Where is tinaecmusic? Tina Chen? brianlittrellfan15? What happened to her?

So after Perez Hilton exposed Tina to the world, she took down nearly all her music and vlog postings off of youtube
http://www.youtube.com/user/brianlittrellfan15
http://www.youtube.com/user/tinaecmusic

I am a huge fan of hers, and I want her to come back so bad!

Apparently, she made a nasty video back to Perez explaining her outrage to him.
She truly speaks her mind without censor.

This may be the last place to see her videos… don’t miss out on her – Shes the best!
http://flix55.com/watch/rFjd3sPsKYP

Basic Tips and Techniques for Filming

Basic Tips and Techniques for Filming

Rule of Thirds:
Something to be aware of is having the focal point of your shot about 1/3 of the way down from the screen. This mimics how you actually see scenes in real life. This is especially important when we are seeing a person face to face. The eyes of the person you are focused on should be at 1/3 down from the top of the screen.
When filming a moving object, or something with direction to one side of the space, leave more room in front of the object than behind. Make more room where it is going.
Here is a site with photos explaining the rule of thirds.
http://photoinf.com/General/KODAK/guidelines_for_better_photographic_composition_rule_of_thirds.html

Use a tripod (or other device to place your camera on) as much as possible. When you are holding the camera with your hand, find something steady to lean on. If you are sitting down, use your leg to steady the camera. Use a pole, the side of a building, a bench. Hands usually shake, look around you, you can usually find something solid to help you stay steady.
You don’t have to get a big clunky tripod either. I had a small, 3 inch tripod. It was very handy and versatile. You set it up anywhere, and you have a lot of options for camera angles, not just limited to being flush with the surface.

Be aware of external sound. Cars moving in the background, scenes in crowded places like bars or restaurants will drown out the audio you are trying to pick up – unless you have an external microphone. The sound may be half of the filming experience, it’s easy to forget about it, but sound is as necessary as the picture for producing your video.

Don’t count on fixing ‘it’ later. It’s easy to say that you will do a voice over or use some editing technique to fix some mistake later. In reality, its much harder to fix it in editing (post) than to just film it over again. Shoot extra shots, do multiple takes; it’s better to spend a couple more minutes shooting than to get home and realize that you are short on the footage you need. Ayayay.

Keep in mind the capabilities of the final destination for your video. The capabilities of a movie theater are much greater than that of internet video (such as Flix55). The resolution of internet video is much smaller and even the sound capabilities are not as refined. Think about how you are watching videos: on a small screen on your computer and with computer speakers. For what we are doing, we don’t need professional equipment.
And we may not want pro equipment either: Go in public, you will get much less attention (and distractions) filming with your camcorder than with a big professional model with microphones coming out the top. Blend in.

Make sure you have an extra battery, and extra tapes – just in case. When you are stuck, you will pay anything for some more juice or more tape. I suggest you buy accessories in bulk, you can get 10+ tapes off sites like ebay or amazon for the same price as a few at brick and mortar stores like best buy (buy online if there is little chance you will have to return the product).

Use zoom as little as possible. The pictures quality may suffer, but more devastatingly, the camera footage will be much shakier.

Shoot with the light not against it. You want your subjects to have bright faces, rather than the sun or another light source being directly behind them (unless you are going for that effect)

Technical Tips:
Become familiar with auto vs manual focus.
Sometimes you do not want to focus in on what is directly in front of you, then you will need to manual zoom. Most handheld cameras, under manual focus, will focus on the crosshair or dot or square in the center. Put that mark on what you want to focus on, press the manual focus button, and when what you want is in focus, frame your shot.
And focus on the EYES.

White Balance:
Many new cameras are relatively good with automatic white balance. Basically whenever you are filming in places with different lighting sources (sun, fluorescent lights, halogen lights, etc.), the camera will need to re-white balance whenever you switch locations. When the video looks blue and washed out, this is usually as a result of not white balancing. To white balance, focus on something completely white (a piece of paper, a t shirt, a wall) and press the button on your camera to white balance.

Helpful sites

http://www.serif.com/education/tutorials/movieplus/MoviePlus_film_techniques.pdf
Basic Camera shots, great rules and terms. Use the awkward shots sparingly, if at all. You have your story to tell, don’t complicate it by adding low angle/high angle/ extreme close-ups. In a 90 minute movie, you might see these camera angles used 9 times in the movie; the rate here is 1 per 10 minutes – that is a good ratio for not getting too artsy and still convey your ideas.

http://clubs.myams.org/studioq/pdfs/camera&composition.pdf

Demonstration of an Interlaced Video and a Deinterlaced Video

Do I need to deinterlace my video? What does interlaced and deinterlaced mean? Why do I get these jagged lines on my video?

