Latest videos round-up

A new design requires new videos so I’ve added a couple of new ones to the Combo playlist. They’re also on YouTube look:

Khia vs Soft Pink Truth -- My Neck My Back / Everybody’s Soft (you got the audio link a while back, seemed only fair to follow it up with the video being as it is such a classy affair l-o-l…)

Toddla T vs LFO -- Soundtape Killin’ LFO (part of a Warp 20 tie-in tribute I had in mind…hopefully more in this vein!)

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Cortney Tidwell -- Don’t Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up (Ewan Pearson’s Objects In Space Mix) (Poptimix 07 extract) (finally got the full version online)

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Studio -- No Comply (new and improved version)

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My Bloody Valentine -- Soon (Andy Weatherall Remix)

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Justice vs Unklejam -- What Am I Fighting For?/Genesis (Poptimix 07 extract)

New base58 design launched in September 2009

HELLO. The site’s been inactive for a few months because I’ve spent large chunks of the Summer working on this new design which seems to be working well enough now for me to go live with at last.

Over a year ago I first customised and integrated Flowplayer’s Flash-based video player on the site, enabling videos to be selected and viewed via a neat playlist system. Flowplayer’s jquery-based flexibility has thrived since then and the self-customised version you see on this site is a quantum leap in this site’s 9 year history, far more significant than the original custom video integration last year. For the first time ever I’ve got a site which can handle embedded video and audio the way I want it to! Pretty much…

With this new design I felt the most important thing was to embed video at a decent size. Not much point showing all these clips if they’re going to smaller than a credit card. YouTube’s new large display size of 640×360 was too big for me to be able to include a panel of the same width beside the player and I wanted to do this from the start. I’d always remembered the standard PAL D-1 resolution for digital video on computer monitors being 768×576 (and Premiere helpfully points it out too) so decided to base it on a 50% reduction of that but with widescreen adaptation of course. 512×288 seemed right. I’m justifying my unprecedented breaking into four digits for a website’s width on this basis.

This resolution size is now what I render videos at – how good it looks fullscreen now depends on the quality of the source material (often poor admittedly), but it’s all progress. This is not particularly important until I start producing much longer videos than the curent batch (unlikely as it stands).

So with the video size decided the rest of the layout was determind on that foundation. All navigation and control of video had to go alongside – nothing above or below. The reason for this was partly because I didn’t want the blog to start too low down, at over 300 pixels a height drop.

The increased width of the design meant two sidebars was now more acceptable. I found Igor Kovacic’s very good ‘Black3column’ template and adapted it accordingly – not much to change beyond selected css attributes and colours thankfully.

By far the most difficult part of this whole redesign process was customising the desired Flowplayer setup so that I could enable five different playlists to be controlled via toggled tabs. Much gnashing and wailing at several stages, coming close to giving up and having to abandon the re-dev for days on end for the preservation of sanity and some social life. But finally, eventually, it came together and the Eureka moments were worth all the aggro, just about…I’m chuffed to bits with it generally.

So there’s five playlists which are explained in the player content box for each tab. Splitting the video content up this way just makes it clearer what I’ve done in each case and the different aspects of video editing I enjoy. I would say that next year I’ll be getting more into original filming and maybe even 3D-based animation again with a view to directing my own music videos….but I said the same five years ago before the Ultramix project took over my life ack.

The blog design is much the same as before and fairly understated (rightly). I stand by the ‘everything at a glance/in one place’ concept although there is always a danger with this design of overwhelming people with too much info. This is why there is no elaborate imagery in the design itself although I do want to add some detail when I think of some that would be worthwhile enough and not just make the look much busier than it needs to be. For now it’s just three colours – white, black and my beloved “robin-egg blue” – my official brand colour, with dark and light variations of that were required.

The emblem was redesigned finally too. You only see it in the video player ‘test card’ because it would’ve taken up too much space in the header itself. A big improvement tho I hope you’d agree, if you cared ha. I’m sure it will be tweaked again before too long.

‘AgencyFB’ was the typeface I wanted to retain for the site (with Helvetica the only other font) so the title appears in that with a new hexagon motif for the ‘58′. With ‘base58′ not featuring on the emblem itself this acts as a little bonus monotone logo whoopty do.

More news about the new video player and video clips coming up in a separate post…

Studio – No Comply (video)

Wanted to make a video for this great track for some time. In the end just used various clips downloaded from YouTube, mostly footage of Gothenburg itself but also some tourism videos of Sweden from the 50s. It works pretty well most of the time -- the timelapse stuff is great (I sped it up even more in most cases to sync with the musical changes). New improved version of this video re-edited and re-uploaded to YouTube in September 2009.

Foreign music video channels online

I’ve used this site to put together a Windows Media Player playlist (also works with Winamp) featuring a selection of music video channels from around the world (mostly Europe), from TMF Belgium to France’s NRJ Groove to MTV India…

download Foreign Music playlist

download accompanying txt guide to channels (handy for knowing what the channels actually are as WMP only reads the stream filenames).

Hoping to add more to the list as I find them.

CiCi’s Disctopian Excursion

Celebrating 5 years of Ciara and the new album with an experimental but danceable mashed up selection of her big hits. You can download each one separately as well as download a continuous 42 minute mix of them all.

1. Thursday Goodies
‘Goodies’ vs Prefuse 73’s ‘Broken Thursdays’

2. Ciarabres Of Paradise
‘Can’t Leave ‘Em Alone’ (ft. 50 Cent) & ‘Love Sex Magic’ (ft. Justin Timberlake) vs Sabres Of Paradise’s ‘The Ballad Of Nicky McGuire’

3. Players Step
‘1 2 Step’ (ft. Missy Elliott) vs Fix’s ‘Players Anthem’

4. Touch Up (Ultramix 06 extract)
‘Get Up’ (ft. Chamillionaire) vs Sasse’s ‘Loosing Touch’ (video on Flowplayer and YouTube)

5. Like A Rebound
‘Like A Boy’ vs Juan Atkins ‘Rebound’

6. Broken Promise (rework of Ultramix 06 extract)
‘Promise’ vs Ellen Allien & Apparat’s ‘Do Not Break’

7. So Sudden
‘So What’ (with Field Mob) vs The Black Dog’s ‘Sudden Intake (Orlando Voorn Mix)’

8. Oh-Dreamer
‘Oh’ (ft. Ludacris) vs T99’s ‘The Skydreamer’

9. Go Girl / Rodney Yates
‘Go Girl’ (ft. T-Pain) vs David Holmes’ ‘Rodney Yates’

CiCi’s Disctopian Excursion (continuous mix of all of the above)

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