USB 3.0 Broadcasts on ... wait ... 2.4GHz?!

Did you ever wondered why when plugging in some USB 3.0 devices, such as an USB 3.0 external hard disk or an USB 3.0 memory stick, your wireless keyboard and mouse almost cease to work? Keystrokes, mouse movements and mouse button presses get lost nearly all time? Or does your WiFi connection breaks down then?

VLC-Qt Woes ... SMPlayer to the Rescue

A recent upgrade of my video editing station causes a really annoying regression in VLC+Qt. I'm using Kubuntu (15.10 as of this writing) as it is a well-done KDE-centric distribution that is quickly installed and KDE works right out of the box. Unfortunately, the recent upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.5.3/KDE Frameworks 5.18.0 causes VLC to only show a small portion of any video frame. So I needed some remedy...

Transition Tricks in Kdenlive

Kdenlive is a powerful non-linear video editing beast, not least thanks to its MLT engine. Unfortunately, most newcomers to Kdenlive often miss the more subtle tricks that we old hands use in our projects all the time. So how can an empty video track make matter better...?

200K Views for Underwater Cycling Video

Well, who would have ever thought that one of my videos could get 200K views? This evening, Under Water Cycling passed this mark. Unbelievable.

Kdenlive Lost+Found: Some Split Screen is Muli-Track View Instead

Kdenlive lost+found is about these kind of things you wished someone had told you about Kdenlive years earlier. Those thing, where you should've read the Kdenlive documentation more thoroughly.

Today: Kdenlive uses a very convenient two monitor concept. The clip monitor is, you guessed it, for working with clips. In contrast, the project monitor shows what the final outcome of your clips+transitions chaos in the timeline will be: this is what will be rendered. Now, both monitors come with a «split view». So I would expect this to be the same functionality?

Well, both «split views» are actually completely different things. In the clip monitor, «split mode» splits the clip display into two halfs, one part showing the clip before effects are applied to the clip shown, and the other part shows the final result of applying all effects. In contrast, the project monitor in «split mode» instead shows four quadrants (instead of two halves). Each quadrant then parades one of first four tracks that are currently visible (unhidden).

Thankfully, when made aware of the misnaming, the Kdenlive developers kindly renamed the multi-track split view mode of the project monitor into, well, «multitrack view». In the future, this should hopefully avoid further confusion ... and not only on my side. Small UI changes, yet very important for an overall smooth Kdenlive experience to both newcomers as well as seasoned hands.

Kdenlive Lost+Found: How to Zoom In/Out in Monitors

Kdenlive lost+found is about these kind of things you wished someone had told you about Kdenlive years earlier. Things that you've missed and nobody knew Kdenlive even had them already.

Today: how to zoom in and out in Kdenlive's project and clip monitors. The mouse wheel normally simply seeks back and forward when the mouse is in either the clip or project monitors.

But, when holding both Shift+Ctrl when wheeling in the monitors then zooms into the frame and out again.

Extremely useful when dealing with slightly more involved affine transitions with several key frames and each such frame needs to be precisely placed on screen, for instance, for simple animations.

A Year of Surface Pen-Testing

Working for more than a year with the Surface Pro 3 in screencast production it's time for some real-use review. Not those boring paid quills reviews.

Screencast Recording on Linux

Recently I needed to record some raw footage for my screencasting projects, this time recording from a Linux system. This system happens to be my power-horse video editing station with a 27" screen attached, with 2560×1440 pixels (in 16:9). So the frame size is beyond FullHD, which is 1920×1080: the maximum my HD rocket can record.

Deep Down You Want the Best ... Address Planners

Please allow me to introduce a brand new PAYDI deep diver exercise: the /128 ft address planning expert. It's going to replace all those existing toy exercises.

Deep down you want the best ... address planners, that is.

Anyone who has done this on the surface will agree that's a hell of an impossible  exercise down at 128ft/40m with plain air. But then, I will never understand why anyone would do this at all even at 0m/0ft...?!

Maybe the IETF wants to step in with a new RFC...

E-Paper for Screencasting ... Sort Of

Real e-paper ;)

There are sooo beautiful things to be found in this dark, filthy, intelligence-ridden Internet, such as real paper textures at Lost&Taken. One out of the bazillions of uses for paper textures is in my screencast projects. So real paper goes «e-paper», at least sort of.

3x Speedup Transcode Job for Kdenlive

Somehow Ffmpeg is the Chuck Norris of video processing, not least for speeding up raw video footage. However, better tame it through Kdenlive's transcode jobs. This way, speeding up video footage is only a single click away. And it is neatly integrated into the Kdenlive project workflow.

Fast Forward ... Using Ffmpeg

In my screencast videos about technical things I regularly face this situation: showing slides is boring, so watching an illustration develop is more interesting. Yet developing an illustration in real-time is boring, similar to watching paint dry. Just using a swipe transition from beginning to end looks again like Powerpoint presentations, yuk. Luckily, speeding up the drawing process works much better. And Kdenlive does come with a speed effect, right...?

Shuttle Crash: X11 & Qt 5.4

I've recently upgraded my Kubuntu installation to 15.10 ... just to find out that pressing any button of the ShuttlePro crashes Kdenlive. After some digging I found out that Qt 5.4 in combination with X11 are the culprits here. The ShuttlePro gets integrated as a pointing device by X11, then Qt dumps core trying to dispatching Shuttle events happily into the great void...

Audio Post in Audacity for better Screencasts

Screencasting: audio works...

A good screencast is not only about good video, it's also about good audio too. So in post I do not only work on cutting raw footage into something pleasing. I also need to process my raw audio recordings, so they get pleasing too. Luckily, there's a great open source tool for free to do this: Audacity. But what audio processing needs to be done?

Win Apps: Share to ... Disk!

Since I purchased my Surface Pro 3 almost a year ago, I'm constantly pulling my hair at exporting data from Windows 8 Apps. In particular, I need to export PDF files from my illustration app Squid on a regular basis. For whatever reason Microsoft did totally miss to include a share to disk functionaliy: nope, how needs this anyway...?!"

Rejoice, there is help!