I wanted to test a homemade green screen that I made, so I put my MS Office 2007 CD-holder on it and took a pic with my Cliq XT. Then, I searched Google images for a replacement background, and chose a photo of a beach. I put both pics on my desktop, then went to YouTube to find a tutorial on how to chroma key in Photoshop CS4. Not only did I find a tutorial video (see below) but, with it coming in at 2 minutes and 35 seconds long, I found a very SHORT one at that… and miracle of miracles, it was easy to understand and follow.

Less than ten minutes later, I’d successfully chroma keyed my first photo. Yay, me!

I combined these two photos…

To get this photo…

Why did I do this? I needed to see if my homemade greenscreen would work, because I’m going to start video blogging again and this time I wanted to have different backdrops behind me to liven things up a bit, at least visually, anyway. I haven’t done a vlog in several months. I hadn’t been feeling well (fibro flare), and I also had to try to find a new place after I decided not to renew my lease in Sandy Springs. By the way, I love living in Midtown!

I’ll be doing a full write up, including pics, of how I made my greenscreen in the next few days. So, stay tuned! In the meantime, if you want to learn how to chroma key using Photoshop CS4, here’s the tutorial video I watched.

Update: The lens isn’t really a “fail”. It’s just quirky. I decided to keep it, but I just won’t try to use it in full manual mode without first adjusting the exposure compensation on my camera. As I said below, when I put my camera in Aperture Priority mode, the photos are fine (aka properly exposed). So, I’ll probably just only use this lens in that mode.

…..
So, I finally got the lens Saturday. But, I had to head out of town at the last minute on Sunday, so I didn’t get to take any test shots until I got back and recovered from the trip. From looking at the lens, it looks fine. No oil on the aperture blades, no fungus on the glass, no scratches or chips in the glass, and the body was okay, etc.

However, when I put the lens on my K10D and started taking test shots, I noticed that the photos taken with the lens wide open at f2.8 were DARKER than the photos taken stopped down to f5.6. In fact, the f5.6 aperture setting seemed to be this lens’ “sweet spot”, as it got the exposure right. The photos taken at f8 through f22 were all supposed to gradually get darker as the aperture got smaller. Looking at the photos in the order taken (from largest to smallest aperture: f2.8, f5.6, f8, f11, f16, f22), the darkening of the photos should have followed an easily detectible progression from brightest/lightest to darkest. That didn’t happen.

The weird thing is that when I took the camera out of full manual mode and put it in Av mode (aperture priority), the exposure in the shots was balanced correctly. But, if I want to grow my technical skills, I can’t get into the habit of shooting in Av mode all the time. But, if I only shoot in Av, without understanding how to use manual mode, how would I know what to do if I needed to use full manual mode in a difficult lighting situation? Exactly. I’ve contacted the seller to arrange a return and refund.

This is about a week late, as I got really busy, but better late than never…

So, my first experience with building a computer went well, although I did hit a snag with the first CPU cooler I bought. It attached to the motherboard with plastic pegs that were to be pushed through their corresponding holes in the motherboard and then twisted to “lock”. But, the problem was that the holes in the first motherboard I bought were too small.

I took the motherboard and cooler back to swap them out, and instead of a microATX motherboard, I got a full sized ATX motherboard, and instead of a cooler with push-pin connections, I got one that attached to the motherboard via screwing into a back plate. After I figured out how to properly attach the back plate to the motherboard (the directions were lousy), it was much easier to get the cooler installed.

The Parts

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3L

Hard Drive: 500GB Seagate Barracuda

Memory: 4GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800MHz

CPU Cooler: CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Plus

Power Supply Unit: Antec EarthWatts EA 500

Graphics Card: Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS

Case: Thermaltake V3 Black Edition

The Build

It took longer than I anticipated to get finished, but I’m very happy with my final product. The computer booted up properly the first time I turned it on. I installed Windows XP Pro without a hitch, and then installed all the drivers without a hitch. The pain in the butt was the 12 quadrillion Microsoft updates that were required. But, in the end, it was worth it. I added to my repertoire of skills, and got a kick from seeing something I put together work the way it’s supposed to the FIRST time.

Here are a couple of pics of the build process…

Empty Case (aka chassis)

Motherboard, power supply, and DVD burner installed

The End Result

And, here’s the end result…

Front View

Side View

I’m using the WordPress for Android app to write this post on my new Motorola Cliq XT. This is very cool! This app can be downloaded from the Android Market app that comes preinstalled on Android phones.

