Cosplay interviews at PAX Australia - Introduction

While I was at Pax Australia, I took photos of cosplayers (because I'm a photographer). After talking to them about their costumes while photographing, I though "This is interesting, I should record it". So I did.

My next post is the first in a series of interviews with cosplayers.

I learnt a few things in the process of these impromptu interviews. Next time, I
should:

• Get people to introduce themselves with names up front.


• Bring a better microphone


• Bring someone else to hold the camera


• Take some reaction shots, in case I want to get fancy and actually edit the videos. (Credit to Mike Moore from Frontline for this tip)

I plan to do more of these, so I'd love to know what you think of them. If you have any comments, please tweet me a message or email me at cosplay@abznak.com.

Some photos not converted in Digital Photo Professional

I just figured out my problem with "Digital Photo Professional" (Canon software which converts CR2 (raw) files to jpgs). If software hasn't created the thumbnail yet, the file can't be selected.

So if you click on the first photo, then shift click on the last photo, it looks like it selects all, but actually it only selects the photos that it has had time to load. Then you batch convert them to jpgs and wonder why you only have one photo of the flying trapeze.

This also explains why the "select all" button is greyed out.

Editing Canon 600D .mov files

This is the workflow I currently use when I want to edit a video that I shot on My Canon 600D.

1. 
   Re-encode the video with SUPER, using these settings:
   
   
   
   
   Note that the SUPER download page is hard to navigate and that SUPER installs some extra software if you don't pay attention to the questions during the install. Icky, but it does the job better than anything else I've found. (I also tried Handbrake and the software that came with the camera). Oh, here's instructions if you want know how to download SUPER.
   


2. 
   The resulting file can be edited in VirtualDub.
   

I think (and hope) that there's a better way, but this one works.

Here's the video, incidentally:

The edit was just switching out the soundtrack.

youtube suggested tags

Youtube just suggested I tag a video "Sydney (City/Town/Village)".

So I did. Now it says:

Suggested tags:
+Village (Fictional Organization Type) +Town (Type Of Fictional Setting) +City (Type Of Fictional Setting)

Which I though was amusing.

Kaizen Event? Sounds ominous.

I just watched this video: (via In the Pipeline)



Is it just me or does "Kaizen Event" sound like the sort of thing that would level a forest or destroy communications infrastructure?

R - GGplot with white background

I wanted to draw a graph without lines and backgrounds. The relevant code is:

opts(panel.grid.minor = theme_blank(), panel.grid.major = theme_blank(), panel.background = theme_blank())

Example:

s = seq(-2*pi, 2*pi, length.out = 1000)

dat = data.frame(x = s)

ggplot(dat) + 
geom_line(aes(x = x, y = sin(1*x)), size = 2, color = "red") + 
geom_line(aes(x = x, y = sin(1.1*x)), size = 2, color = "red", linetype="dashed") + 
opts(
  panel.grid.minor = theme_blank(), 
  panel.grid.major = theme_blank(), 
  panel.background = theme_blank()
)

Android voice search

Android voice search works much better if you change

Settings -> Voice recognizer settings -> Language 

From English (Australia) to English (US).

For example, "map brisbane" actually brings up a map rather than just doing google search.

See http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=168603 for commands.