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Ben, keep working hard on this and eventually the six foot Christmas tree will take it’s place alongside tunnels in LUG lore. #deadhorse
>> Ben, keep working hard on this and eventually the six foot Christmas tree will take it’s place alongside tunnels in LUG lore. #deadhorse
Uh huh. I have a better chance of getting Greg to finish his tree than I do of getting you guys to stop using an apostrophe in ‘its’ when it’s a possessive pronoun. Where’s The Grammarist when you need him? @philmatt24
apostrophe in ‘its’
D’oh! #forehead slapping #Homer #Grammer Fail
Ben, keep working hard on this and eventually the six foot Christmas tree will take it’s place alongside tunnels in LUG lore. #deadhorse
The 6-foot Christmas Tree is supposed to HAVE tunnels!!!
Uh huh. I have a better chance of getting Greg to finish his tree than I do of getting you guys to stop using an apostrophe in ‘its’ when it’s a possessive pronoun. Where’s The Grammarist when you need him? @philmatt24
I was trying not to dignify this thread with a response. But since Greg and Tim are, and since these faulty apostrophes cannot be tolerated, but mostly since Greg used an epic Princess Bride reference, I guess I’ll join the fray…
Also, @tim… “grammAr”, not “GrammEr“…
D’oh! #forehead slapping #Homer #Grammer Fail
I see this thread never came to anything. Maybe cause I haven’t really built anything of significance in the past two years. I got curious about what happened to it after the Pick a Brick Wall thread got slightly threadjacked on a conversation about my old castle. So I’m bumping the thread. I still have a ways to go to catch up to Greg and Rich though.
This is a bonus post for Dan’s Spaceman Skiff contest. I can’t get it to post here, for reasons unknown, so I am trying it here to see if I can get it to work. Original post starts:
As I was coming up with my entry post in my head, it occurred to me that its style is most likely a result of reading several years of Frost’s Febrovery entries, Honest John in particular, although it could also just be from nearly half a century living of the good ol’ yoo ess of ay.
Anyway, here’s plenty of bonus info that nobody asked for:
Longtime viewers of the show will recognize the SPSK35 as being based off the car in my ‘Those Space Plants Aren’t Gonna Water Themselves’ build, which first appeared in the 2019 Q3 build challenge, and later traveled in more polished form to Bricks Cascade in February 2020. Since that car was deliberately designed to be as small, plain, and simple as possible, I figured it would be a good starting point for the contest. I was dismayed to discover then that the car was already at 39 parts. I cut ten parts by removing the wheels, and cut four more by tweaking the original build, changes that most likely will be permanent, so we can thank Dan for that. But it still didn’t leave much for me to add on, and I tried to keep as much of the original car as I could, to keep it as recognizable as possible.
Obviously this is a friendly undertaking, but for contest purposes, pic 2 is actually the official entry photo. The whole thing was conceived around the idea of the spaceman holding the hose to water the plants. After I took the pics though, I realized I should really have a photo of him sitting in it flying it like everybody else does. The spaceship really doesn’t look good flying with the hose curled up and clipped into the holder though, hence the ‘self-retracting’ hose (it’s supposed to shoop right up into the spaceship, like the power cord on some vacuum cleaners).
By removing the hose though, it freed up two parts from the count, which let me add the flames for when it’s in flight. The flames were the inspiration for the insulated tank, since it seemed like a bad idea to put the two so close together. It made me think of an internet article I saw some years ago, it was a list of what they considered the dumbest GI Joe toys ever made. One of them was a truck that was also a mobile missile launcher, and the guy controlling the launch sat on a seat right next to where the flame exhaust of the missile would come out (as shown on the box cover), and so the article pointed out that even though he wouldn’t come in direct contact with the flames, he nonetheless would literally be toast after a single missile firing. (I don’t consider the trans-clear parts holding up the ship in flight to be part of the count, such techniques are commonplace in Flickr photos and convention displays, and I thought it preferable to having my hand appear in the photos.)
