July 12, 2011

Video: The Incredible Rube Goldberg Portrait Photography Machine

I kind of can’t even talk about this:

Hats off to David Dvir and the team at 2D Photography. Here’s more info about the project, plus a making-of video:

[Via Harrison Liu]

YouTube stabilization: Nice!

I read a few months ago that YouTube was planning to offer video stabilization for one’s uploaded clips. It’s not easy to find, but if you go to youtube.com/editor, you can drag a clip into the project timeline, then press the little magic wand icon to show the editing UI. The process is a bit convoluted: Why you can’t just set a flag to stabilize video on upload, or see this UI during the upload/tagging process, I don’t know. Perhaps that’s coming, and meanwhile it’s a little lame to pick nits with a free, fast service.

I’ve tried only one test movie so far, but I’m quite pleased with the results. Here are before & after clips. (Note that stabilizing a clip will result in a second copy on YouTube, requiring you to copy over captions, tags, etc.)

Original:

Stabilized: