Not Enough Recursion

I was having a look at The Recursive Camera — MISSION: DS106

You’ll need a camera. And you’ll need another frame. Hold the frame in one hand (don’t let you hand cover the side facing you), and take a picture with it in the center of the image. Then step backwards and take another photo just like it. Repeat until you are tired of making art. Nest the images in Prezi inside the frame of the next picture. Now make a zoom path. Record it with video capture software. Add some video editing (you’ll have to use multiple stacks(only so much zoom in Prezi atm) and splice the ends of them together to make it seem contiguous), and you have a trippy.

I though I’d give this a short test before I tried to make a whole movie.
I got it a bit wrong, I didn’t realise that the camera should show the last taken photo. I decided to see what I could do.

  1. Open fireworks and opened the most zoomed photo.
  2. Added the next photo as a layer.
  3. Cut out the screen
  4. Resized the first layer to fit into the cutout
  5. grouped the two layers
  6. Brought in the next image and repeated the process

I then tried to take the photo into imovie, and use the ken burns effect to zoom in or out. This did not work as I could not zoom in enough.
So I opened up my old copy of Flash 5 and put the image on the time line, I made this frame a keyframe and added another keyframe at fame 240 on the timeline. I scaled te start and end to get a zoo,
This seemed to work ok, so I though to try exporting to a quicktime movie, another fail. I ended up exporting to an image sequence, 241 images. This I opened in QuickTime and saved to a 1.1 mb m4v:

So although I’ve not managed VideoAssignments546 yet (so have not tagged this post) I’ve had a bit of fun, dusted off Flash for the first time in years, and have perhaps a better idea of how to go about this assignment. I’ve also added the sublimevideo plugin this blog.

A short excursion into code

A few posts/couple of weeks ago I installed the oEmbed HTML5 audio plugin here. This allows me to upload mp3s and other audio files, the plugin takes care of presenting the audio using the html5 audio tag with a flash fallback for browsers that do not support the type of audio: This plugin converts URLs to audio files (MP3, OGG, WAV) into HTML5 audio with Flash-based player backup
This seemed to do the trick. This morning I noticed that none of my audio was showing in FireFox. I right clicked on the space where I expected to see the player and saw the the Flash file was not loaded.

Looking at the source it seems that it is using a swf file belonging to google:
http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf

and that is Error 400 Not found.

Using Cyberduck I had a look at the plugin’s code.  Part of this check to see if the file is an MP3 and the browser FireFox. firefox does not support playing of MP3 via the audio tag so the plugin uses the google Flash file, which is of course missing.
$embed = sprintf( '<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="audioUrl=%1$s" src="http://www.google.com/reader/ui/3523697345-audio-player.swf" width="400" height="27" quality="best"></embed>', esc_attr($matches[0]) );
On my ‘real’ blog I usually embed audio using dewplayer so I decided to edit the plugin to use that.

I uploaded the dewplayer.swf file to the top level of my site and changed the code, I need to change the name of the var from audioUrl to mp3 and the url of the google swf to /dewplayer.swf.

If you are viewing any of my audio posts in fireFox you should hopefully be less puzzled.

Update: the plugin has been updated: WordPress › oEmbed HTML5 audio « WordPress Plugins

1.1

  • Google removed their MP3 Flash player from their website, so we include it in the plugin itself now (it’s still the same player)

Here

Poetry Reading — MISSION: DS106 Poetry is meant to be read aloud. Select a poem – it can be a personal favorite or one you find randomly – and read it aloud. Explain in your recording why you chose that poem.

Lots of S sounds I am afraid.

I am reading a poem by my daughter about hillwalking.
An Caisteal and Beinn a'Chroin

DS106 Confusion

Create a ds106 radio bumper Now that we have a #ds106 radio up and running creating a 15 to 30 second bumper for the station.

This one is pretty simple. Short segment from Gnawa Diffusion‘s Frik Fashion.
I’ve enjoyed Gnawa Diffusion for a few years while hardly understanding a word of their lyrics (in Arabic, Tamazight, French and English). A fair metaphor for DS106.
Nothing fancy. Just the start of the track and a few words. A few minutes with GarageBand. I regularly do some quick edits of recorded audio and normally use audacity followed by Levitator for that but prefer GarageBand now for recording and simple ducking.

Bobbie and Me

SongStory — MISSION: DS106

My memories fade over time, but sometimes there is a song that can take me back to a place that revives the memories of my past. The song allows me to remember things I thought I had forgotten. So, for an assignment, pick a song that does that for you, and tell some stories about what you remember…  …In the assignment you might want to mix your voice over parts of the song, give an intro, tell the story first and play the song, break up the song with the story – lots of options. But nothing too long – my attention span is short. These would be great to post on ds106 radio.

About two minutes, hopefully not too long.

bobbie and me