I did my homework on a Android emulator, that occurred to me being the cheapest way to find out if this works out well. On the web I discovered two tools that could do the work for me: ContactsCalendarSync and Touchdown. The native email clients  (POP/IMAP and GMail) were ruled out already,  my company doesn’t support IMAP nor POP mail. The main problem getting Exchange access using the commercially available tools appeared to be to access the Android Market.

I executed the following steps. First get an emulated version of the Android phone up and running:

1. Download the Android SDK

2. Create a phone image.

These are the images available:

cd android-sdk-linux_x86-1.5_r2/tools/ (change to the tools folder of the sdk)

./android  list (find out what images are available)

We create a 1.1 image, and I name it Android11. There appears to be a route that does some additional tweaking to get a semi 1.5 (cup-cake, with the on-screen keyboard) version, but I want to stick to as native as possible, ruling out that my over-tweakedemulated version can do a lot more/different that a real one. To create the 1.1 version:

./android  create avd -t 1 -n Android11

3. (Create another two images)

You do want to play with the ‘cupcake’ version (1.5)  as well! The second image is the ‘bare image’ and the third one contains Google’s applications like Google Maps etc.

./android  create avd -t 2 -n Android15 (to create the ‘bare’ version of Android’s 1.5, aka Cupcake)

./android  create avd -t 3 -n Android-full

4. Start the image (remind to take the version 1.1 image)

./emulator -avd Android11

Booting takes a while, the ANDROID text needs to be replaced by the nicely colored background. (It uses QEMU, one of the open sourceemulator/virtualization solution)

Then we need to update the (running!)  image with some additional packages to access the Android Market. Here you can find the 4 files needed. (You will need to register first!)

To be safe, I suggest to follow the same order I do when installing the packages:

adb install SetupWizard.apk (required to bind a Google account to the Android emulator)
adb install gtalkservice.apk (Gtalk service)
adb install Talk.apk (GTalk app)
adb install Vending.apk (Market)

Now you have Android market installed. Reboot your phone if needed, and find the market icon in the menu (3rd col, 3rd row). Open the Market and authenticate against Android Market using your Google account (or create a new one).

Congrats, you’re in! Now you can navigate to the Productivity section and look for Exchange by TouchDown.

Install the app, you have a 5 day free trail. It takes a little, and then you’re able to start TouchDown.

The bottom icon on the left opens the settings panels. There are three of them:

In the first panel (Account), provide your ID (the trick for me was to use the right domain, which was not the same as our web/email address domain), and enter your email address.

The second panel (Connection) I had to configure to use ActiveSync only, and state the server name. We use SSL of course.

The third panel (Advanced) deals with the advanced options. Here you specify some display settings, but more important what folders to sync. Include your calendar and contacts, and you’re ready to roll!

Return to your email and/or agenda, synchronize, and enjoy the virtue of Exchange email/calendar on your Android Emulator.

Since this is working, I trust it will do so on a real Android phone. The showstopper of no Exchange email/calendar on Android is successfully killed…

2 weeks later

My experiment was succesfull, and the request to purchase the phone as well. So now I am the lucky user of an Adroid. Forget the emulator stuff, it’s all fine using the real phone. And the Email (even push-mail) is working like a charm indeed! I purchased the Touchdown for $24.99 in the Android Market using Google Checkout, and I am on the go! having access to email, calendar, notes, todo’s – Android ready for the Enterprise!

Sidestep: Evolution

Considering the ease of configuration of the ActiveSync in Touchdown, why does it take Evolution so long to provide a way to connect to Exchange? Being a Linux user I have need to connect to Exchange in another way than IMAP/POP, or the insecure version of OWA2003/OWA2007… Why is there no https bridge to Exchange2007 or one using ActiveSync? (I am even prepared to pay for it…)

Wonder what the difference is with ‘Adams kernel‘…Have to test later.

And lets see how the disk usage is in fstab. I have a SSD only, so would like to prevent unnecessary disk access for temp-like stuff.

I added:

tmpfs      /tmp                    tmpfs        defaults      0 0
tmpfs      /var/tmp                tmpfs        defaults      0 0
tmpfs      /var/lock               tmpfs        defaults      0 0

I changed the occurences of ‘relatime’ with ‘noatime’

First impression:

• Why are all windows maximized by default?
• Why do netbooks use the small sized desktop for navigation and menu, where the big brothers have an empty desktop and a start menu??

