This is a quick test
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Prisoner106 Supercuts by numbers
In a continued attempted to find meaning in Prisoner106 I am continuing to analyse the first reel of the surveillance footage by various means.
I had previously downloaded Videogrep a tool for making supercut videos from video and subtitle (.srt) files.
First I had to find a subtitle file for the video. As usual with these things google is helpful. Adding the date of the video, 1967 and eng to the search helped. I could not find one for the dvds I had acquired, but got one for a cd set.
The first run through of the tool
python videogrep.py --input ~/Desktop/the\ prisoner/the-prisoner-ep-1.m4v --search 'six'
Threw a bunch of errors that I could not understand. I headed over to the other confusing village that is github to look for clues. I did a bit of googling too. Eventually I decided just to download a fork of videogrep,habi/videogrep and see what happens. As I had all the dependencies installed I just ran the new version. This did give me a video, but confusingly nothing matched, the timings were out.
It looks like the STR file I had did not match the DVD. I’ve had this problem in the past and usually failed to fix it. But I gave Subtitle ReSync Basic from squixz.com a try and seemed to match things up.
Back to videogrep which ran through its ‘stuff’ and spat out a video, it did seem a bit short so I looked at the output:
[+] Search term 'six' was found in 3 places. [+] Creating clips. 547.155 to 549.109: Woman Is your number six? 1429.498 to 1432.741: Please go to number six - adjustment is needed. 2195.285 to 2198.724: - Yours is six. - I'm not a number. I'm a person.
Opening the srt file in a text editor I just replaced all the occurrences of Six with six, I should have used the regEx for six or Six or case insensitive, which I’ve done before but I’ve forgotten how and my Internet connection is currently very slow.
I figured out the case for the second supercut:
python videogrep.py --input /Users/john/Desktop/the\ prisoner\ rips/the-prisoner-ep-1.srt --search 'number|Number' -p 1000 the -p flag pads the segments (in miliseconds)
I don’t think my SRT files is properly matched with the video, hopefully I’ll be able to find or make a better match from some subsequent reels.
Meanwhile some image analysis is getting results into the mind of number 6:
The Village 106
I’ve resigned myself to Prisoner106, this looks so far like an interesting twitter account and lovely webpage. No schedule or anything else I’ve seen which give us free range to explore the village.
I decided to go all in for £17.90!
Given I want to watch this on my commute I am afraid the first thing I did was rip a few episodes to m4v files. HandBrake: Open Source Video Transcoder works well, it prompted for another install to remove drm and I just followed through with that. I don’t feel that makes me a bad person.
After watching the first episode I was compelled to knock out a few quick gifs.
I used the usual method, open in MPEG Streamclip. Set in and out points. Press cmd-t. Export to image sequence. Open the first image in FireWorks (CS3). Drag the other files into the FW window. Open he Frames window. Select all the layers and choose distribute to frames from the frames window menu. Mess around. Export to MP3.
Taking Command
I’ve started exploring episode 1 from the terminal, relying and developing techniques that I’ve posted about here. I am getting quite interested in the fun that can be had through random and unexpected results and the ability to generate different files & views at a cracking rate. Instead of working hard to produce a single artifact this will allow me t oexplore the
A lot of this relies on various command line applications that I’ve installed over the years in a fairly messy way. I tend to try things that, if they go wrong, leave me googling like mad.
I am just going to note what I’ve played with so far and not give details of installing the software for now. Much can be installed on a mac via Homebrew.
FFmpeg
A complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.
First I split the video into images (How to extract images from a Video using FFmpeg | Linuxers helped)
ffmpeg -i the-prisoner-ep-1.m4v -r 1 -f image2 images/image-%4d.jpg
I now have 2938 jpgs to play with.
Recently I’ve been interested in averaging images so into the image folder, make an average folder and:
ls *.jpg | xargs -n 10 sh -c 'convert "$0" "$@" -average average/"$0" '
Which gives me 294 files, each an average of 10 of the original jpgs.
I googled most of that code, the average command is part of ImageMagick.
To my mind these look rather lovely losing the clean 60’s lines of the original for something rather more dreamy and dark:
Duplicate the folder move, in the terminal into the new one and:
sips --resampleWidth 240 *.jpg Gives some thumbnails:
Averages which I’ll perhaps figure out what to do with later.
Next up I moved on to supercuts and gifboard, but I’ll leave the reporting of that to another post.
