In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. And chances are it will be in a Steve Jobs biopic.
27 2015-10-12 19:19:00
Re: Zarban.com (21 replies, posted in Off Topic)
I regret that some people took offense to remarks that were made when I misquoted myself on the subject in question. #Zarban2016
28 2015-10-12 06:23:25
Re: Zarban.com (21 replies, posted in Off Topic)
Oh jeez, that's two. Now I'm sorry for the American Girl jokes. Mea culpa. Mea culpa.
I am not obsessed with American Girl. I'm sure it's a fine product with empowering messages for girls, which is why it seemed funny to claim that I--a grown man with no children--had become obsessed with it and its wiki. I have nothing against the franchise or its fans. It seems perfectly charming.
29 2015-10-11 20:20:40
Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread (971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)
Herc wrote:
Zarban wrote:Also, did I spell The Crow wrong or something? I got the other one but there's still one crow left, right? Maybe it's one of the other black bird movies.
The Birds
I got that one first, but it only applies to the two birds on the left. There's still one bird on the right, so I tried The Crow and got it wrong. Maybe it's The Raven.
I got that one first, but it only applies to the two birds on the left. There's still one bird on the right, so I tried The Crow and got it wrong. Maybe it's The Raven. Probably not Maltese Falcon.
30 2015-10-11 19:37:20
Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread (971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)
Cheat facilitator:
http://www.zarban.com/pics/movie-cheat.jpg
31 2015-10-11 18:51:56
Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread (971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)
Herc wrote:
Cotterpin Doozer wrote:Also, there were at least four that I couldn't figure out just because my computer screen is too small to see them clearly.
I can all but guarantee that one of them was O Brother, Where Art Thou? wasn't it?
Dapper Dan pomade can, lower left.
I got 51, but only after messing up by trying to enlarge the picture so I could see the damn thing and accidentally getting 2 extra strikes. It's the horror stuff that I find most frustrating. I recognize them, but there's no way I know what movie they go to.
Also, did I spell The Crow wrong or something? I got the other one but there's still one crow left, right? Maybe it's one of the other black bird movies.
Other stuff I couldn't get
Can't believe I didn't go with my gut on the poster labeled "singe". I REMEMBER THAT EDDIE IZZARD BIT EVEN.
Can't believe I didn't go with my gut on the poster labeled "singe". I REMEMBER THAT EDDIE IZZARD BIT EVEN.
Also, now that I take another close look, the posters I thought were Hitman or Adjustment Bureau are surely CMIYC, a much more popular movie.
Also, really wanted to guess "DC Cab" for the yellow door, but no way, right?
Dark smiley
Mask on wall near it
Circular design on wall above it (oh: man w arms outstretched--another horror movie)
Wrapped guitar
Garden gnome
Floating spores
Fire extinguisher
Dark thing in the middle of the floor (shit, that's a spinning top, isn't it? Damn you, Leo!)
White thing between Dapper Dan can and soap
Yellow and black medallion or ball (horror thing, right?)
White snake above it
Casper mask (Trey's probably right)
Black thing above eye (maybe that's just a bowler hat to go with the eye)
Something under the car between the hand and the robot?
"Shocker" sticker above it, which I assume is a reference to a teen sex comedy and not Shocker
Something on the window of the Delorean?
Something around the neck of the dog in the cast?
32 2015-10-09 14:02:08
Re: Zarban.com (21 replies, posted in Off Topic)
Next major project: converting WhiteHouseMuseum.org to Weebly or something.
33 2015-10-09 13:43:35
Re: Zarban.com (21 replies, posted in Off Topic)
Oh jeez now I'm embarrassed. I didn't want THIS group to find out about my American Girl obsession.
But thanks for the kind words. It really was fun for a long time (7 1/2 years!). I'll maintain the site for years as is and clean the spam out now and then.
(Also, I don't know how many of you know Wordpress, but I hacked the hell out of that code. For awhile, that was part of the fun, but the thing is a beast to mess with anymore. I can't even update my plugins properly because I hacked the main ones of those too.)
