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From DV to Vimeo on Linux

Short summary of "how to get a movie from DV camera to Vimeo on Linux" (after several tries with 16:9 format rendered as 4:3 :-)).
Download data from camera (used Firewire port and Kino). Only needed thing was to load raw1394 module and add permissions to r/w to /dev/raw1394 before launching Kino.
Exported movie as DV-AVI (type 1).
Converted the resulting AVI to H.264 (and rescaled it on the way).

mencoder -profile vi -aspect 16:9 -vf scale=848:480 $1 -o $2

Here the vi profile refers to a section in ~/.mplayer/mencoder.conf:

[vi]
profile-desc="Lo-quality x264 video with aac"
vf="pp=ci"
ovc=x264=yes
oac=lavc=yes
lavcopts="ac3"
x264encopts="threads=auto:subq=6:partitions=all:8x8dct:me=umh:frameref=5:bframes=3:b_pyramid:weight_b:qp=30"

Value of the qp parameter in x264encopts determines quality - the lower, the better (and larger file). In general 10 seems very nice, 30 acceptable for not-so-hi-quality source.

Actually - the size it's rescaled to should probably be chosen better...

Playing with Selphy CP530 (and not really amused)

Selphy printers are small, cheap to get and not that expensive to use. In addition, there are are no inks that would dry when you don't use it for few days. Why is it cheap? Color space of the printer is very poor and there's no support for color management - so except for special types of images you are going to need more then one paper to make the result look acceptable (and in many cases even that is not going to help).

Sky - long exposure

I tried to make an exposure of a night scene - so long that the stars would turn into arcs of light. Results are below - I think that I at least got some ideas how to do that right.

First - how long the exposure should be to get a reasonable effect? If the stars rotate 360 degrees in 24 hours, that makes 5 degrees in 20 minutes. That should do.
Canon 400D has exposure time limited to 30 sec unless in bulb mode. Bulb mode only makes sense if you have remote shutter trigger - you can surely hold the shutter button 20 minutes, but there's no way the image will be sharp. After several tries to securely lock the trigger mechanically, I reverted to 30 sec exposures, expecting to combine them later. As 30 sec would probably result in some sensor hotspots, I turned the long exposure noise eliminitation on, took some spare clothes and spent half an hour half sleeping and half pressing the button.

As a result I got 21 images with ISO 100, F3.5, on a 16 mm equiv. lens, spaced ~1 min in time from each other - 30 sec exposure, 30 sec noise elimination exposure, write, my wake up time.
After 10 frames the battery died and the image got slightly shifted, so I only used the remaining ones/second part of the series.


This was created by loading the images as layers into Gimp, turning the overlay option to Lighten only for each except background layer and tuning the curves slightly. As you see, the stars and clouds move - but stars turn into dots, not arcs...

Just to try I also fed the same images to Picasa's Collage option. Here you get more blurred image, against with dots for stars, but the merging seems to be done in a smoother manner. Maybe just sum of 1/n weighted matrixes?


Anyway, what might work better for the given set of stills is to combine them into a video.
This was done in mencoder using:

mencoder mf://*.jpg -mf type=jpg:fps=5 -ovc x264 -x264encopts crf=5.0 -noaspect -o a.avi


Next time:

1. Take the remote trigger with me :-)
   
2. Replace the battery in camera before shooting to make sure it will last when it's freezing around.
3. Try withouth long exposure elimination, so we'll get lines, not separate points.
4. Try with stopped down lens and noise elimination for a time like ~10 or 15 minutes.
5. Try clear sky without the moon and (especially) without clouds