There’s nothing I hate more than dropping new music into my iTunes library only to learn once it has finished importing that it doesn’t have meta-tags (No Song Name, Artist, Album Title etc etc). So now, before I add new music, I run it through MusicBrainz Picard. Here’s the programs description from their site:
“MusicBrainz Picard is a cross-platform (Linux/Mac OS X/Windows) application written in Python and is the official MusicBrainz tagger.
Picard supports the majority of audio file formats, is capable of using audio fingerprints (PUIDs, AcoustIDs), performing CD lookups and disc ID submissions, and it has excellent Unicode support. Additionally, there are several plugins available that extend Picard’s features.
When tagging files, Picard uses an album-oriented approach. This approach allows it to utilize the MusicBrainz data as effectively as possible and correctly tag your music. For more information, see the illustrated quick start guide to tagging.
Picard is named after Captain Jean-Luc Picard from the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
To get started, download and install MusicBrainz Picard HERE. Once you are up and running, drop the music files you want to tag anywhere in the window. They will then populate the list on the left called unmatched files.
When you have finished adding files, click the line of text with the folder icon next to it that says “Unmatched Files” to make it active. When it is active it will become highlighted. Now, go ahead and press the “Lookup” button, and MusicBrainz Picard will start scanning your music and comparing it to their database for identification.
Once MusicBrainz Picard has identified the album and added all of the songs to it, the CD icon next to the album name will turn gold in color. If you don’t have all of the songs from the album, it doesn’t matter, you can still proceed, but the CD icon stays silver. The next step is to click Album Name next to the CD icon to make it active, and highlighted. You can now click “Save”.
MusicBrainz Picard will now write the Meta Tag Data directly into your music files. Once it has completed, you can close out of the program, and then drop your music files into iTunes, and everything will be correctly categorised and ready to play.
Heytell is a great little app. For me, it’s like a phone call, a walkie talkie, and a answering machine all rolled into one. But if you have a few contacts, and use the app regularly, it wont be long before your conversation window is full up, and you can search the app until your blue in the face and you won’t find a “delete” or “Clear” option anywhere!
Thankfully, it is REALLY EASY to clear recent conversations!
All you gotta do is swipe your finger left to right on them! Just pick the conversation you want to clear, swipe your finger left to right on it as shown below,
And look what comes up!
A delete button!
All you gotta do now is press delete, and your window will be free and clear, and ready for your next conversation!
Easy when you know how huh! This method also works in other apps to, so don’t be afraid to drag your finger across something, you never know what will pop up!
I have been looking at sites and blogs lately that describe how to make a 3D Anaglyph (viewed using Red/Blue Glasses) picture from a 2D picture using the channel mixer in Adobe Photoshop, and I was wondering if this method could also be implemented in Adobe Premier Pro? After a little bit of testing, and finding a few video’s on Youtube about it, I decided to give it a try.
This video is shot in 720p Hi Def, with great audio, and it does a great job conveying what it is like to be so close to one of these fire breathing monsters. Please check out z400hauls other videos too!
To begin, open Premiere Pro (If you don’t have it, you can download a fully functioning 30 day free trial from Adobe.com) and create a new project. As z400hauls source video is 720P at 30fps (Frames Per Second), I am going to stick with this for my 3D transformation settings.
Once you have created the appropriate editing environment for your videos specs, import your source/donor video by selecting the file menu, dragging down to “Import” and selecting your file.
Once you have it in Premiere Pro, Drag it to the timeline.
The next step is to create a second video track from the first, so we can make the left and right channels required to trick our brains into seeing 3D. To copy the video track only (because we don’t need two identical audio tracks) click the video in the timeline to highlight it (Notice the audio track will highlight as well), then right click it and select “Unlink”. This will unlink the video and audio tracks.
Now you can click on the video track to highlight it only, and the audio track will stay unselected. When your video track only is highlighted, right click it and select “Copy”.
The next step is a little tricky, so follow carefully. Premiere Pro is a bit like Photoshop, in that it uses Layers to build up the scene. If you were to select “Paste” from the edit window now, it will place the copied video on the same track as the original one, which doesn’t help us. We need to place the copied video onto a separate layer, or track, in order to achieve a stereoscopic effect. If you look closely, you will see that video track 1, and audio track 1 are highlighted, and are a different color from the other spare blank tracks that Premier Pro set up for us when we created the document.
This means that these tracks are active and are the ones we are working on. As we want to put video onto video track 2, click the blank area in the video track 1 and audio track 1 attributes bar to deselect them, and then click the blank are next to where it says “Video 2” to Activate/Highlight this track.
Now that we have Video Track 2 selected, we are nearly ready to paste in the second video channel. Premiere Pro will place the video wherever the play head (red vertical line) is, so to make sure our two video tracks line up, press the “Go To In” button to make sure the play head is at the very beginning of the timeline.
