Open Source Video

Big Buck Bunny is a new film produced by the Blender foundation, makers of The Elephants Dream. Big Buck Bunny is a funny little showcase of what Blender is capable of: rolling 3D eyeballs, an über realistic 3D spacious layout, high definition detailed imaging, flying camera pans … an enjoyable film although a bit manieristic in its effects and pretentious in its Wagnerian soundtrack: anyway, worth checking out if you want to learn how pestering turns even the sweetest bunny into a revenging jungle warrior. Many different file types and sizes can be found on the download page.
The film is under a Creative commons attribution share alike license, we’re looking much forward to the forthcoming mesh ups. It is made entirely with open source tools of which besides Gimp and Inkscape the most important is of course Blender. Rumor goes that for the next film the whole team will be female, to balance out the obvious gender inequality from which the current production crew is suffering.

( From blog.wired.com )
Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by
YouTube users, including users’ names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which
is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on
YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular
than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google’s
liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.
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Check out the (relatively) new blog: Open Movie Editor News by Open Video enthousiast and developer of the open source video-editor Open Movie Editor Richard Spindler.

Open Movie Editor is a video-editing software for Linux which can be downloaded here

Some nifty tips and articles on the blog; among others Richard has been fiddling with making titles for video in the popular drawing soft Inkscape, you can download SVG files of tests he made, open the files in Inkscape, adapt to your taste. Quite useful if you don’t want to start from scratch.

More later on the editing software itself, looking forward to giving it a good test.

A new initiative on the Open Source Non Linear Editing video block: Lumiera started out as Cinelerra 3, a complete code rewrite of Cinelerra, but is now turning into an independent project.

On the still very incomplete Lumiera.org website you can share your ideas on the GUI with the developers.

As an introduction you can find information on a pipawiki page.
Design documentation can be found in a TiddlyWiki.
You can browse the code repository with webgit.
For the structure of the code look at the Doxygen documentation

More coming soon

Committed to sharing her music via the net, Kristin Hersh is throwing her muses at us in unconventional ways. In this small manifesto she writes:

I think I need to engage in a grassroots kind of capitalism, choosing principles over profits, values over image, ideals over marketing. I have to create a permeable membrane between artist and listener — I’m a craftsperson, after all. (…) This little business will be interactive and intelligent; you will not be lied to, no shiny poison, no middle man.

Kristins work is featured on the website CASHmusic.org. Cash is ‘a Coalition of Artists and Stake Holders building an open-source platform for the new, distributed music business.’
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Stray Cinema is an open content filmproject. The idea behind it is that people from all over the world can download and re-edit raw footage, they make different films using the same footage. The films are then uploaded and voted on by the community. Stray Cinema organises ‘real world’ screenings of the top five films. The first one will take place in New Zealand on the 23rd of September 2008.
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A good way to start the summer: From 20th to 22nd June 2008 folly and SoundNetwork are bringing Open Source City; a micro-festival of art and music to Liverpool, as part of the European Capital of Culture.
Read more about the festival.
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thenyouwin.yooook.org

A sympathetic documentary project in the making: Then you win is an open content project by France based organisations Loin de l’Œil and Yooook. Check the FAQ for more concrete info.

Ekta Parishad is a mass movement based on Gandhian principle – organized in October 2007 the “Janadesh”, the largest non-violent gathering in India since its independence. For four months, we travelled across India to tell the Ekta Parishad adventure, from its origins to its biggest achievement… three movies are on post-production!
Loin de l’Œil has organized the shooting of three films related to the movement Ekta Parishad, from its origins in the early 70’s to its biggest achievement - the Janadesh. Total duration will be about 1:30 to 2 hours.

The name of the project was suggested by that famous Mahatma Gandhi’s quote: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”.

Then You Win plays an interesting game with opening the content: The movies are copyrigted, but can be ‘freed’ by donating money: the more money rolls in, the more open its contents will be published.

“By your donations you can help the project to reach more levels of freedom of use. (…) There are many ways to participate in freeing the copyright covering the three documentaries, but money is the concrete point to reach the freedom steps.”

Check out more on this policy here.

The films are edited using Cinelerra, if you are in the region of Toulouse and want to contribute: it is much appreciated.

As part of the exhibition Place@Space in art center Z33 I have made a ‘Routes + Routines’ installation and organise some walks that are streamed and can be viewed in the exhibition room. Clips from the stream are added to a random ‘film’ that is subtitled by a choice from quotes and citations from legal texts concerning internet access control from different sources; law texts, terms of use documents, eu directives etc. These texts are wallpapered in the expo space. Continue Reading »

We spent some saturday afternoon time installing the current version 1.2 of the Internet tv application Miro. Christina installed it on her G4 Power mac running Mac OSX 10.4.10 and I updated at the same time an old version 0.9.8.0 Beta on my Linux Ubuntu box. After a smooth upate from the Synaptic package manager and equally smooth install from the Miro download page an immediately visible difference to older versions is the IHeartMiro pop up window.

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