Author: Eric

We’re out on the causeway. It’s overcast but not oppressive. It is also a little windy which is a concern. We walked up to the countdown clock and took pictures and now we’re all back down at the chairs listening to the commentary on the loud speakers.

We made it through the world’s longest line and are back on our tour bus waiting to drive out to the causeway. The weather is still grim but we’re holding onto hope.

It’s 1:51AM and we’re standing out front of the hotel waiting for our bus to come around. It has stopped raining briefly but the radar last night looked like it was going to come and go.

I found the rain we haven’t been getting in Texas. We landed in downpour. The chance of favorable launch weather was 30% when I left this morning. It’s not looking too good.

It came to be in the early days that the Lord bestowed upon his charges the bounty of the Tree of Toys and lo there came to be great turmoil in the garden. For the larger dog took the greatest of the nasty-ass pig ear bits for herself leaving only the lesser for the smaller dog. The Lord looked upon this arrangement and saw that it was right and proper that the larger should to the larger and smaller to the smaller and continued his mighty Labors with the Python and the Oracle. Then came the smaller dog to the Lord and said, “I cannot hold my piece for it is shaped funny and so I cannot chew it.”

The Lord took then, from the larger dog, the greater pig ear and split from it a portion that the smaller dog could hold and returned what remained. The larger dog took her piece far from the sight of the Lord and devoured it entirely. Returning swiftly she took from her brother the piece given him as his. This displeased the Lord and he returned the piece to the smaller dog giving to the larger dog the smaller piece that had been her brother’s in the beginning. Again, the larger dog consumed the piece given her and returned to take the piece from the smaller dog.

Seeing this treachery the Lord stood between the larger and smaller dogs with a flaming sword that turned every way and kept safe the smaller dog and his piece of the nasty-ass pig ear. The larger dog howled and raved and charged the smaller dog each time to be turned aside. After a time, the smaller dog carried his pig ear unto his cave and, seeing that he was, for a time, safe the Lord left to tend to the garden.

Upon his return the smaller dog came out to greet him and also came the larger dog cursing the smaller dog and again seeking to take from him what the Lord had given. At this sight the Lord became enraged and taking hold of the larger dog, cast her into the land of Nod there to dwell amidst the darkness until the Lord grant her forgiveness for her trespasses or the dawn of a new age or time to go outside before bedtime. And she wailed in sorrow at her banishment such that she could be heard through the high walls of the garden of Livingroom wherein dwelled the Lord and the smaller dog.

I was cleaning out a directory on the computer here and found a pdf of some pictures my mom sent me a while back. And since everyone likes to see baby pictures here you go.

In case anyone cares, this is what I had to do to convert the movies from my camera to one single time-lapsed / frame decimated movie.

first extract frames:

ffmpeg -i FILE0002.MOV -r 1 -f image2 frames2/fr-%06d.png

-i : input file, ffmpeg will autodetect format
-r : the target frame rate, 1 frame / sec
-f : output format
the output file name takes the standard printf format for serially numbered images

I did this to each of the four files I had and ended up with four big piles of images. The numbering started from 000001 each time so I wrote a little script to renumber files as needed and move them into the appropriate directory. I used python because that’s how I do but I’m sure a sufficiently clever person could use the shell or the scripting language of their choice. I’m not going to put that in here because it is shameful.

Now I have a single very big pile of images.
I want to use the H.264 encoder to make an mp4 of high quality. I want to do this because I don’t know that youtube will mangle my pretty encoding when I give them my file. So it goes.

ffmpeg -r 30 -i allframes/fr-%06d.png -vcodec libx264 -vpre max -b 2048k -threads 0 mov1.mp4

-r : target frame rate, 30 frames / sec
-i : input files with the requisite printf format token
-vcodec : use libx264 to encode*
-vpre : use the x264 preset configuration ‘max’**
-b : 2048k video bit rate
-threads : 0 means use as many threads as it wants

*When I first tried this I ended up with an error “Unknown encoder ‘libx264′”. This is because Ubuntu doesn’t install libx264 by default. You have to go and uninstall libavcodec52 and install libavcodec-extra-52.

** apparently a couple of years ago it was decided that video encoding is hard and you needed to have a base config to work from. -vpre loads a preset video codec options set and then subsequent options you provide override values in that config. So, this uses a max quality option set and then sets the video bit rate to 2Mb/s which is pretty good quality for a 480p 30fps video.

So, this takes about three and a half hours of 60fps 848×480 video and smushes it down to a little under eight minutes of 30fps 848×480 video. Tada!

I managed to get the video I took of Bike to Work day chopped into little pieces and reassembled into a more tolerable length than 3.5 hours.