Best Videos - 2009

24 x 256GB Samsung SSD Insane RAID

Saw this funny animal clip on The Soup.

It's probably like 20 years old and you're all going to stare at me for being so dense. Whatever. You can all go screw yourselves. It's still funny.

I found some great stuff in the past few months. Some is famous, some you may have seen, but I think its all quality

• Jeremy Paxman and Dizzee Rascal on Obama
• Surfer on the news
• Danielle Ate The Sandwich - Dream A Little Dream Of Me
• Insane Motorcycling in India
• Dan Bull - Generation Gaming
• The Peal P50 on Top Gear

Some real-life Linux gadgetry in the data center:

Don't Shout at your Disks!!!

Awesome. Never tried figuring out the vibrational impact like that with the storage systems I used to support, but I imagine they would have similar issues.

And from the web site, it looks like they were using OpenSolaris and DTrace to get the info out of the hardware, on a platform they are calling FISHworks. I've been pretty impressed by dtrace so far, glad to see it getting used more and more.

The Cock Shot super well-done "As Seen on TV" commercial parody.

Missed it, It's gone from the U.

Oh noes!!11!!one!eleven

I think this is the original.

White People Problems

Schick ad

Wolf and Pig This is neat. Be sure to watch it to the end.

One for Godfrey and Doug ;-)

Frenchman makes valves by hand

Warning, the soundtrack is a little tedious. The music he uses in the background isn't very long and doesn't loop properly. But the sheer nerdiness of the visuals more than makes up for it.

I think if valves had been mass produced this way it would have taken the average family 20 years to save up for a TV and then wait another 10 for it to be made!

I started out by thinking "I could do that". It wasn't too long before I realised I was way out of my depth! If I had to choose a buddy to be holed up with in a WW2 POW camp I'd choose him!

Agreed, the soundtrack was a little monotonous. It reminded me of soundtracks from the late 60's trade test transmissions.

Western Spaghetti

Interesting version of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

Cops vs Clowns is quite a masterpiece.

Danny MacAskill rides his bike around Edinburgh is a brilliant bit of trials riding footage.

Wow. Just... wow. So smooth. Looks like he's done a lot of, or taken a lot of cues from, freestyle BMX.

Check out the videos at Transgression Park - he is in a couple of them, and is seen fairly often down here.

Nice skate park in the centre of Edinburgh a mate of mine set up after he left my team. Interesting career change from IT to stunt dude.

Time Warp on the Discovery channel had some slo-mo trials bike footage a while back. It was pretty cool stuff.

The Tarantino Mixtape.

The problem I have with these mashup artists is that they're leveraging the creative efforts of others often without any attribution. There's talent and creativity in the mixing and composition, but to not credit the source is inexcusable.

I couldn't find any acknowledgements on that linked site nor their official web page for the Tarantino or other videos. Not even a simple list of source material.

ScamNow (ShamWow over-dub parody) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm03Dgu_yXA&NR=1

ShamWow Song (ShamWow script put to melody/music): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsQcyhBsSjI&NR=1

Okay, this certainly isn't the best video of the year. But it's so cringeworthy it deserves a mention.

I'm so glad I never saw that when I was working on SP1.

Our ecosystem rocks!

I like this one, too-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWRyj5cHIQA
about a minute too long, but well done.

"Weird Al" Yankovic - Craigslist

Wow, he looks slightly odd without his glasses on.

True, though he hasn't had glasses for years now.

Google it with Bing

I need to link this one back to my "people are stupid" thread.... Un-be-friggen-lievable 911 calls

Awesome webcam-filmed music video. It's awesome because of the synchronization and kaleidoscope effects of the many webcams used.

So you think you can ride a bike?

Awesome! Whenever I've watched the X Games, the only events I watch are bike riding ones. It amazes me what those guys can do.

And a little Band of Horses never hurts.

I think your link broke.

That's cool, sort of like free running but with bikes. He can't have pneumatic tires surely?

Updated the link (in this post only) with a working one from YouTube.

Here it is again as plain text...
SOUR '日々の音色 (Hibi no neiro)'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfBlUQguvyw&feature=player_embedded#t=39

Yep - pretty normal bikes. He does break them on occasion :-)
He does a lot of training at my mate's skate park in Ocean Terminal in Edinburgh, and works at the bike shop you see in the video. Very cool - if mental!

Watching trials riding is always amazing. I recently saw this artistic cycling video which blew me away at their bike control.

Time lapse battlecat.

