Kevin Alexander

Weekly Wrap-Up 1/29/12

2012-01-29T15:26:00.001-05:00

Another busy week of blogging this past week with no sign of slowing down any time soon. Hoping to get some videos edited this week to add to the mix!

For Perpetual Geek Machine:

Dustforce PC game review. I had already been tasked with reviewing this for Gamezebo so having to completely rewrite a new review for the same product was an interesting challenge.
Episode #00043 of the Perpetual Geek Machine podcast. I produce and edit this show on a biweekly basis.

For Gamezebo:

Unstoppable Gorg indie PC game review.
Drakensang Online browser-based PC MMO review.

That's about the size of it for this past week.

Weekly Wrap-Up 1/20/12

2012-01-20T17:09:00.001-05:00

I spent a lot of time writing this week, which felt great to push out so much new content. Here's some links to the posts:

For Perpetual Geek Machine:

Introducing Project: Movie Log 2012

For Gamezebo:

Pixel Mall - Android game review
Q.U.B.E. - PC game review
HyperQuiz - Android game review
Cube World - PC game preview
DustForce - PC game review

Next week I'll be writing another DustForce review for PGM as well as recording and producing the next PGM podcast. For Gamezebo I'll have a review of the new tower defense PC game Unstoppable Gorg. See you then!

Messing With Android's Movie Studio

2012-01-04T15:00:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago I picked up the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. It's the latest and greatest Android phone, complete with version 4.0 of the operating system more commonly known as Ice Cream Sandwich. I had been patiently waiting to replace my Motorola Droid for a while and when word started spreading that the flagship Android phone would finally be hitting Verizon I knew I wanted to hold off from buying the HTC Thunderbolt, Samsung Droid Charge or anything else that seemed appealing at the time.

Overall, I've been very pleased with everything about the phone. ICS is snappy and responsive, pretty close to being on par with iOS 5 from what I can tell. Switching between apps now seems to be everything that it was originally promised to be. I'd almost dare say that after all this time, this might finally be Android's coming out party.

One of the things that surprised me after I got the phone was the included "Movie Studio" software. This app was released as part of the tablet-only Honeycomb 3.0 software and is making its phone debut in ICS. It's clearly a response to the mobile version of iMovie, which is to be expected when you have too huge companies competing as fiercely as Apple and Google are. Though I have absolutely zero experience with iMovie I have plenty of experience with professional video editing software so I decided to test out Movie Studio to see what it's all about.

When you first load Movie Studio you're shown any previous projects that you've created and given the choice to create a new one. If you choose to create a new project you'll be prompted to give it a name before it lets you proceed.

The project window is broken up so that you have your "program monitor" at the top (the window where you can what's playing in the timeline along with any titles, FX or transitions you've added) and your timeline of clips, effects and transitions at the bottom.

If you have any experience with editing programs you'll notice there's no "bin" to store all your items. You basically add one element at a time as you need it. If you choose to delete it, that's it. It's gone. I suppose that's just one of the sacrifices that needed to be made to squeeze video editing into a mobile app.

When you add a video clip it lays the entire clip onto the timeline. Long press on the clip in the timeline to edit the in point and out point of the clip by dragging the edges of the clip. This process can be a bit cumbersome since you're working in a small area. Even with the huge screen on the Galaxy Nexus it's almost impossible to have any kind of precision. Patience will be your greatest virtue when trying to get things just right.

While the clip is selected you can also apply FX and transitions to spruce things up a bit. The choices are limited, it's not like we're working with a portable version of After Effects here. Slap on a wipe, crossfade, fade to/from black, make it sepia, negative or black and white and that's just about it.

Whenever you do add some sort of transition, effect or title to the timeline the phone takes a bit of time to render it so that you see it in the preview window, only the app doesn't give you any indication that it's busy doing something and to hold on a second before you try to do anything else.

I found that it's generally easier to work with the app in landscape mode as it gives you a wider view of the timeline and makes it a little easier to work with clips. It also puts the play, fast forward and rewind controls off to the left instead of overlaid on the preview window.

Movie Studio can export your project into a .mp4 file at three different resolutions (all the way up to 1920x1080) and three different qualities. You're not gonna find any fancy bitrate settings or the ability to completely customize the resolutions (which amount to widescreen 480p, 720p and 1080p). The process doesn't take too long, maybe a few minutes. I have found that the final movies don't necessarily render correctly if you add too many transitions or effects and they tend to lose audio sync. You'll see a couple examples of short videos I made in Move Studio at the end of this post.