I recently uploaded two versions of the same video to my facebook page to demonstrate the visible difference between a video that is interlaced and one that is deinterlaced or scanned progressively. I have attached a couple stills from each clip to demonstrate the point. You can see artifacts in the first video. This is the combing or “mouse teeth” effect that can occur with interlaced video. It is always more apparent when you watch an interlaced video on computer monitors because they natively use progressive scanning. Notice that you don’t see artifacts in the second still, that is because I deinterlaced this version.

For those of you who do not know what interlacing is, I will give you a brief description. There are basically two methods of scanning when a video is played, interlace and progressive scan. Interlacing involves the displaying of even horizontal lines of resolution followed by odd lines of resolution in a single frame of video. Whereas, progressive scanning, involves displaying a single frame of video by scanning horizontal lines of resolution from the top to the bottom of the screen. This translates into a smoother and crisper video especially when there is a lot of motion being displayed, particularly in sports broadcasts, which is why some HD stations choose to broadcast major sporting events in 720p as opposed to 1080i. They are willing to sacrifice the higher resolution for a more clean look. It is still open to debate, however, whether the tradeoff is worth it.

As demonstrated by the pictures, interlacing can lead to some bizarre results. You might be inclined to ask why this method is even used. The answer is because it is the standard used by television sets (CRTs) and has been for many years. Nonetheless, when we display our videos online or just keep them on our computer, it is usually wise to deinterlace them when possible because there aren’t the same standards and restrictions in the computer world as there is on a standard NTSC broadcast. Therefore, we should take advantage of the freedom we have in displaying our videos on sites such as youtube and facebook, so that our videos look as good and as sharp as possible.

How to resize videos in myspace (or any other site)

How do make the videos that I put in my myspace profile smaller? or bigger?
How do I resize videos?

Heres the solution:
you  embed your videos as usual in your myspace

Now, you go to the code which contains the code for the embedded video. In that area, look for the code which says something like: height=”###” width=”###” – it should be near the beginning.

This is the code which tells myspace (or any other site) the dimensions for your video.

Now, take those numbers and change them larger or smaller – but keep the same ratio.
For example, the  youtube videos will have a width and height of 425 and 350
You want to adjust these so that the ratio of width to height is the same, however you adjust it. In this example, if you want to make it half as big, you would make the new W = 212 and H=175.
if you want to make it twice as big, you would make the width 850 and the height 700.

NetVibes – Streamline your internet time.

How do I cut down my internet time?

Stamp of approval: Netvibes.com

The new state of the internet is that it is so wide open, there are now so many avenues to spend your time in. Every time I sit at a computer, there is a routine of checking my 2 main emails (general and personal) then less often my other 2 older professional emails, also checking the blogs, and then the stocks, and the news of the day, and then going on to a search engine or wiki to get started in what I sat down to do in the first place.

At first I used the google personalized homepage, which worked well. Netvibes seems to fit more stuff though. Useful stuff.

Netvibes is helping me streamline my internet time tremendously. Now, when I go to my computer, I go to one site, and I can check everything at the same time. I have 3 emails, 3 rss blog feeds, my google calendar, the NY times, and a few search engines. Also the weather. Oh, and tech news, and digg. And also a to-do list. This eliminates at least 4 sites I would normally have to log on to.

There are also add-ons for keeping tabs on myspace people, ebay, craigslist…. I don’t use them though.

Now, comes the period where we need to cut down our internet time. Lets get lives. Hope this helps.

How do I put a link into myspace comments? or put a URL link anywhere?

MYSPACE CHANGED THEIR CODES SO THAT LINKS NOW GO THROUGH THEIR SITE. This is supposed to protect you from spammers or other malicious individuals, but I think it just reduces your accountability on the internet. People should be able to see the link they are clicking on….
That being said..

There are no stupid questions, only stupid people. I can see how people come about my blog page, by what searches. There has been a number which came about by the search “how do I put URL into myspace?” which I interpret as people wanting to know how to put in a link on a myspace comment or any other site.

