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>> “The Flight of the Bumblebee” would be appropriate music … unless there is a maniacally fast ninja music piece.
Thank you Captain Obvious 😛 Josh used an arrangement for solo xylophone for his time lapse of us setting up for Greenberg in November of 2014.
The other problem with that piece is its length. Although it’s super famous now, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote it as incidental music for an opera – as in, it’s played to entertain the audience while the stage crew changes the sets. And so every version of it I’ve heard is less than 90 seconds, which is not long enough to cover even half of my shortest video.
Also, I already have four videos, and I don’t wanna use the same music every time. Which does bring me to an important question which I was gonna get to soon – anybody have any suggestions on a site for free music? I haven’t looked into that yet, but I’m gonna be ready for it soon.
>> If you don’t mind my asking, what program did you use to do the stop motion?
It was right in the camera feature on my Motorola smartphone. The phone was on the cheap side and is not special or recommended. I just opened the camera, tapped the video icon, and then the settings icon. In the settings, time lapse is one of the options, and then it has me choose from 4x, 8x, 16x, and 32x. I used 32x every time, since it’s still leading to videos that are longer than I’d like. There must be a way to artificially speed up an existing video, but I’m not at the point of looking into that yet. Anyway, once I’ve chosen 32x, I just tap record and it goes, at the bottom of the screen it keeps a visible count of the length of time of the resulting video.
So I looked into Krista’s suggestion of Windows Video Editor. I was already looking into using the Photos application that comes on Windows, and after looking around on the internet, I discovered that the two are the same thing, Windows calls the editing capabilities of the Photos program ‘Video Editor’, so we’re on the same page there.
Last night I successfully combined two videos into one video, and it was in fact quite easy once I figured it out. What I noticed, though, is that there’s no Save feature in the program, or at least, there’s no feature called Save. Instead it’s called Backup, and I mention it because although the new video I created was made of two videos that are both MP4, the resulting file created by Backup is not, it is a VPB file. I thought maybe that stood for Video Project Backup, but apparently VPB has a variety of uses and I found no answer given to what it actually stands for, if anything. Anyway, the only reason I mention it is that I read that MP4 is YouTube’s preferred video format, so I don’t know if this will cause problems or not.
The next step is in fact to add music to the video. After that, I will be able to post it to YouTube. I still haven’t figured out how to remove stuff from the other video. It looks like if you use the Trim function, you can only select what you want to save, not what you want to remove, so what you actually have to do it create a whole bunch of isolated chunks you want to save, and then recombine them in one final video. It seems like there should be an easier way to do this, but I haven’t figured it out.
>> If you don’t mind my asking, what program did you use to do the stop motion?
It was right in the camera feature on my Motorola smartphone.
That’s pretty sweet. I used to use a TI-85 and a DSLR way back in the day. That makes it so much easier!
What I noticed, though, is that there’s no Save feature in the program, or at least, there’s no feature called Save. Instead it’s called Backup, and I mention it because although the new video I created was made of two videos that are both MP4, the resulting file created by Backup is not, it is a VPB file. I thought maybe that stood for Video Project Backup, but apparently VPB has a variety of uses and I found no answer given to what it actually stands for, if anything. Anyway, the only reason I mention it is that I read that MP4 is YouTube’s preferred video format, so I don’t know if this will cause problems or not.
So it seems like the project file auto saves any time you make a change in the program, so you may not need manually to save it. I tried making some changes on a file and then exiting and it seems that it saved the changes (nerve wrecking if you don’t know it does that). If you click “Finish Video” in the upper right hand of the window, it should export it to an MP4 file. Just note, it never explicitly says MP4 video just “video file” throughout the process, but looking at the output that’s what it is.
I still haven’t figured out how to remove stuff from the other video. It looks like if you use the Trim function, you can only select what you want to save, not what you want to remove, so what you actually have to do it create a whole bunch of isolated chunks you want to save, and then recombine them in one final video. It seems like there should be an easier way to do this, but I haven’t figured it out.
It’s definitely not super intuitive, but seems to run similar to other video programs that way. I find that Split works a little better if you’re trying to cut things out. You may have to split a video at the first cut, then another split on the new one at another part and so on and/or some combination of split and trim. It’s definitely a labor of love. 🙂
>> “The Flight of the Bumblebee” would be appropriate music … unless there is a maniacally fast ninja music piece.
Well, some good came out of this suggestion after all 😛 I told Rachel about it, and I discovered that when she was younger, she performed a jazzier version of this piece called Bumble Boogie. You can find it on YouTube. I also found an arrangement on YT for solo piano done by Rachmaninoff, which I’d previously been unaware of. Also, all that bumblebee music talk gave me an excuse to play Bettencourt’s Flight of the Wounded Bumblebee, which can also easily be found on YT.
I’m reading up on music sites for videos. Now that V-day is over, I can publicly state that my fourth time lapse video is of the Flower Bouquet. It should be the easiest to finish, because it’s a single video that requires no trimming or combining with other videos; all I have to do is select music and post it. The video itself is only 3 minutes and 18 seconds.
