Monday, June 25, 2012

Shawty......(Shorty...get it? hehe)

One thing you will notice about this blog, is the randomness of the content. I admire people that are capable of creating content on demand on a daily basis. The steady stream of videos, perceptions, opinions produced by some people is just astounding to me.

Content creation, for me, comes from my gut, from my soul, from my feeling of the moment. I hear a song, and think to myself  "Oh wow, I could totally see how I could put 'this' scene in". So I start the project, and go full steam ahead on the idea. Eventually, I get to a point where I'm not really inspired, and end up with an unfinished project.

I will, however, go ahead and compile and upload to see how the video will look online, and also get feedback from my close friends about the flow. I don't post these to my main YouTube account, as I try to keep that as my 'finished project' account. I don't want people linking to videos I'm going to eventually delete.  

In this example, it's a 30 second clip of a song that I will eventually finish. I have run across some technical issues in the character color choices and the chroma key coloring used (as you can tell below) in the WoW Model Viewer. 



Almost immediately after the video was uploaded, I got the email from YouTube about ContentID match. It's a 30 second clip. What was fair use again?


Friday, June 22, 2012

The Oatmeal VS FunnyJunk

Threadjack: This post has nothing to do with WoW, or Machinima, or music. It does, however, touch on copyright fuss.

The basic gist of this whole train wreck in motion is that The Oatmeal did a piece voicing an opinion about pic aggravators like FunnyJunk. Charles Carreon took offense to the piece, and set in motion a set of events that just got weirder as the week went on.

I'm not going to delve into details, there are plenty of people doing that already. Here's a set of links to read the insanity for yourself.

 Even I'm not THAT crazy.

http://theoatmeal.com/blog/funnyjunk_letter 

http://www.popehat.com/tag/oatmeal-v-funnyjunk/ 

http://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=charles+carreon 

If Blizzard doesn't build in a M-Fing Pterodactyl in Mists of Panderia, I will be very disappointed.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Anti is a Dirty Pirate

It's nearing the end of the expansion. People are tired of doing the same raids over and over. It's just getting into summer time and people want to go AFK for swimming, BBQ, poker tournaments, and movies. Diablo 3 also just came out, and a lot of people are off playing that. 25 man progression had kind of hit the proverbial wall, and a lot of people would rather go AFK than wipe on the same heroic bosses over and over.

Our 25 man ranks are starting to shrivel down to where we have to do 2 10-man groups for our weekday raids.

I personally prefer 25 man raiding. There is just something about the epicness of having 25 people gathered together trying to kill a boss. Anyone can do 10 man raids, but 25 man......that is a lot of work.

This past week was the first time in a couple of months in which we had to do dual 10 man raids. It's always kind of frustrating, no matter how you sort out the players, there is usually one group that ends up killing either more bosses, or kills things faster. The end of Wrath, when we were in ICC for almost a whole year, there were issues with people in guild feeling like there was an A and a B team. That's why we try to stick with doing 25 man raids, so there isn't any of that kind of fuss going on.


This past week the 10 man raid I was in ended up getting down 2 more bosses on heroic than we had done in the 25's. It was kind of bittersweet: nice to get the kill, but sad for the people that couldn't be/wasn't there with us. I went ahead and got everything set so that we could show the rest of the people that attend the 25 man raids what to expect.


I have 2 monitors set up on my computer. The 22" screen is where I play WoW, and the 19" is where I have Mumble, Chrome and Fraps running. Chrome is generally opened up to YouTube and I have a playlist of songs just for playing while raiding. 

On Zon'ozz, once we got the strat down pat, I went ahead and set up to record from the beginning of the pull. Most of the time when we post our kills, we add separate music and mute out the mumble conversations. However, I left the mumble conversations in this time so that people in guild could get a feel for how the fight goes, and what type of communication is needed.




From a copyright discussion standpoint you can barely hear Coldplay's - Sparks playing in the background in YouTube. How exactly does that work? Am I a dirty pirate?

