Monthly Archive for February, 2008

Apple trailers: when 720p isn’t always 720p

Published on February 28, 2008 in Apple and audio-video. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

One of the best places to look for high-quality movie trailers is Apple Trailers. They have lots of bandwidth and a large selection (altough they don’t have e.g. the new Indiana Jones 4 trailers, which are exclusively on Yahoo HD trailers).

Apple typically offers its HD trailers in 3 formats: 480p, 720p and 1080p. The “p” stands for “progressive” i.e. not interlaced, every frame is a full picture instead of only the odd or even lines. The 480 in “480p” stands for the number of lines in the image. 480p is roughly equivalent with DVD quality, 720p is “HD Ready” and 1080p is “Full HD”.

But let me give a concrete example of the resolution of 3 trailers:
resolutions of Apple Trailers
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Bob Flora is a spammer

Published on February 22, 2008 in spam. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Linkeroever spam

Dear Mr. Bob Flora,

you are probably a collaborator for the “Linkeroever” movie. I see you were a sound designer for “Dju!” by Daniel Lamberts, who’s a friend of mine. So you’re connected to the Belgian cinema scene. But might I point out that we have never talked or met in person. So when you send me an email like the one above, that is not only impolite, it is also spam.

First off: didn’t your mom teach you proper manners? You don’t address me, you don’t introduce yourself, you just start shouting “Check it, rate it, forward it!”. Do you think that exclamation mark is gonna convince me? Never heard of the word ‘please’?

Secondly: where did you get my email address? I sure never gave it to you. I’m gonna reply to you to request to be removed from your spamming list, and it would be a good idea to comply with that.

Finally: do you think you’re doing Linkeroever or Pieter Van Hees a favour with stunts like that? I’m not linking to the movie or the Youtube trailer, as you might notice. That’s because you pissed me off. Your marketing skills are severely underdeveloped. Do something about it, or stick to designing sound.

 Regards,

Peter

Screenshots of a DVD with ‘ffmpeg’

Published on February 8, 2008 in audio-video and scripting. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

I’ve been playing around a lot with video conversion lately and one of the tools I use often is the Swiss armyknife for video manipulation ‘ffmpeg‘. It does format conversion (MPEG1/2/4, Quicktime, AVI …) , rescaling, recompressing, frame rate conversion … almost everything. It exists for all flavours of Linux/Unix, and also for Windows.

To give you an example: this is a script I wrote to extract screenshots of DVD files, straight from the disk.

1) the naive version
ffmpeg -i [input file] -r .05 -y [output name]%%03d.png
This does indeed extract a PNG image every 20 seconds (framerate = 0.05), but it does not take into account that the DVD image material is stored anamorphically. What you get is this:
V4Vendetta_1_720.012
Natalie Portman looks really thin, but that’s because the image dimensions (720×576 pixels – PAL standard) are for 5:4 aspect ratio, and whereas the actual image should be 16:9. So let’s make the image wider while keeping it the same height.

2) Rescale to 16:9
ffmpeg -i [input file] -r .05 -s 1024x576 -y [output name]%%03d.png
The result looks better:
V4Vendetta_1_1024.012

As you see, there are still black borders on the top and bottom. This is because a feature film is made in ’scope’ format, with an aspect ratio of 2.39 instead of 1.78 (the decimal equivalent of 16/9). So, while the full width of the image is used, only 428 pixels of the height are actually in use. Let’s crop those black borders off.

3) Crop black borders away
ffmpeg -i [input file] -r .05 -croptop 74 -cropbottom 74 -s 1024x428 -y [output name]%%03d.png

V for Vendetta: cropped

4) old 4:3 movies
The older movies used a 4:3 aspect ratio, so when you extract them as 16:9 they look like a weight feel on them:
MammaRoma_1024
In those cases, you can use the ‘naive’ version above, which will give you:
MammaRoma_720

Here also, the actual 4:3 image is ‘letterboxed’ to the 5:4 DVD image.

Continue reading ‘Screenshots of a DVD with ‘ffmpeg’’

New lens for my Canon camera

Published on February 2, 2008 in photography. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

My current favourite lens for my Canon 350D is the Canon EF 50mm F 1.8 II ø 52 mm. I really like the wide aperture (f/1.8) that allows me to take pictures without flash in dark environments like tango events, and the small depth-of-field that brings out the subject really nice. Plus, it was only 100€ when I bought it, and now it’s even at 84€.

Maryline-Vincent-Roma (5)

But a 50mm lens in a small digital SLR is equivalent to a 75mm, and sometimes that’s too much. I have to step 2m backwards to get a portrait of two persons (people ask this, you know), and even further if I want a picture of a tango couple with their feet included as well as their head. So I’d like to find a second lens with at least the same aperture, and with a lower focal distance, at a non-ridiculous price (below 400€).

Candidates seem to be:

Does anyone have experience with these lenses? Any suggestions?