*edit*
(given the average age here, there's probably not too many He-Man fans)

Protect Insurance Companies PSA with Will Ferrell, Masi Oka, Olivia Wilde, Donald Faison, Jordana Spiro and more...

AWESOME.
Saw that last night.

Damn!

Tree touching powerlines bursts into flames

Yeah, that stuff is scary.

Each city contracts with a tree-trimming company, whose job is to keep that from ever happening. When they don't keep their end up, you get problems. One of the largest wildfires in my home town area was caused by that very situation, causing the loss of thousands of acres and millions of dollars of property damage. The resulting lawsuit was a thing of legend.

Shut Up Woman, Get on my Horse

Possibly NSFW.

Video of a very well done case mod. The Mac OS Xbox (YouTube link).

The music however, sucks. Sucks bad. Engadget quoted the video's author saying there's about $1500 worth of hardware in this case, which he claims (so incorrectly) is equivalent to $4500 Mac Pro (maybe in his wet dreams). That's like saying a Hyundai is the same as a BMW because you can put premium gas in it and drive it on the same road.

Using a single Core2Quad processor, 2.5" drives and shite Ballistix memory.

But, again, the mod work and the video are really great.

Mostly images, but there are some videos of it in action...

Volpin Props' BioShock costume.

Initial build, and images from initial Dragon*Con appearance.

Recent photo shoot at aquarium. BRILLIANT idea. Results: Phenomenal. More.

His current Ebay auction for the costume. I love some of the text at the bottom, including "Creepy Fiancée shown above is not part of this auction", and "How are we supposed to know what it looks like if you only show the luscious game art? How about some real photos?? Edit: Holy CRAP!"

The known universe - wow. Kind of irrelevant whether there's life on another planet when that other planet might take you a billion years to get to.

Yeah. That whole speed-of-light thing's a real downer...

Meh, it's not the speed of light that's the problem. It's the limited lifespans of the squishy wetware that wants to get from place to place.

Damn, if if we were immortal, I think a million or billion years, traveling at the speed of light, is still a hell of a long time to get from point a to point b. Especially when you consider that unless you're also visiting immortals, chance are when you get there whomever you were gong to see won't be home. Or that their home may not be there.

Any hugely meaningful space exploration will require the craft to get from point to point faster, much faster, than the speed of light. Even Star Wars and Star Trek speeds are ridiculously slow when you factor them into the size of our real universe. Though I suppose they've addressed that in a number of Trek episodes and series.

Both Star Trek and Star Wars pretty explicitly limit themselves to a single galaxy.

Star Trek occasionally comments on other galaxies as being very far away; for example, Kirk once noted that it would take thousands of years to get to the Andromeda Galaxy. Also, Voyager was transported to the "Gamma Quadrant", which is a quarter of the Milky Way disc, and it was impossibly far away from the "Alpha Quadrant" that the vast majority of the rest of Star Trek occurs in. The stable wormhole near to Deep Space 9 and Bajor led to and from the "Delta Quadrant", which had been unexplored territory before the discovery of the wormhole. Also, the original series shows there being a nearly impenetrable border at the edge of the galaxy.

Star Wars is less explicit, but it does state that it happens "in a galaxy far, far away".

Normal Star Trek speeds max out around 1500c, though, which still means that it would take decades (5-ish) to go from one end of a quadrant to the other.

I'm not familiar with Star Wars speeds.

They are exactly as fast as the waving of a hand.

This is (also) good. 7 part review of the Phantom Menace, 10 minutes per part. I've only watched the first two so far. Probably NSFW.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG1AWVLnl48

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqGU22UeZMM

Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOlG4T1S2lU

Part 5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBvp1r2UpiQ

Part 6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORWPCCzSgu0

Part 7: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIWKMgJs_Gs

Similar concept, opposite direction.

tanstaafl.

Ajijic? Admit it, you just let a chihuahua walk across your keyboard.

Tony's T-Shirt silhouette game had me looking at some old videos when I stumbled upon this gem. I didn't want to put that thread off topic so here it goes...

What's better than an original 1980's music video?

The 2005 music video for a remix of a classic 80's song...


Original: Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes.

Charlie Brooker - How To Report The News

Pee Wee Herman previews the iPad - unfortunately you can't play this video on an iPhone or iPad.

(Humor) Here's an OLPC ad that never was: http://www.ucbcomedy.com/videos/play/5674

Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot (a sort of demo-reel): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnozSXyF4k&feature=player_embedded

Basically a small glimpse at how prevalent chroma-keyed footage is used in your average TV program, even for shots you may have thought otherwise simple/normal.