I can tell you........

So this is the Heroic Lootship encounter we did on Wed night. We have never experienced this fight in 25 or 10 man mode on Heroic. We had wiped a few times, and after we pulled this one time, something told me to just record.

I hit F9, my hotkey for Fraps to start recording the encounter.

Again, I had YouTube in the background, this time playing Def Leppard, because I was on a Def Leppard kick for some reason that night. However, since I figured we were going to spend all night wiping on this boss, I had it playing louder than normal, just jamming during the fights/wipes.

Except, this time, I was recording, and I didn't have time to go to the 2nd screen to adjust the volume. I wasn't going to wipe the raid because I needed to turn down the music. Plus I did set up mumble to turn the volume down on all other sounds so that I could make sure the instructions from the other raiders were clearly heard.




Yes, we did end up getting our guild first Heroic Lootship kill in this recording.

I uploaded the video for the rest of the guild to be able to review to understand how to do the fight, from our guilds perspective.

The next day I got the following warning:



It appears that the only thing they have done is add the Artist and Buy links. I'm fine with that.

I guess I just don't understand, it's perfectly acceptable to open a browser, go to YouTube, and watch videos. It's perfectly acceptable to open up World of Warcraft and play the game. It's perfectly acceptable to open World of Warcraft and Fraps to record what is in the game.

However, if you happen to have YouTube open at the same time you have WoW and Fraps open, and it happens to record the audio from YouTube, now it makes me a Copyright Infringer? It doesn't even matter that I had purchased the cassette tape, AND the CD when the songs originally came out, and that I wasn't adding this music specifically to these recording.

Somehow, I'm still a dirty pirate.










Reality

Vimeo Pro has been good to me. Not a single problem yet with these guys.

I was lucky enough to have this video featured also:
http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/04/12/wow-moviewatch-reality/

I do, however, need to step up my game on the next one.


Reality from Antimatter the Insane on Vimeo.

Shortly after I finished this video, I found that sometimes, stepping out into the Reality isn't quite so bad.

Stay Tuned.

First Real Smack Down - I'll Fight for You

I find it quite ironic that the first hard core take down I have had on one of my videos happened to be on a song titled "I'll Fight For You".

I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's go back to December 2011-Jan 2012.

For the first time ever, our guild was able to muster through the 'Holiday Break' having enough people to still be able to raid 25 man Dragon Soul. Every year prior, when the holiday season would come around, people were too busy with Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year's plans to get online to raid. Every year prior, we would have to deal with a month or so of just running 10 man raids, because there was never enough people for 25's.

I was so excited, because not only is our guild the only one running 25 man raids, but we managed to do it at a time most guilds had to stop raiding, period. I was just so happy with the guildies, and the progression, and how much fun we were having.

One day I was rumbling around on YouTube, and the Vevo ads that kinda show up around the videos sometimes, one of them had a link to a Jason Derulo song that I recognized. It sounded like the Toto song "Africa" from the 80's, but updated. It totally fit how I felt about my friends in guild, how tight knit we had become, the challenges we had overcome to just have fun in game.

I had just gotten a new computer, and couldn't wait to try out the new software (Corel VideoStudio) on the next video. I just needed the inspiration. This was it.

I was having so much fun trying to figure out how to make the new software work: how to add a cleaner look to the videos, better transitions, shiner titles.

With my new computer, I had enough hard drive space to make the Fraps videos larger, crisper and also capture some of the conversations the guildies had during raids. I also purchased the song on iTunes, put a Tweet on Jason Derulo's Twitter about it, and I emailed his manager to try to get prior permission.

What was really cool is that one of our guildies pointed out that at the :35 second mark in the video, the words that the artist yells out (which we still aren't sure cause none of the lyrics sites mention it) actually sounds like one of the names of the guys in our guild (Renwald). 