It seems that if you have no experience with higher-end video editing software you might get a bit lost as to what to do in Movie Studio. There's not much official help readily apparent on the web, which is a bit surprising since this is a program that clearly needs a tutorial to help out new users. I guess it is possible that if you just keep playing with it you'll figure things out in time. Either way, it's not something that they have to include in the software but it's definitely a welcomed addition and something fun to play around with.

I've embedded a couple videos here so you can see the general quality of what Movie Studio spits out. Neither one of these is all that interesting nor are they going to blow anyone's socks off. They were both rendered at 1080p, High Quality.

First a cut down of a single video file that I recorded on New Year's Eve where I added a fade in, title and fade out with a couple cuts in between:

Second, a video of a shuffleboard game I played on Monday where I added a fade in, two crossfade transitions and a fade out:

I hope this gives you a decent idea of what you can expect in Movie Studio, available in the Android operating system 3.0 and above.

Got any tips or videos you made? Share them in the comments!

So This Is The New Year...

2012-01-03T12:53:00.000-05:00

2012.

Another new year, another feeling of getting caught up in new beginnings. It's easy to focus on all the stuff that you feel like you might have messed up the previous year. All those broken resolutions. All the goals you didn't meet. It's time to take stock on what's important and what's to come. Plan for the future and live in the now.

Sounds cliche and a bit goofy but right now I don't care. I'm going with it.

I made a list today of goals I want to accomplish this year. I don't know how well I'll do crossing off items but every time I complete something I know it will feel good. There's so many things I want to do and I think I have the time for them. I tried to make them reasonable, there's no "become an astronaut" on there.

"Lose 20 pounds and keep it off". Not just for vanity but because it's healthy. I'll feel more confident. I won't die when I'm 40.

"Write 500 words every day." If not for this blog than for this one. I like writing and I think I'm somewhat decent at it. In all honesty I wouldn't mind doing it for a living.

"Learn to play an entire song on guitar." I've tried chronicling my efforts to learn my favorite instrument here but like most things I've attempted I didn't keep up with it. The WILL change this year.

There's some other items on the list. They're just for me though. It's not that they're embarrassing or anything but some stuff I want to keep private. I share enough of myself via Facebook, Twitter, our podcast and other areas.

Some things should stay with me. I'm sure you don't mind.

New Beginnings

2011-04-14T09:12:00.000-04:00

To say that I've been restless at my current job is a bit of an understatement. It's becoming all the more apparent to me that I do not want to do this for the rest of my life. I especially do want to be associated with this company for much longer. It's suffice to say that I've spent a lot of time daydreaming and thinking about what I'd rather be doing.

When the feelings first started to surface I turned to my closest friends, as I always do. A few suggested that I try reading What Color Is Your Parachute? 2011 after they had some personal success with figuring out what they wanted to do. I realized while I was reading the first few chapters of the book that I already knew what I wanted, I just hadn't realized it yet. All I had to do was pay attention to my fascination with the business aspect of sites like Penny Arcade and the Whiskey Media family.

If you take a look behind-the-scenes at either of these companies you find a group of friends pumping out great content for a large audience, and having a blast doing it. Almost nothing else looks more appealing that this. Fortunately I have friends who agree with me. And we just happen to put together a pretty great podcast that few people listen to.

Recently we've been talking in ever-increasing detail about coming up with a "for realsies" business plan to try putting forth a serious effort to make something real out of Perpetual Geek Machine. The process so far has been pretty exciting seeing that there's a good amount of potential for making this in to something real.

I'll be spewing out some words and thoughts as we go along, more for myself keeping a record of where I'm at in my headspace as this all goes forward.

No Direction Home

2009-11-19T22:46:00.000-05:00

This is a post that I've written any number of times on this blog. The one where I talk about how I haven't been writing for a while. The only things that I've ever truly kept up with in my life are my marriage and a passion for music. Everything else seems to come and go.

I really want to be able to write here frequently but I've never been good with stringing together cohesive and coherent sentences that actually express what I'm trying to say. Maybe I don't have anything to say.

Man, this post has turned "emo" pretty quickly. Ugh.

As you can see below I tried learning guitar. Again. Couldn't keep up with that.

I got a week in to the Couch To 5K program and fell behind on that as well.

Here's to hoping I force myself to write about something every day, maybe the words will come more easily that way.

/Rant

Anyone Can Play Guitar - Day 2 & 3

2009-07-29T22:27:00.002-04:00

Last night I wasn't able to devote too much time to practicing, which is exactly the sort of thing that won't get me anywhere. For the little bit of time I did spend I just tried to get the "E", "A" and "D" chords a little more comfortable.

