Video

Very many people are currently moving to video-based meetings. For that reason I have written up some quick advise on how to improve your setup. This is based on my interview advise, but grouped differently. Network {width=“200” height=“100”} The first important thing is to have as good a network as you can. Video conferencing requires a lot of bandwidth, so even though your e-mail and regular browsing works fine, it may still not be sufficient for good video transmission....

I am continuing my explorations of the great terminal-based video tool FFmpeg. Now I wanted to see if I could “flatten” a 360-degree video recorded with a Ricoh Theta camera. These cameras contain two fisheye lenses, capturing two 180-degree videos next to each other. This results in video files like the one I show a screenshot of below. These files are not very useful to watch or work with, so we need to somehow “flatten” them into a more meaningful video file....

As part of my exploration in creating multi-exposure keyframe image displays with FFmpeg and ImageMagick, I tried out a number of things that did not help solve the initial problem but still could be interesting for other things. Most interesting was the automagic creation of image masks from a video file. I will use a contemporary dance video from the AIST Dance Video Database as an example: The first step is to extract keyframes from the video file using this one-liner ffmpeg command:...

While I was testing visualization of some videos from the AIST database earlier today, I wanted to also create some “keyframe image displays”. This can be seen as a way of doing multi-exposure photography, and should be quite straightforward to do. Still it took me quite some time to figure out exactly how to implement it. It may be that I was searching for the wrong things, but in case anyone else is looking for the same, here is a quick write up....

Researchers from AIST have released an open database of dance videos, and I got very excited to try out some visualization methods on some of the files. This was also a good chance to test out some new functionality in the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Matlab that we are developing at RITMO. The AIST collection contains a number of videos. I selected one hip-hop dance video based on a very steady rhythmic pattern, and a contemporary dance video that is more fluid in both motion and music....

We just started a new run of our free online course Music Moves. Here we have a tradition of recording wrap-up videos every Friday, in which some of the course educators answer questions from the learners. We have recorded these in many different ways, from using high-end cameras and microphones to just using a handheld phone. We have found that using multiple cameras and microphones is too time-consuming, both in setup and editing....

How does an “old-school” document camera work for modern-day teaching? Remarkably well, I think. Here are some thoughts on my experience over the last few years. The reason I got started with a document camera was because I felt the need for a more flexible setup for my classroom teaching. Conference presentations with limited time are better done with linear presentation tools, I think, since the slides help with the flow....

We have a bunch of Canon XF105 at RITMO, a camera that records MXF files. This is not a particularly useful file format (unless for further processing). Since many of our recordings are just for documentation purposes, we often see the need to convert to MP4. Here I present two solutions for converting MXF files to MP4, both as individual files and a combined file from a folder. These are shell scripts based on the handy FFmpeg....

I have been interviewing a lot of people for various types of university positions over the years. Most often these interviews are conducted using a video-conferencing system. Here I provide some tips to help people prepare for a video-based job interview: We (and many others) typically use Skype for interviews, not because it is the best system out there (of commercial platforms I prefer Zoom), but because it is the most widespread solution....

I was invited to talk about my experiences with flipped classroom methodologies at a seminar at the Faculty of Humanities last week. Preparing for the talk got me to revisit my own journey of working towards flipped teaching methodologies. This has also involved explorations of various types of audio/video recording. I will go through them in chronological order. Podcasting Back in 2009-2011, I created “podcasts” of my lectures a couple of semesters, such as in the course MUS2006 Music and Body Movements (which was at the time taught in Norwegian)....