Threadjack:
I want to take a quick minute here to give props to the Beepa Pty Ltd folks, the ones who make Fraps.

When I was setting up my new computer, I had forgotten to get the license information from the old computer for the Fraps license that I had purchased. I got even lazier and just went ahead and purchased another copy of the software one night in a fit because I didn't feel like fighting with support on trying to get my old license working and I was taping some stuff that I didn't want the watermark to show up on. I mean, cause that's what most software companies are like....I'm looking at you Adobe, Autodesk, Symantec.....fuss and fight and make legit license holders jump thru hoops to use what we paid for in an effort to stop the 'dirty pirates'.

I made the payment, and received an email shortly after. I was expecting it to have the license info. Instead, I received a note explaining that they have sent the money back to me, and resent my original license info.

They didn't have to. They could have just kept the money, and I would have paid for 2 licenses even though I was only going to use one.

THAT is how you treat your customers.

You guys are the shit. Just sayin'.

Back on Topic:

I get the video done, upload it to YouTube, and then go ahead and submit it to WoW Moviewatch on WoW Insider hoping it might get featured like "Colder..." did.

(Hint, the below link embed may not work for you)


Sure enough, a few days later....

http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/02/06/wow-moviewatch-ill-fight-for-you/

The part of the review that I thought was the best was this:

"While I like to think of myself as a fairly pop-culture-savvy dude, I don't know every artist, every song, and every cover created. While I obviously recognized the Toto sample, I've never been exposed to Jason Derulo. I really grooved to this song, and I loved the way it worked with the video. So now I get to enjoy a new artist, which is an added bonus to a video like this."

That is what Machinima is all about. We take what is on our minds, and mesh it to make something cool we can share. We don't do it for the money, it's all for the expression.

Two days after this story hit, the worst thing happened:


I had uploaded it to YouTube on Jan 31st. It was featured on Feb 6th. It was blocked on Feb 8th. WTF.

Even more WTF, it's only blocked if you are attempting to watch the video from inside the United States. So, this song that was created in the US, purchased in the US (from iTunes), remixed into a Mechinima in the United States, uploaded to a server in the United States, featured on a website that is hosted in the United States, yet everyone in the United States is blocked from viewing it.

What a bunch of crap.

I finally paid for the premium version of Vimeo so that the video could still be available to people in the US.



KoT - I'll Fight for You! from Antimatter the Insane on Vimeo.


To all of you Copyright Maximalists out there, you have no idea how much free advertising we do for you.


WTF? Auto Copyright Content Claim FAIL

Copyright holders have been fussing with Google for a few years now over copyright issues on YouTube. "You should be able to auto-yank copyrighted content" and "Ban infringers" and trying to get laws passed that violate the very principles this nation was founded on.

There is no innocent until proven guilty with the Copyright Maximalist crowd. Ban, Ban, Yank without a second thought.

However, as this example proves, the current systems that allows content to be claimed by the copyright holders is too open to abuse.

I made this little snippit video one day after our 10 man alt raid made it to the LootShip fight in Dragon Soul. It was about the same time Eminem released his new album, and I had this song on replay.

We had taken a time out to allow the raid leader to explain this fight to us, because we were kind of surprised to have made it this far this fast. Patch 4.3 had dropped on Nov. 29th, and here we were on Dec 13th already to the 6th boss in Dragon Soul.

This song was resounding in my head, I thought the graphics around the ship were amazing, and Uprise, the rogue that keeps running around, was cracking me up.



Short little clip, 1:13 in length.

Let's take a closer look at the YouTube Page.


The song is "Not Afraid" off of Eminem's Recovery Album. I had actually pre-ordered the album from iTunes so was able to get the entire album the day it came out. I used iTunes to extract as MP3, where I then imported it into Windows Media Player to merge with this Frapps video I took. 


