HDD Killers

So I was linked to a video last night. It was really weird, but kinda cool, someone dancing at 100 miles per hour to Daft Punk.

A girl had danced to a slowed down version of the song, then sped the video up. A very cool effect actually as it makes the video very snappy, with limbs that were moving fast suddenly stopping mid-motion in time to the song. Of course there were the usual retarded commenters who actually thought she could move that fast, but unless she had pneumatic cylinders instead of muscles, I highly doubt it.

Still, some people were adamant in their denial (and their caps lock), presumably these are the same people that claim the moon landing was faked and deny the holocaust. How people with such a low brain cell count even manage to turn a computer on in the first place I just don’t know, maybe someone does it for them.

For those of you wanting to see the video, I have uploaded it for your viewing pleasure.

All fear the slightly misaligned mono-arm! [8.77 MB]

Anyway, I decided I wanted to see what it looked like before it was sped up. So I did the obvious thing and slowed it down. Firstly I had to get the video, for which I used Vixy. How totally awesome, not only does it give me the video, but it gives it me as a DivX AVI.

The video was at 30 fps, so I guestimated that the original video was 25 fps, which would be right for a PAL camera (PAL being 50 half-frames / second). I used a direct stream copy in Virtual Dub to avoid compressing already compressed video (which would result in a loss of video quality).

For the audio, I downloaded a CD quality version of the song and opened it up in good ol’ Audacity. To make it match the video I slowed it down by 16.666%, then I raised the pitch by 20% to match the original song. Finally I exported it as a WAV file.

Back to Virtual Dub and I imported said WAV file, only thing left to do is create the new AVI file. Unfortunately Virtual Dub doesn’t let me compress audio to any greater than 56 Kbps, which is somewhat lacking. Because of that I went back into Audacity and halved the sampling rate to 22.05 kHz, which should prevent some of the hit on quality that would otherwise result. I also couldn’t work out how to import an already compressed MP3 into Virtual Dub, which would have been very preferable, since Audacity uses LAME to create MP3’s (and at a higher bit rate too).

So here we are then, the final product, now with 1/6 extra free.

This would look cooler if there was a mirror down
the middle reflecting her right hand side. [8.72 MB]

One last thing, I should mention is that you need to be able to play DivX files, so if you can’t already, go here to get the codec.