As I explored in a previous post, we used a digital still camera to take our single frame images, then stitch them together in quicktime as a longer move. For the event itself, we used two cameras. The primary camera, a Canon 10D, was equipped with a 16mm wide-angle lens that gave us a really good shot of the entire space. The second camera, a Canon G9, wasn’t quite as wide-angle, but would be a good backup camera in case something happened to the 10D. A sample of the space:

We taped off sight lines, just out of frame, so the artists would know what was in frame and what was not.

Our events & media production team set up a very nice mount for the cameras, as you can sort of see in this blurry, hastily snapped iPhone shot:

Unfortunately, every good plan has it’s own particular achilies heel. In this case, that heel was electronics’ desire for an uninterrupted flow of electricity. Midway through the evening on Friday night, the circuit breaker that powered the computer and cameras was tripped. Power was quickly restored, and the computers were turned back on. However, the startup procedure to get the time-lapse running was not something that could be scripted or automated, so the capture did not start again until 9 AM the next morning when I cam to check on things.

The lesson here: Time lapse is awesome, but next time, use an uninterpretable power supply. Preferably one that has a loud audible warning. I probably should have thought of this, but it really didn’t occur to me how chaotic and crazy the event would actually be (I mean that in the most endearing way possible).

The fact that we lost 12 hours of the time-lapse does stink, but it also means we still captured 12 hours of the event. I’ve assembled the video, and it has been posted to YouTube, but the quailty is not as good as a quicktime file. Here is a higher-quality quicktime MP4:

Click here to view the embedded video.
Click to play, or download the original file.

To fill some of the 12-hour gap, we hastily collected photos from whoever was available and had taken photos. They’ve been put together as a short slideshow filling a portion of the 12-hour missing period.

Walker Art Center iTunes U page.

Several weeks ago, Robin posted about the Walker Channel on iTunes U. I am going to follow up on her initial announcement with a more info about the process of designing an iTunes U Page, the preparation of content, and putting content online.

Designing an iTunes U Page

There are a number of different designs for pages in iTunes U. Some institutions that have been in the store for a while have a three column layout. However, Apple has now standardized on a two column layout for iTunes U pages. There options for customizing a page are limited, but not restrictive. Colors for backgrounds, borders, and text can be changed. An overall header image that is 600px by 300px is used on the top of the main page. The downside of a two column layout is that it does not re-size to a smaller iTunes window as nicely as a the three column layout.

A three column iTunes U page.

In order to design our site, I ended up doing some of the initial work right in iTunes. I figured out our color scheme and organizational structure, then took a few screenshots of iTunes. The screenshots were pasted together in photoshop, and I layered the header and course images onto it. Thankfully, the iconography choices were straight forward. The exhibitions use images from an exhibition, either artwork or an installation view. For Subjects or Featured courses, the icons are all similar, just using color, pattern, and language changes, each referencing the different artistic program pages that are already on the Walker web site.

Encoding video for the iPod using h.264

The h.264 codec is both amazing and vexing. It has very high compression, good quality, and is a widely supported standard. Working with h.264, especially for devices, can be complicated. Since the 5th generation, iPods have been able to play h.264 encoded video. They can even play 640×480 video and downscale it to their 320×240 screen, which is great since a 640×480 video will look good on a larger screen too. The real trickery with h.264 comes in with profiles.

Exporting to mp4 in Quicktime Pro. Not iPod compatible.

The MPEG Streamclip settings we use

Most of the time, if you just export a movie from quicktime using h.264, you use the main profile. However, for a device like the iPod, which doesn’t have a fast processor, Apple specifies that you need to use the low-complexity profile. There technical differences are mostly beyond me, but the low-complexity profile drops some of the more advanced hinting and shape features, but will mean a less processor intensive decode process that the iPod can handle.

Getting video encoded into a low-complexity h.264 profile is not a clear process. Apple’s own QuickTime Pro doesn’t let you encode to low-complexity and have any control over the output. If you want to make a movie compatible for the iPod, you must use the Movie to iPod or Movie to iPhone preset. Both of these presets encode at a very high bitrate, which makes for good quality. However, if you have the scenario we have– long movies of not a lot of action–a high bitrate is both filesize prohibitive and not necessary to maintain quality.

