When you export your Korsakow film and then view it on your computer in a browser the URL will begin with file://. This tells you you’re viewing the work on your computer, not via the internet. If you’re using Chrome there’s a know problem (which might be Flash, it might be Korsakow, I’m not sure and don’t really care) where if there is a space anywhere in the path to the file then it won’t work. A space, when rendered for HTML becomes %20% Continue reading →

When you are publishing media online, and you view it in your browser to check that it is OK, if the URL begins with file:// (or local:// for that matter) then the thing you are looking at is on your computer. It is not yet published on the inter web thingie. Things published on the web all must have the http or https prefix (HyerText Transfer Protocol). To publish it, if it is a stand alone web page/project (like a Korsakow film) you usually use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to transfer it to a web server.

On OS X flash is now not allowed to run from a local file. That means if you view flash that runs on your computer, rather than via a web server, it won’t run/work. This is a security issue, as it is possible to write flash that runs on your computer that can then get access to things on your computer it shouldn’t. THIS ONLY APPLIES TO FLASH THAT YOU RUN IN A WEB BROWSER FROM YOUR COMPUTER, NOT FILES YOU VIEW ONLINE ON Continue reading →

A common scenario witnessed this week.

Launch Korsakow. “Ok…”, drag some video in.
“Mmmm, Ok, that wasn’t so bad.”
Double click. “SNU editor? Whatever.”
Make some changes, add some keywords, link to an interface, and a thumbnail (“What’s the drama with this?, this is easy”). Repeat.
“Cool. Oh, better save the work.” File, Save.

“Shit.”

It’s all gone. “F$#kn rubbish piece of software.”

If you don’t want this experience then open Korsakow, and SAVE THE PROJECT BEFORE you add media, and you’ll be good. (Subject to good housekeeping.)

If you want to know why, continue reading (you are asking the software to do something impossible).

When you drag or insert media into your Korsakow project you are not putting the video ‘in to’ Korsakow. Korsakow just remembers an address of where your video is and so when you do an export it uses this address to go and find the video, and then transcode it when you export (publish) your film. This address is called an alias, and Korsakow relies on an alias, which is in effect a link to the real file, to find it.

Lots of programs use aliases as a way to have multiple copies of a file without actually having multiple copies of the file (incredibly useful when working with video), and it’s built into the Finder of OS X (File – Make alias, aka Command L). That’s pretty straight forward. Korsakow does this so that it doesn’t have to swallow video, which introduces all sorts of storage and data problems which would make the program slower (since it has to process all that video) and less agile (as keeping the media outside of the program makes it much easier to change the media as you go).

How do aliases work? By addresses and paths. All the files on your computer, much like everything on the Web, has a file path, which is its address. On a modern Mac this begins with / and then is a series of folder names and eventually a file, so a word doc in my user account on my computer might have the path /Users/amiles/Documents/somewriting.docx (That example isn’t strictly accurate but it will do.) This is its address.

Now we saw that Korsakow needs to know and remember the address of where your video is when you add it (which is why you don’t change the names of files, folders, or where they are on your computer after you add them to Korsakow unless you want export hell). I imagine it does this in the simplest way, which is to remember where these media files are in relation to where it is. On computers we call this a relative address. In other words if it knows it is here, and the video files are in a folder called ‘media’ next to it there, then Korsakow only needs to know an address that says ‘media’ to be able to find those videos. Now the program could me made to remember a full path, all way to the top of your computer, but then if you moved your project to another computer all these addresses and paths would break. By remembering where the media is relative to where the program file is makes it easy to move the project to other computers.

These relative addresses on a computer are just like personal directions you give someone in the street. When asked how to get from Carlton to Brunswick you don’t tell someone to first go to the Melbourne General Post Office, you say go up there, turn left, then right, etc – these are directions relative to where you currently are.)

Can you see the problem? If you haven’t yet saved your Korsakow project file (the file that ends in .krw that stores all these aliases) then how can it know where it is? And if it doesn’t know where it is how can it then find a way to where the video is? Now yes, just crashing is basically a bug. But it is happening because you’re asking a program to do something impossible – to think about the relative address to somewhere else without first telling it where it is. The fault here is with us, not it.

When using FTP to upload your completed K-film to themediastudents.net we have noticed that doing this from RMIT in the lab, using wifi (wireless) might not work. Would seem the IT gods at RMIT have blocked the port that FTP uses on wifi. No idea why. However, on ethernet (the blue lead you plug in), it’s not a problem. So if you are using your computer, our computer, over wifi, only at RMIT and it doesn’t work, do it somewhere else, or plug in the ethernet.

Dear Adrian,

I have trouble with inserting text to my Korksakov movie. I tried putting the text in both the “insert text” and “preview text” in SNU Editor but when I exported the movie nothing comes up

confused?

Dear Confused

The one you need is insert text, and you add the text in the SNU editor. To have it appear you need to edit the interface/s you are using, and place the insert text widget into the interface/s of your film. Where you put that widget is where your text will appear. You can also modify some of the features of the text using this widget (font size, colour).

Can be a pain. (Welcome to windows.) Three simple rules. Do not run the installer from the desktop, it won’t install properly (apparently a known windows issue). Secondly if you’ve installed it and you’ve got problems, try running:

http://korsakow.net/tools/qtjavahelp.jar

Thirdly, when you install QuickTime on Windows the default is to not install QuickTime for Java, so when you install it tick the install Java option (or go back and reinstall and tick this option). This solves the generic “Korsakow won’t run on windows” problems. Often helps. After that, we need to get into specifics, these are two known generic issues.

As the major k-film projects are being made something that is becoming clear is the, well I’ll call it fluidity, the fluidity of how to make a good k-film. What do I mean by this? Well, it is still not that clear as we are collectively inventing ways of working in a very new form, but it goes something like this.

A procedure is created that lets Continue reading →

Korsakow is software. It lets you make and publish multilinear video (and sound) works online. That is pretty much all you use it for and all it does.

Some questions: why do we use it? What might Continue reading →

How do I change the font, size, and colour of the text that the Korsakow film can display?

For those things that Korsakow displays, for example Continue reading →

These are some brief reflective notes on how I went about designing the interface for the k-film note commentaries that I made.

Figure One. First Interface.

Here the thumbnails are jpegs, that are black, with the text centred in each one. The background of the project is black. The text on all is Continue reading →