Ubuntu and The Art of an Aerial Acrobat

One Small Step For A Woman

2009-10-05T22:44:00.001+01:00

One Giant Leap for Community Circus

Today, after we had finished teaching aerial acrobatics in a local primary school, Rhys and I sat down and discussed the next steps in our grand plan for Community Circus. Rhys asked me if I am now ready to launch my first experimental courses in Contemporary Circus Video Production in January next year. I explained that at last I am ready for this next step.

Resources are a bit limited at the moment. I have so far purchased one Panasonic HDC-SD100 AVCHD full HD camera; chosen because it uses SDHC cards, and has full manual control via practical external controls. I have also just purchased the Zoom H4n professional broadcast quality audio recorder. The OpenShot video editor is now sufficiently advanced in its development that I will be able to have children and teenagers using it to easily produce professional quality videos of their artistic creations in aerial acrobatics. We still need a suitable portable PC to install Ubuntu, OpenShot and a few other bits of necessary video production software on. But we have several ideas on how to acquire that. We also need to get the audio/video equipment added to our insurance before I can risk letting the kids loose with it. I will be a bit poor till after Xmas because I have poured all of my circus income for this month back into this Contemporary Circus Video Production Project to start the ball rolling for our community circus to develop the ability to produce professional Creative Commons Licensed video productions.

Purchasing the Zoom H4n means that I can now ensure that any further audio equipment and microphones etc acquired will be fully professional items which will connect to the H4n via XLR etc inputs. This will future-proof our audio production resources.

The Next Step

My intention is to enable our Community Circus to be able to produce professional arts videos for many years to come, and publish them as Creative Commons videos in line with the new trend for community publications begun by the Blender Foundation.

I had originally thought to base our resources around the Sony HVR-Z7E (as shown in the side panel). The initial investment for a system using just one camera and the necessary accessories would cost in the region of £7,000 - £10,000. This to me seemed a sum possible to raise.

However the more I studied this option, the more I realised that in a few years time this system would become as dated as the professional DVCAM cameras produced 5 years ago are now.

So I started looking at the next generation of digital video for Digital Cinema. I joined with TJ from the Ubuntu Kernel Team, and a fellow developer on the OpenShot project, and we started work on the next generation of professional video editing, broadcasting and live stage projection production. We begun the En Rapport Project. We started by looking at the next generation codecs used in Digital Cinema and high end professional digital still cameras. The RAW formats! We collected as much data and examples we could on the Redcode RAW format used by the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company for their Red One Camera, and begun reverse engineering it so we could decode and encode it.

As I studied the Red camera range, I realised that their claims that they were "future proof", making "obsolescence Obsolete" were valid. A system based on the Red One camera could be built with a reasonably small initial investment, and this would future-proof the resources for our Community Circus Company.

I looked at the minimum requirements for a Red One system.

We would need a Red One body costing $17,000.

Then we would need the Base Production Pack costing $1,250.

A couple of lenses would start us off nicely; 50-150mm zoom, and a 18-50mm zoom costing $8,500 and $6,500.

Then a Red LCD with arm and cable costing $1,700, along with a Red EVF viewer costing $2,950, both complete with arms and cables.

To power it we would need a Red Power Pack with two Red Brick batteries costing $1,450. And we would need a Red Drive 640GB hard disk storage at $900.

To allow light weight use we would also need the RedFlash module at $500, and a pack of four special high speed compact flash cards at $1,400.

Add a Red Camera Case at $500, and we have a total of $42,650 (£26,755). Then add a couple of hundred pounds for odd spares such as lens caps and screws, and allow for a strong tripod and a couple of good microphones to augment the Zoom H4n, and we have a total of about £27,000.

We would need a few extra bits such as lighting and insurance. So I am now searching for funding opportunities to obtain about £30,000 for the initial investment, and will afterwards look for further funding opportunities to build upon the basic kit later.

Musing on my Grandmother

2009-09-20T22:05:00.000+01:00

I was happily editing the page on Wikipedia about my Great Grandfather Dr Joseph Kidd, when I was contacted by a distant cousin, Peter Kidd. He had wondered if I was a cousin when he noticed that I was editing that page.

Suddenly I found myself back in touch with family members who I thought had scattered like a string of beads across the world. Especially my Uncle Joe who I thought had vanished to Australia, and had never realised he had returned here many years ago.

My Uncle Joe and Aunt Rosemary both expressed suprise at all the many adventures I have had since we last met, and at all the many exciting things I do in my life.

This brought me to musing on my Grandmother, Dorothy Margret Kidd, pictured here sailing on the Kiddbrooke at Brooklands in 1898.

