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  • How To Set Up a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

    Prerequisites

    For this tutorial, I’m going to assume that you’ve got enough hardware to get started. And if you got your Raspberry Pi as part of a kit, then you should be good to go. You should have the following:

    • Raspberry Pi board
    • Raspberry Pi power supply (micro USB Output 5V DC 2.5A Regulated, Input 100V to 240V AC)
    • Raspberry Pi case (not technically required, but I definitely want to protect my pi!)
    • Micro SD card (at least a class 10)
    • HDMI cable (full size, male to male)
    • Monitor or television capable of displaying output from a full HDMI port
    • USB-A mouse
    • USB-A keyboard
    • A computer
    • A micro SD card reader

    Download your OS

    You can run tons of different operating systems on your Raspberry Pi, but for this demo, we’ll go with the OS officially supported by the Raspberry Pi Foundation called Raspian (based on Linux Debian). You can download the operating system here. Once you have the operating system downloaded, you’ll want to head over and download the latest version of Etcher.

    Etcher is a great, simple, open source software used to create bootable media. Use Etcher to select your downloaded copy of Raspian. Next, select your micro SD card as the volume to burn to. Then click go! It will take several minutes to write the OS to the micro SD and then validate the burn. Once it’s complete, eject your SD card and you’re ready for the next step.

    Boot your new Raspberry Pi

    With your freshly burned SD card inserted into your Pi, connect the keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and plug power into your pi. There isn’t a power button on the pi, so as soon as power starts running through the board, it will automatically start the boot process. You should be greeted with a simple setup wizard to help you configure some settings that will be applied every time you boot your pi in the future.

    That’s it! Enjoy your new Pi!

    matt

    April 30, 2019
    Lifestyle, Linux, Raspberry Pi
    debian, DIY, linux, pi, raspberry pi, raspberry pi 3, raspberry pi 3 b+, raspian, setup

  • Why The Breeze Cursor Theme is The Best

    Themes

    So basically, there are themes.

    Themes can do a lot to change the look and feel of your computing experience. If you’re a Linux user, there’s a good chance you like things customized. Just have a Google for “linux themes” and you’ll see what I mean. You can take this to whatever level you want. You can change the look and feel of literally everything, or you can do a subtle cursor change like me.

    Breeze Theme

    Lately I’ve been a fan of the Breeze cursor theme. To get that theme and a selection of other themes to choose from later, open a terminal and install the unity tweak tool and a few theme libraries:

    $ sudo apt install breeze-cursor-theme oxygen-cursor-theme oxygen-cursor-theme-extra unity-tweek-tool

    Once you install the themes and the unity tweak tool, you can open the tweak tool and head over to Appearance > Cursors. Click through the list until you find one you like. Make note of the name. Once you’ve got one, open your terminal again and type:

    $ sudo update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme

    This will bring up a list of all the themes you’ve installed on your system. Look through the list and find the theme you liked. Type in the number of your selected theme to confirm your changes. To make sure your changes remain changed, simply run:

    $ compiz --replace

    and you can either reboot or log out and log back in to make your changes. That’s it! Enjoy your new look!

    matt

    April 16, 2019
    Lifestyle, Linux, Ubuntu
    breeze, computing, cursor, linux, pc, theme, ubuntu, windows

  • Flowblade Review: Most Capable NLE on Linux?

    Flowblade 2.0 Released

    Janne Liljeblad and other contributors released Flowblade 2.0 recently and I thought I’d try it out. I edited a quick 1 minute video from about 10 drone clips shot in 4k. The first impressive feature was how easily I was able to render proxies. It was just as easy to replace them with the original media before the render.

    As both a Premiere user and a Linux user, I’ve been on a quest to find an NLE that is just as capable and intuitive as Premiere, but on Linux. So far, I’ve used only a few and had just ‘okay’ experiences. My first Linux based NLE that I dove headfirst into was Kdenlive. I was cutting some footage for a client and built out the complete project in Kdenlive for a few reasons. First and foremost, at the time, I no longer had access to Adobe CC through a former employer. And finally, even if I had $53/mo, I could think of 1,000 things I’d do before I got an Adobe CC subscription.