I received another copyright notification, which I kinda expected I guess, but what I wasn't expecting was 2 of the links they slapped on my page. Let's take a closer look:


First - someone +1'd this on their Google+. That's fine

Second - Where the hell did this come from? If you click that link, it takes you to something called Aberdeen and North. Some sort of news broadcast. How on earth did they ever think that clicking that link would even come close to taking you to the full version of Eminem's "Not Afraid Song". 



Third - Artist: Eminem, this is YouTube's auto-generated playlist for the artist. No problem there.
Fourth - Buy: This is good, list of places to buy the song. I'm OK with that. 
Fifth - Contains Content from STV news - WTF??? WAT???


I have racked my brain trying to figure this one out. I cannot, for the life of me, find anything in the video I created that STV would even be able to claim copyright on. This was Eminem's song, and a Fraps video I TOOK, on my own computer, with my own paid for version of Fraps while I was in my paid for version of World of Warcraft. 

I have tried submitting to YouTube support, just to be ignored. Maybe someday, someone can use this to prove just how out of control automating copyright infringement reporting can get. 






Colder...

At it's peak, World of Warcraft had 12 Million active subscribers. I have to give it to the programmers and designers at Blizzard. That is entirely too many people to keep happy at once. Some people fussed about how easy WoW had become at the end of Wrath because they were catering to the casuals, others fussed about how Blizzard made WoW too hard in Cataclysm. Between the articles, comments on articles, YouTube Videos and forum posts, the uproar from the player base was at an all time high.




For me, it was kind of a fun circus to watch, including my own personal quips, I mean come on, who doesn't enjoy a good online squabble?....That is, until it hit a little closer to home.

Several of the people in our guild, including my closest friends that I had been spending a good 15-30 hours a week with online announced they were quitting the game, and never coming back.

I had always been friendly with people in the guild, but always had that 'meh, it's online, people come and go all the time' attitude, even the ones that I considered 'best' friends.

The announcement that so many of them were quitting at the same time came as a shock to my social circle that was almost as bad as if it happened in the flesh. That's when I realized these people were more than just 'online' people, and I was going to miss them terribly. I wasn't going to hear their voices, I wasn't going to be able to raid with them again. They were just gonna be, gone.

I'm not one for listening to country music all the time, but for some reason, this one song kept appearing when I would scan through stations on the radio. I finally sat down and listened to it. I knew it was the one, the song that was 'Goodbye'.

I had been using Fraps to capture videos ever since the first one, so I had a ton of clips to go through. I was able to convince one of the guys that was leaving to help me finish out the rest of the video. It was quite an undertaking, because some of the shots I wanted could only come from his end, due to Cataclysm phasing issues in certain zones. His computer was a lot better than mine, and the shots he did were stunning.

The file sizes, tho, were HUGE. I got a dropbox account set up to try to find a way for him to get his shots to me, but then we ran into his ISP limiting his bandwidth due to the amount of data he was uploading. I'm sure to them, they thought we were trying to pass copyrighted materials (kind of like in the old Napster days). 3 days of uploading and 2 days of downloading we decided that was enough. Here is is 2011, and we still can't pass data in a timely manner without ISP hiccups. So much for collaboration when you live 1000 miles away from the other person.

Threadjack 1:
Putting together this video was the first time I had really put my heart and soul into a production since I was probably 7 years old (1977). Back then we lived in a really old farmhouse out in the boonies of Missouri. This house was like 100 years old, dusty, falling apart, cold air seeped in everywhere. That was the year my mom was sick a lot, and so I spent a lot of time alone while she slept.

This house had a huge fireplace with a rock hearth that was almost half my height.

Edit: Found a pic of it!


I used to put on this Marty Robbins record, and stand on the fireplace hearth and pretend to sing to the crowd.





Oh I knew I would never make a career of singing and dancing. I wasn't near pretty enough, and had a terrible singing voice (still do). This was before MTV was around, but I knew that I enjoyed listening to a song, and making up the visual story in my head.

