20081121 session#05

Collage and Code, was the subject of the morning session. In it Michael Murtaugh spoke about his ideas dealing with what he calls "collage" editing as his preferred technique in manipulating video. As the title of the session clearly states, he was referring to collage achieved mainly by software and coding. In the first part of his presentation he explained that he had found in .srt files (the conventional file extension used for subtitles) a very powerful and simple resource for experimenting with the time line and the time code. He said that .srt files could enable a certain "wikiness" in video. As an example he showed how using the "grep" linux command and the search results that it throws, and then feeding this edited time code to Mplayer, it's possible to view simple movie files in many different nonlinear yet meaningful ways. To illustrate this the works of : Aaron Valdez http://aaronvaldez.com/ were shown.

The second part of this session was practical, and in it Murtaugh asked us to become beta testers of a small application that he developed using Phyton. The main idea of this application was to use the "video tag" recently integrated to HTML and already readable by the new Firefox version (in progress). He used this tag and his application for editing .srt files and then turning them into javascript code which creates a time line for a web page. This is, he created a way in which you can have complex animations, frames changing, and video appearing and dissapearing within a webpage without the need of flash or advance coding skills. His application worked well in Linux and Mac OSX, and some of the workshop attendants like Jan and Sebastian did impressing things with it.

The second part of the day was devoted to analyzing the features of Plumi & Miro. Sedat Güzel, explained Miro in detail while Andy Nicholson spoke about EngageMedia and the possibilities of video sharing systems.