skytrain

UPDATE: also on flickr at http://flickr.com/photos/roland/3208339940/

60 Skyte (aka "SkyTrain") photos per second Video with cool Derek Miller Soundtrack, "In Phase One". Thanks Derek!

Pinging Ian Bell, John Biehler (use the new Korg Beat box John :-) ) and Ryan Dempsey for alternate 30 second soundtracks!

Let's say you had 1796 photos in a directory from flickr and wanted to animate them in Shoes which is built on Ruby, how would you do it?

Here's how I did it (forgive my bad code, it was just a fun 1st project and of course you could do this in QuickTime Pro with no programming but that wouldn't be as much "fun" :-) !):

Shoes.app {<br /> flow :width => 1024, :height => 768, :margin => 50 do</p> <p>Dir.chdir("/a directory with 1796 skyte photos")<br /> skyte_pics = Dir.glob("*.jpg")<br /> size = skyte_pics.size<br /> @skyte = image skyte_pics[0]<br /> animate(200) do |frame|<br /> close if frame > size<br /> @skyte.path = skyte_pics[frame]<br /> end<br /> end<br /> }

[I know my blog is NOT usually about politics, but Paul is worth a brief digression!]

If I lived in Surrey, I'd be voting for Paul today on the basis of his transport policy alone! Not only that my friend Paul is an articulate, passionate man who knows his stuff and I've been lucky enough to meet him at TransitCamp, Transport Hero Camp and many other transit related events in the city.

QUOTE [From Civic Elections 2008, Surrey Council Candidate Paul Hillsdon » Vancouver Blog Miss 604 by Rebecca Bollwitt]

One thing that Paul is passionate about is transit and he’s outlined an ambitious yet extremely responsible and practical proposal with his Transit for Tomorrow plan.

“The detailed plan is quite simple: shift $1.1 billion provincial dollars from 6 km of SkyTrain in Surrey to funding a 43.4 km light rail network across Surrey and Langley.”

In fact, transportation is one of the main reasons Paul has even considered a career in politics. “It was a matter of timing,” he noted “I decided to run and bring this to everyone’s attention.” However he’s also branching out and you’ll find his name in two places on your ballot this Saturday.

END QUOTE

The KRZR K1 video is decent CIF quality but it's two year old techology. The Nokia N70 videos were just as good quality back in 2005.

Check it out and judge for yourself:

KRZR K1 video of the Skyte (blip.tv bug, I rotated the original but the flash video below is not rotated: original KRZR K1 Skyte 3GP Video with correct orientation)

Not bad CIF quality. Not great either. About as good as the N70 which is now 2 years old. Not nearly as good as an Nokia N93

Compare and contrast with Richard's Nokia N70 video of the Skyte

UPDATE:It looks like blip.tv took the FLV that the Brightcove Publishpod encoded out of my MP4 (if the video below doesn't work, go to my blip.tv post to play it!):

Click To Play

The first video I did with my N93 was a 5 minute one of the SkyTrain (of course!). It's an awesome video but its 100MB (since I did it at 640x480 30fps MPEG4). I tried to upload it to Brightcove (since I know it won't work on blip.tv, my fav service; file is too big) but it didn't work. The Brightcove Mac OS X uploader, Brightcove Publishpod, successfully encoded the MP4 to flash video aka FLV but the sites says it's processing (and it's been saying that for 24 hours!).

I guess I'll try Google Video. I did search the Brightcove knowledge base and FAQs but found no documentation for video file upload limits or that MPEG4 (and yes I know there are many variants of MPEG4 and perhaps Nokia's is not supported) was not supported. Ah well early days. Brightcove sounds great (Robin Good's Brightcove review makes it sound wonderful) but I couldn't get it to work.