Lansdowne Lectures

Using the eXist version of FrancoToile as a starting point, I've started a rebuild of the Lansdowne site. Since most of the grunt work has already been completed for FrancoToile, I don't expect this to take me more than a couple of weeks. I started by making a copy of FranoToile on my local machine, and will be editing from there. There are only two videos with completed transcripts at this time, so there isn't much test data to play with.

Carly, Greg, Dr. Bowman and Filiz met to determine some blanket rules for data entry that came up repeatedly as major issues. The following decisions were made:

Almost every sentence containing a verb becomes an "event".
Statements of interest will be included in the notes field and not as "events".
If Jim has Tiffany, Heather, Cody, Dylan and Dermot by Brandine, then these are entered as "relationships" ONLY, with the marriage, sex, conception and birthing implied, and not listed as actual events.
If two people get married and there's a huge hullabulou, then the marriage is listed as an event, and they are also entered as "relationships". Same for if it's a famous rape or birth. Marriage, sex and births aren't an event unless they're a big deal.

If someone is said to be somewhere, they should be linked to that "place" without a mediating, made-up event. eg. "Carly was in Victoria" becomes a link Carly=Victoria, not an event like "Carly existed in Victoria" and then link that to Carly and to Victoria.
If someone's going on a journey, make two "events". "Carly left Victoria to go home to Whitehorse for the holidays" becomes "Carly leaves Victoria", (one event, link to Carly and Vic) and "Carly arrives in Whitehorse" (another event, link to Carly and to Whitehorse).

If there is an embedded citation or contested information in the text, enter it as if it were true, make a note, and write Greg about it. We will make the notes field for this case available, and note the reported nature of the information. This happens most often for Character/Character/Citation.

Greg's going to see if he can create an "uber-character" that is a group that constitutes many characters that we can associate with events.

Carly's going to come up with a sample journey describing any one labour of Hercules from listing events in the database in order. Also continue answering any emails from Filiz and Amy.

Filiz is going to keep entering Apollodorus.

Dr.Bowman is going to finish disambiguating and eventually proof-read all this data.

Yesterday I booked all of the movies left, and plan to digitize them over the next two weeks.
For exporting videos in iMovie, use: stream dv; NTSC; Progressive Scan Mode; 4:3 ratio; 44.100.
Jouet was in iMovie from before, I exported and handbraked it, and put it on the server.
O'Reilly was captured, exported and handbraked, and I put it on the server.
Halle was captured and exported.
At start of week I had 22 hours left.

I captured Jouet.
I handbraked Calder.
I re-exported Klepfisz in standard ratio to see how big a difference it made.

I captured Pestureau and Calder.
I exported Klepfisz and Pestureau.
I handbraked Klepfisz and Pestureau.
Booked Iannnucci, Aronoff and Jouet, and renewed Calder. Returned Calder, picked up those three.
Transcribed Feeney to 01:02:27, finished transcribing him to 1:19.
The handbrake pre-sets aren't holding very well, I need to double check everytime to make sure they've been applied.

Checked hours worked, backed-up everything new to the server.
Captured Penelhum, Hockey and Parker.
Exported Penelhum.
Handbraked Skal, Barber, McGann, and Penelhum.
Worked on transcribing Feeney.
Greg rebuilt the computer, and we had to figure out new presets for HandBrake. We set it at 640 width for archive, and 480 for web versions, with no anamorphic. Tried exporting Hockey under these conditions to see how that would go.
Reviewed my old notes from October, the settings we talked about using were: MP4s, H264, any bit-rate, 2-pass encoding, 30 fps, and 768x576 for archive. For web, deinterlace on fast, anamorphic "none", keep aspect ratio, 320x240, 15 fps. Although all these numbers were our first try, and may have been adapted as the project progressed.

I checked the status of my work since December and Greg fixed my handbrake problems.

I re-exported Nepveu and produced web and archive versions of it.
I made web and archive versions of Jones and Shkandrij.
I borrowed 5 tapes from the library, due next Tuesday.
I captured, edited and exported McGann and Barber. Captured Penelhum.

Braeburn has been acting up a lot, so I have double checked my back-ups on the server, and Greg has said he will try to rebuild it.

Tues - I digitized Skal and Shkandrij, and Handbraked them. I Handbraked Nepveu and redid a web version of Hammel. I also worked on transcribing Feeney.
Wed - Braeburn is acting up. It froze yesterday and didn't do any of the hand brake tasks I assigned it when I left, and I am trying to do them over today. I'm also ripping Jones.

I went to the library and talked with Imba Kehoe, who said she would try to renegotiate my borrowing privileges for the purpose of the project. When I went to go borrow the movies the Media Centre Supervisor Jennifer Medd just changed my permissions then and there. I can now borrow 5 films for a week on my own card, as well as pre-book these films and request extensions without penalty.
Borrowed Gregory and Feeney. Digitized Gregory.
Discovered Kampen was missing from the library. It may only be misplaced, or it may be actually missing. Jennifer's going to try to figure out what's going on, and let me know tomorrow when I check in with her. If it's really gone, I may be able to get special permission to remove the archived version from the library to digitize it.

I digitized Eugene Hammel "The Yugoslav Labyrinth in Perspective", 3 April 1997. I discovered that currently the library will lend me as many tapes as I want, but they are all due back the next day 3pm. Greg gave me an overview of the project, explained what I would be doing, and taught me to digitize tapes.

