Category: Geekery

My current video workflow

So this post showed up in my “On This Day” feed on Facebook, and so I thought I should post an updated version. These days I record with 2 GoPro cameras, a Hero 5 Session on my head, and a Hero 5 Black on the front of the boat on a mount made by James I Smith, from North Carolina. James gave me the mount as a gift, which I’m really grateful for. I also managed to snag a legit copy of Final Cut Pro X when it went on sale.

So here’s what I do now after shooting some video.

  1. I make a bluescreen video with my Garmin data overlayed in Garmin VIRB Edit. The procedure I use is detailed in this video
  2. While that is processing, I bring the files from each camera into Final Cut Pro X, and for each camera I make a full duration compound clips to simplify the editing.
  3. Hopefully I will have remembered to clap or otherwise do something distinguishable in front of both the cameras so I can get the two compound clips time synchronized.
  4. I’ll use the transforms to move and clip both compound clips to create a split screen effect.
  5. It’s sometimes a good idea at this point just to leave everything overnight so the VIRB Edit export can finish and so can the creation of FCPX render files. Even my new iMac is pretty sluggish until those files are finished.
  6. I’ll scrub back and forth on the split screen looking for things I want to comment on in the video, and putting in lower third titles. I’ll also look for places where I only want the front view or the back view instead of the split screen, because all the action is happening in front of or behind me. I’ve experimented in the past with making my own transitions using key-frames so the split screen transitions to a single view over a few seconds, and transitions back over a few seconds, but I rarely use it because of all the cutting I do later.
  7. At this point I’ll bring in the blue-screen video above the other clips on the timeline, and apply the Chroma Key effect to it so the other videos below show through. Then I’ll try to time synchronize it – hopefully you can see me pushing the start on my GPS in one of the videos.
  8. Now I’ll make a compound clip of the blue-screen and the two compound clips.
  9. I’ll use the “Blade All” key shortcut and cut out all the bits where I didn’t have anything to point out. I’ll make another pass of cutting and deleting to try to get the video down under 15 minutes, although sometimes I don’t succeed.
  10. I’ll add transitions on all the cuts. I prefer to use the same transition on every cut for consistency, usually one of the simpler ones. I want it to be obvious I’m cutting.
  11. Usually I reduce the volume on the compound clips down to near zero, and try to find some music to put over it. There isn’t a lot of talking during paddle races, and some of it we’d rather not remember afterwards. I prefer bouncy folk music, especially stuff from Genticorum or Great Big Sea or something that sounds like Voyageur music, but I’ve had problems with YouTube and copyright on those songs.
  12. Add title and out-tro titles. In the out-tro, don’t forget to label all the music I used. I should probably have boilerplate asking people to like, subscribe and share like all the pros do.
  13. Export the video to a master file, and then upload to YouTube.

During the off season I’ve been thinking about and experimenting with some things to see if I can improve my videos. Here’s some of the ideas that you might see in this year’s videos:

  • Using motion tracking or a 2 second freeze frame to label the other people in the video. Here‘s a short example of using a freeze frame.
  • Adding a third camera. I’ve only got lower resolution cameras like the Contour, but I’m thinking of sticking it behind me pointing backwards for when the camera up front is missing what’s happening because of my body being in the way.
  • Making a public Dropbox that other paddlers can share their videos so I can include other people’s points of view. The biggest hurdle is finding out if people will actually do this.

Alternate Side of the Street Parking

I’ve gotten a number of tickets over the years because I misinterpreted the alternate side of the street parking signs on our street. Yes, I’m embarrassed that somebody whose livelihood depends on being able to interpret and write complex boolean expressions should have trouble with these signs, but there you have it. But I resolved to not get caught out again, so this is what I did:

  1. Installed IFTT on my phone
  2. Created two PNG files, one that says “North” and one that says “South”, and set up two lines in my crontab on my computer that copies the appropriate one to my public web server when the parking rules change over.
  3. Created an IFTT rule that when I get close to home it displays a “rich” notification including which ever image is on my web server
  4. Created two IFTT rules to send me a notification when the parking rules change over.
  5. Created a shortcut on my home screen on my phone so I can check the image on the web server if I miss the IFTT notification.

If I get another parking ticket, it won’t be because I didn’t try.

