We did presentations and watched everyone's videos. But we did more than that also. At the moment I am burning DVDs of the data that was on our group's external hard drive. I have to burn eight DVDs. It actually took four DVDs to fit all the data that I wanted. I decided that I really wanted to have all the data in the class resource folder, which was almost a gigabyte. Then I decided that I wanted the rendered final project in AVI format with DV and WAV codecs for better quality, which was another 2 gigabytes. Then I realized that the long video I had taken at the dance was not encluded in the 11.6 gigabyte estimate and was another 2 gigabytes. All of this necessitated another DVD.
The other groups final projects were good. I didn't really appreciate the projects that basically showed a slide show of our time at COSMOS, but I suppose I will in a couple of months. I liked the movie made by the Juggernauts, "Its just a game...", although the "Its" should be "It's" because of "It is just a game...". Anyways, the special effects were really cool. Hearing afterwards that Jordi had worked on the lightsaber scene for around 16 hours surprised me because it was such a short scene. When I was watching it I was thinking, "Wow. That's amazing." So I guess it was worth the time.
It is hard to believe that today is the last real day in COSMOS. It all passed by so quickly and we all barely got to know each other. It was only in the past two weeks that I got to know everyone. Everyone lives all over California too so we will probably never run into each other. Maybe I will run into Kyle, but I doubt it.
After watching the videos everyone took a bunch of pictures which will probably be put on our blogs. It was a rather happy/sad moment.
So I'm the last one left in the lab. Currently the final disc (4) is being burnt and the second is being duplicated. We are getting there...
Friday, August 3, 2007
Thursday, August 2, 2007
The end of Video Editing
Today was the deadline for our final projects. We had no trouble finishing our project on time. However, there are not enough DVDs for people to have more than one to save their source files on. Without compressing the files they take up 11.6 GB, which would take 3 DVDs. It takes too long to compress the files and they don't compress very well because they are already compressed for the most part. Kyle has also asked for the source files so I need 6 DVDs in total. I guess it is finally time to actually buy something from the Price Center unless Danny has some DVDs he will let me have.
I think the video turned out rather well. It is one frame less than nine minutes and 45 seconds. The credits took more than a minute of that, but a lot of people helped with the video and we had to showcase an image rotated with Jython because our main video did not. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's movies tomorrow.
I think the video turned out rather well. It is one frame less than nine minutes and 45 seconds. The credits took more than a minute of that, but a lot of people helped with the video and we had to showcase an image rotated with Jython because our main video did not. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's movies tomorrow.
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
More and More Video Editing
Today everyone did a lot of video editing. Even though we were given all of class time to work on our final projects, some teams still needed more time outside of class time to work on their projects. Nick accompanied a group of people down to the computer lab in the CSE building. I was the only person from my group who was concerned aenough about the video to go. I was able to finish editing the video during the time given, but I still need to finish making the credits. In addition, one person from my suite complained about how bad the video was when it was shown in my suite. Because of this, Le thinks that some changes should be made to the video. I'm not sure whether we will have time to make them tomorrow. When I rendered the video today during the evening it took about 20 minutes so we will have to make sure that we have nough time to render it tomorrow.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
People are Crazy
Right now people are making a lot of noise on the third floor beneath suite 400. There was shouting and some people running and something is happening down there.
This morning we had a discovery lecture on using technology to figure out how how a painting has been modified over the years. Using infrared light to look at a painting can reveal details that have been lost over time and using X-rays can reveal where a painting has been touched up. It was interesting looking at famous pictures that had been analyzed using different techniques to reveal secrets about them but for some reason I kept on wanting to fall asleep. Maybe it was because it was so dark in the room.
After the lecture we had a lecture by Shirley about how to put together the backboard for our final project and what to look for in the color and writing of the backboard. Our team looked over our literature and found some things that could be written better and some errors in typing. We also used personal pronouns a lot in some of the write ups.
The main food at Ventanas did not look good to me so I grabbed some pizza and made a grilled cheese sandwich again. After microwaving it to melt the cheese I put it into the toaster to brown the bread. However, because I did not wait for the cheese to solidify before putting it through the toaster, the sandwich came apart at the end of the toaster. The top part came out of the place toast is supposed to come out of but the bottom part stuck to the grills of the toaster. This meant that it was dragged along the bottom part of the toaster until it came around to the front of the toaster again. Oh well, it still tasted good.
After lunch we had a lecture by Joe, who talked about distributed computing, common knowledge, and faulty data lines. It was really interesting and highlighted some problems that cannot be solved because distance in communication.