    But I digress, this is a post about Flowblade. My experience with Kdenlive was fine, the hotkeys took some getting used to. The alpha channels weren’t automatic either, but it worked. Flowblade, however gave me a much more ‘automatic’ experience. I’m on an older mid-range GTX-970 machine and 4k footage doesn’t playback smoothly. Regardless, it felt like proxies were easier to create in Flowblade than in Premiere. Just a few clicks and it was done. Updated right there in my timeline. And encoding was a breeze. Once I made my edits, which was a pleasure by the way, All I had to do was choose “replace proxies with original media” and I was all set to render.

    Intuitive Experience

    There were several hotkeys that carried over from Premiere and others that just made sense. The i and o keys set in and out points, the HOME and END key pops your playhead to the beginning and end of your timeline, stuff like that. The alpha transparency and title card system took some getting used to, but it wasn’t that bad. I feel like color correction is slightly easier in Flowblade than in Kdenlive. That’s just my experience, and the clips I happen to be working on.

    Overall, I still can’t completely commit to Flowblade, even though it’s a pretty great application for basic edits. If I were a vlogger and just needed something to spit out videos with speed, I’d definitely use Flowblade for everything. And even as a pro editor, I still may use Flowblade for some quick edits here and there, based on the situation. But as long as Resovlve remains an option for Linux users, it no doubt offers the absolute best postproduction experience so far. The grades are otherworldly. I’ve never had so much control over color. Not even in Premiere. Lumetri Color doesn’t even compete with Resolve.

    So far, my only issue with resolve is it can’t take Panasonic .MTS files by default, they have to be transcoded first. And that just may be a “free version” limitation, I’m not sure. Either way, I’m just a few freelance jobs away from picking up a full copy of Resolve for my personal Linux machine, so I’ll keep you posted if my experience changes once I get everything up and running. Until next time.

    matt

    March 19, 2019
    Linux, Ubuntu, Video Editing, Vlogging
    Adobe, creative cloud, kdenlive, linux, nle, postproduction, premiere, ubuntu, video editing

  • What is HTML?

    What is HTML? Hypertext Markup Language is the standard way to format text for use on web pages. So if you ever find yourself needing to edit a webpage or create one from scratch, this is the most basic way to display anything on a page.

    Basic Structure

    HTML is broke up into several different elements, noted by tags. You can write anything you want on your web page, but these tags are at the core of HTML and are used to give your text its structure. Tags are noted with angle brackets <> and wrap around the text that it affects. It should be noted that the tags need to go in a specific order, like so:

    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
         <head>
              <title>Page Title</title>
         </head>
         <body>
              <h1>Heading</h1>
              <p>Paragraph text.</p>
         </body>
    </html>

    Let’s break that down. The first tag is <!DOCTYPE html> and that’s just a one-time declaration to help the computer understand that it’s about to read an HTML document. That way, it knows what to expect. You don’t need to close this tag.

    Next, it’s the <html> tag. Everything, the whole page, is contained inside this tag.

    The <head> tag is where you keep file path references associated files, like CSS files for styling, Javascript files for functions, and other page metadata like titles. The <head> tag closes with a forward slash and closes out all the page metadata before the <body> tag begins.

    Finally, the <body> tag surrounds the main content of your page. Inside this tag, you’ll find lots of tags like <p> (paragraph text), <h1> (largest header text) through <h6> (smallest header text), <ul> (unordered list AKA bullet points), <ol> (ordered list AKA numbered), <a> (anchor tag, used for making clickable links) and <form> for forms. There are several more, but those are some of the most common tags you’ll find.

    Why Tags?

    These tags server two main purposes. The first and primary purpose is to tell your web browser how to interpret all the text coming from a web page. Is it a title? A paragraph? A list? Table? This provides the overall structure of the page. HTML is often referred to as the “skeleton” of the web page. It’s functional, but not necessarily the most beautiful thing out there.

    Additionally, tags provide a great element that CSS files can use to apply style. So instead of applying a style to ALL text in an HTML document, CSS can select just the headings (<h1> tags) and apply styles to just the text inside those element tags.