Video labeling

I thought it would enhance my video if I could call out people’s names. At first I was looking to use motion tracking to have the labels follow the paddler on the screen. I tried using Motion, which comes with Final Cut Pro X, but it has two problems

  • I have to export a 10 second or shorter clip from Final Cut Pro, bring it into Motion, do the motion tracking, and then bring it back into FCP and fit it back into the right part of the timeline.
  • It really didn’t work very well – I had to keep adding manual key frames and restarting the tracking. In the video here, I actually gave up on adding more manual key frames when I was working on JoAnn’s label which is why it goes off into the weeds.

Then I tried a couple of plugins that would supposedly do the job without having to leave Final Cut Pro X. Both of them had trial modes, so I was able to experiment without paying the $100 they wanted. The first one, EasyTracker, did a pretty good job of tracking, but it crashed FCP several times every time I tried to track, and eventually screwed up the playback window so I couldn’t see anything until I deleted the plugin. The second one, CoreMelt TrackX, was practically useless. I tried putting a polygon over Jim’s bright orange shirt thinking it had pretty good contrast to the water and trees it was in front of, and said to “track forward”, and within a few seconds the polygon was somewhere off to the right of the war canoe that was to his right. Useless.

So then I had a thought – in his highly entertaining “How The Race Was Won” videos, Cosmo Catalano likes to call out riders names by using a freeze frame. He also puts a mask around each rider to emphasize it. He told me once he actually takes a screen shot and brings it into Photoshop to do that. I would prefer not to do that, not least because I don’t have Photoshop. However, FCP has a nice “Freeze Frame” feature that inserts a nice 4 second freeze of the frame at the current playhead position. Here’s what it looks like.

I kind of like this way.

Backing up

Unlike some minor internet celebrities, like one of the founders of StackOverflow, I am a big believer in making sure my data is backed up locally (for quick retrieval) and offsite in case of disaster. For the Mac, this is dead easy – I have a TimeMachine disk attached to my iMac, and I back it up offsite using BackBlaze Cloud Backup – $50 a year, and it’s unlimited so it even backs up my external drive full of my iMovie and Final Cut Pro projects. I also use Syncthing to replicate several important directories between my iMac and my Linux computer. Unlike Dropbox or Box or any of the other cloud replication services, Syncthing is free and doesn’t send your data to any third party.

But I also want the “two backups” system for the Linux computer here in my office, and also my virtual private server box that I have on Linode. And unfortunately Backblaze doesn’t support Linux yet. So for several years now, I’ve been doing a local hourly backup on my local computer to an external USB drive. My strategy for that is:

  • Make snapshots of every partition on the box using
    lvcreate -L 10G -s -n ${dir}-snapshot /dev/ssd/${dir}
    (I wish there was a way to snapshot them all at once to get a really consistent view of the file system, but I haven’t found a way.)
  • Mount them all under a root snapshot so I’ve basically got a static view of the system.
  • Back that up to the external drive using rsync. I use “--link-dest” so it really only backs up the files that have changed and makes hard links to the ones that haven’t, so it’s pretty fast and doesn’t take a lot of disk space to keep weeks of backups.
    rsync -vaSH --delete --exclude .gvfs /mnt/snapshot/ --link-dest=$PREV/ $DEST/allhats2/hour$HOUR/
  • unmount and lvremove the snapshots file systems.

As well, once a day I backup one of these snapshots to a third Linux system I haven’t mentioned yet. A while ago I discovered a company called Kimsufi that was advertising VPSes with Atom processors in Ireland or France (I’m actually not 100% sure which). Nothing too fancy in the CPU or RAM department, but with 1TB of disk space for 10 Euros a month. Not as cheap as Backblaze, but better than losing everything if Linode burns down. So once a day, I copy one of my hourly backups (still using rsync with the --link-dest option so multiple daily backups don’t take up much space, and I also backup my Linode the same way (except there’s no way to take a lvm snapshot inside the VPS so it’s just a simple rsync --link-dest of everything.

That’s been kicking along nicely, and it’s a good backup. But it’s brittle – if an hourly backup fails part way through and try to do an --link-dest the next hour using that one, I can end up with two full copies of the backup with no hard links. And there are other problems as well. Plus keeping the Kimsufi VPS just to back up to seems like a waste.