Yeah, I saw that a few weeks ago. It's incredible how much of that is in your typical TV show. The thing that strikes me about that is how there are several of those instances where I don't really understand why they had to do that stuff. Instances where it seems like they could have just found a street or something. I guess getting location approvals is expensive.

I watched some of the other Stargate Studio clips. At first I was going "Hey I remember all those, but then wait a minute, I don't remember that one or that one... Then I figured it out, they were clips from never to be finished episodes of canceled shows.

I am so much more disgusted with the execs that made those decisions than I was a moment ago.

I had no idea that VFX were used so much in "simple" street level scenes ! Lots of those scenes I have seen and I have never spotted that they were effects shots.

So, why when I watch a typical modern movie are most of the VFX shots obvious and distracting ?

I'm not sure what you mean. I only picked out a few shows from that clip that have been canceled:

Ugly Betty - I could care less, I guess it dropped severely in popularity

Trauma - ill conceived to begin with. was an obvious replacement for ER, but nobody wanted that.

Eli Stone - I quite liked it, but I guess nobody else did, and the clip they used was in the very first episode, not an unaired one.

Heroes - probably should be cancelled


I didn't see many others, and the ones that I didn't recognize didn't look like series I'd care much for anyway.

It probably depends on the type of effect. Most of the ones shown in the video could just be normal filmed material overlaid into the appropriate places. IE, someone went and filmed a real street, then brought the footage back to build the set and place the green markers in appropriate places. Touching up/editing real video keeps a realistic feeling to it. The advantage here is they can film the street in ideal lighting/weather conditions, and still be able to film as many takes as necessary indoors, without worrying about continuity issues from sunlight position and such.

Most movies are going beyond this and creating their own scenes purely in a computer, so at that point it comes down to the quality of the artists and effects studios used. Making 3D things is easy. Making 3D things that look real and natural is much harder.

It probably comes down to scheduling. TV Shows are going to be under tighter time constraints to get things out, so they don't have time to wait for entire scenes to be created from scratch. Movies have plenty of time, and in some cases the actors filmed their performances years before a movies release.

That's just it. For every obvious and distracting effects shot that you notice, there are probably ten others you didn't notice.

Or in the case of the Star Wars prequels, 1000 other shots you did notice.

For instance, Avatar makes the Star Wars prequels look like the 1970's Sinbad movies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk&fmt=22

The thing that impresses me more than the motion stuff is the quality of the keyers they use. The lack of fringing and tinting is really quite good.

Not terrible, but also not terribly convincing comps.

Of course, it's not like they're using the chroma key feature on a video switcher. They're shooting in high def and/or using high resolution film, and then applying some pretty awesome software compositing tools to the problem. These days, the tools are getting quite advanced, being able to do things like resolve fine filigree objects, hair blowing in the wind, or even the transparency of smoke or water. They can anti-alias and get graduated transitions that look entirely convincing. Ever play with a Photoshop plug-in called Corel Knock Out? It's like the movie equivalent of that.

Something in particular I noticed about that demo reel, something that really helped sell the shots, was that many of the shots were outdoor shots. In other words, with only a few exceptions, if the scene was an outdoor scene, then it was actually shot outdoors with proper outdoor lighting.

I think that, as jaded viewers, we've come to recognize a chroma key shot any time we see an outdoor scene where the foreground actors are obviously being lit by indoor lighting. By making sure the outdoor shots are actually filmed outdoors, it takes away the single biggest problem that made our eyes recognize it as an effects shot.

There's other lighting tricks they can use to help the chroma key software. A big one is to hit the actors with a faint key light from behind (ie, the light shines from the approximate location of the green screen itself), and have the key light's color be exactly 180 degrees opposite the color of the green screen (ie, orange or red). This helps reduce the "green bounce" on the actors and makes the keying process more accurate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1JZ9O15280

Cheers

Cris.

What do they say about teaching grandmothers to suck eggs? I was impressed because I know first-hand how difficult it can be to get a good key sometimes.

IMHO, the key (pardon the pun) to getting a good key is not to subsample your chroma. You can do what you like with lighting and software tweaks but if you've started throwing colour information away before it's even left the camera, you've already lost the battle.

Defying Gravity had a lot of shots. Trauma had some that never made it into the show. Those are the ones I recall specifically.

Want to see a TERRIBLE pilot?

David Krumholtz must be quite happy this turd never aired.

Thread continued in Best Videos 2010