Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Subscribe to Comments of Your Picasa Web Album

Now you can read all comments of your Picasa web album in your favorite RSS reader. There is no need to go back to the website to check new comments.
Just subscribe to feed://picasaweb.google.com/data/feed/base/user/USERNAME?kind=comment&alt=rss&access=pub
(replace USERNAME by your Picasa username) You will receive all comments of all photos in all albums through the feed.

It seems that Google does not provide this link explicitly. There is an RSS link of all albums. I looked at the link and wondered what will happen if the link parameter "kind=album" is replaced by "kind=comment". Then I found this useful comment feed link.

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Video Preparation for Computer Graphics Papers

Here are some of my experiences in preparing a video for a CG paper.

Narration - Audacity
Audacity is an audio recording software. It's free, and runs both in Linux and Windows. Remember to use the noise removal filter to reduce background noise. The volume of the recorded narration might be very small. You can use a amplifier filter
to increase the volume.

Screen Capturing - Camtasia

Video Editor - Adobe Premiere Pro CS3
It's a professional video editor. It can do almost anything I need, and is very easy to use. Its help pages are very useful. Most of the time I can find answers in the help pages.

Video Editing

Fonts: Vadana

Opening a New Project in Adobe Premiere
Format: custom
Width: 640
Height: 480
Pixel ratio: square pixel (1.0)
Importing Video Files into Adobe Premiere

If your video comes in a sequence of image files. use file->import, choose the first image file, for example "video0001.tga". And also select "Numbered Sequence" option. The entire sequence video0001.tga, video0002.tga, ... will be imported as a single video file.

Exporting
The following settings are for QuickTime MPEG4 codec. It produces a 18MB for a 3-minute video.
  • File -> Export -> Adobe Encoder
  • Format: QuickTime
  • video:
    codec: Apple MPEG4 compressor
    quality: 70
    width: 640
    height: 480
    uncheck Bitrate
  • audio:
    codec: Apple lossless
    channels: mono
    frequency: 16 kHz