J ust recently I set up a new computer for transcribing... again. I found myself scrambling all over the place to find the programs that I had put together years ago to make the job easier. This is a note for myself if I have to do it yet again, but it also might be useful for others who are looking to get set up for typing audio files. I mainly transcribe interviews for faculty at a University. They demand fairly accurate, word for word, sigh by sigh transcripts so they can analyze the data as objectively as they can.

Playing the Audio:

I use winamp for playing the audio files. Winamp has an incredible amount of customization options and also allows global hotkeys to be set. This means that I can stay in the typing program and use shortcuts to rewind, pause, or fast forward. Before I figured that out I had to do the very annoying alt+tab / left arrow to rewind in the program / alt+tab to get back to my typing program. I use the dvorak keyboard layout so I bind my rewind, fast forward, and pause to keys that are useful for me, but qwerty typists would probably want to put them in places handy for them. To set them, hit control + p in winamp and click the left menu item that says "global hotkeys." My particular bindings are:

alt + h -> rewind
alt + t -> fast-forward
alt + c -> pause/play

Of course, this can be found at:

http://www.winamp.com/
Preparing the Audio (optional) :

Sometimes, if the audio has quite a bit of noise I use Sony Vegas to process it. Their noise reduction plugin can take out low hums, high hissings, etc, and their 4-band EQ can allow you to put a spike in the 2300 kilohertz region where a lot of verbal information lays. This can really help reduce forehead wrinkles and wear on the rewind key. Obviously this program is expensive, but if you have an audio background, this little step can save a lot of time and effort later.

Customizing Winamp:

I add two plugins to winamp, the first is pacemaker, and the second is called repeater. The pacemaker plugin allows you to slow down the audio (or speed up if the speakers are quite slow.) Once it is installed, enable it by going to the winamp preferences (control + p) and under the plugins, click the area for dsp/effect and simply click it in the righthand box. The install download is here:

http://www.surina.net/pacemaker/download.html

The repeater plugin allows you to change the number of seconds that is rewound or fast-forwarded with each keypress. This plugin is only for the super anal-retentive, like myself! (Normal rewinding, at five seconds, is usually adequate, but if you find it rewinding too much, those wasted seconds add up.) Once it is installed, you change the seconds rewound by right clicking on the actual rewind button in winamp. More options can be found by configuring the plugin in the winamp preferences (control + p) and going to the "general purpose" area in the plugins category. Click the repeater plugin in the righthand box and click configure. The repeater can be found at the following url:

http://www.nunzioweb.com/daz/repeater.html
Typing:

I use TypeWell, an abbreviation system/program that is used at hundreds of schools for doing real-time transcription in classes for the deaf or hard of hearing. They require completion of a training ($400) before one is allowed to purchase their software. Prices for various licenses range from $100 to $600. I think it's quite a good program, using decades and decades of theory to build a strong abbreviation system. I was into Gregg shorthand as a kid and it was a delight to see that they use some of those old ideas. The TW system also derives from the competition between it and other transcription programs, but even neater: they use some of my own ideas for building a quicker system (I've been focusing on techniques to reduce use of the spacebar). You can customize and add your own abbreviations, too, naturally.

As far as speed, my coworkers and I average between 90 - 120 wpm although sometimes, when the groove is on, some of us can get to 140 wpm runs for a good 5-10 minutes. More information about TypeWell can be found on their site:

http://www.typewell.com/licenses.html

Of course, you don't NEED TypeWell to transcribe. You can use any program you want to tap into. You could even use notepad combined with a program like ShortKeys to build an abbreviation system from, or type without abbreviations at all. I would recommend MS Word over notepad due to its autosaving features and all its other jazz.

Sharing the Files:

I use dropbox for aligning a folder with a client. That way, they can simply drop an audio file in their folder and I can drop the transcripts in the same folder when I'm done. Easy as pie to pipe. Pretty much everyone is aware of Dropbox at this point, but if you don't, use the following link to register, it'll reward both you and I with 250 extra megabytes. :)

http://db.tt/KaVHZd8

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I think that's all! If I think of anything else to add, I shall.

