by   •   Daily Shoot, What I'm Watching
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I was watching the Judge Pirro show a few days ago, and there was a court case about a custom dress designer suing a former client because the client didn’t pay for three dresses the designer made. The court case itself wasn’t funny. The funny part was who the defendant was.

No, that is not a woman. That is a man dressed as a woman.

He competes in beauty pageants on a regular basis. He failed to rank in the most recent beauty pageant he participated in, and he is blaming the failure on the designer’s poor dress making instead of his hideous looks.

That person made me :facepalm:, and I decided to share this with you so you could :facepalm: too.

 

Quote of the Day

“I used to think that I was indecisive, but now I’m not too sure about that.”

 

What I’m Watching

Following a recommendation from one of my friends who wishes to remain anonymous, I watched a movie called Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

This movie, although released in 1982, is a good representation of the things high school students have to live through. The movie has two main plotlines: the secondary plotline is about a drug addict and class rebel that is on the verge of failing his history class, while the main plotline is about a girl that wants to find a special male friend with whom she can extend their relationship to levels where she has never gone before.

The whole movie is 90 minutes, and I thought most of it was pretty entertaining. Having just graduated high school, the movie helped me see that the drama from high school has not changed much compared to 28 years ago. Also, because of my particular interest in a human’s role and self-portrayal in society, it was pretty funny watching how the director portrayed the different stereotypes within the movie.

Before you go and watch this movie, please note that this movie was originally rated X in the United States. More specific details about why can be found in the IMDB Parents Guide (keep in mind that the guide may contain spoilers).

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

Make a photo that uses negative space to good effect. Give your subject room to breathe, and balance it within the frame.

 

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by   •   Daily Shoot
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

Hi hobos. … I mean, humans.

Well apparently, the definition of “hobo” changed this past Sunday. I noticed that my dad left the Sunday paper on the kitchen table, and the top-most section on the pile was the comics. On the top-right corner of the comics, I saw this advertisement:

HOBO: Home Owners Bargain Outlet

I’m not sure if that name is epic fail or epic win.

 

Quote of the Day

Little girl: “You have AIDS on your arm!”

Me: “That’s called a mosquito bite.”

 

Project Four-Panel Update

I’m pretty much set to record now. All that there’s left to do is to put the transposed version of the song on my iPod so I can listen to it while playing each portion and keep perfect timing. And I have to find a good place to record, hopefully somewhere different for each instrument, and preferably some­where bright with lots of intriguing furnishings.

As for the camera, I might hold off on the recording until I get a better camera. The one that I use most frequently right now can only record 640 by 480 pixels in dimension, which isn’t exactly the best quality when I’m looking to make a high-definition final product.

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

Rotate your camera today a bit and make a slightly off-angle photograph. Use the angle to emphasize your subject.

 

Today’s Tweets

I got my rooming assignment for this coming school year today, and I’m living on the fourth floor. I hope I don’t fall out the window. (View original)

 

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by   •   Daily Shoot, What I'm Watching
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

A few days ago, I wrote a little complaint about Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, and said that I probably was going to stop using most Adobe products eventually because of their high price and my lack of intelligence to be able to figure out how to use all the features properly. One specific thing I mentioned was that I was going to switch from Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 to Notepad++.

Yesterday, I got an opportunity download and try out Notepad++, and so far, I have to say that it’s better than Adobe Dreamweaver.

The most obvious advantage of using Notepad++ is that it starts up much faster. Normally, when I open Adobe Dreamweaver, I’m afraid to close it because the next time I need it, I have to wait another half minute for it to start up. Eventually, it becomes bothersome and just another icon sitting and rotting in my task bar. However, Notepad++ takes a few seconds to start up, and I’m not afraid to close it, because I know that when I need it again, it’ll be ready in a matter of seconds.

Something else that makes me less hesitant to close it is the Session Restore feature. Using my situation as an example, the pages that I edit the most are my blog’s index, the included footer file, and the article directory. I can keep those open when I close the program, and the next time I open the program, those tabs are automatically opened along with the program. The best part is, using this feature doesn’t slow down the start-up process at all (or if it does, it’s not at all noticeable).

The best thing about Notepad++ is the possibility to use plug-ins. Although a lot of them seem a little unnecessary, one that I like that I am using now is one called FTP Synchronize. It opens a tiny integrated FTP client inside Notepad++, and you can navigate your FTP server using Notepad++. When you find a file that you want to edit, you can double click on it and Notepad++ will download it, cache it, and open it up. When you’re done editing the file, you can hit the Save button and Notepad++ will automatically save the cached version with the changes, and then upload the new version to the FTP server, effectively updating the version on the FTP server as well.

Of course, there’s a possibility that Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 also came with a session restoration feature and an FTP integration feature, but even if it did, I was not able to find it in the months that I used the software. As for the other features provided by Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, I never really knew what they were, or that they even existed.