Additionally, the original car was not built for play value, it was specifically for a display piece where the astronaut stood in front of it with the hose. Therefore, to keep the build studless, a 2×2 tile was put down in the location where he would sit. This, of course, is the ‘comfy padded seat’ in the ad, with the joke (I use that word very loosely here) being that in order for him to sit there, I had to remove the part. The ‘lumbar support’ part comes from the fact that again, he was never intended to sit there, and I clearly had never tried it, because the bar piece behind him (which I was tempted to remove to save a part in the count but resisted, again to keep as much of the car intact as possible) donks slightly into his oxygen tank, causing him to lean forward slightly. Not enough to ruin the build, but enough that if it was for a LUG or convention display where I didn’t have a part limit, I would have changed it. Finally, removing the 2×2 meant that I freed up another part in the count, and whatever that thing is he’s holding (moisture detector, I think I said) was the only vaguely spaceshipy minifig accessory I could find in light bley (see below). The ‘convenient and seamless storage’ for it that was mentioned is another joke (there’s that word again) on the fact that there’s actually no place for it on the build and nothing that even remotely appears like it could hold it. (So in case that’s not clear, it’s a long-winded way of saying that in the first two photos, the part count is 35 in both cases even though the two builds are slightly different.)
The free spray bottle with the SPSK70 is, of course, because of the fact that it doesn’t count against the part limit, but it’s also a reference to my 2019 Q4 Build Challenge entry ‘Those Space Plants Still Aren’t Gonna Water Themselves’ (which I can’t find a pic of). I couldn’t resist including it, even though he looks ridiculous holding it while he’s flying, and in fact it’s awkwardly turned slightly to one side because it’s the only way he can hold it in the space available to him. The ‘safety cap’ on the retracted hose is just a single 1×1 round tile and is visible in the third photo. I originally thought I was gonna have to discard that idea, and then was able to add it in when I discovered on the final count that I’d made an error and was still only at 69 parts and had one to spare.
Anybody here reading this who knows me is aware that building small is not my usual style (I told Rachel that when Dan typed ’35’ he must’ve accidentally left off a couple zeros, but she didn’t find me amusing either), so it’s not surprising that I had a much easier time with the Easy Mode build. As of right now, I have a 56qt Sterilite container that’s nothing but unsorted light bley – it’s been unsorted for quite some time now, cause I built the original car out of that container as well – and my first rule for this contest was that I had to build either out of that container, or from parts whose locations were definitely known to me and easily accessible. Since my collection is currently in various states of organization, this was to keep me from rampaging through the attic and basement pulling out containers and bags and whatnot searching for parts, and thereby generating hours of cleanup for a 70-part build. The trans-red is neatly organized in a container under my bed. The second rule was that I couldn’t build any additional entries. It was tempting – in going through the gray I started assembling several other spaceships before realizing I could get sucked into something that would take hours and hours and probably produce only mediocre results. So I’ll save those ideas for another day, and I am pleased with the entry I did come up with.
In fact, I’m happy enough with it that I plan to keep all the parts intact for the time being. If Covid ever ends, I am hoping that Walter @whitesidewjw will once again invite us all over for a build day like he did twice before. If he does, I would be interested in using all his fancy stuff again – the backdrop, the tan mat, the powerful lights, just like I did for the Perfume-Tron build a year ago – so that I can get some quality photos of this build that I can post to Flickr. Obviously the ones I came up with today aren’t cutting it. I would be willing to come up with some better space plant background landscaping (hopefully without going overboard) for such a photo session.
Unlike Dan and Frost, I didn’t take the time to take photos of the skiffs completely disassembled so you can see all the parts (although I suppose I could have done it if I had, say, not taken the time to type this post). I did have a lot of trouble tracking all the constantly changing numbers in my head as I built, and eventually I had to come up with three 3×5 cards listing part counts for all the sections. I’ll post that as a boring bonus pic (and hopefully nobody will point out any embarrassing math errors), as well as some others.
Aaah, I haven’t done a post this long in quite a while. Thanks to Dan for running the contest. I don’t know if we’re gonna get any more entries – I’m still hoping that Efran and Walter will post something – or even if anybody else is reading this besides the four of us, but I enjoyed it regardless.
I finally have a real post for this thread. I need to ask for advice, namely on what people recommend for free video editing software.
The short version here is that using my phone, I made some time lapse videos of me building some sets, so my nephew (who is six) can watch them (his dad sent me a short time lapse of the two of them working on the NES, which my nephew got for Christmas).
I don’t need to do anything fancy in the editing, there’s really just three things for now, and I figure they can’t be difficult, but I don’t know how to do them:
1) Delete out portions of the video.
The first set I did was Ninjago City Gardens. It’s all one video, but I took several breaks. For most of them I’m only gone 6 seconds or less of video time, but there’s still no reason to not delete that out, since literally nothing is happening on screen. More importantly, I also fell asleep in the middle of it, but left the camera running, and then finished building the next morning, so there’s a major chunk that needs to be cropped out.
2) Combine two or three separate videos into one video.