Now that the play head is at the beginning of the timeline, and Video Track 2 is selected, click edit from the menu bar, and select “Paste”. Now you have two video tracks! WOOHOO!!!
Now comes the fun part! Our next task is to separate the color channels, and create the “Parallax” effect. This is what tricks our brains into thinking that what we are seeing is 3 Dimensional. As we are creating a Red/Blue Anaglyph 3D effect, we need to separate the red and blue colors in our 2 video tracks. At this point, we will define “Video 2” track as our left/red channel, and “Video 1” track as our right/blue channel. To separate our colors, we will be using the “Color Balance RGB” effect. Open “Video Effects” then “Image Control” and drag and drop the “Color Balance” effect icon onto Video 1 track, and then again onto Video 2 track.
First, lets do the left/red channel. Click the video in the “Video 2” track to highlight it, and in the “Effect Controls” window set the green and blue channels to Zero. This will leave only red.
To create the “Parallax Effect”, whilst in “Effect Control”, click the little triangle next to “Motion” to expand this option so we can tinker with its settings.
As this videos dimensions are 1280px x 720px, you can see next to “Position” that the center point of the video is at 640px on the horizontal plane, and 360px vertical. To create the Parallax, we need to offset the left channel to the left of the screen slightly. To do this, simply adjust “640” to “638”. This will move our left channel 2 Pixels to the left of the screen.
We are now finished with the left channel for the moment, so lets make it invisible, so we can get to work on the right channel. To make it invisible, simply click the “Eyeball” icon in the attributes field as shown below.
Your video preview window should loose the red tinge, and be restored to normal. Next, Highlight the Video 1 track (Right/Blue) in the timeline, and set the red to zero in Color Balance, leaving blue and green at 100. Then, enhance the Parallax by moving the Right/Blue channel 2 Pixels to the right. Again, click the triangle next to “Motion” to expand and reveal the options, and set the horizontal plane to 642. If you have done everything right, your video preview will now look all Blue-Ish.
It is now time to bring the left and right channels together and create the Anaglyph. Go back to the Video 2 (red/left) track’s attributes area and make it visible again by clicking the eyeball icon. Your video preview will turn red again. If you click the eyeball repeatedly a few times you will see that not only does your video turn from red to blue, but it also moves position – Yes! That’s the Parallax Effect – You have made a 2D video 3D!
YAY YOU!!!!!
To finish up, we need to blend them together. This is where Premiere Pro borrows from Photoshop. Blending is what makes Photoshop so powerful. With your Left/Red channel visible (Eyeball Icon clicked so the video preview window has the red tinge), click the little triangle next to “Opacity” in the “Effect Control” panel. Click the drop down menu next to “Blend Mode” and select “Screen”.
VOILA! ANAGLYPH VIDEO!
Using these settings, the 3D effect is only mild. To really make a strong 3d Parallax Effect, you move the left and right frames further apart. Instead of 638 for the Red/Left channel, and 642 for the Blue/Right channel, try 636 for the left and 644 for the right, or 630 for the left and 650 for the right. Experiment with these numbers until it looks right for you.
But BE CAREFUL – Don’t push these numbers to far, because you can make the video really blurry.
To save and export the video, select file, export, media from the menu bar. I will be exporting it in exactly the same format as I imported it, but you can play with these settings if you want to export your video in a different format, or for another device.
Once you have exported your new Anaglyph 3D video file, All you need to do now is put on your Red/Blue 3D glasses, turn your volume up to 11, and enjoy this AWESOME video from z400hauls in 3D!
If you, or your friends pass out, or barf, try reducing the Parallax Effect by moving your Red/Left and Blue/Right fields closer together 🙂
Earlier this week one of my favorite movies “The Scorpion King” was on TV, and as I recently bought a new digital set top box with USB recording capabilities, I thought I would give it a try. I remember when I saw The Scorpion King at the movies it was in a very widescreen aspect ratio, and it looked great! But, as soon as it started on Sunday night, I could tell something was not right. Rock Johnson looked more like a character from Avatar than the WWF! He seemed over 10 feet tall and as skinny as a broom handle, which as we all know, isn’t the case!
My suspicion is that someone at the TV station got lazy, or maybe a setting in my set top box was wrong, but the bottom line is I have a 2+ gigabit video file of one of my favorite movies, and it is virtually unwatchable because the aspect ratio is way off.
Thankfully, there is a nice easy way to straighten things out. Now, If I intended to watch the video file on my computer, I would use VideoLAN’s VLC Player, because it’s free, it plays practically everything, and it has nice built in feature’s that amongst dozens of other tricks, will adjust your movies aspect ratio on the fly, so no re-encoding is required.
