/via Jeremy Zawodny.

Read more about this feature on The Viddler Blog in a tutorial on how to get the best quality out of this feature called: How to: Set an image as a video thumbnail.

You can see the results on Eat Weird Episode 5. Gorgeous.

Also, this feature is exposed via the Viddler API’s setThumbnail method.

I’m embedding part one “Initial lay in” here. You can watch part two “Laying in light and shadow shapes”, and part three “Finish and refine” on Viddler.

What I appreciate the most about Jesse’s tutorial is the step-by-step detail that is given. A lot of tutorials, that I’ve come across for similar things, are a mess of screenshots with captions as instructions. I like this balance better.

Source: Texture Tutorial 01 – Seamless Grunge Textures.

Here is a quick excerpt from Wikipedia. If the quoted section isn’t enough for you, I recommend going to Wikipedia to read the full article.

“In footage shot by most television and video cameras (except more recent models which allow a non-interlaced mode), the two fields of a frame are taken at different times, which results in an effectively doubled time resolution as compared with non-interlaced footage, thus enhancing motion perception to the viewer. This remains one of the benefits of interlacing.

However its benefits can only be experienced if the display shows the individual fields in the same timely order they were shot in. At this time, only traditional CRT-based TV set are capable to do so. If correctly adjusted, they need not suffer from any interlacing artifacts, they even benefit from it.

Yet when the fields of the original footage are displayed in a different order than they were shot in (i.e. when two fields taken at different points in time are re-combined to a full frame displayed at once), visual defects called interlace artifacts or combing occur with moving objects in the image.”

It is a long bit, sorry – but it does a fairly good job describing the cause and effect. Now that you know what it all means and why it should be done, run over to Derek’s site and read his tip so that you can save yourself the headache that interlacing can cause.

Source: Deinterlace your online videos.

Update: Somewhat unrelated, new post called How to: Delete photos from within Smart Albums in iPhoto.

For an entire year I’ve wanted to be able to do this easily.  And I think I’ve now found the best way to do this without the possible side-effect of losing all of your photos on your iPhone.

One of the problems with the iPhone is that you can’t delete all of the photos you’ve taken within from within the iPhone’s interface.  If you, like me, sync your iPhone photos with your iPhoto Library then you’ve no doubt noticed that iPhoto does let you delete all of the photos you are currently importing. But, if you’ve imported several times then iPhoto will only allow you to delete the current photos being imported.

So you’re only option has been to create a new iPhoto Library, import all of your iPhone’s photos again, and ask iPhoto to delete the photos when the task is complete.  Or, you could click delete on every single photo on your iPhone one-at-a-time.

Solution: Use Image Capture.

My iPhoto Library has become very cumbersome.  Opening iPhoto is a chore.  Also, with the iPhone in its dock, iPhoto will compare its library with the one on the iPhone prior to allow you to import the new photos – and this takes a very long time.  So, I’m going to show you how to use Image Capture, an application on your Macintosh that you may not even know you have, to create a backup of your iPhone’s photos and, subsequentally, delete them from the iPhone – in one step.

1. Mount your iPhone using either your dock or the iPhone’s USB cable.
2. If you have iTunes or iPhoto set to open automatically, eject the iPhone from both of these applications.
3. Open Image Capture.app ((You can find this application in your Applications folder.))
4. Create a new directory to dump your iPhone photos to.
5. Click “Options” and select “Delete items from camera after downloading”
6. Click “Download all”.

Here are some photos of the process.

Image capture.

New folder.

Delete the photos.

Empty camera roll result.

Depending on how many photos you have on your iPhone this process may take a little while.  When the downloading is complete, the iPhone’s photos will be deleted – permanently.

What if you want to save some of the photos on your iPhone?  This can be done but it takes some work.  After you’ve imported all of these photos into your iPhoto Library, create a new album in iPhoto called something like “iPhone camera roll”.  In your iTunes preferences for this iPhone ((You’ll need to mount the iPhone again to see these options in iTunes.)) select this album for syncing.  This way you only save the photos that you have put into this album.

I hope this helps those of you that want to delete their iPhone’s photos in a quick and easy way without worrying about losing your photos!

“Depth of field is the range of distance around the focal plane which is acceptably sharp.  The depth of field varies depending on camera type, aperture and focusing distance, although print size and viewing distance can influence our perception of it.”

To better fully understand, and calculate the depth of field, for your camera – take a look at this tutorial from Cambridge in Colour.

Source: Understanding Depth of Field in Photography.
Via: Dan Rubin on Ma.gnolia.