Face Blurs in Sony Vegas 9

So, it's easy to find face blur tutorials all over youtube for sony vegas <9, but what about 9? There's a checkbox that seems to have gone missing.

Anyhoo, someone made a great tutorial at http://www.broadcastnewsroom.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=166551 that describes it to a T.

Making outgoing email work in vtigerCRM

I was looking for a CRM for xitome and found vtiger through my hosting provider.

out of the box the outgoing email didn't work. to make it work, i found this post to be helpful:

http://forums.vtiger.com/viewtopic.php?t=19432&highlight=gmail

Getting Asterisk Running

Asterisk seems like a pretty cool option for those that are interested in the masochistic endeavor of setting up and maintaining a system that is mission critical for communication.

I wanted to set one up for our house and found the following links to be useful:


http://www.geek.com/feature-how-to-build-and-customize-your-own-pbx-with-asterisk-20080812/ - This link is awesome! it gives you a shell script to run to setup your asterisk server. use the address below for the asterisk gui part.


Asterisk Gui SVN address: http://svn.digium.com/svn/asterisk-gui/branches/2.0 asterisk-gui

Editing MPEG2

I just got a Canon FS100 and was excited to start editing movies with it.

Like many camcorders, it outputs MPEG2 files.

Firstly, there's something weird going on where it names the files something other than .mpg (.mod), and you use their program to import them from the camera. Once imported, you can export them to a 720x380 mpeg2 avi.

The kicker lies when you want to edit. I tried using it with Sony Vegas and it didn't quite work. I found that the video appear, but the audio didn't. After some looking around, I learned that mpeg2 is a "transport" format (i have no idea what that means), but it has something to do with the fact that it's meant for video, not both video and audio.

The solution is to transcode into something else. MP4 works, as it's both video and audio.

You can do this using ffmpeg. Once you've got your exported avi, you can issue the command:

Ffmpeg -sameq -i input.mpg output.mp4

you can then drop the mp4 file into your vegas project and you'll be good to go!

First Post!

OK! so it's 1AM, i got kicked out of bed because i'm buzzed (and we have a baby, so totally reasonable), and i'm inspired..

I spend a lot of time sleuthing the internet to figure out the solutions to my issues, mostly those of a technical sort. I have this strange void in my soul that appears as i find posts of many like minded souls stuck in a similar predicament. i eventually solve my problem, but i know many others will fall into the same hole, and i hope they'll find their way out.

this blog is my contribution to the internet. i'm going to post the solutions to issues i've had and hopefully they'll be useful to someone (other than myself).