Friday, December 31, 2010

Recent clips - because the YouTube versions SUCK!!!

I just went in and watched some of my clips on YouTube. Ouch!!! The Tube uniformly destroyed all of them!!! Smooth animation looks extremely jerky, the clips look dark and grainy. Geeze!!

Let me apologize in advance for the size of these clips... and also for the way they'll automatically open and start playing full-screen and looping over and over. I had them set up to do that on my computer and forgot they'd do the same for anyone who downloads them. But all you have to do is hit the ESCAPE key on your keyboard to stop them.

So, since I have nothing actually NEW to post, here are a few clips you may have already seen crappy versions of:




Don't just click on the links... for some reason they'll show in bad aspect ratio. You need to download them - that's right click on a PC, control click on a Mac, then select the Download option (might be called something else, but you know what I mean...).

Finally, you get to see these clips the way I see them!

* Restoring the clips to normal:

To shut off the looping and "open in fullscreen" options -


First, if the clip is still playing fullscreen, tap the ESC key to reduce it to normal size. Now, while it's still playing or at least selected, go to the Quicktime menu bar that's showing across the top of your monitor and click on the Edit pulldown menu. Where it says LOOP there should be a little checkmark, meaning it's currently activated. Click on it and the checkmark should disappear. You've now disabled looping. You can re-enable it at any time by again clicking LOOP.

To disable "open in fullscreen" and "automatically play when opened", keep the clip playing and go to the WINDOW pulldown menu of Quicktime. Click on "Show Movie Properties". This opens the Properties window. Across the center of it is a row of buttons: Annotations, Resources, Audio Settings, and Presentation. Click on Presentation. The check boxes for "Automatically play movie when opened" and "Enter fullscreen mode when opened" should be checked. Uncheck them and close the box by clicking on the red button in the upper far left corner. Now when you close the movie itself a dialogue box will open asking if you want to save the changes you made. If so, click SAVE, or if you want it to open fullscreen and start playing next time, click DON'T SAVE.

Armed with this info, you can now set any of your own clips to play fullscreen when opened, and to loop automatically if you want. I do that for clips I want to study, or ones I just want to watch a lot.