Category Archives: photography

Lightning Attempt

My first attempt at photographing lightning. The composition sucks, because I didn’t feel like heading out into the rain at 10pm, but getting the actual lightning in the photo was much easier than I thought it would be,

Some Macro

I played around with some macro photography last night

MultiCam Editing

A co-worker recently asked me about how to merge multiple camera shots of the same event into one video. I didn’t know the answer. Turns out to be not such a simple thing. However, it sounds like the available software is rapidly catching up with this feature/need.

So, I thought I’d share what I’ve found so far:

The best thing seems to be to output an SMPTE time code to an audio track on each camera. There is a free android app to do this, then I think you just wire the output of your phone to the various camera microphone inputs. This technique is called “jam coding”. Here is an article on the process. Then, there is software, like JamSync (~$250) to automatically sync things up. I think some of the fancier paid applications might have this built-in – not sure.

The advantage of Jam Syncing is that if the cameras are at different frame rates, or they turn off/on at multiple different times (i.e. camera A got lost power for 5 minutes while a battery was swapped, etc), then the software can often recover.

Otherwise the best thing seems to be syncing via the audio. Numerous blog posts say that doing it manually with the video yields worse results and is more time consuming than doing it with the waveforms in the audio.

The good news is that things like adobe premier ($700-800) (not elements) or final cut pro (the link has a bunch of audi footage) (mac only, $300) will do this for you. Also there are 3rd party tools, like plural eyes ($200) that supposedly do it faster and better.

There is a website, called switchcam that will do it, but it is pretty expensive to export your video back out of the website.

There are open source, multi platform non-linear editors (NLE’s) freely available, like openshot, nova cut (funded on kickstarted, but not available yet) and pitivi, but they don’t really seem to do the multi-cam thing well – yet (link also has more links on howto’s for various paid software packages). Here’s a good post on what open source NLE’s (mostly don’t) support multi cam.

Wikipedia has a list of NLE’s.

The Proffesor

Someone put some nice tracks on the Professor this week.

Great day at the basin today. Felt great to get outside after being in bed all last weekend.

CES 2014-01-08 Timelapse

CES 2014

We got to go to CES this year.

The flight was delayed a bit because of the “polar vortex”. But on the upside I got to catch a time-lapse while waiting for the plane to arrive.

There were a lot of kickstarted companies/projects in our area. One I still need to checkout is the free walk thing, Virtuix Omni, in conjunction with the Oculus rift. I’ll have to get a better picture.

The booth behind us has one of the sweetest looking electric bikes I’ve seen.

Drytunes might be a bit pricey at $300-400 for what is essentially some speakers in a pelican case. But for a long raft trip, given the price of a raft, it might make a lot of sense (this one is for you Brian – I even got you a coozie with their logo).