I did try to convince my teacher to let me put on a dance to this song for the talent show, but she thought it was a bit too hard core of a song for a bunch of 7 year olds to be exposed to. I ended up not doing anything for the talent show that year.

Threadjack 2:
Now that I think about it, that explains why this part of this song has been stuck in my head lately.....

B.o.B - Airplanes Part. 2

I guess there must be a reason why I missed my plane. I just haven't found it yet.

Back on Topic:

I was trying to get the video done before they were gone for good. Everyone's time was running out on their game cards, and they weren't going to renew.

I didn't have time to make it spruced up, or to play with the Model Viewer. I was only focused on the videos matching the words, and matching the times we spent together. A memorial of this snapshot of our lives at this moment in time.




At the same time that the video was done, Blizzard announced Transmog and other fun features of 4.3, and all of the people that were getting ready to leave decided to stay.

I was honored when WoW Insider featured it.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2011/09/14/wow-moviewatch-colder/

It's almost kind of bittersweet, knowing that the passion that fueled that creativity is actually something people can relate to. It's too late in the game of life to do anything with it, but as long as I can share it, that is satisfaction enough, for me.
















My First Machinima - Circa Oct/Nov 2010

One of the officers in our guild was running a screen shot contest for a game time card. She had been doing this for a few months, but I never was happy with any screen shots I had so I never submitted any.

I was still wanting to try my hand at making a machinima. The computer I was using at the time was an HP mini tower that was purchased in like 2004. Crappy on-board video card, missing parts, seized up fans, it's a wonder I was able to raid at all.

The November contest was 'In the Jungle". I went out to try to take some screen shots, and it hit me that I was going to use this as my first inspiration for my first machinima. It was the end of the Wrath of Lich King expansion, and I was bored to tears anyway (since I had already finished my biggest goal, which was getting the Insane Title.).

All I had was this old Windows XP computer and Windows Movie Maker. Everyone has to start somewhere. The fun part was that I was working on this just as the Pre-Cataclysm patch dropped, so I was able to capture some of the events that were going on in-game during that time. It's kinda like filming a piece of history, cause these events are not ones you will ever see in-game again.




I was really worried for a while about the copyright issues that might arise. I had already purchased this CD back in the day, and the mp3 from iTunes.

I did get a copyright notification from YouTube about the ContentID match, but all they did was put the links up of where the song could be purchased at, and the link to the artist page...oh and those Ads that pop up, I don't get any revenue from those. Not sure who does.

I know it's not near Wowcrendor, Nyhm, Madcow, or Oxhorn level, but it's a start.



Machinima Influence

I moved from taking videos of IRL things to in-game videos when I started playing World of Warcraft. One of the first machinimas I saw, I fell in love with. I knew that's what I wanted to do. No money, or fame to be had, just a way to express myself.





Man, these people are so creative.
(Warning, sometimes UMG tosses out a 'this is copyright, go to YouTube to watch, even tho it's very clear a parody)







Fair Use? Or Copyright Infringement?

This was my first experience with going up against a Copyright Infringement accusation.

Back in 2005, I went on a trip to the Bahamas on a Royal Caribbean cruise. One of the first stops the ship made was a little island owned by Royal Caribbean called CoCo Cay.

 This being my first experience outside of the States, and the first ever on a tropical island, I wanted to capture this moment of what it was like to show my friends and family. The sun, the wind, the surf, the music, the atmosphere were all aspects I wanted to be able to relive when I was older, and also share the experience with my children.

 I sat down at a picnic table, took out my camera, set it on the table, and pressed record.
 

The whole video is only about a minute long, and I added nothing to this video. Mind you, I don't have AdSense set up on my YouTube account at all.

In 2006, I uploaded the video to YouTube after a discussion I had with some people at church. One of the young ladies was from Nassau, and had never heard of CoCo Cay.

