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Almost a little bit country, but I love the Irish (even though she is from Scotland) twang in her voice. Amy Macdonald This Is The Life:

And with that, we’re out of here for a week – off to old Blighty to suffer the pain of a worthless US dollar.

Since buying the Flip I’ve posted some puppet videos, some MINI videos, and a flying video but from now on they will only appear on the appropriate site, and there maybe some videos that I put only on Viddler. So if you want to keep up with my mad directorial skillz you should either:

1. Sign up for your own account at Viddler.com, add me (ukpylot) as a friend and set your preferences such that you are emailed when I upload something new
2. Or, if you want to keep under the radar, you could add my video feed to your favourite RSS reader: my video feed

Now, I can’t say there’s going to be anything great but wouldn’t you kick yourself if there was, and you missed it??

I just posted a new video on my Viddler page, this time some clips of a flight I took last night from San Diego to Imperial and Brawley airports. There’s more of a narrative at the post there, but since I know many of you don’t read it I thought I’d also post the video here in case you wanted to see it.

The mount that I bought for this flight was too big for the dashboard so I had to hold the Flip in my hand, so there are no takeoffs or landings – need two hands for that! It’s a bit shakey, and the propeller looks really spooky in the shots, but it’s a new video so what the heck! I’ll try for a better solution next time.

Except it’s Thursday and I’m too sick to make my own puppet theater this week. Yesterday was the Brit Awards, the UK’s premier pop music award show (and since UK pop is the world’s best, make that the world’s premier pop music award show) and I’ve spent some time digging out clips from YouTube. I am sure these will all soon be deleted due to their undeniable copyright infringement so get them while you can.

I love this one: The Klaxxons and Rhinna do “Umbrella”, cool lasers too.

Mark Ronson won Best Male award or something, despite the fact that he doesn’t do his own stuff:

And in case you didn’t get enough Amy, here she is solo. I love her to death but when she sings live it’s like she sings her own random timing and the band has to be adept at changing tempo to match her. And in both this performance, and the one above, she seems obsessed with the length of her skirt.

Finally, you might be saying “what about Kylie?”. Yeah, she won International artist and performed but frankly she looked horrid and it’s a terrible song (if you can call it that) so I’d rather we just moved along….

I swear, it was just an ordinary evening; no one saw this coming.

Thanks to db, or maybe josh, yesterday I bought a Flip Ultra camcorder so I can join the video blogging craze, or something. Yes, I know I have three perfectly good camcorders at home but none of them are the sweet, easy to carry and use size of the Flip. I figure I will keep it in my bag, whip it out (so to speak) when the mood strikes. Hell, maybe I’ll record some video for the Wailing Cat sometime.

My first impression was a little underwhelming, actually. But the joy is in it’s simplicity. There’s no complicated buttons, just turn it on, point it at something, hit record, hit stop. Then it plugs right into your computer and you can use the supplied software to save/upload or any of your own tools. The video quality ain’t bad for $150. The trick is finding a hosting site that does a decent job of encoding the file but doesn’t take forever to do it.

First, I used good old YouTube which is the de facto standard, I guess. It processes pretty fast but the quality sure ain’t great:

DB tried Vimeo which did a much better job in terms of quality but took a long time to upload and encode. Rather than rehash the same experiment, I tried Viddler which was pretty quick, at least as fast as YouTube, I think, but I’m not sure the quality is improved any.

I’ll probably sit back and let josh and db figure out the best solution, they’re good at that kind of thing. In the meantime, I am pondering registering guapacha.tv for my video blogs, but at $25 a year it makes one think twice.

UK children’s programs are so much better than US ones – Shaun the Sheep!

It’s the last Friday before Christmas so there was really only one video to put here. But I couldn’t find a decent link anywhere on the intertubes so you’ll just have to listen to the Waitresses’ Christmas Wrapping on your own.

Instead, I present the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, complete with “almost-banned by BBC Radio 1” profanity.

Been falling down on this for the last couple of weeks, and to be honest you might ask why I bothered with this.

For reasons that matter not, I had to capture some Hi8 video this week using my Macbook Pro, rather than the PC that I have dedicated to such things. I hooked the Hi8 cam to my digital converter box (the excellent Datavideo DAC-100) and then firewire’d it to the Mac. The plan was to capture using iMovie and then create a DVD image in iDVD, neither of which I had used before.

When the DAC-100 can’t convert the analog signal (due to noise or whatever) it doesn’t send anything to the computer which is usually no big deal but iMovie absolutely did not like this: it seems that periods of silence on the wire are taken to mean the camera has disconnected. So it would keep stopping, and occasionally tell me that the camera wasn’t even connected any more. I tried different things for a couple of days and was about to give up when I discovered….. Vidi.

Not only is Vidi free, but it totally works like a capture program should. Silence on the wire? Ok, nothing gets put in the DV file. Need to chunk the output in 2Gb files? No problem! Some tapes that iMovie just wouldn’t capture for more than a few minutes were an absolute breeze using Vidi. I hit record on the Mac, play on the cam and 2 hrs later I had 26Gb of gorgeous converted video. I encourage you to check it out.