But…

Two things (actually, three). The first is the dual screens… My laptop needs the proprietary ATI drivers, and aticonfig –install was run successfully. If I start with my second screen connected, the second screen hosts the application panels. This is quite a pain when I disconnect the screen, then I run without those panels Apart from that the order of applets is molested when I reboot to get the things right again. My current workaround is to connect only after logging into the system. At work my monitor still does not connect right (my laptop screen goes black, and/or 1one of the processor core’s shoots into 100% activity of some kind)

The second is Evolution. It appears the OWA 2007 MAPI integration is still not in the application. I hoped/expected it would be shipped with the 9.04 release of Ubuntu. So, still no Evolution for me…

The third is that Ubuntu just terminated in some form or kernel panic when I moved my mouse to the “publish” button. A hard kill using the 5 sec powerbutton did the trick, and caused the loss of half this post. Hhhmmm…

Apart from the above, I am a happy user of Jaunty for the last 45 minutes.

First tip: Don’t try this on a Sunday evening! Linux runs fine, but these windows app’s cause the problems. I have to work with the MS Office suite, and like to work with Enterprise Architect. Apart from that I liked to work with tools like Evernote, but already decided I can live without. Office and EA are a must. So I bought CrossOver, a commercial flavour of Wine, I had good experiences with 3 versions ago. Not this time. Office 2003 refused to install decently, mainly Service Pack 2 to be more exact. EA did not run either, but that can be caused by the fact we have a windows license, not the Linux/Wine one.

The alternative was using some virtual solution. I like VirtualBox, but ran into issues running USB like additions. VMWare player 2.5.x won the compatibility contest on external connectivity, and network connectivity (bridged networking if needed, VirtualBox expects one to do the bridging themselves, which is too much risk in running a business laptop).

After some fiddling with aticonfig I got my xorg setup under control serving my second screen and eventually got my wacom pen-tablet in a relative (mouse-like) manner.

I really enjoy my Ubuntu business proof, fast performing laptop. the only disadvantage is Evolution, or depending on the perspective, the fact that my company uses Exchange OWA 2007. There still is no good solution for that, so I am still using web mail through a web browser…

These days, everything would be different. I noticed sometimes I forgot to record ‘important’ events, actually enjoying the moment. And that is Good. I also noticed you get a lot of footage that needs cutting…

There is a need to reduce the amount of footage to create a piece of film someone is willing to see. I studied some documentaries what kind of techniques were used to present images and clips as a whole. My material is a lot of clips (often long shots, a lot of footage from driving in cars) and quite some pictures (and a lack of clips covering the same event). So, often I need to show images to complete a story due to missing clips.

This blog is about the selection of tools I used (or abandoned), not about how to shoot your material.

What I envisioned

• 

  sample 4-facet screen

  I have a lot of content that is too valuable to throw away, but too little is happening to justify full-screen sequential display. Therefore I want my editor to split the screen in 2, 3, or 4 segments. Each segment should be able to show a picture or moving footage. The sample on the left shows 4 pictures, of which each picture can cross-fade into another picture independently.

• I have a need for title elements. My movie is separated in categories, I want to group fragments by period, then by theme (like food, sleeping, playing)
• Only use cross-fades and fades to/from black between scenes.
• Because I have quite some pictures to insert in the DVD, there is a need to show the images in such a way my viewers don’t fall asleep. The Ken Burns effect (zoom in/out or pan over the picture) will be used to spice-up the pictures.
• In my dreams visualising the final DVD before I even started, I saw images of Google Earth spinning around and zooming in and out
• My footage is 16:9 aspect ratio, I have a wide screen LCD screen, so I want it wide screen on DVD.

The Process

The process of creating a DVD has several elementary stages:

1. Production – Record the footage with your camera
2. Capture – Get the footage onto the computer
3. Post processing- Edit the video fragments into the movie/DVD
4. Produce – Encoding and burning

For each of the steps there are various tools, and equally so for a Ubuntu user. We skip the production part; grab your camera (and a tripod) and shoot (see for tips’n tricks for example blib.tv).

