Isaiah 65:24

If you know me personally, you might know that I want God to be the center of my life (and I apologize to you all for when I misrepresent Him)... Anyways, this morning I was on the way to church and just had something on my mind that was worrying me. It wasn't a huge deal, but it was definitely taking away from my enjoyment of the day. Somewhat out of frustration, I told God "if you take this away, I'll post on my blog about it".

Lots of people try to make bargains with God. A lot of times it's when they're on a Titanic that's sinking, or an airplane that's going down, or they are realizing that they made some really bad decisions. It's too easily done out of a desire to control God, or a fear of consequences, rather than real repentance. I know I've done it out of poor motivations in the past, usually when I was doing something stupid and was too stubborn to take the steps needed to fix the situation, and I never followed through on my part of the "bargain".

So anyways, here's a blog post to say that I had the best day in a while and can't remember what was bothering me. Whether or not He gives the answer we want, God does always give the best answer.

Dealing with Camera Flashes in Smoothcam'd Footage

I wanted to post a quick video editing tip that I discovered while trying to stabilize some wedding footage in Final Cut Pro. The "easy" way to do this is to apply the Smoothcam filter to the clip. However, if the footage includes frames with camera flashes going off, the optical flow analysis used by Smoothcam frequently has problems analyzing the footage, and usually winds up adding sharp jumps right around the time of the flashes.

Here's the workaround I've found. I'm assuming you've already got a FCP sequence with the Smoothcam filter applied.
1. Right click (Ctrl+click) on the clip in your FCP sequence.
2. Choose "Send to -> Motion" from the menu.
3. Choose the filename and directory to save the new Motion project as.
4. When Motion opens up with the new project, go to the Motion Layers window and select the clip (which will be underneath a 'Group 1'). Make sure the current time is set to the beginning of the clip.
5. Go to the Inspector tab, and then the 'Behaviors' tab under that. You'll see the "Stabilize" behavior listed.
6. The key to this workaround is to add "trackers" to specific points the scene background that retain their contrast even during a camera flash, and also don't get obscured by foreground objects during the action. Click the "Add" button next to the Tracker label.
7. There should be a "Tracker 1" listed below in the Stabilize behavior's inspector. Click on the "Tracker 1" line to make sure you can see its location.
8. Drag the tracker's crosshairs to a place in the image where there's a high-contrast intersection. If you change "Auto-zoom mode" to "Edge", you'll be able to better see the places that Motion considers "high contrast". It's best if they are an intersection of two somewhat perpendicular lines.
9. In order for rotation and scaling smoothing to work properly, you'll want to add at least one more tracker, using steps similar to steps 6-8 that you used for Tracker 1. Even more trackers wouldn't hurt at all.
10. When you're done adding trackers, click the "Analyze" button next to the "Movement" label. Motion should start analyzing the whole clip.
11. Save the Motion project and exit back to Final Cut Pro.

That should do it! Hopefully Apple will eventually fix their optical flow algorithm to ignore camera flashes.

LinuxConf Australia 2008 Talk: Virtualization Tools

As part of the Virtualization Miniconf at LinuxConf Australia 2008, Ragavan Srinivasan and I are going to be giving a talk on the Open Virtual Machine Tools as a set of technologies and a project, at 1:30pm on January 28, 2008. If you'll be at LCA 2008, please stop by for the talk, or just to say hello!

SVLUG Talk about Virtualization Tools

If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, I'm going to be helping give a talk about the Open Virtual Machine Tools project at Silicon Valley Linux Users Group (SVLUG) next Wednesday evening, January 2, 2008. Join us for an interesting discussion on one of the active fronts of virtualization technology. The SVLUG link has details of when and where...