Labels: Tutorials, Writing

For the last three months or so I have been experimenting with continuous lighting setups. Previously I did everything with off-camera flash and ambient, so it's really been enlightening to work with a very different style. What I mean by continuous lighting is non-strobe light sources such as desk laps, tungsten, fluorescent, and halogen bulbs. What I think is so fun about this type of work is that you can find interesting lighting anywhere. Just look around your house and you'll find plenty. Or run to the hardware store. I'm using two fluorescent desklamps that I found at secondhand stores (go savers!), a halogen, a fluorescent, and a few tungsten work lamps from the hardware store. With this tutorial, I want to show that you can get really cool lighting setups from just what you have around the house, and make them work in cramped quarters!

After a shoot last weekend, I laid everything I used out on the floor with this article in mind. Here are the lights I used:



There you see four lights, a few with pieces of cardboard ripped and duct taped to make some quick, crude, McGuiver barndoors. In the center you can see that there are actually three fluorescent bulbs that are held together, so there's actually five fluorescents.

THE LIGHTS

When you find a light, turn it on and really try to see the color it is giving off. I actually replaced the existing fluerescents with two $7 'grow-bulbs' from Lowes. These give off a very white full spectrum light. The triple fluorescent has a slight yellowish cast. We think that most fluorescents are green, but there has been an industry change which has really started transitioning towards yellow, people like yellow lights better. The one other light in the picture, the 500 watt halogen, puts out extremely bright yellow-orange light.

The reason why these lights are so nice in small spaces is because they give out constant light. When you are working very close with strobes, it is hard to test and visualize how the lighting will work. With continuous lighting, you know exactly where the shadows are falling. The advantages of this are indispensible when leaning backwards, on your tiptoes, neck craneing, one hand balancing and the other trying to hold the weight of the camera, and telling the subject where to be. Try it and you'll love it.

HACKING THE COLOR BALANCE

Now that you understand what color of light you are putting out, you can use that to your own creative advantage. The white balance function on your camera can be set to register pretty much any color as white, with colors to the sides registering as more green, blue, or red. What I did was set my white balance in between white and yellow, which makes the white light appear slightly bluish and the yellow light not as saturated. Where the two lights meet they should give a more true white. Pushing towards the blue will also reduce some of the color intensity of the halogen, which is a color that can become dominant easily. This means that your compositions will already have some color contrast abstract ideas going on just in the way the lights blend together in different areas of the frame.

OTHER EQUIPMENT



The rest of my equipment I used were tripods, tape and bungees to hold the lights to the tripods, and cords - to get elecericity to the lights. I actually rigged a $90 dollar background stand to hold a light as a kind of boom arm. I basically used one of the bars that would normally connect with a middle piece and connect with the other tripod body as a device to hang the lights from. I also have one real boom arm, so one stand for each fluorescent (the halogen would sit on the floor). I attached them to the stands with ball bungees (which, if you don't have any, you NEED to look into).

THE SMALL SPACE



The space to shoot was incredibly small. We are talking about a studio apartment that was filled to the brim with trash. (No offense to the inhabitants, I love ya!) The first hour and a half was spent just clearing a space to shoot in. You see the final result above. We had a space about 6 feet wide and 6 feet deep with a white wall behind. Wow. I hope that you feel cramped! How, oh how, to get a photo in there?

I truly believe that creativity thrives off of being boxed in. You need to work within limits, paramaters that you understand, to see how you can break out. Small areas really force you to think. My friend Daniel was there taking some pictures of the shoot.

Oh, one more thing... please don't think this is biased towards just taking pictures of girls. These techniques can be used for ALL subjects. I just happen to have been doing a shoot with.. you know.. scantily clad females. Try to ignore that and just see the LIGHTING!



Other than noticing that Daniel's camera's white balance was set to something that really brought out the green, you can see that the flourescents are all on tripods, and the 500 watt halogen is on the floor throwing a nice warm light towards the bottom of the frame. (You can also simply turn it off if it seems excessive.) If you are interested, here are some of the final images from this location (images link to deviantart fulls):




So, now that you have the lighting, you can work on bringing your ideas into it. Bring it all together! You can also move it into another location, although that does require some work in the movement of the lights. We also did another shoot where we moved into the bathroom. What is beautiful though, is once you get the lights set up wherever, you can really move them wherever you want.



