Bones - Morning One

Here's a music video I directed, shot and animated for a friend. His music as always been amazing, and is constantly getting more mature and intricate. I had a great time making this video as I used a mix of animation, feedback, programming, and set-design to make it all come together.

Applescript: OverwriteSlicer

My work as an intern for George Blood L.P. is all over te place. I came on thinking I would be working with the digitization process, observing transfers of analog media and learning the nitty gritty. Instead, I've been working mostly the preservation and organization of their in-house documents and database. It's been incredibly interesting, and I've been given the chance to work as an information professional for a company that is incredibly well known in the cultural heritage industry.

I've been able to make a good impression on the other employees by giving them the tools they need to do their work faster and more efficiently. The Applescript droplet I wrote, OverwriteSlicer, is one example of this. One major problem that comes up working with digital audio is that one single file cannot be larger than 2 Gigabytes. So, a digital audio file samples at 94k/sec with a bitdepth of 24 bits cannot exceed one hour. While it's not often that a single Intellectual Unit will exceed an hour, it does happen, and when it does it causes problems for the engineers. Before, the engineers would have to make sure to stop the tape before it reached an hour, then rewind it ten seconds, and start a new transfer. This would give them two files, with a bit of overlap, that they could eventually put together in an access copy.

OverwriteSlicer does this automatically. It takes advantage of the fact that an audio file larger than 2 GB can exist, but cannot be opened. First, the engineer drops a folder containing audio files into the droplet. The droplet then determines if the file needs to be sliced by using the MediaInfo command line app to determine its size. If the file is too big to be opened, the droplet again uses MediaInfo to determine where the slice should happen. This is done by examining the bitrate of the file, which means that files of varying bitrates are compatible with OverwriteSlicer. The droplet makes sure to leave an overlap of 10 seconds on each now sound file, and puts them in a new folder within the original folder. The new files are saved as Broadcast WAV files, which is what the original files it gets are as well. The droplet makes sure to keep all embedded metadata intact across the new files, which is extremely important for George Blood L.P..