After that, I wised up – I went as long as I could without a break, and then stopped the video and restarted it when I came back. As a result, my video for the Skull Sorcerer’s Dungeon is two videos, and the Blacksmith Ideas set is three videos. All I need to do is combine them into a single video, with no break between them.
3) Add music.
This is not actually necessary like the other two, but there’s obviously no sound in a time lapse, and I know there’s plenty of free music sites (which I also haven’t looked into, so suggestions are welcome), and again, adding music can’t possibly be difficult because practically everybody on YouTube does it.
And that’s it. I am not worried about stuff like end credits for the time being, I expect these videos to be of interest to only a few people, and therefore only watched by a few people.
You need video editing software. Macs have iMovie, I do not know what is available in the real world.
To get the video from your phone to a computer is to setup a “Google photos” account for your phone. Then whenever you create a photo or video, the files will automatically back up to Google photos. Then you can move it to the video editing software.
I’ll have to check out iMovie. I don’t know if it’ll work on a PC or not, I certainly don’t have any problems with iTunes here.
I do have Google photos, and I have been using it to transfer stuff from the phone to the computer. Which is nice, in the old days I had to take the memory chip out of my camera and plug it into a reader connected to the computer by USB.
Nope, the internet makes it quite clear that iMovie does not work on Windows 10. It also seems to be generally agreed that iMovie is the best option available.
There’s no clear consensus on what the best alternative is, and it’s sometimes hard to tell if I’m reading the opinion of an independent reviewer, or simply an advertisement made to look like it’s an independent reviewer.
That’s a really cool project! The simple and free answer for a Windows user would be Video Editor. It’s already installed with Windows 10. It does let you trim, as well as stitch together videos and pictures. You can add background music or record custom audio. I think you can even add text frames and pan/zoom. I haven’t played too heavily with it, but it should do everything that you’re looking to do on the quick.
Just so you know, it may actually be better to plug your phone into your computer and transfer the video the old fashioned way. I believe that Google Photos downgrades the photo and video quality when it uploads. If you’re using an Android, it should prompt you with the option to use as USB device and then it shows up just like a hard drive. The trick is knowing where your photos and videos are. 🙂
I believe the software I used in the past was called Shotcut. It was free & open source. I will try to remember confirm the name when I’m next on my desktop.
Thanks guys, I should be able to look into it in the coming days. I’m not sure I was aware that Video Editor was on my computers, I’ll have to check. Shotcut is a name that came up when I was searching around on Google.
We are aware of the Google Photos issue. Basically, you get somewhat limited (15GB) of storage if you keep everything at the original quality, and you get unlimited storage, but only if you let them reduce the quality. (They say it’s still high quality, but they don’t really specify how much they’re reducing it, and I haven’t done any tests to find out.) Apparently they had a PR fiasco some time ago when it came out that ‘reduced quality’ was the default setting, and no attention was drawn to this in the system, and in fact Rachel was dismayed to discovered recently that she had been saving all her personal photo in Google for years without realizing that this was happening. My account is set to Original though, I’ve checked it multiple times, so I should be good. To avoid running out of space, I transfer everything to the desktop, and keep Google Photos as clear as possible.
Of more concern for me is the video quality over on YouTube. After fifteen years of using hand-me-down digital cameras, I was impressed with how incredible sharp the pictures are on my time lapse videos. With the first one, I decided to do a test upload to YT, since I’d never put a video there before. The way it works is that they initially make it available in SD, since the processing for HD can take considerable time, and once it’s ready it automatically updated to HD.
For my video, the SD was borderline unwatchable, and I started doing some research cause it wasn’t immediately apparent to me that it was processing and going to update. The HD update took close to 24 hours (which is long but apparently not unheard of). But even then, I was a little disappointed. It was certainly an improvement over the SD, and much closer to how the video appeared in downloaded form on my PC, but it still wasn’t quite as good. I’m not sure there’s anything I can do about that, so I’ll just have to live with it, but I’m still gonna complain about it.
The HD update took close to 24 hours (which is long but apparently not unheard of).
That seems really long! I recently uploaded an hour long 1080p video in October for a client and it only took me about 3 hours to upload it. How long was your video?
It was certainly an improvement over the SD, and much closer to how the video appeared in downloaded form on my PC, but it still wasn’t quite as good.
Not to totally nerd out here, but what format is the video in from your camera? I’ve found that sometimes different encodings work better than others on YouTube. I’ve had good luck uploading as MP4 files.