Sometimes you have to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves. I was recently faced with a situation like this with my computer. I came up on a decent price for a quad core processor and even though my dual core processor worked just fine, sometimes when an opportunity presents itself you have to take it. And with video encoding and post-processing 10.2 megapixel size photos from my DSLR  being processor intensive activities, I figured it might be time to look into upgrading, with Intel just releasing a new line of processors, causing some of the older processors prices to drop. So, with all my monthly obligations paid, and not knowing when I’d again have an extra few bucks, I took it. And, threw in a RAM upgrade while I was at it.

So now, I’m rocking a quad core computer with 4 GB of premium memory from Crucial (Crucial Ballistix). I upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 CPU. That’s four processors each running at 2.5GHz. Actually, as of a few minutes before I started writing this post, each core began running at 2.7GHz. Yep, I overclocked this bad boy as far as I could get it on the stock heatsink/fan without the CPU temperature getting too high. When I get an “aftermarket” heatsink/fan, I will be able to get over 3GHz per core without running into temperature issues. Overclocking for the first time was kind of nerve-wracking, but it wasn’t hard, especially since I didn’t try to do anything fancy.

When I went into my motherboard’s BIOS, I noticed that both my CPU and RAM were running at lower speeds than their supposedly “stock” settings. That’s called being underclocked, and what’s a trip is that at a whole half a GHz slower than what it was supposed to have been running, my computer was still FAST as lightening, compared to my dual core. At the higher 2.7GHz it’s virtually flying, so I definitely can’t wait to get a new heatsink/fan and max the speed out. That’s going to be freaking insane!

For this tutorial, I’m going to assume that you readers have no money to spend on video editing software, and will be using the software that came free with your computers.

Video Formats
The two most popular video formats are .MOV and .WMV. The .MOV format is native to Mac computers, and iMovie will allow you to encode your video to HD. The .WMV format is native to Windows computers, and Windows Live Movie Maker (Windows 7) or Windows Movie Maker (for XP/Vista) will allow you to encode your video to HD.

YouTube prefers the .MOV format because it’s smaller, but accepts .WMV and some others. The quality of HD in both formats is great. The only time it wouldn’t be is if your camcorder or webcam takes crappy video. You have to put good quality in to get good quality out.

Method
Because I have a PC and not a Mac (sobs loudly ), I used Windows Live Movie Maker to encode/render an example video I made just for this tutorial. The final product is below. But, to show you how I did it, I used a screen recording program to record my steps and my vocal instructions. Because the tutorial video is pretty large, and just under 10 minutes long, I opted for encoding it in the .MOV format over the .WMV format since the former would result in a smaller file size.

Example Video

Tutorial

That’s it! It’s really not a complicated process. If you have any questions, leave a comment or use my contact form to reach me (see the menu bar).

Download the Custom Video File
If you want to get the 960×720p HD custom video profile (.prx file) to use with Windows Live Movie Maker and Windows Movie Maker (for XP/Vista) click this link to download.

How to Install the Custom Video Profile
Unzip the custom file. If you’re asked where to unzip the file, navigate to: C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Photo Gallery\Video Profiles and unzip it there. Start WLMM or WMM and it should be listed in the Save Move settings with the other profiles OR in another section called Custom Profiles (or something like that, I forget). Viola! That’s it. Happy videomaking!

Deuces!

I started back video blogging, but yet AGAIN, I don’t know if YouTube is the right place for me to host my videos. I want to place my vlogs on this blog, but I don’t want to eat up my storage space by hosting them myself, so that’s where YouTube comes in. If I don’t want my videos accessible by anyone on YouTube, I can make them private, and embed them over here, so that’s not the issue either. The issue is that unless one is uploading a HD video, the quality of YouTube’s videos leave much to be desired – even with their new default high quality encoding.

When I record a video, before it’s uploaded to YouTube, it has to be encoded. By the time YouTube gets finished re-encoding it for their system, the quality has suffered. So, since I have to encode the videos no matter what I do, I’m thinking of just quitting YouTube and hosting the videos on my Silverlight hosting account.

I have a 10 gigabyte Silverlight video hosting account provided for free from Microsoft that is sitting unused. I could encode my videos for Silverlight’s specs and upload them there. The best part is that the Silverlight storage is just storage – my videos won’t be re-encoded resulting in a degradation in quality. The end result is SHARP, CLEAR videos of high quality.

Hmmm… I have some thinking to do.

This blog ran into a minor technical difficulty, and I had to track the problem down and fix it. My apologies if in the last 10 minutes you witnessed 3-4 rapid design changes. I had to find out if the problem was a design issue or a code issue before I knew where to look to fix it. Sorry for any inconvenience!