I have been getting into video more and more lately. I have a great little mini-dv cam that meets all of my needs at this moment. The problem that I have found has been the ability to keep my camera steady when I try to move with a shot or even pan slowly. This is typically why most camera users don’t want to move around while shooting. You will often see shoot …stop …move location …shoot. Cutting down on the need for those vomit inducing home videos that we are used to seeing.

So I started to look around for a solution for the problem and I ran across a DIY solution that is very effective and has made a definite difference in the quality of my video. Inventor and amateur video buff Johnny Chung Lee and his site “$14 Steady Cam – The poor mans steady cam” has the solution. He has a very detailed description of how to build this and some of the things you can do with them.

Here is my Steady Cam

Under the Camera View

And the bottom

I have found that this has made a hand addition to the shooting tools that I have now. This really allows for some great action shots and would be a must have for anyone creating their own movies … I hope that this is helpful.

Cheers,

Scott

FYI I managed to build the whole thing for around $20. Not including the cool paint job and old bike grip. I also used 12″ pipe sections versus the 10″ recommended. I did this on the basis that I am fairly tall and that there was no 10″ pipe available at the store.

Posted in Video ~ 4 Comments
Written by Scott

So I signed up for TokBox. A really cool product that allows you to stream live video to anyone. It is fully embeddable in any application. I had it in here but there seems to be something quirky happening when I put it in Wordpress …..going to update the wordpress and see if that helps.

If you had stopped by last night or earlier this morning you would have seen this as a live feed. I am going to see how I can get this to work. Check out the company site and the TokBox blog.

So until I get this up and running you will have to visit me on my site at TokBox. This really removes the barrier for someone to add video chat to an application. This has been designed to be dropped into any application, webpage or profile ……very interesting.

I had to create this new page on the blog to house my tokbox feed. To check this out click HERE … this will have to do until we look at things on the wordpress side a bit harder …. and maybe change things up a bit on how the blog is displayed.

I see a lot of interesting applications for this. I think that they have the right idea by putting service out there and making it very easy for people yo use this where ever they are. should be interesting to see how we can play with this and do

Ping me.

Cheers

Scott

Posted in ConceptShare, Video ~ No Comments
Written by Scott

 

Lots of people have been calling and emailing wanting to know more about how we made our demo video and where they can get the music etc, so I thought I would answer some of the questions here. The actual production happend pretty quick. After a few takes of each screen capture movie they took only about the time that they ran which is usually no more than second 5-15 seconds.

The Video: 

The screen video grabs can be done quickly with any number of screen capture utilities. The popular ones are Camtasia Studio and Scott uses Snapz Pro for OSX. These popular ones give you alot of options for exporting (flash, quicktime avi) which give you the most amout of flexability in editing.

Once the videos are captured, they are then imported into Adobe After Effects for assembly in a timeline format and I can create the text with some effects and transistions and also add some other types of media quite quickly. Alot of this can be done with online services lately so check some of those out. We will probably do more of a ‘talking head’ tour type demo in the future. Oh, and after the video was published, I switched my PC to Vista and the source that was on my desktop got lost. So yes, we know there is an error or two that most people won’t pick up on, but not much I can do now. Lesson learned about backing up everything. Expect a new demo video shortly with some of the new features we have and are releasing.

The Music: 

For the music overlay we wanted something original, catchy yet not take away from the visual content. It would also be nice if it could fit the tempo of the video that was already being assembled. Oh ya and also if it could done the next day that would be great too. For that I enlisted the help of my brother Ben who records under the name Ben Cooper, who is a professional musician, singer songwriter and composer. Where I’d like to be in the digital media/designer world he is in the musical word. I sent an early composition of the video to Ben at 9PM on Monday and he had this musical piece back by 11:50PM the same nite. Simply amazing! Very little direction was given. When you have a extremely talented, creative musician at your disposal you just learn to let them do their thing. For anyone that is not related to Ben, he’s available to do contract work for commercials, movies, demos etc at fairly competitive rates.

Contact him if you are interested bencooper37 at hotmail. Also checkout his Myspace page to hear some of his original vocal music. You won’t be dissappointed.

http://www.myspace.com/bencooperlive

Have fun, 

Bernie

Posted in ConceptShare, Technology, Video ~ No Comments
Written by Bernie

We are showing a first look at the video/audio interface we will be opening up shortly. Basically you will have all the functionaility currently available for commenting on visual including the newly added Text Tool, except they will per frame.

Comments can actually fade up a bit early and show for an adjustable length of time. Adjust the handles on either side of the green bar on the timeline to indicate the time the comment shows during play back. Comments will show up as little flags so you can choose navigate the comments in the sequence they appear in the video.

Audio review will work pretty much the same as video, however instead of the video frames you will be able to point out and illustrate on a visual waveform. This way  you can point out audio ‘pops’ and crackles to adjust for example.

This should be rolling out shortly over the next few weeks with Adobe Flash SWF import to follow soon after that.

Have fun!

Bernie

Posted in ConceptShare, Technology, Tools, Video ~ 5 Comments
Written by Bernie