Quick Tip: Speed Up Playback on YouTube to Get Through Videos Faster

If you’re anything like me and come across talks on YouTube that are hours long on a regular basis, speeding up playback is a great way to get through them faster and have greater focus.

I like to watch videos at 1.5x speed, which is slow enough so I can still understand (usually), but fast enough so my mind can’t get distracted.

Enabling variable speed control on YouTube requires you to enter their beta HTML5 player trial, which you can find here. Keep in mind that your browser will need to meet certain requirements, and the video player may feel slightly different after you enable it.

After you’ve signed up for the HTML5 trial, clicking the little gear button on basically any video will bring up a selection of choices for playback. You can choose to play videos faster or slower.

Surprisingly, I found that when I started listening to talks at 1.5x speed, I ended up comprehending more of the talk than I did at slower speeds. I’m no cognitive expert, but it seems that playing the video faster causes me to pay much more attention.

Tags | technology, video, youtube

Behind The Playground

My Recent short film, “The Playground”, was created using a combination of camera hacks and heavy post processing.

Taking the Pictures:

With this video, I tried my best to document a wide variety of locations and subjects in my life, including family vacations and school events. The following is a complete list of all the shooting locations in order of appearance.

The entire video was made up of small, individual photographs resulting in a folders of pictures totaling over 25GB. Natively, my Canon Powershot S5 IS is unable to take pictures quickly and indefinitely, so I got a little help from a custom firmware known as  CHDK.

CHDK is a simple firmware you can install on top of your current Canon firmware that allows you to go beyond the built in features. Specifically, for “The Playground”, I used a script called fast intervalometer that took a picture approximately every half second.

Besides CHDK, this video would not be possible without the help of my full size tripod and gorillapod.

Processing the Pictures:

Every single frame that you see in this video was processed in Photoshop. That’s right. All 7,600 frames.

To generate the tilt-shift effect, I batched processed all the frames in Photoshop using a gradient on a quick mask layer and then using the lens blur effect. Each frame that was processed was then moved into a separate folder.

Check this out if you want more specific instructions.

Creating a Video

After I had created a folder with all of the frames processed, each scene was imported as a sequence into After Effects and rendered into a 30 frame per second video clip. Each of the scenes were then imported into Adobe Premiere, where I did my final touch-ups, ordering, and time manipulation.

Feel free to contact me if you have any more questions!

Tags | camera, photography, video

The Playground

The Playground.

Contains over 40 scenes shot in many different places over the span of a year, resulting in over 7000 photographs. Definitely the most extensive video I have ever worked on. I will put a behind the scenes post up soon!

HD and Fullscreen please.

Tags | video