Stage: Capture

Capturing the footage is the process of getting the movie fragments from the camera onto the computer. Usually it uses the firewire from PC to the camera. Although there appears to be a good command line tool in the repositories:

sudo apt-get install dvgrab
dvgrab –autosplit –format dv2 <filename>

I personally use Kino

sudo apt-get install kino

A non-linear video editor default provided by the Ubuntu repositories, or already installed in your favourite distribution. It automatically splits the video from the camera into separate files, and is able to append the date/time from the video fragments to the extracted files.

Stage: Post processing

Most work (from a time perspective) is getting to know your material, selection of pictures, and a script. Once that is done, you need a tool to edit the material into a video. Browsing the web I found the following most-likely candidates:

• Kino –  I did not manage to get the effects I needed. I can put the video fragments in order, but that’s it, and I need more…
• Cinelerra – (moving to Lumiera) I haven’t figured out how to use it within a decent amount of time. I think it does not fit my mindset. If my basic edits would have worked out, the Frei0r plugins would have provided me the functionality I needed.
• Open Movie Editor – Great tool, together with the Frei0r plugins. Extremely easy to cut/paste/cross-fade the video’s. The options of defining multiple tracks for video and audio creates a very intuitive experience.

My choice of editor is Open Movie Editor (OME).

deb http://repository.akirad.net akirad-hardy main
sudo apt-get install openmovieeditor frei0r-plugins

It is easy and intuitive to use. The first fragments are put in order in no time. On the top left one can navigate the directories to select the fragment needed. This fragment can be dragged on one of the video tracks (the rows in the bottom of the screen). The video tracks will accept video and image formats (like dv, avi, mov, png, jpg), the audio tracks will accept audio formats (for example wav and mp3). One can add and remove additional video and audio tracks, and label them with a recognisable name. For each individual video and audio fragment the volume can be tuned.

Video plugin’s
The Frei0r plugins can do a lot with mainly the color-side of video, but I love the Scale0rTilt plugin. It enables you to scale the fragment (statical image, as well as a video fragment), and to apply a translation to move the scaled fragment to the right position in the screen.

Tip: The menu’s provide tools to scale and pan video/images. Getting the positioning uniform during all of the video is quite hard using the interface. I frequently closed OME, and edited the XML by hand. (You can find it in the directory ‘Video Projects’ in your home directory.)

Aspect ratio and resolution

The resolution of an ‘ordinary’ DVD is quite low compared to for example digital photography. For video a resolution of only 720 x 576 is enough (for 4×3 aspect ratio). However, my camera creates files in 16×9 aspect ratio.  If I needed pictures that filled my 16×9 screen  I used jpeg’s of 1920×1080 pixels. Open Movie Editor will do the scaling.

The pane right above is the ‘preview’. The effects applied are shown in real-time. Once you are done editing you can render the movie; a final movie file will be created. This final file can then be used to burn to the DVD in the Produce stage.

Audio editing

If you use existing audio tracks you can play with the volume like explained above. OME is not meant to do some die-hard audio editing, then use your tools or prefernce (like Audacity).

Ken Burns

OME is good at showing images statically (I tried png, jpg) and fading in/out, but it cannot apply any effects (like Ken Burns effect). Therefore I needed to do some preprocessing of the images. I started with this script (See Marcus’ contribution).  It is based on ImageMagic and FFmpeg. Basically, you provide 6 parameters, 3 start parameters (scale, offset-x and offset-y) and the same parameters for the end-status. The scale is 1 number between 0 and 1. I needed some practice to get the feeling to really ‘master’ this tool (and I still do not).

You do need ImageMagic and FFmpeg

sudo apt-get install imagemagick ffmpeg

Running the script can look like

./animate.sh 200 0.7 0.2 0.3 1 0 0 image_name.jpg

This will create a mov-file containing 200 frames (using 25 frames a sec, it will be 8 seconds). The start image is zoomed-in (0.7) and has an offset of 0.2 (x), 0.3 (y). The flow will zoom out to the original size of the image.

Tip: First resize the picture to the size you need for the DVD It appears that a resize of the resulting mov-file does not always work out well. And if you first reduce the size of the picture, the process of creating a mov is much, much, much more faster.

