Here’s something I like to do. Listen to different artists perform the same song. That side by side listening always reveals new things about the song and the artists. Seth Roberts likes to talk about the Willat Effect, where side by side comparisons help to make you a connoisseur.
Pearl Jam Live Electric and Eddie Vedder Solo Acoustic – I’ve always liked Pearl Jam, even though I haven’t thought of myself as a fan the way I did with Nirvana, but Eddie Vedder is growing tremendously as an artist. This ain’t the same guy who used to stand in front of the mic with his arms wrapped around himself. He’s learned to play guitar and he’s confident as hell. His soundtrack for “Into the Wild” is what finally made me a fan.
I’m all the time needing to paste text sans formatting. I’ve been using tricks like pasting into the browser’s search box and then copying and pasting that, or pasting into Notepad to clear the formatting.
Turns out you can use Control-Shift-V to paste text without formatting. I probably should have known that a long time ago, but better late than never.
Discovered (where else?) in a Cracked article. Their motto should be “Cracked – It’s like Wikipedia, but with even more penis jokes.”
I’ve watched Beck’s video for Loser dozens of times. In terms of production you can point to a dozen ways it’s a crappy video. (Color grading? What’s that?!) The whole thing was edited on an Amiga Video Toaster and shot on what looks like a budget of ten bucks.(*)
This is one of those videos I look at and think, sheeeit, I could do that. All you need is thriftstore clothes, a stray dog, fake blood, lots of lighter fluid, a homeless guy, and a cheerleader in a graveyard dancing with her friend who peed in her pants. I’d skip the mimes and the kung fu dude in the trailer park. The only challenges would be scoring a casket and not getting arrested.
And I’m not even criticizing the video. I like it. It’s inspirational – it shows me that something I like that’s within my grasp. In the digital age all of this creative stuff is way easier and way cheaper.
While reading Cracked, the only news source anyone needs, I ran across this:
The 1980s were a strange time for established rock musicians. For a while there, it seemed like any band that didn’t employ a keytar player was destined to fail.
What’s weird is that I had never heard of a keytar, but I instantly knew what they were talking about. I won’t spoil it, so check Wikipedia.
Well this is something. In this video you see a close-up of a guy’s mouth saying “ba ba ba.” Then they change the video to the guy mouthing “fa fa fa,” but you still hear the audio of “ba ba ba.” Your eyes trick you into hearing “fa fa fa” even though that isn’t what he’s saying. As soon as you look away from the video you’ll hear “ba ba ba.” It totally worked on me. Dang.
The McGurk effect is a perceptual phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. The illusion occurs when the auditory component of one sound is paired with the visual component of another sound, leading to the perception of a third sound.[1] The visual information a person gets from seeing a person speak changes the way they hear the sound.[2] People who are used to watching dubbed movies may be among people who are not susceptible to the McGurk effect because they have, to some extent, learned to ignore the information they are getting from the mouths of the “speakers”.[3] If a person is getting poor quality auditory information but good quality visual information, they may be more likely to experience the McGurk effect.[4] Integration abilities for audio and visual information may also influence whether a person will experience the effect. People who are better at sensory integration have been shown to be more susceptible to the effect.[2] Many people are affected differently by the McGurk effect based on many factors, brain damages or disorders.
Hat tip to the only peer-reviewed journal of funny, Cracked.
I’ve used the noise reduction in Adobe Lightroom and liked it, but I never realized how much it could do. I captured some freeze frames from a video I’m working on. It’s concert video and the lighting was dark, so I used ISO 2000 to get the video bright enough. I thought the pictures looked OK, but decided to clean them up a little in Lightroom.
I imported the .BMP freeze frames into Google Picasa, then exported them as JPGs. Those are the before pictures. I imported those JPGs into Lightroom and ran some basic image tuning (which is why the exposures are a little different) and then reduced the noise.
Click any picture to embiggen. The bigger they get the more obvious the difference is. The difference is also more obvious in the better-exposed areas, like the guitar and the shirt.
Before Noise Reduction in Lightroom
After Noise Reduction in Lightroom
Before Noise Reduction in Lightroom
After Noise Reduction in Lightroom
Before Noise Reduction in Lightroom
After Noise Reduction in Lightroom
I’m amazed enough that I’m shopping for noise reduction software for video editing.
P.S. I also realized I like the more-exposed (brighter) version, so I’ve increased the exposure in the video a bit.
Laurel Falls in the Smokies, during the camping trip to Elkmon to see the synchronized fireflies
At sibling class getting ready for little brother Charlie
This year you got a baby brother. At first you were too cool about it. Before he was born you called him eBaby and said you were going to sell him on eBay.
It took about four hours with a real live baby brother in the house for you to to change your tune and fall in love with him. Now you’re crazy about Charlie. You and your sister fight over who gets to play with him and you give him a kiss before you leave for school every morning. You act tough, kid, but you’re a big softy.
The Blue Car
Here’s a story I told you that you liked about the blue car. We were talking about how I’m going to buy another car next year and you asked how old the blue car is. I told you I’ve had the blue car since right before you were born and you’re the reason I have it.
