Posts Tagged ‘video’

The rocket: a movie clip.

Saturday, January 10th, 2004

Kerstin has posted a movie on her site. It seems that the Free University’s web server does not know the .mp4 ending of the movie file and sends it as plain text. If that happens to you and you see garbled text in your browser window instead of a movie or a dialogue asking you to save the file, you can either save the garbled text to disk and then open it with the movie player of your choice (VLC or QuickTime should do the job) or you go back and then right click on the link and select to save it to your disk. Complicated, I know. I just send a “bug report” to the webmaster requesting correct configuration of the web server. We’ll see if that helps.

Postscript: 53 minutes after I sent the e-mail to the zedat’s (FU Berlin computer dept.) support address I got the following reply:

Hallo Herr Frers
* Lars Frers <frers@web.de> [09.01.04 15:37]:
> Meine Vermutung ist, das der Apache Server der zedat mit der
> Dateiendung .mp4 nichts anzufangen weiss und die Dateien deshalb mit
Ihr Vermutung war richtig, wir haben den entsprechenden MIME-Type nachgetragen.
Mit freundlichen Gruessen,
Philipp Grau

I must say I am impressed by the speed with which the dealt with this problem. Kudos!

My first multimedia presentation.

Thursday, December 4th, 2003

At the end of the last semester I gave an oral presentation in the seminar “Space, Place, Power” offered by Helmuth Berking and Martina Löw – today I put the presentation file that I used on this server in form of a QuickTime movie file. (Of course I made the presentation with Apple’s Keynote, not with Microsoft’s PowerPoint, therefore the export to QuickTime’s .mov format is no hassle; if you cannot install the QuickTime Player on your machine or .mov don’t work for some other reason you should contact me.) It may be a bit spartanic and not too informative without an audio commentary. However, I want to wait until the college gets the microphones we ordered recently before I record the audio. Otherwise I would have to rely on the internal microphone of my PowerBook or the tacky headset that I have at home and there would be a lot of noise in the recording. So, if you’re interested take a look at it, otherwise it might be wise to wait a bit until I have done the audio (at that point I might also use a different format such as .mp4 or some such thing). As soon as that is done I will reannounce it here and then post links to the file on my static pages concerning my dissertation.

The presentation itself was intended to be a methodological and theoretical statement or manifesto. It succeeded, and we had a very lively discussion in the seminar, which helped me to orient myself and my project.

Moving pictures.

Thursday, October 30th, 2003

Yay! Yesterday I finally got the camera which I need for my dissertation project. I am going to make short video cuts in ferry passenger terminals and train stations and will then analyze them in detail. As the camera wasn’t delivered with a FireWire cable I can’t yet transfer the video recordings from camera to Mac, but as soon as I am back home I will be able to do this and perhaps present you with a few neat clips to awe at.

If you are wondering what camera I chose: it is a Canon MVX100i.

Easier than expected.

Tuesday, September 16th, 2003

A few days ago I contacted the DB AG (German railway) with regards to my study; asking them for permission to do my observations, take photographs and record video. I sent them an e-mail expecting to wait a while for a response and having to re-adress somebody else in the DB hierarchy… However, next morning somebody tried to call me via phone and after being unsuccessful sent me an e-mail asking me to get back to him the following day. I did, and it was a brief and professional question answer interaction with the result that I will get written permission for all the things that I wanted to do for all the respective stations I want to look at. I am even allowed to make recordings in the ticket sale areas (these are owned/managed by DB Reise&Touristik, the stations belong to Station&Service. Thank you Deutsche Bahn. This was very helpful for me. Now the real work can begin!