Parkzer.com is now an official user of Notepad++, and as far as I’m concerned, Notepad++ should be renamed to Notepad+++++++++++++++.

 

Quote of the Day

A customer at our business approaches me with five one-dollar bills and says,

“Could you break this into singles?”

 

What I’m Watching

Yesterday, I watched Timeline, a movie about both archeology and time travel.

The movie begins at an archaeological dig site where a group of people find a note asking for help written by someone from the modern day, but with ink that was carbon-dated to be over 600 years old. After doing some investigations, the archaeologists find out that a professor used a time machine to go back into the 1300s, and now is stuck back there and cannot return. The archaeologists are told to go back a group, rescue the professor, then use the time travel technology to return to the modern day. It seemed like a simple task until they found out that they happen to be in La Roque on the day that it burns down.

Using their knowledge studying history, the archaeologists maneuver the area and outsmart the people, attempting to accomplish their goal. It’s not as easy as they originally thought, however, when they start encountering opposition and begin losing their friends.

Surprisingly, when I looked up some background information on this movie after watching it, many people criticized it when it first came out, and it failed to make more than the $80 million it used for its budget.

I thought the movie was pretty interesting, even though the beginning started off slowly, uneventful, and slightly randomly. I also liked the connections that were slowly made throughout the movie that connected things that happened in the past and what the archaeologists were able to find in the future. My favorite quote from the movie is “That’s me!” which comes from a memorable scene and is spoken by an archaeologist after realizing that he found a fossil of his own body in the future before coming back in time. I would recommend this movie to people who are interested in unconventional medieval movies and movies involving time travel or science fiction in general.

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

It’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Make a photo of a cool, refreshing drink. Go for something crea­tive.

 

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by   •   Daily Shoot, General
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

aksjdhfaksldf

 

Project Four-Panel Update

I am officially severely dissatisfied with Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.

It all started back when I got the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection and decided to try out Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 for my video editing. I had used Camtasia Studio 6 previously, and I felt as if it didn’t provide me with enough control over my projects.

Ever since I started using Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, I have been getting poor quality video results. I fiddled around with the rendering controls for hours on end and looked up many rendering guides online, but nothing seemed to work. Even when it rendered poor quality video, the file sizes were still much larger than the medium-quality videos rendered by Camtasia Studio 6.

Yesterday, I took an hour-long video clip of myself working on developing new content for my website. I threw the raw file into Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and sped it up to over 2500% its regular speed, shrinking it down to two minutes. After rendering it, I noticed that the video was extremely poor quality and saw that it was still over 170 MB in size, even though it was only two minutes long and was 640 by 360 pixels in dimension.

Ignoring the fact that the final product I just produced was complete garbage, I still went ahead and uploaded it to YouTube. The uploading process itself took over an hour because the file was so large (I have a basic 3.0 Mbps DSL connection), and after it finished uploading, it gave me an audio processing error: “We did not recognize the audio codec format for this file, but we will go ahead and try processing it anyway.” I recalled that the audio setting I picked was in MP3 format, but to make the YouTube processor happy, I decided to remove the audio entirely. Rerendering the project took another half an hour.

After it was done rendering again, I reuploaded the new video to YouTube, which took another hour or so. Even without audio, I got the same exact error. Even more unexpectedly, the audio error seemed to have also corrupted the video as well, as the first few seconds flickered white and gray before showing the video.

I was done with using Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.

I pondered going back to Camtasia Studio (which I had updated to Version 7 by now), but although Version 7 provided a lot more features, it still wasn’t good for advanced editing. The only thing I ever used Camtasia Studio 7 for was getting screen captures of, compiling clips of, and editing game video footage, which I did rarely anyway. I went hunting for new video editing software.

Then I remembered some video editing software called Sony Vegas 7.0 that I used a long time ago. I remembered that I stopped using it because two days before the trial ended, the text insertion tool stopped working. I decided to go back to the Sony website and see if they had updated the software at all, and they did; I downloaded my free trial of Sony Vegas 9.0c.

The first thing I tried was text insertion to make sure the same problem as last time didn’t recur, and it seemed to work fine. Then, I dragged some .MOV files from my camera into Sony Vegas 9.0c to play around with the software, and all I got were blank black screens. When I played back the raw .MOV files, I heard the sound but saw none of the video.

Maybe video production and Adam Parkzer just weren’t meant to be together.

Anyway, I went on Google and did a quick search to find out what was going wrong, and within a few minutes, I found out that the problem was with QuickTime 7.6.6 and the way it displayed .MOV files. I downgraded to QuickTime 7.6.5 and everything started working.

Then I decided to try and remake the accelerated recording video that Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 failed to make, and noticed that I had deleted the original raw hour-long video file. The only thing I had was the poorly rendered version Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 had spit out earlier. I dragged the .MP4 file into Sony Vegas 9.0c and started editing, trying to use media effects to make it look clearer and crisper.