Some time ago, we switched to saving all our channel videos in a mp4 file, using the h.264 codec, thinking that it would make them iTunes compatible. We apparently missed the low-complexity part, and discovered that our videos were, in fact, not iPod compatible. This meant we would need to re-encode our video files to make them more useful in iTunes U. I looked at several different pieces of software to do this, but eventually decided upon MPEG Streamclip.

As I noted above, Quicktime Pro would not work for this. I also looked at Compressor, basically the Pro version of QuickTime Pro. Compressor offers much more customizability than QuickTime Pro in terms of codec configuarion and workflow. Compressor, for some reason, takes an inexplicably long time to encode a iPod compatible mp4. On a high-end Mac Pro, encoding a 640×480 was taking well beyond 8 hours. The output look really good, but given that we had 50 files to convert, it was simply not an option, even when using distributed encoding.

I also looked at FFmpegX and VisualHub (now defunct). Both of them are essentially wrappers around FFmpeg, and they produce good results, are very efficent encoders, and let you adjust every setting (almost to a fault). However, FFmpeg suffers from being written to expect a PC gamma of 2.2, and the resulting videos looked considerably darkened when compared to the original.

In the end, MPEG Streamclip worked the best. It offers the same speed of FFMpeg, much of the same control over settings, and deals with the gamma–outputting the a proper video for the iPod. At a bitrate of about 950kpbs, a typical two hour lecture comes in between 450-500 MB, just below the iTunes U limit of 500 MB.

Putting Content into iTunes U

The processes of editing content and putting tracks into iTunes U straight forward, though frustrating, since it involves a lot of clicking and waiting. iTunes has evolved considerably over time, and certainly letting a huge range of users edit parts of the iTunes Music store was not one of the original design specifications. The process is a bit clunky and Web 1.0-style, but it works. Uploading content is done through a browser, which can be a very finicky, especially with large files. After some trial and error, I figured out that setting Firefox as my default browser and using that for uploading worked better than Safari. Safari will time out the upload after a period of time, whereas Firefox keeps on chugging.

Before files are uploaded, they need to be properly loaded with metadata. iTunes U doesn’t let you edit much on the site (just title and artist) so other fields must be filled in on iTunes on your computer before uploading. When you edit the metadata fields, iTunes commits the changes to the movie files itself. When you upload the movie files, iTunes U will pick up on this and display it. One thing I found a little confusing that artwork is not displayed in the store or when you are previewing a file. Apple says that artwork on movie files is used to display on the iPod, but never in iTunes. This is all covered pretty well in the iTunes U User’s Guide.

Despite the time spent figuring out codecs and monkeying around with uploading, we’re very happy to have our content in another venue and excited to keep adding more.

One of my favorite sites, Photojojo, has a roundup of a few different photobooths (they forgot us). The first is very similar to Party People Photos, in that it uses projection to display the shots immediately and has been installed in another museum.

The ability to print photos is a nice touch, since the only thing people like more than seeing themselves on the screen is getting some free personalized schwag to take with them. Of course, if someone really wanted to, they could visit our Flickr page to download and print a photo on their own. The photo’s from Mark’s setup at the Whitney also have a very nice lighting quality, much like ours, which makes all the difference in the world. Their photos are more true to form of the old style black and white photobooth, whereas ours are a more modern fashion-esque interpretation. It also looks like Mark’s setup was a more self contained, appliance-like box rather than the more ad-hoc approach we used. Perhaps we can use the instructions to make our own for the Kara Walker Preview Party. I hope to have automatic uploading to Flickr part of the installation at that point, too.

And, just to make a friendly jab at the Whitney, our installation was three days before theirs. Neener Neener. Sadly, I didn’t see any photos of Ivanka Trump at our party. In Minnesota, we’ve got Al Franken or Prince, neither of which showed up.

And the other remix. Hat tip to my friend Paul for sending me the link.