YouTube also uses two different encoding depending on the resolution of the video. I’m wondering if something may be up with the encoding process. I upload as unlisted and then make it public when it’s done uploading.
Keep us posted! 🙂
>> That seems really long! I recently uploaded an hour long 1080p video in October for a client and it only took me about 3 hours to upload it. How long was your video?
It’s 32 minutes. I took several breaks that are short, but then in the evening I made dinner and then fell asleep for something like 6 hours, and then got up in the early morning and finished building, and the camera was running all that time. I’ve already made notes on exactly what needs to be cut out where, I seem to recall that the total building time in the video is just under 20 minutes. I’ve estimated the set took me about 12 hours of total building time. Unfortunately, the video cut before I was done and I didn’t restart it, so the last 90 minutes or so of building isn’t included in that one. (It turns out it cut off automatically cause I was out of storage space on my phone, which is partly why I decided to keep Google Photos as clear as possible, although I also have a phone on the cheap side that does not have a ton of storage space compared to something like an iPhone.)
At the time I did some research on YT processing times. They said it depends on the length and quality of the video, and that when you submit the video, YT puts you in a queue and processes them in order. Since YT is rarely transparent about what they do, you never know where you are in the queue, and the length can really vary. Somebody wrote that it can be up to 3 days, although 3 hours is in fact more typical. On my account page about the video upload, it said that HD was ‘processing’, but gave no additional information, so I had no way of knowing if it was still really processing or if it was stuck or frozen somehow. But I resisted restarting it and eventually it went through. In fact, it should still be there, so I can post the link here, although I will be taking it down once I get the edited version done.
>> Not to totally nerd out here, but what format is the video in from your camera? I’ve found that sometimes different encodings work better than others on YouTube. I’ve had good luck uploading as MP4 files.
Let’s see, you are a member of Steel City LUG, you’re married to a member of Steel City LUG, and you sent a message where you said that as a statistician, you were bothered by inconsistencies in the numbers: I think your credentials as a nerd are pretty well established at this point 😛
My phone is taking in MP4 format. I seem to remember reading that MP4 is officially YouTube’s preferred format. Other than that, I’m not sure if there’s any technical information about how my phone takes video that I can adjust that would make a difference.
>> YouTube also uses two different encoding depending on the resolution of the video. I’m wondering if something may be up with the encoding process. I upload as unlisted and then make it public when it’s done uploading.
That I’m not familiar with. I don’t know exactly how the encoding works or what they’re doing with it. Since these videos are made for just a few people, I upload as unlisted and private, and left them that way. In fact, I’m not sure how to go back and find the video myself right now.
Here’s the link for anybody who really wants to take a look:
I don’t know what I was thinking when I oriented the phone vertically (mostly I was thinking “I really wanna build this set and I don’t wanna wait any longer”). I didn’t make that mistake again on subsequent videos. This one’s complicated though by the fact that the set is unusually tall, with a sideways orientation, I think it would have been cut off one I reached the upper sections.
The other three I have are all from the same perspective though, a side view from my left as I build. I might try other set ups, but I wanted to be in the video as little as possible, and I wanted to maintain a background that was as plain and undistracting as possible.
I also discovered with this and subsequent videos that I really need to be aware of what’s actually showing up on the screen – which is tough, cause I don’t want the video to be slowed down because I’m constantly checked the phone to see how things look. But being too close or too far from the screen can make it difficult to see what’s being built, and since I always want the trays of parts to be as close as possible, it’s hard to find a spot for them where they’re conveniently handy but not also blocking the view of what I’m building. I also discovered that sometimes what I’m building will itself block the view of additional parts being added on. I rarely deliberately rotated a subassembly so it was easier to see what was being built, and in a lot of cases, this would not have been practical anyway.
I have trouble believing anybody in the group is really gonna sit through twenty or so minutes of me building, but if you do make it to the middle the video – once I disappear, I think some time after the 9 minute mark, I don’t reappear until around 20:15. I also disappear for about 90 seconds in the final few minutes of the video, then I reappear, there’s only about 75 seconds left.
Let’s see, you are a member of Steel City LUG, you’re married to a member of Steel City LUG, and you sent a message where you said that as a statistician, you were bothered by inconsistencies in the numbers: I think your credentials as a nerd are pretty well established at this point
Ha ha ha. Touche. 😂
Thanks for sharing the video. It actually looked great and showed at 1080p. Maybe it just needed some time to finish processing. You definitely had all the settings right, so I was in a quandary as to why it wasn’t working for you.
If you don’t mind my asking, what program did you use to do the stop motion?
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