Tag: 2015

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Papa Smurf goes bananas

Papa SmurfWell … what a day in social media world I had yesterday!

At an unearthly hour of the morning I received a text from my son to say that he always read my blog posts because even though he might not understand them – he always felt that he ought to, just in case there was something he could actually TALK to me about … rather than just converse via Google+ (we live approximately half-a-mile away from each other)!

This was then followed by a Google+ comment from my sister – also before I’d fully woken up, and finally my wife (away for a few days) who wondered what was happening to her Google+ app on her iPhone which was being bombarded by posts from me.

By this time I’d observed for myself that for some bizarre reason, three really old posts on an old blog were being published to Google+. Why? How? I couldn’t see to the problem immediately – I had to give DJ a lift to the airport. Then I had to attend to a central heating problem and then, to cap it all (and by the time I’d sat down) – the broadband was down and wouldn’t be up until the afternoon, meaning I wouldn’t be able to do more than sticking plaster stuff on the blog until I could get full access. So I just disabled any plugin that could in any way be associated with Google from this blog and deleted all the posts from Google+, put up an apologetic post and hoped I’d arrested the flow of “spam” posts.

I hadn’t 🙁

By the time I got the broadband back it had become obvious that the problem lay with my dormant former “Just thoughts …” site and by now, exasperated and fed-up with deleting Google+ posts I took the nuclear option and just nuked the site! It’s gone, no more, I’ll get a proper redirection in place as soon as possible but for now all you can see is a simple index.html file – diharrison.com is no more 🙁

Brainy SmurfWhat caused all this heartache? I don’t think I’ll ever know … what I needed was access to Brainy Smurf to provide all the answers. Was it an out-of-date WordPress installation? Was it a change in a Google+ API? Was it just Friday 13th? I don’t think I’ll ever know. Certainly not now, as the website has been sent to the Room 101 of websites where all redundant and unneeded websites should go. I sent a follow-up apologetic post.

A while ago, I posted on revising my blogging strategy and the need for simplification. I think I need to review this yet again.

Why the Smurfs … I think you need to ask a couple of great friends that question.

 

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What do you do with video clips?

A sequence of anxious emails from my daughter following her discovery that many video clips appeared to be missing following a migration from a PC to a Mac platform caused me to investigate what had gone wrong, and whether there really was a problem … or not? This is what appears to have happened.

All the video clips HAD been copied over, but only the ones whose format was acceptable to iPhoto were viewable in that library. This only came to light when she noticed they were missing from Lightroom after an import from iPhoto – a process described here. Of course iMovie can only read MPEG-4 (MOV) files so they didn’t appear there either!

This raised the issue in my mind of what should you do with video clips to preserve them. An easy solution would be to post them all to YouTube or Vimeo, I suppose – but that seems to be a bit OTT for a clip 15secs, or so, long, and yet that 15secs might represent a really valuable memory that you wouldn’t want to lose. So … what workflow should you adopt for video clips? What practices should you adopt to ensure your snatched clips are retained for posterity?

The first thing that occurred to me, was that it’s very important to distinguish between cataloguing and editing your video clips. Yes … I know that’s obvious but it needs to be re-stated as the workflow that you adopt depends upon the decisions you make on storage and cataloguing. I love Lightroom because (like Picasa) it catalogues your media wherever it’s located in your file system. It doesn’t need to bring all the media together into a single place as iPhoto, Photoshop and others do, and which then lose the individual files inside a catalogue (or database). This approach enables you in Lightroom to have different catalogues looking at different slices of your media collection without creating copies (and taking up disk space). However, if you don’t use Lightroom … I would recommend following the following three golden rules:

1) Keep your video clips in a different folder on your hard disk from your photographs, or images;
2) Convert the clips to MPEG-4 as soon as you’ve imported them, if they aren’t already in that format;
3) After editing (in Movie Maker, or iMovie) always ensure you save, or export the finished movie as MPEG-4.

These three simple rules should ensure that you won’t be left with clips that you can’t read, view or edit as technology moves on.

So if you’re a Lightroom user the import into the Lightroom catalogue is a good decision, especially since it supports a wide range of video formats. [NB It doesn’t support WMV files however, so you’ll need to do a conversion of files if you’re moving from Windows to Mac and want to import files from that format, and its worthwhile doing the conversion for all other formats at the same time into MPEG-4. For this, I recommend Handbrake – but more about that later.]

However, you what you can edit in Lightroom is limited, therefore you need some way of accessing these clips so that you can edit them in, for instance, iMovie, or Windows Movie Maker. I would suggest that means you need a well-organised file-store and also a way of clearly identifying video clips inside your Lightroom catalogue. Luckily, you can do this very easily by creating a Smart Collection in Lightroom which identifies files with given suffixes. You should then export these to a temporary folder to allow format conversion (eg AVI to MPEG-4), and then import into an editing programme. [NB You can only rely on iMovie supporting Apple’s flavour of the MOV format, eg from the iPhone/iPad, so conversion of anything else to MPEG-4 first is a sensible precursor to the import.]

So how do you do a conversion to MPEG-4 or MP4? I use, and recommend using Handbrake – as mentioned above. Although the dashboard you’re presented with looks a bit daunting, the defaults are designed to produced high-quality MP4 formatted files. It appears at first that you can only select one file at a time to convert, but that is not the case since if you navigate using the Source button to the folder where your video clips are (that’s why I mentioned exporting the files to a temporary folder above if the files werre already in Lightroom), you can then select “Add All Titles to to Queue …” from the File tab. The re-formatted files can then be imported back into Lightroom and the originals deleted – again using Smart Collections.

This post has focussed on the Mac and using iMovie, but if you’re a PC user I would recommend using Windows Movie Maker which is a very effective and easy to learn package and which you can use alongside Lightroom as I’ve described above. If you aren’t a Lightroom user then follow the golden rules above. Above all … don’t leave any video clips in any format other than MPEG-4 if you want to be sure of retaining compatibility for the future.