The issue under discussion was animals used in the exhibition. While there were several live and dead animals shown in the gallery, one work in particular, Theater of the World, acted as a lightning rod for attention. Theater of the World contains animals that for the most part coexist peacefully, although crickets do get eaten. Phillipe Vergne, chief curator at the Walker, said in an interview with Amy Carlson Gustafson of the Pioneer Press:

It’s a community living together … The piece raises a lot of sociological questions. There’s morbid fascination. There’s no reason to hide that it is a difficult piece.

Some genuine differences of opinion showed up as a flurry of upset comments on our blog. I’m not trying to open that topic back up here, but I would like to discuss the discussion itself. Most people in any organization are sensitive to bad publicity and when we made our website open for public feedback we were prepared to receive some negative responses. Preparations were made for proper care of the animals, the process was documented, and the staff was ready to explain that process, but it was hard to know what to expect. This was the first time we had such a potentially controversial show in the galleries while our blogs were up. We do want open, constructive conversations on our blogs, and disagreements are certainly welcome and expected, but that doesn’t mean we wanted to host a belligerent flame war on our site. The little tuft of comments about Theater of the World couldn’t be called a flame war, but it did show how much of our time and technical resources might get consumed by a rampant comment string. We’ve been thinking it over and we have some general advice for any organization facing this problem now or deciding how to deal with it in the future.

The first step is the most obvious: be aware of the discussion. There are several people on the Walker staff who subscribe to an RSS feed for every comment posted on any of our blogs. So if a string of comments pop up, any one of us can start thinking about how or if to respond.

Second, don’t put your foot in your mouth, and don’t get into a fight. It can be tempting to fire off a fast reply on your blog, but keep in mind a lot of people could potentially read this later (even years later) and your reply is as much for them as it is for the person behind the comment that pissed you off. Any way you handle it, remember the people commenting on your site are not risking their reputation with an angry comment, but anyone signing for the Walker could be held accountable, by the blog-reading public if by no one else.

If a string of comments gets rolling, don’t feel like you have to respond to every single one. You can let several comments accumulate and respond en masse. That tends to seem less argumentative and it takes less time. A few complete responses are more informative than dozens of one liners.

You can turn off comments. We currently turn off comments after a post is a few months old. This is helpful not only to stop people from trolling old posts but if your site ever gets exposed to comment spam (say if your CAPTCHA gets hacked) then at least only a few months of posts get polluted. In truth it can take a lot of staff time to monitor and respond to comments on several years of posts so it’s good to work ahead on that one.

Keep your spam filters up to date. Most blog software allows you to keep a blacklist of terms that will automatically get marked as spam. Since installing the Walker blogs we’ve been constantly updating that list with satisfactory results. But keeping up with the spam requires someone to constantly monitor the messages that get though and adjust the list so that can be a drag on a groups work flow. When we searched for an answer we found Akismet, a collaborative filtering service that actually came with our Wordpress install. We’ve been using it for several weeks and have been thrilled with the results.

Many popular blogs turn off comments altogether because it can slow a system down so much; others, afraid of creating bad press for themselves perhaps or being wary of allowing vulgar or obscene words to have space on their web server, do not allow general commenting. The text below was quoted from the Eye Level blog.

Lively discussions and different opinions are encouraged. Questionable language, off-topic comments, and flames will either be edited or deleted. Comments are moderated and will not appear on Eye Level until they have been approved.

Moderating all comments is something we discussed when the Walker Blogs went live. We decided against it because we thought it would slow down any conversations.

In answer to the question posed in this articles title I’d say if you take steps to address concerned comments reasonably any string of comments on your blog can be viewed as a success. We look at it as a chance to prove that the Walker is open minded and democratic enough respond to concerns from anyone.

Direct link to the podcast:

Radio mnartists: http://mnartists.org/resourceList.do?action=rss&rid=82170&pid=219

Subscribing to a podcast with iTunes

Copy the direct link. Open up iTunes. Pull down the “Advanced” menu and go down to “Subscribe to Podcast…” then a window pops up and you paste the url into it and hit return. Then iTunes will automatially check mnartist.org for updates to that set and download them for you.

As we know from our hours of work in post production on the Dialog Table those shadows are a killer.

John Jackman’s Green Screen Tips

Owens Originals

Seanet Bluescreen page