Kite Strings

Update...

We actually WEREN'T at pretty-well-fixed-and-then-some status when I so reported in my previous post. That ended up not happening until a bit before noon Eastern on Saturday.

When I realized what had happened and why I was pretty frantic about getting things fixed ASAP where they were most likely to matter. So Phase One was to work from most recent back through the seventeen topics that had seen Calendar Year 2018 activity and deal with all Calendar Year 2018 posts and give myself some breathing room.

Phase Two was to cover the rest of our history working forward through all topics from highest to lowest posting content. Quadruple digit jobs:

1698 - instructors and other qualified pilot fiends
1651 - Weak links
1343 - landing
1108 - Releases

Then I figured I should go ahead and do the preemptive number on the Farm format stuff.
- I was worried about our potential vulnerability.
- My head was still freshly wired for running the task effectively and efficiently.
- Since there's no rush fixing something not (yet) broken I could:
-- go through our history more systematically:
--- high to low volume
--- chronologically within the topics from start to finish
-- take my time and proofread my Phase One work

Soon discovered that I'd totally missed "Weak links" on the Phase Two run. So didn't get that hole plugged until about 23 hours after my somewhat misguided / premature announcement.

So at this point I've got the four aforementioned biggies out of the way plus over half of "The Bob Show" - next in line with 911. And I've found and fixed a lot of C format items I missed the first time (big surprise) and am dealing with a lot of other broken link and other issues.

"You are NEVER hooked in." follows with 895 posts and then things drop off fast and will be a relative breeze.

And here's a little test we can check/run from time to time...

If/When:

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8216/8306258400_43251e5dcb_c.jpg


looks like:

http://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8216/8306258400_43251e5dcb_c.jpg


we'll know that Flickr has done to the Farm format stuff what it just did to the C format stuff and my Phase Three efforts will be paying off a lot better.
---
P.S. - 2018/04/16 11:25:00 UTC

And if/when that happens it'll be relatively easy to find and fix any Farm format image addresses I might have managed to miss.

Phase Three overhaul "completed" today a little before noon local. Completed means to the best of my knowledge and ability. The addresses of all embedded Flickr images - Farm and C format now start off with:

https

All the C format stuff displays and all the Farm format stuff will continue to display if Flickr throws us the same curve ball down the road in the other department. Couple days of being aware of some degree of the problem followed by a week's worth of overhauling the forum.

In the process caught maybe two or three topics that I'd managed to miss completely in editing the C format images, a healthy crop of C format instances that had escaped my notice, a bunch of other broken image links - most of which were fixable (and got fixed).

You may have noticed the way we got phucked over by Photobucket:



Just found out how/why...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photobucket
Photobucket

On June 28, 2017, Photobucket changed its Terms of Use regarding free accounts and third party hosting (hosting on forums, eBay, etc). Only the most expensive plan, at $399.99 per year, now permits third party hosting and linking to forums.

This new business model has caused thousands of forum DIY's and write-ups with explanatory pictures to be rendered useless. About 500 words into the linked document was a declaration that free accounts would no longer permit image-linking to third-party sites. eBay and Etsy have also been affected, in addition to many forums and blogs. Thousands of images promoting goods sold on Amazon and other shopping sites have been removed after the photo-sharing service changed its terms, causing a great deal of controversy. One user was quoted as saying: "The CEO of Photobucket will have trouble getting a job digging a garden after this."

On September 13, 2017, Denver Better Business Bureau gave the company an "F" rating, the worst they issue, citing fifteen complaints related to the change in terms and no response from the company.

Some images I had archived, some I didn't. Not happy about that. If anybody can do anything...

Not gonna look back on the time spent on this exercise with fond memories but am relieved to have it behind me.

Discovered earlier today (2018/08/22) in the course of doing some format editing on a few zillion old posts that the Flickr image address http/https issue is not currently an issue. Consequently my 2018/04/13 14:51:04 UTC post in this thread (last on previous page) currently makes zilch in the way of sense. Can't help but wonder how long the problem manifestef itself - having had about a week of my life sucked out overhauling the forum to deal with it.

