Parapente race
Something out of the ordinary.
I thought that when I bought two cycling water bottles and two normal day bottles I would be done, but then I found a nalgene bottle for a reasonable price, and then someone mentioned drinking from a steel container, rather than aluminium so I was distracted and tempted. I did tell myself that this would replace my habit of drinking other types of drinks. I thought “Stop with these drinks for three weeks per bottle and you amortise the cost”.
It goes deeper than that. If I stop drinking the two drinks I normally drink, then I will save money within three weeks, and not have to spend it again for weeks at a time. It may be materialist to want more water bottles than I can use in a week, but at least it’s a lot less plastic to be recycled on Monday afternoons. I don’t mind recycling. I just hate that there are set times when it is possible. I hate that it has to be scheduled, rather than spontaneous.
If I have less aluminium and PET then my trips to recycle are diminished. In reality my goal is just to switch the budget from one luxury to another, without having a new expense. If I find that I am happy with the new system then that is all the better.
Temptation 1 – to replace the half litre bottle that I use daily, because it’s easier to clean
Temptation 2 – to replace the 1l bottle I have used for over ten years, because it is easier to clean, and because it should be easier to carry.
If we were not in a pandemic, and if we were not in a society where people still do not wear their masks properly, and where people respect the 2 meter safety distance then I would go and look at the products in person, and probably lose interest. It’s because we’re in a long protracted pandemic that I am growing curious about such things. It is a coping mechanism. As dull and boring as it may sound.
A few years ago I looked at mobile phones, new watches, climbing gear etc. Now I’m looking at water bottles. I like water bottles. It is something that you use every day, from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep.
Have you ever considered that we always look at rows of corn from the same angle. We always look at them along the line of plantation so all we see is a wall of corn. Today during the walk I saw that some corn had been cut to reveal the seed rows of corn and it’s interesting to see the cistern like rows of columns of corn plants.
It’s interesting to see that corridor down which animals and other small creatures can run along. You never think of how distinct it is. You always associate corn fields with a jumble of corn, like a forest of trees. Unlike in old films and cartoons this is highly organised, so walking in one direction is easy, but not perpendicularly.
The right side of the Transmission Chain is at the event itself. Transmission chain is a term used to describe the route that a signal takes from an event venue to the device on which you are watching an event. As a camera operator the right side of the transmission chain for me is at the event itself.
For the IFSC World Cup in Villars this year I was both a camera operator and a belayer. Belaying at a world cup event is an interesting experience because it’s rare to clip and unclip from so many climbers in such a short amount of time. Climbers have a limited time to get up the route. They have six minutes. This means that every 12 minutes or so you’re belaying a new climber as they progress up the wall. It’s a great task for introverts. You observe what the person is doing. When they need rope you’re ready to give it. If they’re struggling you make sure to amortise their fall. When they make it to the top or come back down you help them untie the rope and then you start again.
Aside from this task I was camera operator during the semi-final and final of the climbing competition. This means that whilst most people were standing in the crowd watching the competition I was on a podium in the middle of the crowd filming the climbers as they progress up the wall.
From here you see the crowd and you see the climbers from a privileged point of view. You can see the climbers and what they are doing comfortably. You’re also more attentive. You’re following their every move, watching as they clip and progress. You see them progress and you hear the commentator and hear the crowd cheering.
When you’re on the “wrong” side of the transmission you’re hearing the international sound and you’re seeing what the vision mixer is seeing but you’re not seeing the event in context. The image below illustrates this.
In television broadcasting you usually have the cameras, an OB van and an SNG truck or fibre connections. These go from the venue to the Network Operating centre. The signal is encoded either for web streaming and sent to the content distribution network or it is sent on to national broadcasters. On that side of the transmission chain you are in an air conditioned office as a passive observer ready to react if there is an issue and waiting for the event to end.
The Foggiest idea, or a pun, after a walk this morning through Geneva on a foggy day. “The Jet D’eau will be off”, I thought. It was pumping out water at its usual rate but you’d find it hard to see. The grey/white fog, along with the white water, converged and became one.
