Archive for the ‘Multimedia’ Category
How to Repair Corrupted Quicktime Files
I’ve come across corrupted QT files a number of times… don’t know why I finally decided to see if there was anything I could do about them… I’d always considered them a lost cause. Now there’s reason for hope!
A few weeks ago I participated in a three-camera shoot of a concert using two 7Ds and a 550D. When I tried to transfer the files to a computer, I was shocked to discover that two of the files were corrupt. Worse still, they happened in the same scene from two different cameras, which also happened to be the most important song of the concert. What horrible luck. I have been shooting with DSLRs for quite some time, and I have never had a corrupt file, much less two on the same night, at the same time, on two different cameras! I immediatly began to research how to fix them, but found the info on the internet to be a bit lacking. I hope this post will give someone with the same problem a slightly easier time. CONTINUED…
Here’s another possibility with a lot of other useful aps bundled in:
Pro Maintenance Tools (formerly FCS Maintenance Pack) is a utility pack designed to keep your Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro Mac running at optimal performance and help resolve problems when they arise.
The suite contains tools to repair corrupt QuickTime movies, locate corrupt clips within a timeline, diagnose crash logs, manage plugins, repair Final Cut Pro projects, manage autosaves, salvage movie data from corrupt files, and much more.
Show-stopping problems always seem to occur on a deadline – Pro Maintenance Tools is designed to rapidly diagnose and fix common issues, ensuring users get back on track as quickly as possible. With the Task Scheduler utility, maintenance tasks can even be scheduled to run in the background for convenience.
The Joy of Stats – making data visible (and fun)
Hans Rosling’s BBC program “The Joy of Stats” is a real “mind-opener” for non-fiction storytellers who want to engage audiences in the swirling world of data that surrounds us today.
Two chatbots talking to each other
The state of artificial intelligence has really evolved. This video features too “chatbots” conversing with each other after they each learned responses and conversation patterns from thousands of chats with people (you can try that out by clicking here.) The story was profiled on NPR, but ended abruptly when host Robert Siegel couldn’t produce a suitable response to the robot and was overcome with laughter.
Why is Lance Weiler the “dean” of Transmedia? Read on…
Transmedia: Entertainment reimagined
08 July 10Esther Robinson got off the R train in Astoria, Queens, and started walking to the American Museum of the Moving Image. It was a warm July evening in 2007 and Robinson, then 37 years old and a filmmaker, had come with a friend to see a movie, Head Trauma. As they approached the cinema, she noticed that the payphones were ringing — all four of them. “You forget payphones exist,” recalls Robinson. “That was the first thing I noticed.” She picked one up: all she could hear were fragments of a conversation, “sounds of madness”. Outside the cinema, a preacher in short sleeves and a tie was raving, handing out apocalyptic comic books to passers-by. He pressed one into Robinson’s hand as she hurried past, anxious to get to the film. The opening credits prompted the audience to send in a text to a given number. As the film rolled, they started receiving “weird text messages”; phones were ringing.
The film was about a drifter who inherits his mother’s house and starts to lose his mind. The next day, back in Brooklyn, Robinson found the comic in her handbag. On the back was written: “Do you want to play a game?”, along with an address, headtraumamovie.com. She typed it in to her computer. What she found was an online game that continued the story. “In the middle of it, the phone rang,” she says. She recognised the voice. It was the film’s “hooded villain”. He started asking questions: “Do you feel guilty? Have you ever lost consciousness?” Last, he asked Robinson to tell him her darkest secret. Her answer started playing back on a loop through her computer speakers. Robinson clicked on the exit box. She kept clicking, but nothing happened. Her phone buzzed with a text: “Where are you going? We’re not finished yet…” At that point, Robinson was dumped into a conference call with other cinema goers who had just gone through the same experience. “We were all like, ‘What the fuck was that?’ It was totally nuts.”
Unwittingly, she had just participated in an emerging form of mainstream entertainment. Lance Weiler, the creator of Head Trauma, had programmed software to make all the payphones on the block ring. The preacher was an actor, a lead in the feature. Based on the participants’ responses to the automated phone calls, audio and video launched on the desktop screen. The exit box was a fake. Clicking on it sent that last text. For Weiler, a 41-year-old New Yorker, the experience “demonstrated the fluidity of an audience. After the movie ended, it followed people home.”
Lance Weiler is bringing a transmedia education project to Montreal
Forty children and two teachers on different sides of the continent will work together this fall to produce stories and artwork about a robot. These artifacts will board a commercial rocket and, through an actual space launch, make their way to the International Space Station. The “dean” of transmedia is taking transmedia storytelling in some great (and local) directions.
Robot Heart Stories
This fall I’ll be releasing an exciting new participatory storytelling project focused on experiential education, storytelling and creative collaboration.
A robot has crash landed in Montreal and now must make her way to LA in order to find her space craft and return home. Two third grade classes in underprivileged neighborhoods, one in Montreal (French speaking) and the other in LA (English speaking) engage in an experiential learning project that utilizes math, science, history, geography and creative writing to place education directly in the hands of students. By using collaborative problem solving and creative writing the students help the Robot make her way across North America. The project concludes with an actual space launch! That’s right the robot along with copies of the students stories and artwork will board a commercial rocket that is headed to the space station later this fall.
E-junkie is a shortcut to selling online
In the last few weeks I’ve found the easiest way to start selling online is this low-cost service called e-junkie. After you set up your product in their website, they give you a link code. You just paste that into your site and you’re ready to sell. Pretty cool. More info if you click this link:
If you don’t know about Lance Weiler… you should!
Lance Weiler, visionary filmmaker and DIY distribution expert, gives an overview of his highly inventive and cutting-edge distribution strategy for second feature Head Trauma. Lance reveals how he used no cost online tools to create huge buzz around the movie and how he expanded the audience for his film through multimedia remix cinema events and Alternate Reality Games.
Coffee with your news? Beverage revenues the answer for pubmedia newsrooms?
Hyperlocal ‘news cafes’ are taking the Czech news scene by storm
By Teri Pecoskie
While newspapers scramble to figure out how to turn a profit in a quickly evolving industry, a small group of Czech publications might just hold the solution:
Hyperlocal news.
A year after the successful launch of a hyperlocal journalism project in the Czech Republic, Roman Gallo, director of media strategies for Amsterdam-based investment firm, PPF Group, told more than 200 delegates at the annual Canadian Newspaper Association conference Thursday how his company is bucking the trend.
Last June, PPF launched four pilot publications across diverse districts of the country. The ventures, called Nase Adresa or “our address” have three components: weekly newspapers distributed every Monday, interactive websites and news cafes.
While web and print platforms are typical fodder for Ink Beyond delegates, the idea of news cafes may be a bit less familiar.
The idea is to create a newsroom environment where as little separation as possible exists between those reporting the news and those consuming it. To break down that wall his company developed news cafes – newsrooms containing public cafes, where community members are encouraged to drop in, share their ideas and even contribute to the publication.
“We use these cafes as community centres,” he said. “There’s a much better understanding of community life for our editorial staff because there are no barriers.”
The cafes don’t just quench caffeine cravings, either. Each newsroom frequently holds community events like concerts or dance lessons, often attracting hundreds of people from the area. CTD…
The Next Big Thing – Traditional Television
This is a really important article for pubmedia types to consider. While online viewing is increasing dramatically, the tired old “legacy” media is still king. How do we balance the demands of the new with the obligations of the old?
In 4th quarter 2009, the time spent per week with online videos, social networks, blogs, and mobile videos combined was barely 3% as much time as was spent watching television on a home TV set.
Why Online Video Fails To Meet Its Lofty Expectations
Why Online Video Fails To Meet Its Lofty Expectations
With television advertising being a $70 billion market and total online advertising weighing in at $22.7 billion for 2009, you can’t help but wonder why online video advertising only represents a $1 billion market.
In fact, according to the IAB, video advertising grew from $734 million to $1.017 billion from 2008 to 2009 — or 38%. That’s not bad, but when you consider that total video consumption per month has soared from 10 billion videos in July 2008 to over 33 billion in December 2009 (or 230%), you wonder why the revenue growth hasn’t mimicked the viewership.
For sure, economics tend to trail consumer patterns. Moreover, the recession and advertising slump didn’t help either. And yes, the so-called experts might not be all-knowing either, after all.
I personally think there’s more to it than that.
The Genie is Out of the Bottle
In 2000, I worked at a search engine company. We gave away our search engines for free and sought to generate revenue via advertising. The Nasdaq crashed and took down the ad market, after which point we sought to collect licensing revenues for our technology. With the cat out of the bag, it was impossible to get people to pay for the product afterwards. Lesson learned: If you give something away for free, you can’t charge for it subsequently.CTD…
An argument that professional content will continue to dominate the audience’s attention and that the likely way it will be paid for is through ads. But will the ad revenue be enough to fund the programming we’re fond of? Maybe a reality show, but probably not Lost, or CSI.
How to subscribe to blog feeds using Google – easy step by step
If you’re like me, you probably feel like you’re at the back of a long technology train when it comes to things like “RSS feeds” or why so many blogs have that funny orange icon with the three marks in it.
I put this together after finally figuring out (and really benefiting from) setting up a feed reader for myself.
Your Mom’s Guide to Those Facebook Changes, and How to Block Them
A little “how-to” on how to shut down some of the weird stuff that FB is up to.
Facebook launched some fairly impressive new features and services at its recent f8 conference, but some of them were also more than just a little scary. Since a lot of what the company talked about was introduced in either “developer speak” — involving terms like API and JSON — or involved social networking jargon such as “social graph” and “activity map,” we thought it would be handy to break it down for those who aren’t as well versed in such things (maybe your mom, maybe your brother-in-law — maybe you). What do these changes mean? And what should you do if you don’t like the prospect of automatically sharing your activity with everyone you know on Facebook? ctd…