Oh well, I'd established "https" as the standard and might as well stick with it.
---
2018/08/23 13:15:00 UTC

I've pulled a cheat on the aforementioned post such that it again displays as intended. See the amended note.

Dedicated a lot of time between about last Friday and now to a much needed overhaul of my Flickr site and making relevant fixes, patches, revisions, enhancements on the forum.

Prior to the mission I had just about all the photos that greatly help in driving this forum - the vast majority of them video stills - collected and organized in an album titled "Cache". And that sucker had grown over the years to an inventory of about 9.5 thousand items and had major bloat issues. I've left it, for the time being, intact but will no longer amend it with anything.

I created thirteen new albums - Releases, Weak Links, Bridles, FTHI, Suspension, Foot Launch, Landing, Aerobatics, Dragonfly, Paraglider, Dust Devils, Birds, Miscellaneous - which mostly correspond to our major Kite Strings topics and stowed and organized things accordingly.

"Releases" ended up majorly topping off the quantity category - now at 3176 - and is still pretty bloated and really needs to be broken up into collections along the lines of:
- cheap industry standard crap
- Koch two stage
- Street
- Kaluzhin
- hook knives
- easily reachable release disasters

In the course of this overhaul I discovered a really annoying issue with a couple Niki videos and my stills collection:

Both:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYATgxEivm4
Sunset Flying Over Luling, Tx
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_2holKUTxM
Hang Gliding, Landing on Wheels
were posted on the same day - 2014/02/10. I'd been under the impression until this past weekend that the landing sequences were similar approaches from two different flights - but I'd always been bothered and confused by them, had trouble differentiating one from the other. And finally the lightbulb started coming on and I pulled up both videos in Final Cut and shortly confirmed that they were IDENTICAL / the SAME approach and landing.

"Sunset" had a lot of really annoying artsy editing and had ceased to exist a long time ago.

"Landing" is a straightforward one and a half minute continuous clip of an approach and landing done tolerably right.

Identical frames from the former and latter respectively:

23-10629-22611
http://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4425/35541429133_eca19eb050_o.png


http://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1843/44410454212_5ffcaa5588_o.png
23-10629

Note the former has been digitally lightened up such that the colors are washed out crap - relative to what the camera was recording. (Open the full resolution links in new windows and toggle back and forth between them to really appreciate the difference.)

MAJOR headache to:
- delete, replace, enhance, expand stuff on my hard drive collection and mirror to the Flickr site organization
- redo tons of indexing and cataloguing
- check, edit, patch, overhaul four and a half years worth of Kite Strings posts in multiple topics

This was the jigsaw puzzle / Rubik's Cube exercise from hell. But one catches other issues in the process and gets his mind better wrapped around a lot of hang gliding history in the effort.

Also... I'm extremely careful with regard to selecting frames and it was a bit of an ego boost to have found that when I thought I was looking at different approaches I was coming pretty close on the respective selections. One of the ones on final...

Niki-7-34-12413
http://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4216/34683462724_74534af232_o.png


...was EXACTLY the same. Not bad when the rate is 30 fps.

May expand the "Sunset" collection to cover the launch and some of the climb since the video itself no longer exists and these videos are fairly important historical records.

Got the Flickr site pretty well broken down, sorted, organized earlier this week. Looks like the following with album number - number of images - category:

72157670660602197 - 1003 - Aero
72157670971432737 - 0618 - Platform
72157670971479237 - 0857 - Winch
72157673127318498 - 0225 - Niki
72157697830989922 - 0264 - Holloway
72157699419346961 - 0316 - Hook Knives
72157700487346334 - 0917 - Weak Links
72157699214376221 - 0547 - Bridles
72157700822106225 - 0672 - FTHI
72157670783636357 - 0069 - Suspension
72157672915053698 - 0229 - Foot Launch
72157670757443407 - 1857 - Landing
72157670784194107 - 0258 - Aerobatics
72157651966061607 - 0479 - Dragonfly
72157644568745696 - 0331 - Paraglider
72157699245926631 - 0210 - Dust Devils
72157699250198771 - 0389 - Birds
72157700552698694 - 0115 - Miscellaneous
72057594141352219 - 0079 - Aerotow Release System
72057594066212198 - 0064 - Bench Shots
72057594066304861 - 0017 - Bailey Release Performance

Went pretty blind and a little more insane but I'm glad I got it done and it'll make future amendments and organization a lot easier.