In 2011, I got a notification from YouTube that my video had copyrighted content and that even though they weren't going to take down my video, they slapped information about how to purchase the songs from iTunes. I now see that they have also added Google Play and AmazonMP3, and a link to the Artist on YouTube.  I kinda like that part, it's a Win-Win, in my opinion.

The biggest thing I didn't like is how the email from YouTube made it sound like I was a dirty thief, when this video was nothing more than a camera being set on a picnic table and the record button being pressed.

Copyright Madness

I don't even know where to begin. Here we are, in 2012, having discussions about copyright that are the biggest nit picking ever of how users want to consume media. Can you imagine if in 1980 the MPAA was able to follow you down the street with you carrying your boombox and charge you each time you played a song that was on that mix cassette tape, just because you recorded songs from the radio?

I got my first home computer in 1994, and Internet Access came shortly after. I remember the AOL chat rooms like it was yesterday. It was nothing more than a text box of scrolling text, but what made it amazing to me was that you could type in certain commands, and the chat room would do things like scroll a bunch of text, or mock users, or, my favorite, play a .wav file that everyone could hear (if they had the .wav file on their computer.). .Wav files were entirely too large to store an entire song, so most of them were just clips of either music, or little short ditties, or movie quotes. I think I still have a DVD around here somewhere with some of those.

 At the time that we were sharing those .wav files, we had discussions about copyright, but always came back to fair use, since we never used full songs or movies. The clips were always 10 or less seconds. Then, of course, the .mp3 was born, as was P2P file sharing.

At this point, Hollywood and the music creators had no input, no stance, nothing to say about copyright violations. I remember emailing a couple of the artists way back then, and never got a response from them. That was the true wild west of the Internet. We all ripped our CD's and stuffed em in our folder to share up to the world. A part of us were thinking "You Bastards charged me for the full record, the 2 song record, the cassette tape, the 2 song cassette tape, and the CD. Hell yea I'm gonna download the electronic one for free. I paid you 5x already for the same song!".

Now, let's jump forward 18 years. Hard drives have gotten larger. .Wav files have passed away and allowed other file formats to take the spotlight that can store the entire song in the same size as the 10 second clips. Online streaming is slowly becoming the preferred method of consuming media, as users really don't want to have to deal with keeping up with all those files (I know I don't). We just want to be able to access a specific song, on whatever device we have with us at the time, during any time of the day. This leads us up to where we are today.

Copyrights holders VS The Consumer

Maybe it was unfair to the artists that we spent the first few years of being online sharing up all of our songs to each other. We were just a bunch of pissed off customers that were tired of being forced to pay for the same thing over and over and over each time a new format came out. We were tired of having to pay for an entire album in which we only liked one song. We also didn't have ANY choices for purchasing songs from the artists that would play on our computers. There was no iTunes store, no Pandora, no Amazon. Even in 2012, it's still difficult to find some of the more obscure music in electronic format. It's getting better, we are offered up more choices than we were in the past.

The biggest issue is that 'fine line' between fair use and copyright infringement. Some of the copyright maximalists demand that you pay for each time you hear or play a song. Some demand you pay a higher price based on where you are physically at when the song is played. The consumer just wants to pay for the product, and use it however they please. I am just baffled that Copyright holders are trying to pass so many different laws to try to get back to where the consumer has to pay multiple times for the same product.

The software industry can get away with it, because those yearly subscription fees also grant a user the ability to get updates. A song doesn't have an update. There are no new features added to the song. Those should be a one time purchase, and done. Yet, the copyright holders get lawyers involved in individual cases to try to nail down the consumer into supporting the old business model of paying multiple times for the same thing.

To the consumer, it's easy. If I have paid for the song, it shouldn't matter what I do with it, as long as I am not making any money from playing the song. Any non-business related playing of the song is nothing more than free advertising for the artist. To the copyright holder, they just want to be able to put in minimal effort for maximum return, and to be able to charge multiple times for the same product. There has to be a happy medium in there for both sides.