On my way home I did pick up some new strings since I've never, ever changed the originals. Needless to say they were looking pretty skanky which was made all the more evident when I put the ones on tonight. I didn't bother trying to re-tune them yet, but I imagine that's going to be a bit of a chore. I'm going to use one of the reference CDs I have so hopefully that'll be some help.

That's about it for now. Tomorrow night I'm heading out to see Fleet Foxes at the Electric Factory so there won't be any practicing.

Anyone Can Play Guitar - Day 1

2009-07-28T10:13:00.003-04:00

Way, way back in 2001 or so I bought a Jasmine ES31C acoustic guitar with every intention of learning how to play. Besides being able to play a couple chords, one at a time, I've never really gotten very far. It's time to change that. Armed with a copy of the K.I.S.S. Guide To Playing Guitar I sat down in an empty room last night with a curious dog to start working my way through learning and changing chords.

Skipping over all the basic "This is how to hold the guitar. This is how to tune. This is how you strum." stuff in the beginning of the book that I've learned a bunch of times over the last 8 years of starting and stopping this process I skipped right to playing your first chords. "E" is the first chord the book walks you through (this particular book teaching the Tablature style of reading music) and was easy enough for my fat fingers to work around. Being that I've just started trying to play again means that my finger tips are still pretty sensitive to holding down the steel strings but if you don't press them down behind the fret hard enough the sound isn't right. After strumming around the chord a few times it was time to tackle "A" and "D". The fingerings for "A" are simple enough (fingers 1, 2 and 3 down on the second fret of strings 2, 3 and 4) but my hand has a hard time combining holding the strings down hard enough and not touching any other string that's supposed to be played "open". It's going to take a lot more practice to get "A" down to a point that is satisfactory to me. "D" is easy enough, which I had never had trouble with in previous attempts to teach myself.

The most challenging part of all this is struggling with the self control to not let myself get too frustrated while I fumble around changing chords. It's my hope that blogging my different "lessons" and "practices" will kick me in the ass enough to really give it a shot this time around. Tonight I'll keep practicing switching around between "E", "A" and "D".

Sorry 'Bout That Yo

2009-03-09T10:52:00.004-04:00

First off, sorry for the lack of YouTube posts as of recent. You see, I was busy setting up a new pop culture media blog called House Of Awesome. That will probably detract from posting here and I'll be moving my daily YouTube posts over there, if you happen to follow them. So hurry on up and check out the new site!

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Happy Belated Birthday, Mr. Cash

2009-02-27T11:37:00.001-05:00

I missed Johnny Cash's birthday yesterday (he would have been 77) so here's A Boy Named Sue live at San Quentin:

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Evolution Almost Claims Another

2009-02-26T10:00:00.002-05:00

A couple words of NSFW audio.

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Smokin'!

2009-02-25T10:00:00.000-05:00

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Well, At Least They've Got A Schtick

2009-02-24T10:00:00.000-05:00

Party on Wayne.

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Beat It Beat It Beat It Beat It

2009-02-23T10:00:00.002-05:00

This guy's got nothing on my hero, but still a fine showing nonetheless.

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Do You Believe In Miracles?

2009-02-22T14:57:00.001-05:00

Special bonus for today as this is the 29th anniversary of the best moment in American sports history.

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Kirk Cameron is a FINE Actor

2009-02-22T10:00:00.000-05:00

Some of the "best" scenes from the Backdraft + God = Wholesome Christian Flick "Fireproof".

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Man vs. Snowball

2009-02-21T10:00:00.000-05:00

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Ping Pong Pang Wang Chung!

2009-02-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

Exhibition, not a competition.

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Points For Preserverence Or Stupidity?

2009-02-19T10:19:00.001-05:00

Really though, how in the hell did he not break something?

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Driving Into A Dust Storm

2009-02-18T17:02:00.002-05:00

It's straight out of a Sci Fi movie. Especially one of the good ones, like T-Rex-A-Thon 5 or something.

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Silly Slalom

2009-02-14T11:53:00.000-05:00

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: 2 Live Crew On Donahue

2009-02-12T10:00:00.000-05:00

NSFW Lyrics Ya'll

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Yeah, Sure. Cover Me In Bees, I'm Just Gonna Have A Beer

2009-02-11T10:00:00.000-05:00

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Games Have Come A Long Way

2009-02-10T14:14:00.000-05:00

Your Daily YouTube-Tacular: Radiohead Pwns The Grammy Awards

2009-02-09T14:00:00.001-05:00

With Special Bonus: Band introduction with a surprisingly hot Gwenyth Paltrow!