Also, it’s very important that everybody knows that I gave Rachel flowers five times in one day. Specifically they are:
1) The Flower and Chocolates Friends polybag. I ordered a Ninjago set from lego.com just so I’d get it, although I ended up getting one at AFOL days too, which I built myself.
2) The Tulips set. It was originally back-ordered but still arrived in time, and we built them last week.
3) The Roses set. I also ordered them in mid-January when they first became available, and they’re still back-ordered til late March, so I didn’t actually have them physically with me that day, but they still totally count.
4) The Flower Bouquet set. That one went over quite well and Rachel said it was good to see Lego coming up with sets of interest for female AFOLs. Unlike me, she was never an 8-year-old boy, so she has less interest in sets that are robot ninjas and snake men driving a giant car that’s also a boat that flies.
5) Actual live flowers from a flower delivery place. They also went over well 😀
Predictably, I got a lot of results when doing a search for ‘free music for videos’, and in fact, the very first one I read was quite informative and I have trouble believing I won’t be able to find something to use from one of these sites:
https://www.wix.com/blog/photography/2019/11/27/free-music-for-videos/
I’ve actually known for a long time that the danger of telling people about what projects you plan to work on or are working on, is that then they know if you don’t finish them. After three-plus years of this thread containing no real content other than some friendly trash-talking, I thought it was finally taking off when the time-lapse video conversation got going back in February. But when I look at the posts, it lasted less than two weeks. I did work on stuff after that, especially checking out the free-to-use music sites and listening to lots of samples. I never did any real video editing and I never posted anything to YT. I eventually lost my enthusiasm for it and then lost interest completely. Part of it was that the more I looked at my existing time-lapse footage, the more I realized that it wasn’t actually very good – I really should have placed the camera better. And I think what really sealed it was when I showed one of the videos unedited to my nephew, for whom they were originally made, he showed little interest.
I did learn some good stuff in my reading about editing software, and in the stuff people posted here, so it wasn’t a total waste, and I did mess with the software a little bit. But maybe the most important thing I learned was more recent, when I discovered that Frost has a YouTube channel and is quite skilled at producing quality videos. If I come back to doing videos of any kind in the future, he will be the guy to consult with for information and advice. I don’t know if he subscribes to this thread @tfdesigns
In the meantime, I have moved on to other things. In early August I finally got serious about an unprecedented overhaul of my parts organization. I’m very happy with the progress so far but it’s taking really long and there’s tons more to do. Mostly it’s stuff too boring to talk about – sorting parts, consolidating parts, standardizing the storage containers, standardizing the labeling system, replacing slider bags that have been reused so many times they’re barely holding together, and in some cases, taking inventory (meaning counting them out) of what parts I have so I know what I still need to order on BL to complete certain projects. Those ‘certain projects’ are the more interesting topic, and I might post about them soon, but for now, I am mentioning it because in the course of my work on this, I took the attached pic, which I pretty much took just for @timf Tim. You’ll have to ignore how bad the carpet needs to be vacuumed in that part of the hallway. The container at the bottom is other parts – cones, tiles, plates, bricks, flame pieces, etc – but the other six containers contain nothing but cheese wedges, although obviously the one at the top isn’t full. Rachel told me the Woodfield Mall has them back in stock on their wall, although I don’t expect to be there til October 31.
The unofficial word count on the previous post is 1597, which is equal to 1.6 photos. Photos would have been easier.
>> The unofficial word count on the previous post is 1597, which is equal to 1.6 photos. Photos would have been easier.
Yeah, when I woke up this morning, I immediately regretted posting that. It’s been edited down.
I did get sidetracked on posting pics because I thought I could easily find the one with the shark silhouette underwater and I never found it, despite spending significant time on it. I really thought it was in my Flickr Faves. When it wasn’t there, I looked in photos recently posted by people I follow (which is a lot), and in recent posts to TBB, since I’m pretty sure I saw it not that long ago, certainly in the last six months, maybe in the last three months. If anybody knows what build I’m talking about and knows where I can find a photo, please let me know.
It’s been edited down.
I read the original (long) version in the email I got yesterday morning. I enjoyed it. If you find the shark build please share as it sounds interesting!
I thought it would be funny if you varied the spellings of the nametags on each of your boxes (Benjamyn Good, Benjamin Gud, Beenjamean Good, Steal City LUG, Steel Seaty LUG, etc).
I too read the original version via email. I’ve seen that technique and it looks really awesome. I’d be interested as well in seeing the shark in the water. 🙂
Thank you Captain Obvious Josh used an arrangement for solo xylophone for his time lapse of us setting up for Greenberg in November of 2014.
good times.
<< good times.
Way to reply more than eleven months after my original post 😛
>> I read the original (long) version in the email I got yesterday morning. I enjoyed it.
