Continue reading »]]> It seems like just yesterday Madeline was learning to walk and now she’s participated in her very first public gymnastics recital. Melissa has been keeping Madeline active over the last 8 months or so with swimming lessons, music and now – gymnastics. The local YMCA offers a 9 week class that introduces young children to the basics. Last Saturday, all the different age groups got together for a public recital so the parents could watch everybody show off their skills. We didn’t know if Madeline would like it or not but she seems pretty excited about all of it. Even more shocking, she’s normally pretty shy around strangers but being in front of the crowd didn’t seem to bother her at all.

We’re both very proud of her accomplishments and I think this might be something she’ll continue participating in as she grows up. A video of her performance is after the break.

For starters, I apologize for the resolution on this video. After 3 separate rips (camera to XP, XP to .WMV, .WMV to .FLV) I can’t blame the final product for looking almost like VHS. In retrospec, I should’ve just used my darn iPhone to record her performance but we’ve been using our 8 year + old Sony Handycam for most of our video shots – old habits (and technology) are hard to break apparently. MiniDVisn’t exactly modern tech these days but that darn handycam has been such a work horse, it’s hard to put down.

I think for Christmas we’ll look at updating our video cam with something like a Flip or similar device so we can get HD digital directly and not have to jump through several tedious hoops to get the content pulled off MiniDV tapes. The cam is so old, drivers are no longer supported on anything but Windows XP so I actually had to rebuild XP on a junker laptop here at work just to pull the shots off the camera.

Anyway, the embedded flash video (FLV) is a quick view but if you have time, download the .WMV file and watch it on your desktop – the quality is slightly better and plays in full 640×480 standard vs. the 320×240 flash ripped for this site. The final format is slightly different because I was forced to use Windows Movie Maker (which is no longer supported outside XP either). I tried getting it all cut up to my iPhone for editing there but that was an epic failure. Converting the WMV to MOV looked (and sounded) even worse so I just left it with WMM.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Raw download: WMV (67mb)

Continue reading »]]> About two weeks ago, I did something I very rarely EVER do. I broke my phone. 3 years – no drops, dings, nicks or bad scratches. Originally, I had planned on upgrading my iPhone 3G at the end of the month but I was shuffling some stuff around on my desk and the phone slid off the edge. Normally, it wouldn’t be a big deal – I’ve got a case for it and it’s only about a 2ft drop. Apparently this time it was enough. Phone fell flat on the front face. I picked it up an when I turned it on – white screen of death.

After a couple hours fiddling with the internals and some Google searching I had two options – hope the internal connection re-seating fixed it or replace the entire LCD screen and digitizer. Breaking it apart and putting it all back together didn’t work and I figured I was so close to swapping it out anyway, I might as well upgrade early. So after about 2 hours in line at the local Apple retail store that night, I walked out with a new iPhone 4.

So. A lot of really cool things with the new hardware platform. One of the best – the on-board 720p HD camera. I had a chance to goof around with it last weekend while we were at Centennial Park. Madeline was at the play ground so I thought I’d give the camera a try.

There are a couple caveats:

• Shake is hard to control when you walk around, over, through stuff. As far as I know, the phone doesn’t support any sort of hardware/software correction. Ultimately, shake contributes to a decrease in video quality when you try to rip or convert one format to another so it’s something I need to work on reducing.
• Lighting – wash out from reflection or glare occasionally interferes with the visual quality in HD.
• Conversion compression. This is the toughest part of all. A raw 90 second .MOV video at 720p from the phone pushing roughly a 10kbs data stream comes out to about 126mb in size. Not much these days file size wise but still too large for most web blogs posting videos without streaming or smart bit-rate streaming (unlike YouTube, Hulu, etc.). Since I’m just linking video directly into my player code, I need a compression that reduces file size but still maintains some of the HD quality in the feed. FLV is usually the most common type and it’s what I’m going to be experimenting with the most. After conversion, I was able to reduce the FLV file to about 24mbs and still maintain a decent frame quality.

Anyway, I think the final cut turned out pretty good considering I created the entire time-line on my iPhone using the onboard camera and the iMovie app to splice two different shots together and add some additional titles/overlay. iMovie isn’t very powerful but it does let you get something patched together with a little creativity and experimentation. It also lets you export your final cut into 360p, 540p or 720p MOV formats.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Raw downloads: 360p (44mb), 720p (130mb)