culture as we could!

You can see more formats and information here.

I got this supercute mini-laptop last year

I had been using Ubuntu linux Lucid (10.4) and just upped to Meerkat (10.10). (Both were Netbook Edition).
I’d never gotten video acceleration to work before and was stuck w/ ~1-5 fps video most of the time.

Doing the widely suggested:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/ppa && sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/fix && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install poulsbo-driver-2d poulsbo-driver-3d poulsbo-config


bricked my vaio 8-( well, i mean, it gave me root login w/o X/windows ability but… 8-p)
but 2-3 apt-get remove, reinstalls, hunting google later, found the apparent saviour (I did 1000mb from 2000mb recommended here):

sudo nano /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash mem=1000mb acpi_osi=Linux"
sudo update-grub

booted clean! *immediately* got ability to use proprietary vaio accessory to output VGA to external monitor (a first!) and brightness up/down hotkeys working. (brightness to work even at all!)
but best of all, video and appearance *and everything* (moving windows, starting applications) was *so much faster* visually!

cmd-line video playback with:
sudo apt-get remove mplayer
sudo apt-get install gnome-mplayer gecko-mediaplayer

so this is *all* i have done, aside from starting w/ vanilla install (with just a few changes to help w/ SSD instead of HD) of lucid upgraded to meerkat.
(personally, i’m still working on getting suspend/resume to work (seems to work but the display doesn’t come back on — been like this the whole time) and to get hibernate to work — prolly will go with some kinda memory stick to dump to)

UPDATE!

suspend/resume working now with change to suggested “gma500 fix”

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/ppa && sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/fix && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install poulsbo-driver-2d poulsbo-driver-3d poulsbo-config

I think this additional suggestion may have fixed sleep/resume (but it’s possible it was just the gma500/fix related packages in live above:

sudo mv /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/99video /usr/lib/pm-utils/99video

The original materials, background, and discussion can be seen here.

The 7 chapter program can be seen in its entirety here:

So after over a year of owning this site w/ little more than 10 posts and pages geared towards AIDS LifeCycle fundraising and training, I’ve finally merged my personal site into this site and updated it.  So now this is the

New home of Tracey Jaquith and Dumb Bunny Productions.

I’ve got new a new navigation layout and structure, updated CSS and style, and about 20 main info pages added.  I’ll be tweaking it a bit, but the biggest changeover is now live!  This site aims to blend blogging with a more traditional website.

So I combined the 1977 and 2004 DVDs into the highest quality 1977 version of the film! I show all my scripts and techniques here, too, so you can make the same version from your two DVDs, too!
http://www.archive.org/details/reremaster

star wars comparison of two films

If you want to take a bunch of JPEG images, you can turn them into a “motion JPEG” AVI video file (which is ideal for time-lapse). What’s neat about ffmpeg, is you can turn a directory of JPEGs into an AVI and later recreate the JPEGs from the AVI.

Thus, I can take 100-1000 JPEG images from a “shoot” and create a video time-lapse of all the JPEG images in a given subdir in a command-line shell (terminal):
ffmpeg -r 6 -i "%04d.jpg" -an -vcodec copy out.avi

Even cooler, you can go directly back to *the same JPEG* images like so (this is where you can see it is a lossless conversion from JPEGs to Motion JPEG and back):
ffmpeg -i out.avi -vcodec copy "%04d.jpg"


“-r 6″ is the framerate, ie: “make the video play 6 JPEG images per second”.

It doesn’t get much nicer than that! Not to mention, the encoding is FAST! I recently moved from mencoder/mplayer to ffmpeg since you can specify a complete copy of the input JPEGs (lossless from the source) as well as compress them down a bit (as you like).

For the lossless conversion, the (not entirely obvious) *key* to success is to use the “-vcodec copy” *after* the source file(s).

You can get this running on Windows with Cygwin, Mac with terminal, and any linux distribution like Ubuntu.

donors to my AIDS LifeCycle8 bikeride!

I took about 500 photos myself during the seven days of riding. Hunter also took about that many photos, too. I will make a combined album soon and edit a video as well and put links to them on this site.

However, for now, you can see    ~100 of my best photos on my public albums here:

Photo album (1 of 2)

Photo album (2 of 2)

We finished just before the course formally closed, yesterday (saturday) around 3pm.
(A lot of us were late due to two accident-caused road closure/delays and then Hunter and I decided to sneak off course a block to reward ourselves with Peets mocha freddos just before riding in.   We flew from LAX to SFO and then BART-ed and were home just after midnight.  Was sooo nice to see the kitties again and get things airing out!

Some interesting summary thoughts:

• Day 6 got entirely cancelled and we had to be bussed from camp to camp. We originally thought it was due to the uphill and downhill being deemed “too dangerous” in the rain by the CHP, but it was actually because that pass got closed temporarily due to rain related accidents and only ~250 riders (~10%) made it out on the rainy road before the “hold”. We had a 3 hour permit to cone off a single lane of route 101/1 on this narrow “no shoulder” bridge, and by the time the pass was reopened, not all the riders were likely to make it through the pass. CHP didn’t want to extend the times so they asked us to cancel that day. *First time* that has happened in 16 years of LifeCycle / AIDSRide !   Of course, the irony is that the rains stopped early in the morning by about 8am, and Hunter and I (and the riders who have similar pace — at least 50% of the riders) could have easily made that road closure for a really wonderfully beautiful perfect biking weather day.
• Although the weather was a bit ominous at times, we only got about three 5-10 minute very light sprinkles of rain while biking or in the nonsleeping hours of camp.  It did rain one morning pretty good — causing a lot of tents to flood.  We prepared a bit better with a tarp under our tent (and had a thick air mattress) so we didn’t get tooo wet.
• I was slightly crabby or something Day1 (due to lack of sleep and foggy wet start) but every day pretty much got *more* beautiful and better as it went on.  If fact, I loved every day but day6 (which wasn’t awful — just disappointing that the route got cancelled.)
• This year the biggest difference was the fact that while last year was hot and dry nearly every single day, this ride was a slight bit cool (though nicely never cold at all) and *very* humid (comparatively) every day.  Strange this time of year!
• Day 5 was a big change of course this year.  Last year was a total cakewalk (or “champagne ride” as the pros sometime call last day of Tour de France ) at only 43 miles and limited hills (w/ so so scenery).  This year was a noteably tougher nearly 70 miles where the ride to lunch was *jaw droppingly* gorgeous (riding wine country a al the movie “Sideways” into Solvang for the first time in ALC history) and fantastic.  However, after lunch was quite challenging where we headed directly westward for Lompoc — which meant the picking up strong wind was all headwind on flats and downhills and we were working hard on a *lot* of uphills.  So there was “no recovery” period from lunch to camp.  

Overall, once again an utterly fantastic ride!

We knew so many people this year it was like a rolling party of socializing and eating (well with determined-to-finish work on the bike in between ).  It’s soooo nice to have found this wonderful community of people who care for others and everyone in the Ride.  I’ve been thinking it’s a lot like the communities people find in churches (having grown up Methodist but now non-religious).

Rumor is now day may be cancelled
and will have to bus 2000+ riders
and bikes. We will see…

Today’s highlights are Santa Barbara,
Hopefully dolphin coastal sightings,
And an ice cream stop — it’s
Normally super hot today!

Yesterday’s day 5 “red dress day” was
A blast even though it was a bit of a
Hard finish with hills and headwinds

Thanks all for your support, interest,
And comments!

Hunter is doing well too. Each day seems to get more social and more fun. We know and keep meeting more wonderful people

What a fantastic event!

Training Ride Leaders

and share a little of what they’ve learned

It’s OK to be a TRL

tracey bike accident -- walks away scraped but OK

ouchie!

A steel cruiser bike roared blindly out of a blind drive and ran into me.  The impact “taco-ed” (crumpled) my wheel and pitched me over the handle bars and the 2nd bike. I hit the pavement, but managed to not break anything or hit my head. I scraped up my fingers, tore up 4 fingernails, and scraped my elbow and knee. Later we’d learn it was all surface stuff and only my front wheel needed replacing. Amazingly lucky to have had so little damage!

I was prolly doing 10-15 mph; other rider maybe 7-10.  All of this happened right in front of Hunter’s horrified eyes!

More pictures on public Facebook album.

Amy Goodman, Tracey, the Kahles

Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!,  is on tour this month across the country.  She visited San Francisco for two days this week.  My boss, Brewster Kahle from Internet Archive, knew that I am a raving fan of Amy and her amazing show of independent journalism. He was kind enough to invite me along to a long breakfast discussion with Amy.

Brewster and Amy found a common interest on issues of the potential monopoly of Google books, so she scheduled a followup discussion the next day with Brewster on Amy’s show “Democracy Now!” (for likely broadcasting Apr20-25). In person, Amy is an incredibly sweet and inquisitive individual. She is brilliant as well as thoughtful, generous and full of grace. I was thrilled to meet her in person and see how a part of her day goes. I look up to her tremendously as an award-winning pioneer in the field of journalism.

photo album

Oh this made me sooo happy!  8-)

at any rate! macports is a great way to get it installed on your mac.
the current way of setting up macports and then doing
sudo port install ffmpeg
works fine on my PPC at work (oddly — pretty old computer now) but not my Air (intel x386)

So I set out to find the fixes needed to make it work. Here they are:

step 1: install macports — see http://www.macports.org/install.php

sudo port install x264 +noasm # for i386 (not needed for PPC)
sudo port fetch ffmpeg
sudo port checksum ffmpeg
sudo port extract ffmpeg
sudo port patch ffmpeg
remove “–enable-shared” from /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/multimedia/ffmpeg/Portfile
sudo port install ffmpeg

[May update] I think the packages are improving so some of the above steps may not be necessary, depending on your Mac model, xcode version, and such. So I’d suggest just trying “sudo port install ffmpeg” first to see if it works and try some tweaks above if that doesn’t work

This is the debut of my first and only purchased domain/website!

How do I feel? See this

clip from Hunter’s ALC7 Video

WE DID IT! We did our first AIDS charity bikeride and raised over $20,000 as part of the $11.6 million raised by the 2,500 riders plus 500 “roadies” for this weeklong event.
It was 7 days of biking (every day) to go from San Fran to LA in 545 miles (averaging 78 miles/day). We biked *every mile* and had a fantastic time.

I edited the best 100 great photos from the week.

I used this amazing gear resource

and customized it to help me compare options to see if a different rear cassette could bridge the gap. It could! I get a higher top speed/ring now with a double and my easiest gear is now only about 66% harder than my old bike’s triple. So yes, climbing is a teeny harder, but it’s nothing like how much harder it would have been with the standard cassette!!

Ladies and other bikers — don’t fear the double when you can get a compact double and larger rear cassette!

After about 45 days of training for the big 7-day bikeride in June, I got a new bike to help me get through the long repetitive days in the saddle. The training has been going well, and the last week with my first 100 miles with this new bike were even better! I am a believer that a good carbon bike makes a world of difference. Best of all, my bike is now on only about 1/4 pound heavier than Hunter’s (so watch out, boyfriend!)

You can donate! My ALC page.