Then we had over an hour to work on our final projects. So far we are less than half way done editing our video. We are planning to come into the computer lab in the Computer Science Engineering building during study time to work on the video more. EDIT: My group is lazy and does not want to edit the video during study time. It must be time to read some Sci-Fi. I guess I tried out the fixed voiceovers during our time in the lab and they sounded good so I guess we don't have to redo that scene anymore.
During our time in the computer lab we also threw a surprise birthday party for Shirley. Everyone got cake, milk, and lemonade if they wanted.
This morning we had a discovery lecture on using technology to figure out how how a painting has been modified over the years. Using infrared light to look at a painting can reveal details that have been lost over time and using X-rays can reveal where a painting has been touched up. It was interesting looking at famous pictures that had been analyzed using different techniques to reveal secrets about them but for some reason I kept on wanting to fall asleep. Maybe it was because it was so dark in the room.
After the lecture we had a lecture by Shirley about how to put together the backboard for our final project and what to look for in the color and writing of the backboard. Our team looked over our literature and found some things that could be written better and some errors in typing. We also used personal pronouns a lot in some of the write ups.
The main food at Ventanas did not look good to me so I grabbed some pizza and made a grilled cheese sandwich again. After microwaving it to melt the cheese I put it into the toaster to brown the bread. However, because I did not wait for the cheese to solidify before putting it through the toaster, the sandwich came apart at the end of the toaster. The top part came out of the place toast is supposed to come out of but the bottom part stuck to the grills of the toaster. This meant that it was dragged along the bottom part of the toaster until it came around to the front of the toaster again. Oh well, it still tasted good.
After lunch we had a lecture by Joe, who talked about distributed computing, common knowledge, and faulty data lines. It was really interesting and highlighted some problems that cannot be solved because distance in communication.
Then we had over an hour to work on our final projects. So far we are less than half way done editing our video. We are planning to come into the computer lab in the Computer Science Engineering building during study time to work on the video more. EDIT: My group is lazy and does not want to edit the video during study time. It must be time to read some Sci-Fi. I guess I tried out the fixed voiceovers during our time in the lab and they sounded good so I guess we don't have to redo that scene anymore.
During our time in the computer lab we also threw a surprise birthday party for Shirley. Everyone got cake, milk, and lemonade if they wanted.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Editing, editing, editing
So today we edited. Or tried to. The computers would not cooperate for the first two hours this morning until Vivian suggested that we use a different camcorder for the capture (thankyouthankyouthankyou). For some reason that fixed all of the problems we were having with the computers and allowed us to capture out footage. After capturing the footage in real time, we had to figue out what the best scene was out of the multiple takes we did, which was very time consuming. In addition, one of our scenes was shot when it was windy so the audio was bad. We tried to make a new audio track for it, but it had a lot of background noise for some reason. Ming and Tiffany said that it sounded like Tiffany's laptop, but it did not sound like it to me. Either way it was really annoying and hard to get rid of. Tiffany and Ming worked with Sony Sound Forge and tried to get rid of the noise, but in the end it lost a lot of high frequncies and did not sound good. This left us with two options - shoot the entire scene over again or try and record the audio again with better equipment.
After dinner we recorded the voiceovers for the Sun God and the tree using the headset Le had brought from home. It took forever because Kyle wanted the lines to be perfect, but in the end that worked out well. Before we recorded Kyle's lines I tried to fix up the voiceovers we had recorded earlier in the day using Audacity. Using the noise filter actually got rid of the background noise and the intermittent high pitched noise that were so annoying while not making the voices sound too bad. So maybe we won't have to reshoot/rerecord the scene after all.
I just checked and it seems like the noise reduction feature is much improved in the beta Audacity so I'll have to try that out.
After dinner we recorded the voiceovers for the Sun God and the tree using the headset Le had brought from home. It took forever because Kyle wanted the lines to be perfect, but in the end that worked out well. Before we recorded Kyle's lines I tried to fix up the voiceovers we had recorded earlier in the day using Audacity. Using the noise filter actually got rid of the background noise and the intermittent high pitched noise that were so annoying while not making the voices sound too bad. So maybe we won't have to reshoot/rerecord the scene after all.
I just checked and it seems like the noise reduction feature is much improved in the beta Audacity so I'll have to try that out.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Filming today was fun...