>
>> I too read the original version via email. I’ve seen that technique and it looks really awesome.Thanks guys, that made me feel better. I definitely woke up with poster’s remorse the next day. Later on, I was thinking to myself, well why *did* I write and post that whole thing, other than I was extra in the mood to sit at my computer and talk about Lego? And I realized that the reason is that I thought it would be an interesting analysis of what goes into planning a large project once it goes beyond the scope of just being able to get out your container of parts and start clicking things together, and how slow long-term changes in BL supply and demand affect that planning. But I’m still not sure it was worth it or really that interesting.
And then after I wrote it, it was fallacy of sunk cost: I thought, well it’s already written, so I might as well post it. But my later thinking was that I should have just deleted it unposted.
I spent significant time trying to find the shark pic and I never found it. I did find a lot of different ways that people have simulated water using clear tiles, bricks, and plates of various colors, other than in the Ninjago collab, so that might also help explain rising prices. I might try again on the shark but my last search was pretty significant and I don’t even know where to look that I haven’t already.
SHARK!!!!
I found it, high five. My aha moment was when I realized I hadn’t seen it on Flickr or TBB, but on YouTube. And then I started scrolling through recent Beyond the Brick videos, and when I still couldn’t find it, I thought well if I randomly watched a really old one, I’m never gonna find it. But then I discovered that fortunately (or maybe not, depending on your viewpoint), like Amazon and Netflix, YouTube remembers everything. So it was a pretty short scroll through my YT viewing history to find it.
It’s not BTB either, it’s by a guy in Sweden who goes by Brick Opz, he only posts sporadically, and his videos are always short and without commentary. The build is from Skaerbaek 2021 and I don’t know who built it. I had actually left a remark about the shark in the comments for the video, and I was correct in remembering that it wasn’t that long ago (mid-November).
I also follow Brick Opz on Flickr (although there he’s one of 976 people, whereas my YT subscription list is pretty short), and I found his shark pics there, so there’s an additional four links at the end of the post here. His pics are also without commentary and so I still don’t know who built it and I can’t see a MOC card. I do feel like these pics are helping to confirm my (now deleted) claim that the effect is impressive from a distance but somewhat less so up close. (I’m also now realizing that my method of searching through recently posted photos by people I follow was never going to work because I have Flickr set to only show the most recent five items from any given user, and the shark pics are in an album of 345 photos.)
Hopefully I haven’t created impossible expectations with my hyping up of the shark, but I think it still looks pretty cool, and the rest of the build is good too. The shark is easy to spot and shows up in the video multiple times.
SHARK!!!!
I found it. My aha moment was when I realized I hadn’t seen it on Flickr or TBB, but on YouTube. And then I started scrolling through recent Beyond the Brick videos, and when I still couldn’t find it, I thought well if I randomly watched a really old one, I’m never gonna find it. But I discovered that fortunately (or maybe not, depending on your viewpoint), like Amazon and Netflix, YouTube remembers everything. So it was a pretty short scroll through my YT viewing history to find it.
It’s not BTB either, it’s by a guy in Sweden who goes by Brick Opz, he only posts sporadically, and his videos are always short and without commentary. The build is from Skaerbaek 2021 and I don’t know who built it. I had actually left a remark about the shark in the comments for the video, and I was correct in remembering that it wasn’t that long ago (mid-November).
I also follow Brick Opz on Flickr (although there he’s one of 976 people, whereas my YT subscription list is pretty short), and I found his shark pics there, so there’s an additional four links at the end of the post here. His pics are also without commentary and so I still don’t know who built it and I can’t see a MOC card. I do feel like these pics are helping to confirm my (now deleted) claim that the effect is impressive from a distance but somewhat less so up close. (I’m also now realizing that my method of searching through recently posted photos by people I follow was never going to work because I have Flickr set to only show the most recent five items from any given user, and the shark pics are in an album of 345 photos.)
Hopefully I haven’t created impossible expectations with my hyping up of the shark, but I think it still looks pretty cool, and the rest of the build is good too. The shark is easy to spot and shows up in the video multiple times.
*** No Flickr links – WordPress is once again doing the thing where it blocks the post because it doesn’t like the Flickr links. I freakin’ hate this crap. If I can find a way to post them in a subsequent post, I will.
This does look really cool. Looks like it’s just the clear tiles then the colored layer. Would adding an additional layer of clear plates allow a bit of 3D depth to the underwater layer or would that mess up the transparency too much?
>> Looks like it’s just the clear tiles then the colored layer. Would adding an additional layer of clear plates allow a bit of 3D depth to the underwater layer or would that mess up the transparency too much?
I think adding a later of clear plate in between would make it look better. But I have to admit, I haven’t actually tried it in this kind of context. When I made the fountains, I used plain white plate for the bottom because it made the water look bright and cheerful. When I made the lake for SWR, I put the clear plate right on the tan baseplate, I didn’t make any attempt to vary the texture underneath. Based on other pics I found on Flickr though, I think it has to work. Some of the pics I found though, it’s hard to tell how they did it, cause they do a wide shot but no close-ups.
Seems like with some experimentation, one could come up with some pretty sweet depth effects, yeah.
Also wanna see this technique with the dorsal fin actually protruding.
Maybe you can do that by the end of the weekend, Ben?
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