34 2015-10-03 16:49:00
Re: Lightsaber Choreography Competition XIII (25 replies, posted in Creations)
Boter wrote:
Got around to watching just over half of the entries tonight. Holy hell guys, Reunion is the best saber fight I have seen in a very long time.
Jeez. Talk about yer space opera. We're approaching peek epicness with these videos. JJ should be shaking in his boots.
35 2015-09-26 05:14:15
Re: Your Random Creations (668 replies, posted in Creations)
These turned out nicely. A timeline for my town. What do you think of the date redundancy? It started as a way to separate different items, but now it's bugging me.
EDIT: never mind; replaced the redundant dates with icons.
:-)
36 2015-09-15 22:57:45
Re: Last movie you watched (2,068 replies, posted in Off Topic)
The Mouse That Roared is a famous showpiece for Peter Sellers in three roles, but nothing like the genius of Dr. Strangelove. It's dry and inoffensive, with a script that misses more than it hits, which is too bad because the premise is brilliant.
Tiny Grand Fenwick has been nearly bankrupted by a California vineyard counterfeiting its wine. The advisers (Leo McKern and Peter Sellers) of the Duchess (Peter Sellers) decide (way too fast) that the solution is to declare war on America. They'll be defeated immediately (they only have a few longbowmen) and accept the famous largesse of the United States in the form of a kind of teeny weeny Marshall Plan. But doofus head of the army Tully (Peter Sellers) inadvertently "defeats" the US, creating an international incident.
The romance is strained, the pacing is clumsy, and the satire is blunted. American monster movie director Jack Arnold (Creature From the Black Lagoon) makes the American diplomats the only non-morons. Seberg and First Doctor Who William Hartnell are good.
Not bad, but not the classic it should have been.
37 2015-09-14 17:34:50
Re: My first foray into video editing (25 replies, posted in Off Topic)
Teague wrote:
Hm. Define "glitches"?
This is very weird. The output MPG file from rough cut 1 displays a distinct audio and video stutter at 0:01:46 every time I play it, yesterday and today. (The source file and playback in APE don't display it.) But the version on YouTube DOES NOT feature that glitch. Oh well.
EDIT: By the way, I know this is all super basic to you guys. I really appreciate the feedback. It's been mostly fun, when I'm not cursing APE for crashing or just being weirdly unintuitive.
38 2015-09-14 16:23:55
Re: My first foray into video editing (25 replies, posted in Off Topic)
Oh, yeah, that last bit is good advice. That's probably easier than what I assumed would be the "right" way.
The only real problem now is glitches showing up in the final output. I don't continue to work while APE is creating the output, so maybe I've got something running in the background that hogs clock cycles for a moment, creating a glitch? Is this a known thing?
Edit: On the other hand, APE crashes *frequently* in Windows 7, so... maybe it just sucks.
39 2015-09-14 04:36:17
Re: My first foray into video editing (25 replies, posted in Off Topic)
There is a scrolling title template, but it doesn't allow you to paste in a whole spreadsheet of names. You have to type or paste them individually, like the cave men did back in the 1700s.
I've posted a new version, fully edited and with the lighting improved, but missing a photo that the host talks about near the end. I've since added a factoid about each of the battles as he talks about them. Other than that, this is about as good as I can figure out how to make it, I think. I welcome feedback on sucking less. I have 8 or 10 of these to do, and I doubt the camera work is any better on the others.
40 2015-09-13 14:41:10
Re: My first foray into video editing (25 replies, posted in Off Topic)
What's the "real" way to do credits? The advice I took was to create the list as a long image in Photoshop, then animate the list to scroll up. Clumsy, for something that every movie needs.
41 2015-09-12 22:14:13
Re: My first foray into video editing (25 replies, posted in Off Topic)
This took forever to output and all afternoon to upload. And it's just a rough cut. I've done a bunch of more work on the second half of the video today, finding regimental rosters that show local soldiers and whatnot.