Before the blue car I had another car, a black Toyota Camry. It had lots of problems for some reason, even though it was only three years old when I bought it. It had brake problems and radiator problems and windshield wiper problems. And then the biggie - it had engine problems. I paid the dealership $900 to get those problems fixed. Then a little while later – a month, I think – on Halloween night the engine blew up. It threw a rod into the block. The car was worth more running than not, so I paid $2,000 to get the engine replaced.
Then the next spring I realized the air conditioner had quit working. I drove it for another year with no air conditioning, because it’s expensive to replace a car’s air conditioner and I didn’t want to spend any more money on that car.
Your mother and I wanted to start a family and we were very happy when she got pregnant with you. She was going to be pregnant all summer long and have you in late September. Pregnant women get hot easily. We had to have a car with air conditioning for your mother, so I sold the black car and bought the blue car from your grandmother Dorothy. She had stopped driving a year or so before because she couldn’t see very well anymore.
The blue car is what we used to bring you home from the hospital when you were born. Then we used it to bring your sister Natalie home from the hospital. After she was born we decided we needed something bigger. In fact, on the way home from the hospital we drove through the parking lot of the Honda dealership near our house in Louisville to glance at the Honda Odyssey minivans.
Two weeks later we bought a brand new Honda Odyssey minivan for your mom to drive so I put her Honda Civic for sale on the classifieds. That Odyssey was Vanny. Six years later we used Vanny II to bring your brother Charlie home from the hospital. I kept the blue car to drive back and forth to work.
This is us bringing you home from Fort Sanders hospital. You and your mom are in the back seat. Flowers, a laptop computer, and a videocamera are in the front seat. The yellow house in the background is on Clinch Street in front of Fort Sanders Hospital, and may still be there when you read this decades from now.
You liked that story when I told it to you, so I wanted to write it down for you. Your birthday post was late this year, but I got it done because I want you to have these when you grow up.
When I got my iPhone 5 the battery would last a day. Apple replaced it for that and other reasons, but I did some Googling back then on ways to extend iPhone battery life and it helped.
Disable location services where you can to avoid the drain of GPS
I left location services on for weather apps, map apps, Yelp, and Find My iPhone. That’s it. I turned off location services for everything else that wanted to know my location. For me, that was 11 apps, including headscratchers like Fruit Ninja and Photoshop Express.
Location services are under Settings:Privacy.
Disable Push and use Fetch
Push notifications come from Apple servers from a variety of sources. They’re sent to your phone automatically and require attention from your phone that uses up battery life.
To disable, go to Settings:Mail, Contacts, Calendars:Fetch New Data. Turn Push off. Turn Fetch on to periodically download notifications. If you choose the Manual setting, notifications will only be downloaded when you open that app (Mail, Facebook, etc.).
Kill apps running in the background
I just checked and I had 20 apps running in the background, including things like picture apps, maps, and good old Fruit Ninja.
To stop apps, doubleclick the Home button, press and hold any app, and click the minus icon on the app you want to stop. The apps will return the next time they’re used, so you’ll have to repeat this every now and then.
MELISSA: Go to Craigslist and I’ll show you that couch I found in Maryville.
ME: OK, I’ll do a search for “leather couch.”
MELISSA: The search I did was for “couch leather.”
ME: We don’t want couch leather. We want a leather couch. Couch leather is what we’d want if we were going to make our own leather couch from scratch.
Not much blogging lately. I’ve been working on video every night for weeks. Part of that was working on the actual videos and part was learning along the way.
It turns out I didn’t know didley about editing audio. The guys in Alien Love Charm have given me some feedback, and I’m gradually getting there. Learning how use a compressor has made a huge difference, to the point I’m a little embarassed by the uncompressed sound on my older video.
(A compressor reduces the dynamic range of the audio, pushing the loud sounds down and pulling the quiet sounds up. Sound that’s spiky and thin becomes even and full. The too-loud guitar and too-quiet vocals wind up closer in levels. With the peaks pushed down you can increase the overall volume without distorting.)
The hard part on this one was the crowd noise. I usually shoot close to the stage, which reduces ambient noise. At this show the stage was so wide I had to get 20 30 feet away to capture it end to end, so I had three four rows of people talking in front of the mic. I managed to cut the crowd noise way down, but I couldn’t quiet it down as much as I wanted during the intro.
Before the next show I’m going to pick up a second Zoom digital audio recorder so I can have one on the camera and another either close to the stage or better yet plugged into the soundboard. That’ll get the crowd noise way down and give me a direct feed instead of getting the music after it’s come out of the speakers, bounced around the room, and mixed with crowd noise. To be honest, the main reason I haven’t plugged into the board before is that I’ve been too bashful to ask. No more bashful.
This is a clip I recorded a couple of years ago and never posted. I tuned up the audio, made some quickie titles, and added a reprise at the end with YouTube links. Once I get the hang of editing and build up a library of Premiere templates I can probably knock out a video like this in a couple of hours.
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