Tip: Sometimes a zoom-out does not provide the result as expected. I noticed that the lines in the borders sometimes do not get overwritten by the new lines that should be defined as border. It looks like the border ‘collects garbage’. Changing the zoom direction fixed it for me, although I do not understand why this is.

In the last weeks of editing my DVD I ran into Diascope. It delivers high quality transitions, and is easy to use, especially if you need to process many similar (google-maps!) files where all textual navigation needs to be removed.

Stage: Produce

The hard part for me was getting the video edited. Now I need a nice graphical entry into my DVD, and get the thing into an ISO image. I found out there are a few candidates to serve my needs. What did I need? I want a background picture, and a seperate image for each of my 6 sections, no textual menu. The DVD should automatically continue with the next video when finishing the previous, and end showing the menu again.

• DeVeDe – (multiverse repository) It appears to me this can create multi-level DVD menu’s, but the menu entries are text based.
• QDVDauthor - (multiverse repository) This application did not do what I expected it to do.
• ManDVD - (multiverse repository) It does what it needs to do.

ManDVD
Install ManDVD direct from the multiverse  repository

sudo apt get install mandvd

ManDVD has a nice wizzard to get you through the process of creating the DVD. First you can define the background and an audio file (or decide you need a trailer first!). Next you can define the video tracks and assign titles and/or images to each fragment. The final step of preparation is positioning the images/textual menu entries on the screen, and define what the next action is (next video or the menu). Now you’re ready to generate the DVD structure.

Before generating you have to define (again) the aspect ratio of the video (4:3 or 16:9). In the ‘options’ panel you can optimize for LCD screens. Now you are ready to generate the DVD structure. This can take a while depending on the length of your video. If you finished your coffee and the DVD structure is generated, you can create an ISO of it. This is my preference because you can preview before burning and that saved me quite some DVD discs.

Disadvantage is that the last point where you can save your settings is quite in the beginning; just after selecting the video’s to include in your DVD. The position of the menu on screen appears not part of the saved info. This did not matter too much to me, because I included the date in the name of my Open Movie Rendered files.

Failures and unexplained

• The disadvantage of OME is the stability. The application will crash now and then, mostly only when playing video fragments. I cannot put my finger exactly on the ‘why’. Sometimes beacuse there appears to be ‘something’ with the ‘raw’ source video’s (cutting the first and last few microseconds can save you, before playing the fragment. The good news is that the auto-save will prevent any data loss (I have never lost anything). I have to admin that the unexpected crashes reduced over time, and sometimes became ‘expected’.
• The other disadvantage is the auto-save. It is the rescue if the application unexpectedly quits, but if I made a failure, I cannot ‘undo’ by reloading the original definition. A good example is when I re-installed my pc I started OME without the Frei0r plugins. OME automatically strips all Frei0r settings from the XML, and there is no way back. Make backups frequently!
• I did not manage to include GoogleEarth moving footage in my video. I tried to record my screen using CamStudio, but did not manage to find the right frame rate that fitted my Open Movie Editor. I yould expect that 25 frames/sec should work, the frame rate for Pal. My best guess is that it tries to capture 25 frames a sec, but never actually gets there, but some times gets closer than other times. It resulted in hik-ups, lots of time spent, and a great idea dropped.
• My second-best idea to include geographical info was to capture multiple GoogleMaps images and glue them together so the entire trip fits on a mega-image. The Ken Burns tooling came in handy. But… The maps contain text labels for the countries, and having many labels and this did not make a pretty video. The text became kind of micro-jumpy, the scrolling was not smooth enough. Another idea dropped, and quite some time invested.
• The third best idea is to have a static map that fits the screen from start to destination. It would be nice if an arc could be drawn that touches ground in the start and end position of the trip. I never managed to get this to work, so it became the streight line fadin in.
• Finally I am still puzzled about aspect ratio’s and screen sizes. Why does my camera comes with 16:9 aspect ratio where my wide screen TV only allows for 14:9? A strip of footage will dissapear on both sides… Or my TV does the scaling and that results in suprizes as well. Where to apply the aspect ratio, when generating the final formats from Open Movie Editor? Or should I leave the aspect ration 1:1 when exporting from OME, and apply the ratio in ManDVD? Or do both? My conclusion up till today is that this is still unclear to me… (any thoughts are appreciated!)