The reason for my adventurous life, full of exciting activities, is that Granny inspired me with her own adventures. She early on became my hero and role model after I read her books "A String of Beads" and "When That I Was" by Dorothy McCall (nee: Kidd). The tale that really made her my hero early on was that of her mountaineering in the Alps about the same year this photo was taken. She went climbing mountains in full victorian dress. This to me was the ultimate in conquering the prevailing social restrictions upon women wanting adventure.

To me Granny broke the mould and showed the way. She made me realise that I could have as many adventures in my life as I wanted.

What makes me want to work in the Ubuntu Community?

2009-08-16T21:20:00.001+01:00

My beginnings in Linux

In 1995 I was a scientist developing methods for automated visual identification from digital video images. I became aware of something called Linux that a few dedicated hackers were developing. So I built my first PC out of the remains of several broken machines that people had thrown away, and tried out the first distributions; ygdrazil and Slackware. Installing packages was very troublsome because I had to download tarballs at work and split them across many floppy disks. Then I found someone called John Winters who was setting up what he called the Linux Buyers Consortium (LBC) to import linux CDs from the USA into Britain. I joined LBC and got some CDs and installed Debian version 1. At last I had a useable Linux workstation! For the next few years I offered support and advice on the LBC discussion list (email) in Britain.

How I came to Ubuntu

I switched from using Debian to using Ubuntu in 2004 for the simple reason that the development cycles were shorter and so I could keep my computer up-to-date with stable versions much more easily. For the next few years I used Ubuntu for all of my Community Theatre, and Community Circus activities. Script writing and producing all the planning documents for directing in the theatre, using LaTeX. And composing music for physical theatre and contemporary circus, using Lilypond.

My Need to Contribute

I am an aerial acrobat in a contemporary circus troupe called Mists of Time. I also teach aerial acrobatics (trapeze, silks, and ropes). Last year our troupe's leader Rhys Thomas decided to use Ubuntu which made transfer of documents much easier, and as he found out, provided the troupe with access to very much more useful software.

This year I began a major film-making project for our circus troupe developing videos for training, and videos of our artistic productions. These needed to be fully professional.

I tried all the video editors I could find which ran on Linux, and was sorely disappointed in what I found. The only one I found which could produce anything matching any of my requirements was kdenlive, which I used to produce my first promotional DVD. However I couldn't get kdenlive to do anything useful with HD video.

Then this summer I found a reference to something being developed very rapidly called OpenShot. I gave this a trial, and very quickly realised it had an enormous potential. Acting on advice from the author of OpenShot, Jonathan Thomas, I wrote and contributed some Project Profiles which allowed me to edit in full HD 1920x1080 resolution, which is what I so desperately needed. OpenShot was still lacking some major functionality, but my experience with contributing my tiny bits made me realise that if I offered to help the team, this would speed up the process of getting what I needed - a fully professional HD non-linear video editor working on Ubuntu.

I explained to Jonathan Thomas that my programming skills were very rusty, but that I could help with documentation and producing a Help Manual using Gnome Help, and also help out with software testing. I was very quickly welcomed onto the OpenShot Development Team.

Since then I have been doing an awful lot of software testing, whilst producing my HD videos for our circus troupe. And doing a lot of bug management and answering questions, and helping with translations. I have been struggling over the production of the Help Manual. Mostly because my best friend died a few weeks ago and this left me feeling less than perfectly creative. The other reasons were that I needed to learn how to produce .deb packages for Ubuntu so I could produce a good openshot-docs package fully compliant with Ubuntu and with the Gnome Documentation Project (GDP), and also I had great difficulty trying to discover how to get my Gnome Help files to be properly indexed by the Gnome Help software yelp. Another problem was that Jonathan was updating OpenShot so fast that my screenshots were becoming out of date before I had even written the annotation for them! :-/

Last week I started to get my creative mood back again. I joined Ubuntu Women. Suddenly I had access to really useful help in solving my problems. The first problem solved was how to get my help files properly indexed by yelp when my openshot-docs package was installed. Without this you couldn't find my help files by searching in Gnome Help. Now I understand the .omf files and what they are for ;-)

I am also getting very useful help from Ubuntu Women on producing .deb packages for Ubuntu, and I have started refining my openshot-docs package, and I am also building a .deb package for the Creative Commons package cc-publisher to submit to Ubuntu. I have also joined wikipedia and I am regularly updating the OpenShot page there.

My next step with Ubuntu will be to try and become a full Ubuntu Member. :-)