A while ago, a friend recommended Borg Backup as a better solution for regular backups than trying to roll my own. It also encrypts and compresses the backups. So I set up a parallel hourly and daily backup using Borg. The offsite one is still going to the Kimsufi VPS, but it is faster than rsync. So I was just about to pull the plug on the rsync backups and go to an all-Borg solution when that same friend then recommended Restic. Now Restic resembles Borg in a lot of ways, but it’s not very well documented. But one thing it does have is that it can backup to Amazon S3 and Backblaze B2 cloud storage. Doing some quick calculations with the B2 calculator, I think I can do my backups for way cheaper this way than maintaining a VPS in Ireland – like on the order of a dollar or two a month, rather than 10 Euros. The only problem is getting it to work.

And here’s the problem. Doing hourly restic backups to my local machine are pretty quick – about the same time as borg takes. The only problem comes when I want to delete yesterday’s hourly backups (or rather apply the rules to keep 24 hourlys, 8 dailys, 4 weeklies, and 12 monthlies). With borg, I apply these rules every hour when I back up because they’re quite fast. But they’re so damn slow with restic that had to start only doing it once per day – it takes just a few seconds to run the “forget” command to apply the rules and have it forget about the snapshots that it doesn’t want, but to run the “prune” command that actually reclaims that space, it takes over 30 minutes! And that’s on a local file system. I’m afraid to see how long it’s going to take on the B2 file system, and whether it bumps up the storage costs terribly.

I also had a bit of a teething problem with my first backup to B2 – I was doing it over a network link, and I forgot to do it in a tmux session, so when the network connection got interrupted, it left my first backup in a strange state. I did another full backup the next day, and then I was using twice the required storage on the B2 bucket. I did a restic prune which reclaimed the space, but it took 35 hours to do it. That’s not going to be useful. I need to do a couple of non-failing B2 backups and see how long prune takes in those cases – but if it’s going to take hours, I’m going to ditch restic and go back to borg to the VPS.

Oh, another thing I should mention about restic – It puts a ton of files in ~/.cache. Since I was backing up from the root account, I ended up having to resize my root partition from 4GB to 14GB just to accommodate all the cache files. Very annoying. Borg has 259MB of .cache, and restic has 7.4GB.

AWS Training

So over the Thanksgiving week, Udemy had a sale on video courses. Since my job search is going so slowly, I thought I’d maybe occupy the time by doing some of these courses, and I decided to start with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) certification training, starting with the AWS Certified Developer – Associate. Here are some impressions I’ve had after watching 10+ hours of course video:

  • The AWS offerings change so fast that it’s really easy for the course to fall behind reality. That might be one reason why they were selling the courses so cheap
  • AWS itself is very inconsistent in the way the UI for each individual web service is structured in the console. Some of them are very “here’s a list of options, pick one and configure it and launch it” and others are “here is a wizard to walk you through a bunch of steps that hopefully will lead to something you can launch”. It’s hard to describe exactly what I mean by that. That’s probably a result of how fast things are changing. Unfortunately, sometimes the course module was made when the console was the first way, but now it’s the second way and you basically have to watch half the video then try and remember everything he did on the first screen so you can do it on the Nth screen instead.
  • A couple of times, things in the AWS console have just failed. Sometimes it’s failed silently with no indication of why or even that it saw the “Create [blah]” button press. Other times it’s given very cryptic messages like “You have requested more instances (1) than your current instance limit of 0 allows”. (In that case, changing an obscure parameter from t2.small to t1.micro was the solution). The silent failure happened mostly in the Cloud Formation module when I was attempting to create a “Stack”, but after it appeared to fail silently (and nothing was shown in the list of stacks), and I tried to create it again, it complained that there was already a stack of that name and suddenly it’s there in the list of stacks again.
  • Other than the way the video is out of date in some place, my main complaint is that he is obviously reusing modules between the AWS Solutions Architect – Associate course and the AWS Developer – Associate course and so he’ll say “for this module, just use the S3 bucket named [blah] that you created in the last module” when you didn’t create anything of the sort. So then you have to hurriedly pause the video and create an S3 bucket and hope he didn’t expect any special permissions on it or any content in it.
  • A secondary complaint about that is that he never tells you when you’re done with a resource. I try to clean up all the S3 buckets and EC2 instance and whatever when it appears we’re done with them. I occasionally guess wrong. I wish at the end of a module he’d say “OK, we’re done with that bucket, feel free to delete it.” Sometimes he does, but mostly he doesn’t. I wonder if that’s an artifact of the fact that he’s mixing and matching modules? I’m probably over paranoid about leaving stuff around and getting charged for it, although when I started doing this course I discovered that a few years back I’d created an EC2 instance, stopped it, but never terminated it, so I guess their “free threshold” is high enough that I’m unlikely to hit it.