Update: adding tags AnimatedGIFAssignments & AnimatedGIFAssignments1744 for the new ds106 Assignments: Animating #Prisoner106
The Postman’s Noir Cat
Not got much time for typing. Just finished working through this week’s demands. Strange things afoot. I am no sure how seriously to take cats in a story. But you have to do some research in this business no matter how strange. I’m not making the right connections but some things are aligning up….
And this is what I am hearing:
The audio was knocked up in a few minutes, Paul has a nice voice. The technique I used will be in a post tomorrow or the day after. I am planning a supercut tutorial too.
Schooling the Wire
Three SuperCut videos from season 4 of the wire on the words, school, schooled and schooling after a prompt from Jim Groom. Made with videogrep.py
@johnjohnston Could you grep supercut “school” in Season 4 of #TheWire and maybe “schooled” separately to see the distinction #wire106
— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) November 15, 2014
I was surprised at how few times schooled or schooling were used.
Supercut videos are a nice way of looking at this sort of stuff but you can get a quick idea of the use of words by finding them in the subtitle (.srt) files.
For example I downloaded season 4 subtitles from The Wire S04(Season 4) english subtitles – TVsubs.net. This gives several versions of the files. I found before that the DVDRip.TOPAZ.en.srt ones work best for me. I’ve put them in the same folder as my wire episodes and renamed them to match these files.
I open the terminal and type cd then drag the folder from the finder into the terminal window and hit return. This moves me into the folder.
I then grep -e 'school ' *.srt which outputs a list of the episodes with school in the subtitles and the line:
The Wire Season 4 Episode 01 - Boys of Summer.srt:for some back-to-school stuff.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 01 - Boys of Summer.srt:back-to-school stuff for?
The Wire Season 4 Episode 01 - Boys of Summer.srt:When school start, I'll be selling it
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:for your school clothes,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:your school shit, man.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:I can't wait until school starts.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:of school coming up, right?
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:- Y'all need school clothes and shit?
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:to buy school clothes with.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:to school some.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 02 - Soft Eyes.srt:to that school lookin'
The Wire Season 4 Episode 03 - Home Rooms.srt:do you want to go to school for?
The Wire Season 4 Episode 04 - Refugees.srt:For school or out the business,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 04 - Refugees.srt:to start out a school year,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 04 - Refugees.srt:school on Friday,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 04 - Refugees.srt:school you, brother.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 05 - Alliances.srt:ain't in school tomorrow morning,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 05 - Alliances.srt:take him in, school him,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 06 - Margin of Error.srt:- High-school biology.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 06 - Margin of Error.srt:Ain't no school today.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 07 - Unto Others.srt:Does the school have
The Wire Season 4 Episode 07 - Unto Others.srt:creep out of school after lunch.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 07 - Unto Others.srt:He's got to be at school in the morning.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 08 - Corner Boys.srt:the word around school is
The Wire Season 4 Episode 08 - Corner Boys.srt:the school or not.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 09 - Know Your Place.srt:after school lets out--
The Wire Season 4 Episode 09 - Know Your Place.srt:to the school social worker.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 10 - Misgivings.srt:I'll get the school police.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 10 - Misgivings.srt:of the school year,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 11 - A New Day.srt:front of the school today,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 11 - A New Day.srt:at school 45,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 11 - A New Day.srt:school 52, and school 58
The Wire Season 4 Episode 11 - A New Day.srt:- The school audit.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:when I look at the school budget.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:for the school budget.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:with the school board itself.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:is on the school system.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:As president of the school board,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:not the school board,
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:- to go see the school superintendent.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:the Baltimore school system's
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:middle school no more.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:no school closures.
The Wire Season 4 Episode 12 - That's Got His Own.srt:over the school board
The Wire Season 4 Episode 13 - Final Grades.srt:It knocks the school deficit
The Wire Season 4 Episode 13 - Final Grades.srt:your school system."
The Wire Season 4 Episode 13 - Final Grades.srt:I went to school here
Where as schooling:
01 - Boys of Summer.srt:So... he was schooling me.
07 - Unto Others.srt:Don't be schooling us now.
08 - Corner Boys.srt:we schooling them.
Only has 3 mentions as does schooled
01 - Boys of Summer.srt:You laughing. I've been schooled, dog.
09 - Know Your Place.srt:You schooled me good.
10 - Misgivings.srt:- You schooled them well.
If you just want the number of mentions:
grep -e 'school ' *.srt | wc -l
outputs 45.
I am sure lots of ds106 students can thing of some other useful and interesting ways to use this.