Kite Strings

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGMqFvBJftY
Couds, epic glories and a 360°hook landing

Andrea Ghidini - 2020/09/04

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGMqFvBJftY

So here's what my stills harvesting machinery looks like on the 2560x1600 display of my 13 inch MacBook Pro:

http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50615271918_5fdc6d0136_o.png


using Andrea's monster 3840x2160 video as the (worst case scenario) example and the 0:34:11 (24 fps) Rosetta Stone frame as the sample with the Browser area width minimized / Viewer area width maximized. We're displaying at "Fit" which in this case is "52%" (reverse) magnification 'cause of the high resolution.

In theory all we need to do is go to the little Share/Destinations button in the upper right hand corner and "Save Current Frame..." in some folder we'll have created for the project in PNG (Portable Network Graphics lossless data compression) format. But as we've discussed before...
(http://www.kitestrings.org/post11927.html#p11927) (previous post in this topic)
...there WILL BE a noise issue so we're mostly just using the result as the canvas/frame/guide/backup for the final product. (Final Cut Pro 10.4.10. Yeah right. Keep up the great work, Apple.)

Preparation... Note the three little blue Markers at the top edge of the top Browser area. The first marks Frame Zero (often comes in useful), the second the beginning of relevant Glider Camera sequence, the third the Frame (03411) upon which we're working. Just type M to establish one, Control-M to lose it. Click on the Marker to hit your precise Frame. Will save a fair bit of time and effort.

So what we do now is blow up to actual/100% magnification and take four screen section shots (Shift-Command-4) anchoring on the four corners of the Frame and using Photoshop to paste/layer them into our canvas for the pristine final product we were supposed to have gotten in the first place.

1 - Top Left
http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50617220386_6bb623183f_o.png

2 - Top Right
http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50617330752_dfc70ab312_o.png

3 - Bottom Left
http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50617330597_9bdca992c9_o.png

4 - Bottom Right
http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50617330632_43c15ff8a7_o.png


Two problems - the first of which you'll have noticed and the second of which you won't.

- When we blow up beyond what our screen real estate can handle for a complete view a gray translucent rectangle appears at the middle of the far right side of the frame. Within it is a red translucent rectangle which we drag around to reveal the areas we wanna see and/or capture. We get this with our screen shot. So to deal with that issue we select and delete. Odds are real good that the underlying Layer 0 area will be clean. Otherwise we go back into Final Cut, drag our rectangle elsewhere a bit to expose what had been the damaged area, take a small screen shot...

- When we're dragging our screen shot rectangle hard against the right side of the screen in order to capture the far right row of pixels (in the view or in the actual far right edge) the product comes back with white blended into that row. Even going to the full rez URLs and zooming in we'll have a hard time seeing the problem in these examples what with our forum's light blue background but we most assuredly wouldn't if it appeared somewhere in the middle of a photo. Full rez Example:



We can clearly see the light vertical line close to the upwind face of his (black) helmet and if we zoom in we can follow it from top to bottom. Most practical workaround... Take the full shot, crop off the problem row, paste it in hard against the right edge as if we didn't, nudge the Layer a single increment to the left, flatten. I don't think I've ever found a noise pixel in an actual right edge.

Also... You'll notice that whenever you change your magnification (as in Fit/100%) your Share/Destinations button will dim and become inert. (Mine does anyway - pretty sure I didn't have this issue with earlier versions. (And ditto for the noise.)) Clicking in the Browser gets you back in business, clicking on your Marker gets you back in business and where you wanna be.

So dealing with this recent real world example...

When in Shift-Command-4 mode we get horizontal and vertical coordinates as we move the cross-hairs. The numbers change with two-pixel increments. We can use these coordinates to minimize or - if we're a bit lucky - eliminate the crap we need to crop from the frame. This will be - at worst - an excess of one pixel's worth of width and/or depth beyond one to four of the edges.

In the example of this video I got lucky. With things configured as in the first illustration but with the magnification at 100 (versus 52) percent and dragged all the way to the top left we go into Shift-Command-4 mode and zero in on the Top Left corner. 281-093 (latitude-longitude) nails it. Click on that and the coordinates zero and start increasing as we drag in our desired direction - which will be SSE. At the right edge of the display (which for Top and Bottom Right will also be the right edge of the Frame) and the bottom of the desired selection (which for Bottom Left and Right will also be the Bottom edge of the Frame) we'll be at 999-677. (And while we're working we just need to memorize the last digits 1-3 and 9-7 in this case. (And not really the 9 'cause that's the edge.))

It's worth our time to determine the optimal Top Left position coordinates by taking a couple small screen section shots. We go a wee bit generous for the start position on the first effort, determine the width and depth of what needs to be trimmed, take a second shot to verify our arithmetic.

Shoot, prepare, paste in the order I've illustrated:
- Top - Left/Right
- Bottom - Left/Right
There's plenty enough overlap to bury the little frame navigation rectangles - not to mention the edge issue - on the left side Layers even in this rather extreme example. (In the image immediately above I deliberately pasted in reverse order - right first, left second/last - to illustrate the right edge issue.)

Then drag Marquees around the right Layers navigation rectangles and delete their contents to reveal the area of Layer 0 (the Frame you saved in Final Cut). It will very likely be noise free. Otherwise... Deal with it.