On a day like today, the Jet D’eau is not the only thing that is hard to see. So are the mountains. If you try to see the other side of the lake you see nothing, just a blank canvas on which you could add anything. It’s also a time when you might be happy to go back indoors where it is nice and warm.
On such a day it would be interesting to set up a timelapse camera from the top of the RTS tower or some other building. You could capture as the fog burns off and reveals the view. From the top of the RTS tower you have a good view of Geneva and it’s surroundings.
ast night I spent hours going through videos and changing them from “public” to private, so that they would be removed from the index. I went through them by loading 2024 without filters and worked my way through 60 or so files at a time, before scrolling, and waiting for content to load. After a few hours I got bored so tried to switch things up.
I decided to sort images by camera but that’s slow, so I tried to sort by colour, and by category, and more. I found that if you sort by colour, category and other filters the video thumbnails load within seconds. I don’t mean sixty images per scroll. I mean hundreds of images at once.
In my use case I wanted to make private or unindex thousands of files at a time. Imagine if you have a thousand images of a wedding, or three or four hundred images from a conference. If you want to change hundreds of files you want to be able to see all media assets at once, rather than mindlessly scrolling and waiting to load.
I counted and with the unfiltered process I had to wait at least eight seconds for 60 thumbnails to load, and then scroll again. By using various filters that was reduced to seconds, for every image.
On the same topic, if you want to bulk modify media assets the limit is 999 files at once. Once the changes are applied you can select the files that were not processed, and continue from there if you selected more than 999 files.
This is good for adding the country for images where that information is not in the exif, or adding a photographer’s name if that is not in the exif. It’s a trick worth knowing about.
In the process I also learned that my instance of PhotoPrism could index faces from video and photos. If you take photos at an event then PhotoPrism will help you index photos according to which faces are in them. De-rushing videos becomes faster. Of course this probably works for keyframe images, rather than actual video but that’s still great if each face is used as a keyframe for the relevant file.
If you’re at a wedding you can define the names that go with faces and it can find images with the bride, groom, and other key personalities. Instead of just giving a photo book you can give them a way of searching by key individuals. The advantage of using PhotoPrism is that it’s hosted at your home or work place, rather than in the cloud and should thus be more secure, as well as kept out of Google or Facebook’s hands.
In the end I marked 68,000 video files as private. That is 68,000 files that I could migrate from PhotoPrism Instance to another. I could have one for personal photographs and video, and the second one for random videos from the web. Do the videos, themselves, have any value? Nope, but the photo archive does, and the establishement of a faster work flow does too. The faster we can process tens of thousands of files, the more time we can dedicate to high value media assset management.
Yesterday the Theta+ Video app came out for Android. The Theta+ video app allows you to trim video clips and then share them to social networks. This means that you no longer need to wait until you get home to prepare content for sharing. You can do it while you sit and have a post activity hot chocolate or other drink.
[caption id="attachment_3325" align="aligncenter" width="169"] Video options[/caption]When you select the raw video it is converted to be a spherical video. When that process completes you can choose between creating a 360 degree video or a cropped one. A cropped one is a tinyworld video.
[caption id="attachment_3326" align="aligncenter" width="169"] Filters, Trim and music[/caption]The next menu gives you three choices, filters, trim or background music. I never bother with filters and the trim option is fiddly on the Sony Xperia Z5 compact with a 13 minute video. With a shorter video I would have found this process easier. Saving is not intuitive. First you trim the video and then you go back and save the changes. While saving you need to keep the app open.
The sharing options are to Facebook, youtube and other social networks. This varies according to which apps you have on your phone. I like that the two first options are facebook and youtube as these are the networks that I usually share to. When I tried to upload to youtube it failed twice. When I attempted to upload to Facebook it was stuck at 99 percent twice.
This is a great app to trim videos before sharing and add some music when required. What I would like to see in future versions is the ability to compile a number of 360 videos together to create edited sequences. They need to improve uploading so that it works better. At the moment of posting all attempts to share videos failed.