VLC Player falls into my “I can’t Believe it’s free” category. No matter what OS your running, they have a player for you that will knock your socks off. But if you want to watch that distorted video file on something like a WDTV, or plug a USB key into your flat screen TV, your gonna have to re-encode it and repair the problems.
Luckily, my set top box records in MP4 format, so my tall and skinny video file will drop straight into a really cool, and again FREE program, called MPEG Streamclip, which is what I am going to use to fix my aspect ratio problem in my video file.
Thankfully, MPEG Stream not only fixes tall and skinny video’s, but short fat ones too 🙂
To get started, if you don’t have it already, get your free copy of MPEG Stream clip right HERE! You can do a bunch of cool stuff with it, it’s free, so there is no reason not to have it in your video tool kit! Once your installed, FIRE IT UP!
Once the main window is open, drag your wonky video clip into it, and you will see a preview window.
To begin reshaping, open the file menu and select “Export to MPEG-4”, or if you want to cross encode to another format, you can choose it here instead.
Once you have selected your preferred export format, a new window will pop up where you can adjust your settings, and de-distort your movie.
As you can see from the above capture, my video was recorded in 720px wide by 400px high, so I am now thinking I really do need to go and take a look at the default settings on my set top box. To start repairing the problem, I clicked “Other”, left the width at 720px, and started to play with the vertical height. After I changed the setting, I clicked “Preview” to see if my changes made the aspect ratio better.
A new window popped up and the movie started to preview, and I noticed a secondary window which looked like it had already begun encoding, but this doesn’t appear to be the case. It seems to me that it is just encoding your preview while you are watching it, but its not the final pass.
If the preview looks good, or even if it doesn’t, click the stop button after you have assessed your changes. If you want to re-adjust your settings, you can go back and do so, or if you are happy with your changes, go ahead and click “Make MP4” in the bottom right hand corner, and give your FIXED video a new unique name.
Like most video encoding, it will take some time to process the file and apply your changes. But when it’s done, everything will look like it should again.
Recently, a Webernets reader (Yes, there is at least one person looking at this site) crashed their XP Pro virtual machine, and it made me think about a really quick and easy way to back up and restore a VMWare Virtual Machine in the unfortunate event of a terminal failure.
As VMWare Virtual Machines can grow in size pretty quickly, especially if they are not regularly “cleaned up“, in most cases you will need to use an external hard drive or a very large USB key to store your back up. Whilst it is convenient to keep your back up on the same computer, its also no help to you at all if that computer is the one that fails, so keeping a back up some where else is a pretty good idea. I actually would recommend doing BOTH. You can never have too many back ups in multiple locations – ask any one who has ever had a catastrophic failure!
To get started, you need to locate your Virtual Machines, and this is REALLY easy! Open a finder window, click “Documents”, and you will see a folder called “Virtual Machines”
To back up your virtual machine, simply drag the virtual machine file to your back up destination. As you can see below, I have a virtual machine called “XP with Apps”, which is my main Windows computer, and I would be pretty lost if anything happened to it. I also have a FREENAS server, which is just basically a big hard drive that is attached to my home computer network, and shows up as a “Share”, so to back up my XP Machine, I just drag the virtual machine file onto the Freenas entry in the side bar menu, and let it do its work. As my Virtual Machine is quiet large, it does take some time for it to copy over.
Now that we have our Virtual Machine backed up, you are probably wondering how easy it is to restore it? Its just as easy! Check this out!
To restore a saved virtual machine, just locate it on your back up source (In my case, it is on my Freenas server), and drag it into your virtual machines folder. For this demonstration, I am going to restore my most FAVORITE Linux distro, PUPPY LINUX! I started by dragging the Puppy Linux Virtual Machine from my Freenas server to the desktop on my Mac.
Once the file had copied over, I moved it into the “Virtual Machines” folder in my “Documents” folder with my other virtual machines. Then to begin the restore, just double click the virtual machine file.
When you double click it, a window will pop up asking if you have copied or moved the virtual machine. In this case, we have performed both actions, we have moved, as well as copied the machine. Given the wording in the dialogue box, and the confusion that arises after being presented with a multiple choice question where both answers are applicable, I went with “If you don’t know, answer “I Copied It””, and I clicked “I Copied It”.
Almost instantly, my Puppy Linux virtual machine sprang into life, and before you can say “How the heck did I do that?” my Puppy Linux Virtual Machine was up and running!
Thanks to the folks at VMWare for making this so easy!
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There’s nothing I hate more than dropping new music into my iTunes library only to learn once it has finished importing that it doesn’t have meta-tags (No Song Name, Artist, Album Title etc etc). So now, before I add new music, I run it through MusicBrainz Picard. Here’s the programs description from their site:
Recently, a Webernets reader (Yes, there is at least one person looking at this site) crashed their XP Pro virtual machine, and it made me think about a really quick and easy way to back up and restore a VMWare Virtual Machine in the unfortunate event of a terminal failure.
