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MURRIETA, California - Last night around 7:45pm, a Nissan 350z skidded into a telephone box on Whitewood Rd. I heard the accident from my driveway. It sounded like a long skid followed by a loud thud that was none other than a car slamming into a stationary object. Then I clearly heard a another vehicle speed off. I am assuming there was another vehicle involved, but this is purely speculation on my part.

The accident knocked out telephone, TV, and internet service for Verizon customers for almost 24 hours. In fact my internet was just restored as I am posting this video. As you can see in the video, the metal box was torn up, so many thanks to the Verizon guys who worked all through the evening in an effort to restore the phone, and internet service.

This stretch of Whitewood Rd, in Murrieta, California is notoriously dangerous. I hear cars speeding along this road all the time.

This movie appears to be very good. I have yet to see the Dark Knight, but since I am not much on the “theater” experience, I will wait for the DVD.

Enjoy the trailer, courtesy of Apple

Here is a brief “how to” instruction in adding a transparent text, or image logo (jpeg instructions are at the bottom) to the lower right corner of your video using Quicktime Pro. These are also known as “bugs”.

The following steps are the same for windows and OSX, the tutorial is for OSX users.

First, create a transparent image in photoshop choosing the size you want. Be sure you have a transparent background as shown

Next, choose the type tool in photoshop, and type the text you want in the box as shown. You can change the color to any color, I have chosen white here:

Then Choose “Save for Web & Devices” in photoshop

When the next window pops up, choose png, and check the transparency box as shown:

Then open the newly created png file with Quicktime as shown:

Once you have the png file open in quicktime, then choose “movie properties” as shown:

Then select the video track:

Select the visual settings button, then choose “straight alpha” from the bottom left drop down menu:

Close the window, then you should still have the image opened in quicktime in front of you. Click on the video anywhere (not play, just make the window active) to make it active, then select edit>select all (command a in osx), then edit>copy (command c in osx). Now close that quicktime window entirely.

Now open the target video (the video that you want to add the logo to) in quicktime, select edit>select all (command a in osx), then choose “edit>add to selection & scale” as shown:

The text will then appear in the upper left as shown:

To move the text into the desired position, you will need to complete a few more steps.

First select “Movie Properties” as shown:

Then select the video track with the image in it, and click “visual settings”

Now, to the right, play with the numbers in the offset boxes until you have the desired position

After you have the desired position, click “straight alpha blend” in the drop down menu to the left:

Now, you should have the completed video with the logo you just added.

We still need to save the video, so choose file>save as:

Name your new video, and choose the location you want, and save the movie as self contained:

At this point, your video will play with the new logo in the entire video. Anyone can remove this track, so to make it permanent you need to export it using any compression method you might like. It is important to add the logo to the highest quality copy you have, so when you compress it, the quality will be better.

Please comment on any mistakes that I may have made in these steps, so I can correct them as necessary. Please link back to this page for future users. It took me a while to find how to do this on google, and I think this is now the best page to link to.

You can also add any image to the corner of your video (jpeg file etc) using the same steps, except skip the first straight alpha step, and use normal blend. Just use the normal image, no need to setup transparency in the beginning.

Use the comments for questions.

Born To Skate - First Trailer from Vanishing Point on Vimeo

I found this cool skateboard video on Vimeo just now, and decided to share it with my readers. Of the skateboard video I have seen, this is one of the best skateboard videos.

Well ok, maybe not that great of s skateboard video, but made ya look!

Tags: skateboard video, video

I took down around one hundred of my own blog posts today because of the insecure nature of Flickr. Even with my recent addition of those pesky watermarks, there were around three hundred images that had no watermark.

Some of you think this is no big deal, and I understand. I still plan on selling my images at some point in my life, and with my images out there running around, I was a bit nervous after reading this article.

I simply marked my entire flickr account private from about April 2008 (that is when the watermarks started) back to when I signed up for flickr. I don’t blame this on flickr, but the nature of the internet in general. Now all my images will carry a watermark, and if they are posted elsewhere, then I will just consider that an ad for my site.

Thanks for understanding, I will repost much of my previous content with some meaningful articles, and new content.

Thanks,

Tony

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