Also expanded the "Landing" collection.
---
2018/09/20 00:30:00 UTC

Got both the "Sunset" and "Landing" collections expanded and kicked into pretty good order.

http://www.kitestrings.org/post6165.html#p6165
http://www.kitestrings.org/post5670.html#p5670

At 2018/11/07 19:04:30 UTC Flickr fired off a message to all its account holders notifying us that the one terabyte free ride we've been enjoying since forever ago will - for anyone with over a thousand photos or videos - be coming to an end 2019/01/09. After that you can get a first year discount for $35 and then $50 a year for the rest of time.

I'm approaching ten thousand (9763 at the moment) and I'd say that it's a safe bet that those shots are this forum's most powerful weapon. Just about all the really good videos get taken down for the same reason anybody with enough in the way of brains and character to post anything positive worth reading will get locked down, banned, deleted. And the stills often reveal astounding information that's almost never detected in the videos themselves.

I've put an insane degree of time and effort into building this archive and had hoped it would outlive me and remain publicly accessible - through Kite Strings - forever.

Ideally we'd be pulling in younger folk who'd wanna keep things going but - given the political dynamics of this sewer of a branch of aviation - that ain't never gonna happen.

I'll talk to my (younger) brother about this situation and what to do if I get hit by a truck - but if anybody else has or gets any ideas...

Just paid for 2019 so nothing to sweat for the time being.

Don't get hit by a truck.

At:

http://www.kitestrings.org/post11920.html#p11920
2020/06/01 19:10:05 UTC

I posted a stills collection from two of Jonathan's flights at the SCFR 2011/09/19. I'd taken a series of 23 shots way back and amended the series with another 151. Procedure is to load the video into Final Cut, select and save frames in PNG (lossless) format, save them again in PNG max compression (also lossless but slower loading), upload to Flickr.

Frequently on particular videos when I save a frame I get:

SCFR-026-02822-Test
http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49977799903_80157648ae_o.png


Note the turquoise noise pattern. Almost always appears in sky, here we see it on the similarly featureless surface. (Although it has a strong affinity to darker patterns on this one.) Good news... I don't recall it EVER appearing in anything that matters. Occasionally I'll get violet. It's never present in the original video frame. Some videos come through perfectly clean, others are a real mess.

Virtually every new frame I pulled from Launch 1 was dirty. And I'm sure I didn't have any problems with anything in the original series. But now if I pull up the same frame from the original series it too is dirty.

Just did an experiment with this 026-02822. Saved two copies to the iCloud Drive and one to my hard drive. All three had identical noise patterns. What the fuck...

Two ways to clean up. Photoshop Clone Stamp tool - which I'm sure is what I always did before - or do things really right.

Run your Final Cut view at 100%, move around so the frame problem area is covered, take a screenshot (using Shift-Command-4 on a Mac), layer and position it in, Flatten Image, save...

SCFR-026-02822
http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49948203268_61da1c519d_o.png


If anyone catches anything I've missed in any stills I'd greatly appreciate a notification.
---
P.S. - 2020/06/07 18:10:00 UTC

Wanna make it REALLY EASY to check for noise?

SCFR-026-02822-Test-Check
http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49980545131_5c5c59bc7e_o.png


Photoshop > Image > Adjustments - > Invert / Command I

Accidented upon that one a bit earlier today. (Not a great help in this example but tiny little turquoise clusters floating around in a mostly blue sky...)
---
2020/06/11 14:00:00 UTC

Way better example - spat out by Final Cut ('cept cropped from 1280x720 to 1272x714 (see below)), Inverted for check, perfected using 100% screenshot layer of frame from within Final Cut:

098-23104-25420-Test
http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49993522688_6dd663ffde_o.png

098-23104-25420-Test-I
http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49994291447_924fb84b29_o.png

098-23104-25420
http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49979995768_581997b8ac_o.png


Go to full rez using the URLs and for best effect pull image files up into Photoshop or reasonable facsimile.