In that shoot, we eventually filled the toilet with spagetti and did some reverse bulimia themes. Here are some of the results:



I hope this gives you ideas! I am always curious about other people's creative processes. Please, try to map em out and post 'em up.

Labels: Tutorials, Writing

Photoshop's Web Photo Gallery is a powerful tool with endless possibilities--despite its benign appearance. On the most basic level, it allows a user to import selected images to be resized, thumbnailed, and embedded into a html gallery. Each image gets its very own html page, navigation, and more. Once this is created, a user can upload the entire directory to the web and they'll have a webpage. It is a suprisingly unused tool, and almost undocumented on the web. Only a hardful of sites talk about it, but nothing that I've seen really explores what you can do with the tool. I think the reason is that it seems, on the surface, to be almost uncustomizeable. The built in templates are interesting to look through, but no self-respecting web designer would be satisfied using someone else's design.

Where it gets interesting is when you explore how the templates are put together. It's actually just simple html! The information that photoshop uses are located in /[photoshop directory]/presets/web photo gallery/. Here you can see how the structure within the program mirrors your hard drive:


There's nothing tricky or hidden. It's all simply files and images that photoshop uses to generate full html pages out of. This means that if you have any understanding of html you have complete control. If you want to call your own custom images, simply put them in the /images/ directory. The .html pages are easily managed with any editor (including textpad if you've got the guts). Here's an example of how the file structure looks:



For integration with photoshop, Adobe has developed special codes that you can place in the html files that they call "tokens." These tokens allow for variables within the"Web Photo Gallery." For example, a token $BGCOLOR$ would allow you to set the background color within in the photoshop appletinstead of having to go through thecode and changing it, like this:



This means that once you have your templateset up, simple maintanence and color customization can all be done from photoshop without the hassle of html editing.

A useful photoshop token is called %NEXTIMAGE%, which generates a unique html address when it is called on within a subpage (the page you get to once you click on a specific thumbnail). So, for the html page looking at photo1.jpg, the %NEXTIMAGE% token would generate something like, "http://webaddress.edu/pages/photo2.html" after photoshop operated. Note that it generates a link to an html file, not an actual .jpg. Whiih brings me to:

Limitations - There is nothing built into the token code to generate a link to the image url in the next image. This proved to be quite a headache for me because I was interested in 'preloading.' Preloading images speeds up navigation for other people by calling up the file that you think a viewer will click to next. It loads in the background as your viewer is looking at what is already on screen. Hopefully, when they click to look at the next page the image will have already been loaded in the background, and then the browser covertly load the next file. But, without a way to call up the address to the next .jpg, navigation would be a bit groggy.

I tried to figure this out all last week. It may be that the solution is so simple that it's a given for most, but it was tough for me to figure out.

Since we have a code which will give us the address to the next html page, it is only a directory and an extention away from the address wanted. We want the address:

[rootdir]/pages/image_xx.html
to switch to
[rootdir]/images/image_xx.jpg

Here is where javascript can be a real help. Javascript allows you to set up variables, and then you can operate on those variables. We are going to make the html data be a variable, use the .indexOf operator to find where to cut, and then the .substring command to snip. As you can see, Photoshop's token %NEXTIMAGE_CIRCULAR%' is set up as the variable: "nxtimg." The variable "bad_ext" finds that offending .htm and stores the position as a number. This means that we can use the number of where the charater starts when we write the html, and snip appropriately.

This is where the document.write command comes in. It writes a simple <img src code, with the new /images/ directory, and then snips the filename from the zeroth position to the extention. Tadaa! If you add a css classification to make it hidden, you then have an image that loads, but is not seen.

<script type="text/javascript"> var nxtimg = '%NEXTIMAGE_CIRCULAR%'; var bad_ext = nxtimg.indexOf(".htm"); document.write ('<img src="../images/' + (nxtimg.substring(1,bad_ext)) + 'jpg" class="hiddenPic">' ); </script>

And there you have it. The solution that I wish had already existed last week. What's nice is that with this code you could expand it with an <a href=%NEXTIMAGE%... or <a href="PREVIMAGE%... tocreate the popular effect of having thumbnails of the 'next image' and the 'previous image' on each sub page. If you have any questions on specific implementations, don't hesitate to email.

Labels: Tutorials, Writing