/home/jeff/blog » Video and Animation

Improved Film Noir rendering

jeff — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 12:59:37 +0000

Thanks to my brother, who is much better with gimp-perl than I am, there’s a vastly improved version of the original RenderFilmNoir.pl script, available here.

If you get a chance (shameless plug), please patronize his Flickr page, as we does work very hard at being a great photographer …

Linux support for ADS DVD Xpress DX2

jeff — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 20:42:13 +0000

I take no credit for this at all, but the maintainer of the go7007 linux driver recently added support for the ADS DVD Xpress DX2 (which until recently was conveniently available at Walmart and other retail stores) after I took a picture of the board and asked him *very* nicely. If you get any kind of mileage out of it and decide that you really *have* to send someone money, please send it to him. (To avoid spam, check out the name of the package maintainer.)

I’m posting a copy of this as a kind of public service, since I haven’t seen any upstream releases in a while. Disclaimer that your mileage may very. I have had great luck with this, and have used it to preserve old VHS content … I would also recommend using the ffrecord tool, since it has better av sync than the included tools.

Original driver : http://oss.wischip.com/wis-go7007-linux-0.9.8.tar.bz2
Patch : http://jeff.ourexchange.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/wis-go7007-linux-20061021diff.gz
Site for device : www.adstech.com

UPDATE: As of March 2010, I have posted an updated patch against a newer kernel, available here.

First stopmotion test

jeff — Mon, 21 May 2007 08:17:10 +0000

Our first few stopmotion animation tests were successful. As per everything else we do, everything was done with Linux and freely available opensource software. In this case, gphoto2, imagemagick and mplayer (with ffmpeg thrown in for the .flv conversion for Gootube.

We used my Canon 350D mounted on a tripod with Adam’s fixed focal length 135mm lens, with fixed lighting and a green background for eventual chromakeying. There was a quick hack involved getting gphoto2 to immediately spit out a photo, instead of trying to logically process it, which was solved with:

gphoto2 --set-config "Capture size class"="Full Image" --capture-preview --filename "${OUTPUTFILE}" --force-overwrite

(If you choose to try this, remember that whatever format you set your camera to will be the format that it comes out in, so don’t set it to RAW unless you really don’t value your time and want to have to convert it using dcraw.)

The first video can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp5t_IRIf58.