Created a simple budget for digitizing the remaining 33 videos from the original 50, and sent it to SB to see if she can find the funding.

Met to discuss a possible budget for capture of the remaining 33 videos in our list, and planning for the next stage. We'll put a budget together next week, and leave the second and third stages (transcription and a web interface) for the future.

Met with the gang to discuss next steps, and discussed using the TS video as a pilot, since we already have a transcription of it. Back in the office, contacted the AV folks to ask if they might actually have MP4s as part of the DVD production process, so we don't need to rip and re-encode the DVDs of recent recordings. Test-ripped one of our DVDs to MP4 using Handbrake -- there's a good 64-bit version. Took about an hour, and came up with a file less than 1GB. Still not small enough for the Web, though; I'll do another one next week aiming at a smaller video size, and see what I can get it down to.

SM has finished capturing 16 videos now, and has burned DVD archives from most of them. While she burns the remaining ones, she's working on transcribing the Shippey video. Greg stripped off the audio track, and I worked on it a bit to bring up the quality. It had a loud continuous hum which had to be removed, and the volume was pitifully low. After bringing it up a bit, I tried time-stretching it so it would run at typing speed, to make the transcription go more easily, but the results were pretty poor; squeaky artifacts are introduced as soon as you get above about a 30% increase in length. This might work better with higher-quality audio, or with a better set of tools (such as Sonar 7, which I've used at home to stretch multi-track audio data with some success), but in this case it didn't help much.

SM has finished about a quarter of the transcription, which is in plain text. When it's done, I'll use Transformer to convert it to a suitable format, probably XHTML based on what we're using for Vic Van Video, leaving gaps for the timings, and she'll go back through and add all the timings. Then we'll see what we can do about a Web version of the video, as a pilot.

So, now we have a working solution for labelling the disks. We did a quick, text-only test and it worked a treat. Took 16 minutes, though. I'll start working on a "look" this week.

The drive is external, using a Macallay housing (USB/Firewire) and a LG drive; we had to buy Toast 9 for doing the burning on the Mac. It appears as though the software that is needed is more like a printer driver, with the "front-end" being the same old crappy interface that they've been using for years to design stick-on labels. Clipart is dismal and the editing tool itself is basically MS Publisher v2. That said, I don't think one needs to us it - it looks like you can import TIFFs and use them.

The Hollister M4V being complete, we wanted to create a DVD from it. After getting it into iDVD, we discovered it was too large to fit on a single-layer DVD, so we created an iDVD project file and burned that to a DVD instead. Then we passed that to Greg F., who had a DL DVD disk, and burned it to DVD for us (and also made a nice cover for it). We now have two DVDs. It's definitely time to create the iDVD theme, before we burn too many more which will have to be re-created with a new theme when we get the LightScribe drive.

... for this.

Martin and I got a quick tour of iDVD from Greg F. and it looks like we have a winner with iMovie and iDVD. Here's what we think we can do:
1) capture from S-Video tape to disk with iMovie 8 and render to disk using the "Large" output filter (looks like H.264@720x540). This produces an m4v file (just a renamed mp4) of approximately 1GB for a 45-ish minute lecture.
2) import the m4v in to iDVD and add the m4v as supplementary data. This creates a regular DVD filesystem (VIDEO_TS and so forth) plus a regular m4v file, giving us an on-DVD archive!
3) transcode the large m4v to a more web-ready format. Say H.264@320x240 and about 15 fps or so. We can use MPEG Streamclip for that; it does batching as well.

iDVD also appears to provide the ability to create an "archive" version which actually archives the iDVD project, including all media, fonts, text files, photos etc. Not sure if we need that, but it will allow us to edit the DVD later if we need to. The app also lets us produce a disk image (.img file) of the DVD, which may be useful for the tape archive.

A really professional look can be achieved by creating a DVD sleeve and using a matching Lightscribe theme on the disc itself. A LaCie external dual-layer, Lightscribe DVD burner can be had for around 150CAD.

Set up this blog and did a tentative capture/render today with Sheryl using iMovie 8. If we can make iMovie work it will provide a very simple workflow. The limited output options may be a deciding factor, however.

I'm hoping that we can export H.264 (MPEG-4 AVC) from iMovie and use it as the basis for producing a standard DVD, an archive file for tape and a web-ready version for use with a flash player. We should know by week's end whether we'll be using iMovie or FCP for the initial phase.

I've done a bit of work looking in to Flash as an alternative to QuickTime (as is used in the original, written by Mike) and it looks promising:
* We can create H.264 video (with an mp4 extension) and have a flash player play it back from the filesystem; the advantage being that we only need to create one web-ready file for playback in multiple players..
* Flash has pretty rich APIs for JS and ActionScript that we can use to blend video, text and extra content.
* Flash supports a subset of the W3 Candidate Recommendation for Timed Text which may be of use. Even if we don't rely on Flash for the captioning we can use the W3 standard for our data. EduTech wiki has an entry on the subject here.
* a free, CC licensed Flash player is available that appears to have a large user-base and an involved developer. Source is available.
- An example of the player using TT is here.
- A thread dealing with using the player in a PHP-based app is here.
- From the same site, a list of apps that can be used to produce captioning: MagPie (Windows, free), Subtitle Workshop (Windows, free), Captionate (Windows, 45USD). From the looks of it we might want to just stick with oXygen, or even roll our own web-based app to create captions.