Technical details on the creation of Max's Photo Album

o)( Photos

The images were prepared by transferring selected frames of video onto the computer via Brown's ``abekus.'' The images were then brightened, resized, and converted to gif format using xv. The inline images are 1/16th original size. The images are set up so that clicking on them gives the full size image.

Oo( Video

The video segments are in MPEG format. If you don't have an MPEG viewer and an 8-bit color monitor, you probably won't get to see them. For more information on MPEG, look over the information from the mpeg developers at Berkeley. They have public domain viewers that you can install.

The clips themselves are each about 3 1/2 seconds long (100 frames at 30 frames/sec). They were captured directly off of videotape using Brown's ``abekus.'' The images were then brightened and resized and converted to an alternate bitmap format using the ppm package. The resulting frames were converted to MPEG using a program called mpeg_encode.

The standard MPEG viewer does nasty things to your color map. Be aware.

)#( Sound

The audio clips are in SPARC ``au'' format. They were taken off of video by connecting the video camera directly to a SPARC microphone and then recording using /usr/demo/SOUND/bin/soundtool here at Brown. The interface allowed me to clip out some of the noise the occurs before and after but I was unable to clean up the sounds themselves.