Robot Media just moved to a new shiny office in Barcelona’s Eixample and we had a welcome party to celebrate with friends. While discussing the party “features”, we had this crazy idea where we would assemble a video out of many other videos with robotic stuff.

I immediately thought that was a job for ffmpeg, as cutting the videos manually would be super tiring and we didn’t have much time for that.

So I assembled a quick script that read a text file with a list of collectively sourced YouTube URLs, then used youtube-dl for downloading the videos, and finally called ffmpeg to extract three second slices from the videos, resized and padded them as required (to create a Full HD version), and finally appended all of them together using the amazing MP4Box.

After that, I placed the half gigabyte file in the very capable hands of mr. Eyeclipse, who added the Robot Media watermark and a tint of “corporate blue” with After Effects. Maybe that could have been done with ffmpeg too, but getting the right tint hue wouldn’t have been as interactive (and immediate) as with AE.

We then placed the video on loop in the office TV. Party guests were challenged to identify and tweet the name of ten robots appearing in the video. Only one person managed to do that, and he got a full set of robot stickers!

The script is slightly messy so I haven’t got round to publishing it yet. I’ll do that soon, so that you can create your own crazy randomized mash-ups with just a couple of YouTube URLs.

Few days after the party I remembered the supersupercut project that was unveiled at past seven on seven project on New York. Back then, they mentioned they had used already “cut” scenes in the project they showed, so the scene detection process was manual.

This time when I checked the supersupercut website, it turned out they are now using something called Shotdetect, an open source piece of software that can detect scenes in videos! Damn! I should have checked it before! That way I would have been able to select slices from different scenes, as sometimes there are several clips from the same scene and it looks like it’s the same clip.

Though it would be even more interesting if it could detect things such as faces or objects appearing in the scene and then filter scenes according to that (e.g. return scenes that contain robots). Surely there’s some sort of academic thesis on this waiting to be implemented by Adobe on the next CS iteration!

In any case: food (or software) for thought. It goes to the list of “things to revisit” at some point; hopefully it will get into my “bag of tricks” too, just as MP4Box and ffmpeg did :-)

By the way, it was a pleasure to find out that both ffmpeg and MP4Box are available in ArchLinux’s repositories, and they are very recent versions too. Excellent! No more compiling from SVN just to get things such as WebM supported! Beat that, Ubuntu :-P

• enjoying the glorious sunny weather which Ricardo writes about; I’ve been having delicious reading sessions on the sun, open air, almost every day!
• visiting well known places but looking at them with different eyes
• picking up my university degree certificate – this reminded me that after all the taxes I paid during my studies, I still had to pay more (100+ euros) for getting a piece of paper, two years after I paid for it. With a letter welcoming me to the workers life: “In this new period of your life…”
  I should have reclaimed all the interests accrued during those two years!
• meeting old friends, part 1: we met Corsario & Liso on Valencia and went to a great restaurant called La Ovella Negra (apparently it’s not related with the one with the same name in Barcelona), where we enjoyed the great food and wine they served. Great paella! After the lunch we went to say hi to Estrayk and also picked up Liso’s girlfriend, whom I hadn’t seen for ages, and went to an Irish pub to have some pints.
• meeting old friends, part 2: we met a friend which I hadn’t seen for a very long time, was pretty cool to see her after so many years (almost 10!), and recall our old school adventures!
• meeting old friends, part 3: we met Silenci & Madgoblin in Barcelona, and we tried to go to the Mexican restaurant we’ve been trying to go like three times already (always without any luck). Finally we had to go to the classic pizzeria, and after doing some shopping, we managed to convince them to join us in our quest for patatas bravas at a hidden place we know. Unfortunately after walking all the way until the place, we came to find it was Wednesday, and they close on Wednesday. Luckily we remembered sml’s wise advice about the nearby restaurant being the same style and could find out they look like being ran by the same people. Which allowed us for some extra points of fast food, spanish style.
• meeting old friends, part 4: we met Mac and his wife, whose name I do not know how to write ó_ò, and it was very cool to see the original xplsv together after so many time! and to meet her as well :-)
• getting myself updated on what is going to happen in Rails 2, since there’re lots of changes coming and I had got a bit lost during the previous weeks. I also have a couple of thoughts about this which I’ll detail in future posts, I hope.
• watching lots of movies! Being with a film lover it’s great, just look at his movies list :-) I think we went to the cinema like 4 times, saw a couple movies more in the TV, and somewhere else, like in the computer.
• doing nothing, yeah, I really needed it, in order to do something :-) I’ll detail what and when soon ;-)

• 24 dec london -> valencia
• 29 dec valencia -> barcelona
• 02 jan barcelona -> valencia
• 08 jan valencia -> london

Plenty of time for seeing old friends, relaxing, tourism, and doing nothing too…

Nada, que me voy de la Gran Bretaña durante unos días a ver si vuelvo a tomar un poco de color y abandono este look gótico-camden que tan poquito me gusta, y que en realidad llevo luciendo como desde hace dos veranos, enganchando un proyecto fin de carrera con prácticas de universidad y con proyectos absurdos en el trabajo, produciendo todo ello que mi  bronceado pertenezca a la categoría moreno monitor, tan poco glamouroso y combinable con las gamas de colores que más me gustan.

No hay más que recordar aquello que dijo la madre de Sardu el año pasado por estas mismas fechas: Llévatela a la playa, a ver si coge un poco de color. Total, ¿por llevar una camiseta amarillo azafrán, y que la piel de los brazos estuviera un poco [bastante] más clarita que la camiseta?, jejeje ;)

Así que un año después, me llevo (bueno, me lleva el avión un trocito) yo misma, acompañada del excelso trace, al cual le hace falta un poco de color también después de estar tanto tiempo entre nieblas y chirimirís. Aprovechando que estamos por Barcelona, acudiremos al MMT (Montcada Mig Tempo), un festival de dos días (8 y 9 de julio) bastante interesante participado/organizado por roterfleck y en el cual trace hará visuales, como el año pasado. Imagino que también se pasarán por allí insignes sceners como shine, sml o acidbeat (y todo aquel que se quiera apuntar) así que no hay excusa para no acudir diciendo que no conoces a nadie. Y yo por primera vez desde hace N meses, no tengo que hacer NADA!! ¡Viva! (me llevaré un libro para no caer en demasía en el frenesí calmado de la vida contemplativa).

Ya volveré… espero no tener que quejarme de Spain… temedme… ñ_ñ

We did some tourism and also surrendered to the gastroscene traditions and what is called a pleasant way of life. Luckily we just were there like five days – I can’t think of maintaining that gourmet style during a whole week :-o. Also we realized that the Sacred Family Cathedral building works have not yet been completed, so we’ll have to come back repeatedly to check whether they finish it or not XD

Thanks to trace (aka my precious XD), and his family for all, Silenci, Madgoblin, Sardu, Teknik, Acidbeat, Sandra, Spite & girlfriend (sorry, I forgot the name :-(), dvd/onesk8man aka the party organizer, sml, dr.kami, jak, harlock, and shine. And of course, all the tpolm and roterfleck people: alex martin, neurokin, scope, mayte and edurne.
I really, really enjoyed my stay here. If it was not because I am feeling quite lazy about taking a plane again, I would love to come back next week :P