Monthly Archive for June, 2007

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The Barcamp video saga: background

Published on June 12, 2007 in audio-video, barcamp, nokia and scripting. Closed

I’ve had a number of requests from attendees of the Barcamp Brussels 3 event. “The speeches were recorded on Nokia N95 phones, right? How come we haven’t seen them yet on Youtube/Google? What’s taking so long?” Well, here’s the answer.

The reason is purely me. I received the N95 video’s (3DVDs, about 12GB in total) from Fré quite soon after the event. At the time, I was ‘just going to throw them’ on Google Video, maybe with a title image before the movie that included a Barcamp and Nokia logo. How hard would that be, right? Well, slightly harder than I thought. The files were huge, so had to be transcoded to something smaller, there were too many files to do things manually, so I needed to start scripting, and the tools I used for it, ImageMagick and FFMPEG are powerful but tricky. That combined with my tango activities, a holiday, a girlfriend abroad and the non-negligeable fact of having a day-time job made for this delay of over a month. Mea culpa. But the wait is over.

These are the first videos. Feedback on video, sound and other details are welcome! I will then proceed with the conversion of the other ones. I will also do a post on what tricks I used to do the video rendering of the title, the transcoding and the merging of video files.

Jeroen De Cock – “Online communities & offline events”

Will Moffat – “Introduction to Freebase”

The godfather of disco

Published on June 11, 2007 in music. 2 Comments

I got an email from Gene Graham, who has just finished his first full-length documentary on the early days of Disco. Me being a fan of house and disco music, that is one movie I’d like to see!

The Godfather of Disco is a feature-length documentary based on Mel Cheren’s powerful autobiography: My Life and the Paradise Garage: Keep On Dancin’. Through a series of interviews with a who’s who of the dance music community, The Godfather of Disco follows the arc of Mel’s life to examine the early 70s musical and cultural currents that gave birth to disco; West End Records‘ contribution to that scene; and the rise of the Paradise Garage.
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This documentary not only celebrates the foundation of the dance music scene, it contains interviews with some of todays biggest industry players like Louis Vega, Kevin Hedge, Tony Humphries, Louis Benedetti, Barbara Tucker, and Deli G to name a few.

Gene has already won the Emerging Filmmaker Award at the 2007 Minneapolis/St.Paul Internationla Film Festival. I wish him all the best for the other festivals where the movie will be shown, and I hope I get to see it eventually!