IF YOU WANT TO COPY AND PASTE THE CODE, CLICK THIS LINK

BELOW IS A VISUAL EXAMPLE ONLY. WordPress messes up the quotes and this will not work unless you replace the quotes.

<a href=”http://orlickenterprise.com”>my site</a>
will give us: my site

If you want the link to open in a New Window – this is nice, you probably do…
<a href=”http://WEBSITE URL” target=”_blank”>TEXT TO DISPLAY</a>
Which will yield:
my other site

you can use that code on most social networking sites (myspace, not facebook). its html.

A trick I have been doing is that all the code I frequently use to write comments on profiles and blogs I put in a notepad file on my desktop for easy access. In that file, I have some numbers I have to enter frequently like some long PIN numbers and also the code for inserting a picture and the code for linking.
It is code, and it is fickle. You won’t leave room for mistakes if you cut and paste from your notepad file. And its quick!

spreading the word

There are so many avenues to spread your word through. I can spread myself thin and do them all. Doesnt seem like its the most constructive use of my time. I am starting to believe that the filter to the top is much better now. What I mean is the cream is actually the creamiest. What I mean is that the only the best stuff gets to the top now. There is no way I can create the best stuff. some old addage says theres always someone better than you. I could really care less about the person in iowa shooting freethrows who is better than me. I only see my competition, and there is a lot. With what we are doing, I believe our best option is to be a forum for other people. This reminds me a lot of when I ran a tv station in college. All I did was make it the most open for people to express themselves. I tried not to deny anyones dreams, I wanted to make everyones creations happen. and it worked out pretty well. Same goes for here, theres no way we are going to consistently create the word on the street. We need to make it so we are the best outlet for other peoples creations. only the best will still be around in 2 years. I want to work here so badly that I feel like its up to me to make it work> Im going to do my best. heavy.com has some good outlets for spreading the word. but I am not about to advertise for them. they look nice but it reminds me of break.com with the corporate influence. very starsky and hutch animation like.

How do I insert a video into myspace? as a comment?

I thought I would never do this. I was going to abandon it. This has been on my mind though. I have good information that I come across, that should be out there. I think this might work. this might just work….

My job lately has been creating myspace profiles, and maintaining them. someone wanted to comment a video in one of our profiles, but didnt know how. heres how(assuming you have a video)::
How do I insert a video into myspace?

1-upload it into a site like youtube…
2-view the video
C-on that page, there should be a box that says EMBED
D-click once on the area next to it , then copy it (right click, copy or CTL C)
f-paste this info into the section where would normally write a comment.

sites that host your video will almost always have a way to insert your video into wherever you want it to go. they want you to spread it too.:
If you find that there is some writing above or below your video which says: width=”300″ height=”150″
you will have to go into the code itself and do a little big of operating(don’t worry, its very easy) -> all you have to do is edit your comment and take out the code that looks like this ——-<object width=”300″ height=”150″>——- then repost.

send a comment if you need any more help

now, also, for making profiles. If you dont pimp your profile, you are nobody. people wont respect you in the community. Myspace is getting these great video and picture slideshows – but you can only take in videos which are in the myspace system – not from other sources like youtube. Kudos anyhow for that.
For making cool backgrounds, and your boxes transparent or moderately opaque, here are some tools, I made today.
They are all clean now. if you do a search for them, they will always try to enter in their own ads into your myspace page. dont be violated. I havent sold out yet – so here is some very clean code for pimping your myspace. Be Safe.

For: transparent boxes – background image
<STYLE>
td, table, tr, span, li, p, div, textarea, DIV
{
background-color: transparent;
}
body
{
background-image: url(http://XXXXXXXXXX);
background-repeat: repeat;
}
</STYLE>

opaque boxes and a background image>>>>
<style type=”text/css”>
body {
background: url(http://XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX);
}
</style>
<style type=”text/css”>
table, td, textarea, a, body, input{background-color:transparent;border:none;border-width:0}
table table table {border:1px double; border-color: 000000; padding:1; background-color:FFFFFF; filter:alpha(opacity=90); -moz-opacity:0.9; opacity:0.9; -khtml-opacity:0.9;}
table table{border:0px}
table table table table{border:0px}
</style>

insert image with link
<a target=”_blank” href=”http://HERE IS WHERE YOU PASTE THE ADDRESS OF WHAT YOU WANT IT TO LINK TO”><img src=”http://PASTE THE ACTUAL IMAGE LOCATION HERE”></a><br>