Flatten image, save as PNG:

22-03411
http://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50595345893_e145e3c77b_o.png

---
2020/12/03 01:00:00 UTC

For a nice 1920x1080 resolution life gets much simpler. We can display at 100 percent and take a screen shot from coordinates 300x161 to 961x541 which gets us to 1922x1082 with a comfortable bit of edge to spare and then trim down to target in one easy cropping operation. (Note... Two-pixel increments, 961x541 = 1922x1082.) Downside... At this resolution on this screen "Fit" is 104% and it's pretty easy to get faked out when you're intending to do "100%".
---
2020/11/19 10:45:00 UTC - This was Post 9000 for me.

http://www.kitestrings.org/post8610.html#p8610


Another blast from the past...

http://hghistory.org/hang-gliding-2/hg78-79pt2/
Hang gliding 1978 and 1979 part 2 - Hang Gliding History

Jim Johns did not need an engine, however. On 18 April 1980, he flew his un-powered hang glider (in free flight as we call it) from 134 foot-high Jockey's Ridge, North Carolina, 4.5 miles down wind to land near the Wright memorial.

Jim Johns at Jockey's Ridge. Photo by J Foster Scott reprinted courtesy Light Sport and Ultralight Flying magazine.

Jim was my first and primary instructor in my first and last set of lessons, 1980/04/02-07, Kitty Hawk, Zero to Two. Parted eleven days prior to that flight. First and last time anybody thermalled up and out of the Park.

Had a horrible digital disaster - of my own making - from which I recently recovered over a roughly 24 hour span commencing Sunday evening.

I maintain an archive of every video referenced on Kite Strings (though I've dropped the ball a few times and have had the source go extinct) plus some miscellaneous stuff of personal interest. (Bringing up the issue here 'cause I've largely hijacked the original intent of this thread to discuss technical issues regarding photos, Kite Strings is largely powered by still photos, and videos are the primary sources of the still photos.) This archive is maintained on my Mac PowerBook hard drive and - in theory - backed up on an external drive. Currently up to the better part of sixteen hundred videos eating up close to 121 Gigs.

For ease of access I added the "videos" folder to the Mac's Dock (which lights up at the bottom of the display). The icon for this folder is a frame from about ten seconds into:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn01oWAHoUQ

"Cigüeña" prototipo - Guidopicca - 2009/07/19

Due to the leading quotation mark it's alphabetically first and the frame is not the one selected by the author - in this case from about 0:10.

A couple weeks back my laptop had some strange little hiccup for a second and a half and when it was over the Dock folder icon had taken a strong green transformation. WTF. There was no corrupted frame in the video upon which it could be keying and everything had been working fine. It wasn't broke so I didn't fix it.

But then one day early last week - Tuesday maybe - I was feeling a little industrious, had gotten tired of looking at the corrupted icon, decided to fix things. Delete the icon from the Dock, create a new Alias, install it on the Dock as before. Done. Go back to the Folder and... Where'd my Folder go?

Panic and nausea quickly set in as I started realizing I'd just deleted the entire collection. And I hadn't done any backup maintenance for YEARS.

I knew the drill. The files were still there - it was just the placeholder coding which protected them from being overwritten which had been removed - so DON'T TOUCH THE HARD DRIVE. Had some faint hope that I might be able to fix things from within the Mac OS but...

Third party utility software. SCORES of choices. How do I pick something? So I didn't pick anything and went into major procrastination/misery mode and did lotsa workaround stuff to stay off the hard drive. Then Sunday evening I found an independent endorsement of:

http://www.cleverfiles.com
DiskDrill
Disk Drill - Best Free Mac Data Recovery Software in 2021!

The way most/all of these apps work is you download and install a free version which scans the disk and finds what can be recovered. Then if you want it recovered you pay. Ninety bucks for this one. Sold.

So Sunday night I get serious. Scans for an hour and a half and tells me it's done this much - but if you REALLY wanna make sure consider running this other scan. Yeah, zero desire to run anything. Another hour and a half and I try to figure out how to look at results of what's recoverable. At first I'm scared 'cause I'm not seeing anything the way I expect to. But I dig a little deeper and THERE'S EVERYTHING!

OK, where and how do I pay? But there's nothing so I just keep following instructions. I create a designated recovery folder on the external so I'm still not touching the internal source and after a while I have EVERYTHING. And still haven't paid or been asked to.

I fell asleep for maybe an hour at some point but otherwise this was a nighter. And kept working to get things properly recovered, organized, checked, backed up until early Monday evening. Checked for excess duplicates, stuff that was on the backup but had somehow been wiped from the internal, alterations of file names... Gawd I was wiped by the time everything balanced and checked out - 1589 video files / 120.91 Gigs. What a learning experience and thanks, DiskDrill folk, for the freebie - intended or not. Finished up in really bad physical shape.

Really oughta get another drive to store stuff off site. A lot of our most important historical videos - like the Bob Buxton lockout, Torrey PG midair, Pokhara Dragonfly - tend to get taken done and disappear from the historical record for all eternity.

P.S. What I SHOULD HAVE done... Control-click > Options > Remove from Dock