    That’s it for the basics! There are tons of free online courses and videos out on the web to help help get to grips with the basics of web design and development. In this day and age with so much of our lives existing on the internet, it definitely doesn’t hurt to know some of the basics of how the web works.

    matt

    March 5, 2019
    General Computing, Linux, Web Design, Web Development
    computing, internet, linux, portfolio, web design, web development, website, wordpress

  • How to Use ffmpeg (The Basics)

    The Problem

    It all started when Premiere Pro started glitching out. When I was trying to import a simple image sequence, like I’d done a thousand times before, it only imported the first 25% of the frames. Everything else was missing. There was no inconsistency in the file naming convention. Everything was sequential. There were no missing frames. Premiere is just glitchy.

    The Workaround

    I came up with an idea for a workaround. Instead of importing an image sequence, what if I just concatenated all those image files into a ProRes MOV? That way I can just drop the whole thing into Premiere with no problems. I tried to get Adobe Media Encoder to do that, but it wasn’t the most intuitive experience of my life. Every time I tried to import a sequence, it only gave me the first frame, and ended up rendering frame 1 over the entire length of the sequence. Solution? FFMPEG.

    What is FFMPEG?

    Ffmpeg is a command line application that allows you to manipulate images, video, and audio. It does take some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it is WELL worth the time you put in to learn the basics of the application. I do want to emphasize just the basics, as ffmpeg and all of its options are pretty vast.

    As a 3D artist and animator, I deal a lot with image sequences. Unfortunately Premiere and other NLEs can sometimes glitch out and not give you what you want when you import a sequence. FFMPEG allows you to concatenate a series of images and encode those frames into a single video file with a codec and container of your choosing.

    If you have other open source video applications like VLC player or Handbrake, you might already have ffmpeg installed on your system. You can check by running this in the terminal:

    ffmpeg -version

    If you don’t have it, you can get it easily by running:

    sudo apt install ffmpeg

    Now that you’ve got ffmpeg, you can do TONS of stuff with it. There’s a giant list of commands or you can check out the man page:

    man ffmpeg

    You can convert video files as simply as:

    ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.avi

    The Tricks

    ffmpeg is used to initialize the program, -i is used to set your input file(s), and you can add more options like scale, fps, codecs, bit rates, and more with a long list of options available. For my purposes, I usually want to take a folder full of .png files and convert them into an MOV file for editing. For that, I can just ‘cd’ into the folder containing all my .png frames, and run something like:

    ffmpeg -f image2 -pattern_type glob -framerate 23.976 -i cyclesShotFour_*.png shotFour.mov

    Let’s break that down. The -f tack lets you indicate a format. To see all available formats, just run:

    ffmpeg -formats

    It’s worth noting that formats are different than codecs. To view the massive list of codecs available in ffmpeg, just run:

    ffmpeg -codecs

    Easy, right? Next we told ffmpeg to grab all the .png files in the current working directory matching the pattern we defined. In my example, all my files were named cyclesShotFour_0001.png, cyclesShotFour_0002.png, etc. There’s quite a few ways to define a pattern, and you can learn more here. Once ffmpeg has all your images defined, all you need to set your framerate and other stuff you may want and you’re good to go! Tack -framerate defines your framerate. At the end, just type the name of your output file. That’s it!

    Some of the other options that wasn’t mentioned in the above example, that I use quite frequently is setting the bitrate and the codec. The tacks for those options are -b:v (bitrate for video) -b:a (bitrate for audio) -c:v (codec for video) -c:a (codec for audio). So let’s say I want to encode a bunch of .jpg files into a Apple ProRes MOV file. Clearly, the output won’t have audio, so we don’t have to specify any audio options.

    ffmpeg -f image2 -c:v prores -framerate 23.976 -b:v 6000k -pattern_type glob -i frame*.jpg output.mov

    Anway, there are tons of different things you can do with ffmpeg, and it’s an absolutely amazing tool. It saved my butt just last week! Have fun and keep learning.

    matt

    February 26, 2019
    3D Animation, Linux, Ubuntu, Video Editing
    audio, bitrates, codecs, encoding, ffmpeg, formats, handbrake, linux, media, postproduction, transcoding, video
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Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 Thess 5:21