Blog.JonECat.com

IITT Video Done

So the main reason I was in Germany a few weeks back was to participate and video a Think Tank for some of the people involved in the Cisco Networking Academy. Well here is the result of my trip there. Enjoy.. if you can.

Click Here to view.

HTML 5 and the .OGG Format

I don’t know how many of you are web developers that come here, but I am really looking forward to the HTML5 standard that will be implemented in Firefox 3.1. HTML5 allows for the use of the <video> tag. This will nativley support .ogg files that are encoded in the Theora video CODEC and OGG audio CODEC. Why is this important you ask? You will not have to require Flash player or any other plugin for that matter to playback video in the browser. The browser will support it nativley.

Well Theora and OGG are a part of the Xiph project. The 2 CODECs are open source and quite good in my opinion. Theora is comparitive to DIVX or XVID CODECs, but it is completely free and open source. OGG is similar to MP3 or MP4A (AKA AAC).

The only hurdle we will have is getting all of the other browsers such as IE & Safari to support it. That may be the most difficult part of this new standard, but hopefully with time we will see this widespread.

So what do say, as soon as this hits the market lets try to make an active effort to get this video type mainstream. Ars Technica wrote a good article about this here.

Links:

Quicktime Plugin for Theora and OGG

Specs about the new <video> tag

Thats A Lot Of Tapes

I was sitting here at my editing station, and looked to my left, I noticed that I had a lot of tapes sitting there (over 250). I thought wow, I have shot quite a bit of footage since I started working for CLI.

I can’t claim all of it. My fellow partner in crime Rich, has shot just as much as I have. We have spent many days from home to capture all of this footage. I hope it was worth it.

The funny thing is, this does not represent any of the time spent in the studio shooting chroma key footage, I shoot using a tapeless setup for that, straight to the hard drive. It makes for a faster turn around time.

Lunch == Avocado Roll

I am eating a wonderful lunch from Yogi’s. It is an Avocado Roll, I can’t get enough of these!

Castle Crashers Is Incredible

I got Castle Crashers last night for the XBOX 360, and I am thoroughly impressed. If you have a 360 and have this game, hit me up with a friend request, my username is “GoukiXL”.

Traditional Bavarian Music

Here is a clip I shot on a SD1000 P&S camera. On the last night we had a little going away party and they brought in some musicians. They play us some traditional Bavarian style music, it was very cool. I don’t know if I would load it up on the iPod, but interesting to experience once.

Instruments left to right:
Hammer Dulcimer, Accordion, Acoustic Guitar, Sitar (I know that is wrong but that is what they called it)

The Secret Rooms Of The Monastery

As you probably know by now I have been staying in a converted monastery. Well not all of the rooms were modernized for the training center. A few of the most sacred rooms were kept as they were hundreds of years ago. The two rooms that I am going to share were by far the most incredible of the facility.

First was the “Chapel Of The Mother Mary”. This room was incredible, it had gold leafing and frescos everywhere. The Second is the library. This room had so many incredibly rare books it was ridiculous.

Our tour guide who is one of the facilitators of the think tank has been working here for the last 20 years. This was only the 3rd time he was allowed to be in these rooms just to give you the significance of this event. I truly felt privileged to be allowed to go in these rooms. He later offered to give myself and Rich Miller (my partner in crime at work, he does the Flash work and I do the video) a separate tour from the rest of the group to get closer look at all of it by one of the Conservationist of all the rare items of the monastery. She also took us into some rooms that the others did not go into, it was sick!

Once again, click on the image to see more information about it, and to see a larger size. Enjoy!

I lied I guess I am going to show you three rooms.. kinda, this image was in one of the rare animal rooms.

This is a panorama of the ceiling fresco in the library, sorry the ends got a little scewed, I did it by hand, no tripod laying on my back.