August 2013 – Page 2

From One Chicken to Another

Moving into week one of the headless ds106 the task for folk who are already in the ds106 house is:

See what you can do to welcome newbies, and consider writing posts about your experience and/or tutorials- such as explaining in more detail how you made your Daily Creates.

I seem to have may name down for helping out if I can and though I’d start with a wee ramble on ds106 radio. I managed to get the server setup and broadcast for about 18 minutes tonight.

Some advice about taking part in ds106 from someone who has, in fact, only produced a few blog posts over 2 or 3 iterations of ds106.
But it gave me a chance to get my hands on the ds106 radio mic, and might be useful to someone…
Have a listen.
mp3 download/link

With the slightest encouragement I’ll do this again with a better plan.

No editing, bar a brief run through Levalator, we podcast econo;-)

Spinning gifs for Challenge 14

August 2013 GIF Challenge #14: Fruedian Alphabeta

Tina has again set a very high bar with her example gif.

I started off making the search gif, just to see how it could be done. A quick screen recording-mpeg streamclip – firework workflow go that.

I then used the advance image search to find content I could modify using the ‘too much fun’ search string, this go me a nice flickr photo Too much of a good thing | Flickr – Photo Sharing! by gemsling with a Creative Commons — Attribution 2.0 Generic — CC BY 2.0 license.

I though I might spin the photo ove one of yesterday’s panos, but decided to use another one I had taken (Ben Challum Pano). I’ve got a reasonable workflow for splitting panos into slices and giffing them now (SuperCard is my friend).
Once I had the pano giffed it was just a case of making a new shared layer and adding Josh to it. I wanted to combine the 2 gifs, but the first had 40 odd frames and the pano spin only 16. So I’ve just uploaded then and aligned then in the blog to save a bit of file size.

too_much

awesomed

Spin a Gif

So the challenge for day thirteen is one of @cogdog‘s wonderful assignments, Animated GIF Assignment 859: Riff-a-GIF, which asks us to take someone elses ds106 work and RIFF-a-GIF from it.

from: August 2013 GIF Challenge #13: RIFF-a-GIF | I am Talky Tina

I scrolled through a few recent daily create pages until I came to Make a 360deg panoramic photo of a room in your house. I somehow missed that one, I’ve messed about with panos quite a lot and even made a few experiments for displaying them. Anyway I though I’d sit in one of the nice office seats and give them a spin.

Both Rockylou’s and Bill’s images had suitable licenses the others did not.

bill

Basically I opened the pano in fireworks and changed the canvas size.
I then duplicated the frame a number of times.
When through the frames moving the image -180 pixels in the Property inspector for each frame.

Click the screenshot for a bigger version:

For the second one I took a different approach. I chopped a series of images out of he original, then used those to make the gif in fireworks:
Opened the first one.
Switched to the finder and selected al lthe rest
Dragged then onto the first in FW
Selected all of the layers
In the Frames window, distributed layers to frames.

rockylou

So my gifs also rif a little of Tina spinning her head around in Rockylou’s and Bill’s offices.

The quality is a little rough but I prefer smaller files size to quality.

Here are the source images, thanks to Rockylou and Bill for licensing them appropriately.

both published under Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC 2.0

Wiggle

Today August 2013 GIF Challenge #11: Get Your Wiggle on based on ds106 Assignments: Wiggle Stereoscopy

There was a bit of chat on twitter today about using a mobile for the upcoming ds106 headless course. I’ve used an iPhone and iPad for a few assignments and a fair number of daily creates so though this might be one t otry. I started with my new fav giffer app, 5SecondsApp, but didn’t get far. It hade worked well for a couple of seamless gifs recently but I could not get a good wiggle. The then turned to giffer pro which did a better job for me.
The whole wiggle process is describe well by Rockylou today.
Photo 12-08-2013 20 17 25

Here is one with iphone photos edited in Fireworks on my mac.

jug

PS 1, there is a nice site: NYPL Labs : Stereogranimator for playing with this stuff with old 3D images from the stereograph collections of The New York Public Library.

Duck!

August 2013 GIF Challenge #10: Monster Chiller Horror Theatre 3D Style GIF on I am Talky Tina.

look for a part of a scene in a 3D type movie where the thing comes right out of the screen at you and then makes a GIF out of it.

This could be quite a time consuming challenge, unless you were a 3d fan.
I just went to youtube and put 3d movie in the search. Halfway down the results was Ramayana – The Epic I clicked through and skimmed through the movie. I usually use Fastesttube to grab youtube videos but this one was over an hour and a half long, so I used quicktime to record the screen to a movie file for a short section. This section I opened with MPEG Stramclip and trimed to a shorter section. This was exported to an image sequence, setting file type to jpeg, quality to 80% and 12 frames per second.
I got 60 images in a folder. I had exported at full size 1280 pixels wide so I used the sips program in the terminal to resize them (I could have done this in MPEG streamclip, in the export settings or later in Fireworks, but sips is a handy thing).

sips

To use sips you open a terminal window and type:
sips –resampleWidth 640
Then drag all the images from the finder into the terminal window. This lists the paths to these files after the command you just typed. It looks a bit of a mess but just hit return and all of the images are resized.

Fireworks

I open the first image in Fireworks to create a new document, then drag all of the other images onto that document window. This gave me a 60 layer doc. I clicked on one layer in the layers window and then cmd-A (Select all) .

Next I open the frames window and from the popup menu at the top choose Distribute to Frames this gives me a 60 frame animation. It is also about 3mb.

In the frames window I cmd-click on all the even frames and drag them to the bin. I select all the remaining frames and double click on the Frame Delay column, I double the delay to 14/100 and preview. Still a bit big.

I delete some of the initial frames as not a lot happens there. I repeat the removal of every second frame, but don’t delete the one (5) in the middle of the big move. This time I set the delay to 21/100, it looks ok so I set the delay to frame 5 and 6 (now out of 11) back to 14. I set the delay to frame 1 and 11 to 50/100 to get a bit of a pause.

A preview shows this looks not to bad so I have a look at the Optimise window. Mostly adjusting the number of colours. Exporting a gif each time to see what it looks like. (I really like the feature in fireworks that in a file save the warning dialog that you are going to replace a file has its default to OK to replace rather than cancel). I finally settle on 128 colours which give a 750k gif:

A couple of weeks ago I did a screencast of using fireworks for giffing, but missed a couple of important points. I will redo and publish in case other ds106ers would find Fireworks a useful giff tool.