42 2015-09-12 05:44:07
Re: My first foray into video editing (25 replies, posted in Off Topic)
Okay, half-way thru this Civil War lecture, and it's going well except for when half my lecture clip got corrupted and APE crashed repeatedly. (Deleted the bad clip and reinserted.) I'm dropping in maps and pictures of generals as they get mentioned, even doing pan-and-zooms to follow armies moving across the map.
Even so, I'm fighting a pitched battle against the cameraman. He's as unskilled as I am. There's only so much jerky panning and zooming that I can cover by going to a map.
I'll post a rough version tomorrow morning for those who are curious. I appreciate the advice.
43 2015-09-11 23:34:18
Re: My first foray into video editing (25 replies, posted in Off Topic)
After searching around for a pan-and-zoom tutorial, I found one that mentions that the default for images is for APE to down-res them to fit in the frame. The only real problem image was a scrolling list of local Civil War vets, so I deselected "Scale to frame size" and redid the image scroll, and it looks great.
Still figuring out the keyframes thing. (And thanks, Teague.) I get that the yellow lines in the clip show in and out points for fades, but I seem to keep accidentally putting a keyframe in the middle of a clip and not being able to see it and deleting them and starting over.
The appallingly unintuitive copy-and-paste for titles also took a while to get (don't copy! "duplicate"!).
44 2015-09-11 17:52:17
Re: My first foray into video editing (25 replies, posted in Off Topic)
I bought Adobe Premiere Elements and am finding it a bit unintuitive (not unlike Photoshop Elements).
Anybody who wants to give me a quick Skype tutorial on how keyframes work would have my gratitude. Also, everything is blurry even after rendering, whatever that is.
45 2015-09-11 02:45:00
Re: My first foray into video editing (25 replies, posted in Off Topic)
Well, Davinci Resolve was a bust. Just kept crashing, even after uninstall/reinstall.
46 2015-09-10 00:46:13
Re: My first foray into video editing (25 replies, posted in Off Topic)
Premier Elements seems more my speed. But at the same time I often feel limited by Photoshop Elements. I use it and an old copy of Dreamweaver a lot. I'm actually kind of tempted to go the full Adobe Creative Cloud "all apps" route, but I'd rather not have to tell people I have a hobby where i pay for software like it's medicine.
47 2015-09-09 22:32:46
Re: My first foray into video editing (25 replies, posted in Off Topic)
Oh, those look terrific. Very powerful. I'll just... um... start using one of them.
48 2015-09-09 19:50:42
Topic: My first foray into video editing (25 replies, posted in Off Topic)
As mentioned previously, I'm volunteering at the local history center, and now I've been asked to try my hand at editing and publishing the "history chats" where a local expert talks about some part of local history.
Knowing almost nothing about this sort of thing, I've tried Windows Movie Maker, but it is almost comically limited in its capabilities. It can't even put an image over the main video. What do you non-pro hobbyists use?
49 2015-09-01 15:39:24
Re: Random Movie Talk That Probably Doesn't Deserve Its Own Thread (971 replies, posted in Movie Stuff)
Herc wrote:
But I don't understand
a) how he managed to get the matte to follow his head while he moved smoothly around (it seems unlikely he could hold a position while they advanced to the next frame and changed the matte, and then resume a frame's worth of motion for the next frame), and
b) how he managed those moments where his hand passes in front of his missing head (where the matte would presumably be)
The heads that he physically handles are dummies. The part at :18 where he waves his arm in front of the head on the table, the arm is clearly painted in.
He had to stop the film to get the dummy heads put into his hands, so I'm guessing a black bag got put over his head at the same time, but there's also some optical dodging going on too. I suspect that the bag was too obvious most of the time, and he dodged that spot (waving a little piece of card on a wire in front of the projector to keep light from getting to that area of the print) when copying to the final master.