In the morning half of the people in our group slept in until after nine so we were not able to shoot any of our film in the morning. Because I was bored and nobody was around to do any work I looked for motherboards that have the i865PE northbridge and have a voltage regulator that supports conroe processors. So far, I have only found two that exist: the conroe865pe from ASRock and another from Gigabyte that does not have an easily remebered name. The conroe865pe has been discontinued and the one from Gigabyte does not seem to exist except on their website. There are a lot of motherboards based on the i865G northbridge, but they are all in the microATX form factor, which can only fit three PCI slots. There are also boards based on Via chipsets, but they tend to be less reliable and perform worse.
After lunch our team and some other friends of ours grouped and went down to near the Price Center to film our final project. But before we went to the Price Center Tiffany and I had to go down to the computer lab our cluster usually uses and get the equipment that we were going to use (a microphone). For some reason somebody does not trust the students and so a teaching assistant or someone has to accompany us when we use the equipment. Today Ming had to stay with us the entire time we were filming. Hopefully it wasn't too boring for him. Even though we had almost three hours to film, we still did not finish filming all of the scenes. We are almost done though. Hopefully the rest of the movie making process will be mainly editing the movie. We also have a lot of funny bloopers from today's shooting.
Not much of the stuff for dinner today at Ventanas appealed to me so I got some cheese filled noodles and made my own grilled cheese sandwich with the bread and cheese from the salad bar. First I microwaved it to melt the cheese and then I toasted it with the ST-1 Mini Toaster. It worked out rather well.
After dinner during study time our team finally finished filming all the scenes for our final project except for the eighth one, which no one cared about and we are going to make with the footage we have somehow. Hopefully none of the scenes we have filmed so far turn out to be really bad. Then we would have to refilm then. We should have the time if that happens though.
After lunch our team and some other friends of ours grouped and went down to near the Price Center to film our final project. But before we went to the Price Center Tiffany and I had to go down to the computer lab our cluster usually uses and get the equipment that we were going to use (a microphone). For some reason somebody does not trust the students and so a teaching assistant or someone has to accompany us when we use the equipment. Today Ming had to stay with us the entire time we were filming. Hopefully it wasn't too boring for him. Even though we had almost three hours to film, we still did not finish filming all of the scenes. We are almost done though. Hopefully the rest of the movie making process will be mainly editing the movie. We also have a lot of funny bloopers from today's shooting.
Not much of the stuff for dinner today at Ventanas appealed to me so I got some cheese filled noodles and made my own grilled cheese sandwich with the bread and cheese from the salad bar. First I microwaved it to melt the cheese and then I toasted it with the ST-1 Mini Toaster. It worked out rather well.
After dinner during study time our team finally finished filming all the scenes for our final project except for the eighth one, which no one cared about and we are going to make with the footage we have somehow. Hopefully none of the scenes we have filmed so far turn out to be really bad. Then we would have to refilm then. We should have the time if that happens though.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
The Zoo Trip
Today was a rather long day. In the morning our team shot a lot of our scenes for the final project. We didn't have access to an external mic to use, so I'm not sure how the audio came out.
That took almost all morning. We just had enough time to come back to ERC, have lunch, and go to the zoo. We rode a new bus on the way there that had seatbelts in it and a roof that was designed to reduce the amount of noise in the bus. It was perforated so sound is absorbed and not reflected from the ceiling. At the zoo I walked around with Wesley and Xiaozhe. We walked around the whole zoo and while we were doing so Xiaozhe decided to name all of the animals he liked. Dinner was the standard boxed faire from Ventanas, but this time I was able to get a chicken sandwich that did not have the sliced turkey meat with nitrates in it. After eating dinner we decided to look at the exhibits we had not seen yet, which were not many. During this time Xiaozhe and Wesley made little sketches of the surrounding environment. Everyone had the option of doing the scavenger hunt after dinner, but we chose not to.
That took almost all morning. We just had enough time to come back to ERC, have lunch, and go to the zoo. We rode a new bus on the way there that had seatbelts in it and a roof that was designed to reduce the amount of noise in the bus. It was perforated so sound is absorbed and not reflected from the ceiling. At the zoo I walked around with Wesley and Xiaozhe. We walked around the whole zoo and while we were doing so Xiaozhe decided to name all of the animals he liked. Dinner was the standard boxed faire from Ventanas, but this time I was able to get a chicken sandwich that did not have the sliced turkey meat with nitrates in it. After eating dinner we decided to look at the exhibits we had not seen yet, which were not many. During this time Xiaozhe and Wesley made little sketches of the surrounding environment. Everyone had the option of doing the scavenger hunt after dinner, but we chose not to.
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