Electric Pedal

Steve TV: Gas Station

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This video was recorded on the Nokia N95. I then edited the video on iMovie on my MacBook Pro.

I learned a couple of things. An 8 minute movie, exported as 640x480 is a 266MB file. So I re-exported this as a 320x240 QuickTime movie using H.264 and it ended up as a 73 MB file. A better size for uploading to blip.tv.

I might switch to recording these Steve TV videos as 320x240 so I don't have to deal with the file size problems. The 640x480 quality is amazing, but for these little tests capturing life streams, I think the smaller size is fine.

I'm also being seduced by the ease of use that the N95 provides with it's internal editor. After having gone through all the trials and tribulations of logging and capturing, editing, compressing and exporting video with a desktop based system and miniDV based camera, it's freeing to be able to shoot, edit and post from one device.

Steve TV: Waiting Room

Steve TV: Waiting Room
The N95 did the title and credits. I used the menus to make this movie. First I merged two clips, then added the title, then added the credits. All without a timeline. Pretty sweet. There's a timeline based editor too, but I wanted to try this out today.

Also, part of this was edited in camera, meaning I shot a clip, then paused, then shot, then paused, and then saved. So I ended up with a clip that had three shots in it. very cool.

Boston from BostonNOW

Nokia N95 Spectrum Visualisation

Listening to Bang Camaro Push Push (Lady Lightning) on my new Nokia N95 via headphones with Spectrum Visualisation turned on. ROCK!

Coffeebabyyeah

My class at Northeastern shot and edited this short piece with the Nokia N93 (standard Ravi disclaimer from the Channeling Ralph Hinkley post).

Again, there seems to be some audio synch issues when editing clips (?).

Channeling Ralph Hinkley

As an avid preteen television viewer, I distinctly remember the harrowing dilemma faced by Ralph Hinkley in The Greatest American Hero. In the pilot episode he receives a magical suit from space aliens (I remember the space ship was quite impressive in that episode as was the iconic shot of him reaching upwards from his Jeep as they flew away).

The suit was capable of amazing things but he lost the manual, so was always scrambling to figure out how to use it. This led to comedic highjinks as he would fly into walls and such.

I received the Nokia N93 recently on a loan basis from folks at 1000heads (thanks to Steve). The enclosed manual is in Finnish so I've been kind of winging it, Ralph Hinkley style to figure out what I can do with the camera.

After gearing up with a universal charger and a 1 GB miniSD card (so I could charge the phone and shoot more than a couple of minutes of video), I shot and edited this piece (Sundays with Sonia) that represents a typical Sunday down at my in-laws. I've uploaded in it's unadulterated mp4 form that I downloaded from the phone to my computer via the USB connector cord.



Some observations:
• the editing is a little clunky, but hey -- it's on a phone!
• I couldn't seem to figure out how to save my project file (trimmed clips in a sequence); whenever I reopened an edited piece it was flattened to one clip
• There seemed to be some audio-synch issues that came up through the process of editing (see the clip where I'm thirsting for wine).
• I couldn't figure out how to "play" any text inserts to preview; hence the title text is oddly tiny
• Next I need to figure out how to post the video somewhere from the phone.

Note: I did find the user manual PDFs on Nokia's web site, but I was already too far gone with my Greatest American Hero riffing...

Broadcasting Live from Cellphone to the Web

Broadcasting Live from Cellphone to the Web - Originally uploaded on flickr by stevegarfield.

I can't believe I just did a live broadcast from my Nokia N93 over WiFi to the web. This is the future. Amazing.

Using the ComVu PocketCaster software I broadcast live audio and video from the secondary video camera to the web. I almost can't believe I just did it. But we have video to prove it. So it must have been real.

Here's the video from The future.

Here's my Personal Cellphone Webcast page where I also have a second video recorded with what ComVu calls the back cam, it's the bigger one on the side of the N93.

Demonstrating N95 Video Editing

David Tamés took this photo of me demonstrating the Nokia N95's video editing features at this month's Boston Media Makers meeting in Boston.

Here are his meeting notes.