When I rendered the new final product with Sony Vegas 9.0c, the file size went down to around 72 MB. When I uploaded the new final project, I no longer got the audio processing error, but just to continue to drive me crazy, the video was still corrupted somehow that the beginning of the video faded in from white instead of fading in from black.

To put this into perspective, this happened throughout a span of a full day, starting from around midnight when I first started editing the video to around 11:50 PM when I posted this. I decided that I dealt with enough video editing software today to last me the rest of the week, so I kept the Sony Vegas 9.0c version of the accelerated recording on my YouTube account and gave up.

 

Question of the Day

Today’s question of the day is, “Are you ever going to update to Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5)?” Nobody actually asked me this question, so I asked it to myself because I wanted to elaborate on my rage against Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.

When I got the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection, I intended to try out all the software and use it all to my advantage when doing stuff on my computer. After trying it out for a while, I realized that a lot of the software wasn’t really necessary. The only programs I used moderately frequently were Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Premiere, and sometimes Soundbooth. A clear substitute for Dreamweaver is the free Notepad++. If there are massive advantages to using Dreamweaver to write PHP, HTML, and CSS files, I have yet to find them, as I see Dreamweaver as an ordinary colorful text processor that takes a long time to start up. A clear substitue for Premiere, which I already explained above, is Sony Vegas 9.0c. Premiere tends to not work anyway, according to my experiences, and I already made the switch earlier today. I hardly ever use Soundbooth (although I may be using it a bit more once I get more deeply into Project Four-Panel), but for what I need, I’m sure that audio enhancement can be done with Audacity (which is free), and audio compiling can be done within Sony Vegas 9.0c. If I ever need something more advanced, people have told me about a program that has a name that sounds a lot like Fruity Pebbles, and apparently it’s one of the best audio editing programs available on the market.

So as you can see by my desire to avoid using CS4 programs, I’m most likely not going to update my full set to CS5. However, I have always been satisfied with Adobe Photoshop, even though there are a lot of good free photo editing programs available. Something about Photoshop has always made it seem like the right program to use for everything, so I’m going to try out the free trial for Photoshop CS5, and eventually upgrade to the full version.

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

Ads promote removing wrinkles, but they often add character. Make a photo of something wrinkled, crinkled, or folded.

 

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by   •   Daily Shoot
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

This is what happens when I create too much content in one day:

That is my “I feel like a zombie right now” facial expression, if you haven’t noticed already.

I set up my camera and took an hour-long video of me working on new content and on my website. If I can, I’ll try to get that video footage thrown together and sped up into a two- or three-minute clip, and post it in tomorrow’s blog post.

 

Project Four-Panel Update

I’ve been mentioning my new small project for the past few days, that I have named Project Four-Panel. After my publicizing the details of the project, people have been repeatedly asking me how the project is going, and if there are any new details or updates that I’m willing to share. Instead of answering each person individually, I decided to post an update publicly on the place where most of you likely heard of the project in the first place.

The truth is, there really isn’t much of an update. I’ve been doing more content development than I have video-making and video-editing. The only thing related to Project Four-Panel that I’ve been doing is practicing and memorizing the different parts of the song and preparing for the recording session. I also decided that instead of having alternating panels, I’m going to have smaller sub-panels within the four main panels. For example, the lead vocal part would have its own panel, and the video of the back-up vocal part would be included inside the lead vocal part’s panel, just as a smaller sub-panel. It would only appear when there’s active back-up vocals, and would disappear when there’s no back-up vocal part.

If none of this makes any sense to you, you may want to check out the corresponding section on the blog post from July 15, 2010.

 

Quote of the Day

“I can speak two languages: Body and English.”

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

Sunday Challenge: Compose an image that has a soft and dreamy look today, and make a photograph.

I boosted the brightness up a lot to make it look dreamy and heavenly, but now it sort of looks like a picture of a dead person’s bloodless arm.

o__O

 

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by   •   Daily Shoot
 

This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
 

I came across this video today and ended up spending over an hour watching the whole thing.

http://youtu.be/z5o3d104SKQ

It brings back memories of my childhood when I played Super Mario Bros 3 on my SNES. I obviously wasn’t as good as the person in this video, and it took much longer than an hour and seven minutes for me to beat the whole game, but it still entertained me pretty well.

For those of you wondering how that video is possible, it’s a tool-assisted speed run that particularly focuses on exploiting glitches and programming bugs. That means that the person that played and re­corded this footage used an emulator on a computer to play the game, and was able to rewind the game, replay portions, and use other tools available on his emulator to make the final product.

 

Quote of the Day

“Everybody has a photographic memory. It’s just that some people don’t have any film.”

 

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

Find something that’s out of context today, natural or staged, and make a photograph.

 

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