Tag Archives: movies

WebCam Timelapse – July 11, 2007

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Lots of confused cloud activity.

The Arizona sky is making me a liar. In a post earlier this month, I talked about how most days started clear and the clouds built up throughout the day. This week, however, it’s been cloudy early in the day and clears up in the late afternoon. Makes me look like I haven’t got a clue, huh?

This is a great video (in the new “large” size) that shows off all the confusion in yesterday’s sky. Watch the clouds carefully — they move in various directions throughout the day!

After clicking this image, you may have to wait a few seconds for it to load before it starts playing. Be patient and click only once. It’ll play right in this window. QuickTime is required.

[qt:https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/Timelapse-071107.mov https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/Timelapse-071107-poster.mov 320 256]

Although I can do a larger image movie, I think the 1.1 MB bandwidth is enough. I’d like to increase the number of images that make up the movie, but that’ll also increase the movie size and bandwidth when it’s played. If you have any preferences about this, use the Comments link or form to be heard.

And I do want to note that I’m not releasing these every day — just the days when there’s something interesting to see. This time of year, that can be several times a week.

WebCam Timelapse – July 9, 2007

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Another interesting timelapse.

What I like about this one is:

  • Nice colors at sunrise. Remember, this camera points northeast, so we don’t actually see the sun.
  • About halfway through the day, the clouds going by seem to make a right turn as they move across the sky. I think there was a wind shift up there. Interesting.

You need to click the image to download and play the file with QuickTime. I did this purposely for the folks who aren’t interested in wasting bandwidth on something as trivial as this.

[qt:https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/Timelapse-070907.mov https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/Timelapse-070907-poster.mov 160 136]

For those of you who requested a larger image, one is on the way. Yesterday’s big image was too big, so we’ll have to wait until the next interesting sky. Today’s might be a good candidate; lots of clouds. We’ll see.

And for those of you just tuning in, these images are my attempt to show how the weather changes here in Arizona during out annual monsoon season. Usually we don’t have any clouds at all, so these images really do show something special. I’m hoping that images created later in the season will include storms and, if we’re lucky, even a few lightning strikes.

Gila Monster

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My first Final Cut Express video project.

After spending three days going through a tutorial to learn Final Cut Express HD, I was ready to create my first video project. I’m sharing it with blog readers so you can see how much effort a person can expend on 25 seconds of video.

About the Project

This particular project features a Gila Monster (pronounced “heela monster”), which is a rather large lizard that can be found in the Arizona desert. If I’m lucky, I see one or two of these in a year, so they’re not exactly common. They are, like so many things in the desert, poisonous, so you don’t want to get too close. But since they’re not exactly fast and they’re definitely not aggressive, you can get photos of them in action if you have equipment with you.

On a backroad trip with Mike and some friends, we happened to come upon one croassing the road. I had my video camera with me and whipped it out to capture some pretty decent footage. This Final Cut Express project cuts out the boring shaky bits, replaces our silly comments with music, and adds opening and closing titles. This is the first in a series of short videos I hope to add to wickenburg-az.com, so make the site more interesting to visitors.

But this is also an experiment to check out video formats and Final Cut Express’s export feature. I had great success when exporting to QuickTime movie format, for iPod, and for Apple TV. But the Windows Media Player export didn’t work right at all and the AVI format was extremely poor quality, despite the file size, so I’m not going to distribute them. I just spent another few minutes using the iPod version of the file to create an e-mail version using QuickTime’s Share command. That worked best of all for the Web view of the file. Only 3.3 MB (which is smaller than the iPod version, and it looks pretty good.

Getting it Online

XHTML purists will tell you that the EMBED tag is a no-no in Web development. I think it has something to do with Internet Explorer which, for some reason, can’t interpret XHTML and CSS like the rest of the Web browsers on this planet.

So this project is also an experiment to see if the QuickTime Embed plugin for WordPress will work. If you’re reading this article shortly after I put it online and there’s no QuickTime movie below (or if the whole site is messed up), it’s because I’m trying this out and debugging. (Check in again in about 30 minutes.)

That said, here’s the movie with a Poster movie. I think I’l leave the iPod file for wickenburg-az.com distribution.

[qt:https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/GilaMonster-web.mov https://aneclecticmind.com/wp-content/movies/GilaMonster-web-poster.mov 480 335]