On Jonathan there are single pixel strays way outside of the blotched zone that would be virtually impossible to find on the positive. (I previously mentioned turquoise and violet noise colors... That one has both and I now realize those colors are inversions of each other.)

On Velcro we have NOTHING in the way of clumps. Virtually all the noise is single isolated pixels. A double is the largest "clump" that exists and we can literally count the occurrences on the fingers of one hand - four. The noise is virtually totally undetectable in the low (800x449) rez embedded/displayed images and tough to find in the full rez displayed at 100%.

(Hadn't noticed that you could see the other glider again in this sequence until playing around in the negatives.)
---
2020/06/11 16:00:00 UTC

That 098-23104-25420 still is a world treasure with respect to the hang gliding historical record and was worth every ounce of effort in getting it up totally right.
---
Noise colors detected to date on the top row and their inverses below:

2020/11/09

I now almost wish I hadn't discovered that Invert noise check trick. Previously I was pretty confident that I was catching just about all the issues. Now...

I recently started amending, reworking the Rincon Beach velcro hook-in inconvenience sequence collection:

http://www.kitestrings.org/post11842.html#p11842

154 shots from the GoPro (keel mounted until just after impact). Just checking the uninverted stills I'd caught maybe a half dozen that had issues. Running the inversion check I'd guess at least three quarters - including damn near all the in-flight stuff - were infected. And minus inversion (which is a color photo negative) one wouldn't have found anything on most frames with an hour to kill and a gun to his head.

I'm thinking in theory it shouldn't matter. If it blends in the positive why shouldn't it also blend in the negative? But in the inversion a single pixel of noise stands out like a sore thumb - at least at full rez and maybe blown up a little.

Yeah, I know... If you can't find it without using an electron microscope then what the hell does it matter?

- Some of these shots are historical treasures - 'specially seeing as how most of the historical treasure videos don't stay in public view for very long. And one wants these as perfect as possible.

- I'm an obsessive compulsive rabid perfectionist and if I know there's a bogus pixel up I lose even more sleep than usual.

Fixing this collection was a nightmare and I don't wanna even think about the hours that went into it. But I did learn a few new tricks in the process. And things are ten times easier if you catch the noise on your initial effort.

Tried a couple times to find out if this is a known issue but have come up totally empty. Strongly suspect this is an issue with Final Cut. How else could the output not be as perfect as / identical to what we're seeing / is displaying on the frame in that application? And if this is the case it majorly pisses me off to know that this nightmare was precipitated by sloppiness of individuals doing and checking the programming.

Couldn't resist checking my Jonathan SCFR collection for noise. Too fresh in my memory and the material's great and I was geared up for the task fairly well. Found, edited, reloaded fifty stills. Worked a fair bit smarter and the reward was a ton less tedium and aggravation.

The main pain is precisely positioning the screenshot patch over the noise area - and it's safest to assume that the entire frame is the noise area if you've identified a single problem pixel.

In Photoshop you can add a layer larger than the original frame and move it around as needed - what's off the edges doesn't and won't matter. Thought I'd be able to trim the screenshot layer (in a separate Photoshop file) to match the lower right corner of my target but was coming up a we bit short - for some reason I have yet to fathom. Oh well, I could match the bottom edge no problem so it was just a matter of nudging the layer a bit to the left.

Final Cut scares the crap outta me. I only need, use, want a dust particle's worth of its capabilities and only understand that fraction's worth of its menu and clickable options. And I've instinctively hit Photoshop command key combos in Final Cut, sent the screen to the Land of Oz, spent the rest of the morning trying to get it back into useable configuration. And I've never been able to understand and/or remember the steps. So I've always been afraid to play around with it.

But in the past few days I've had to recover from lotsa screw-ups and now understand WAY better how to make it work.

In Photoshop I was working on one of Garck's stills. Lotsa videos have this horrible black crude fading out on the edges that needs to be trimmed off if you don't want the stills to look like crap. His frames were 1280x720 and needed to be cropped to 1272x714. I was trying to check the "Image Size" with "Option Command I", missed the "Option" and "Inverted" on a very luckily infected frame. "WOW!!!!"

Sure wish I'd made that mistake on an infected frame many years back. But many years back - on an earlier version of Final Cut - I don't think I was seeing this issue.