Stupid ho calls 911 trying to get laid
http://my.break.com/media/view.aspx?ContentID=128172Robert Redford using Phone Phreaking and Social Engineering techniques in the 1975 movie
Three Days of the Condorhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8fuaeVDyGkCrank Yankers "Caulk" Prank:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrX_AexyOg4OK now, Re: My new avatar:
How did you get that part of the show as an animated gif, and what is the max size allowed by the forums?
I downloaded the video off YouTube using the
VideoDownloader addon for Firefox. If you don't use Firefox (for shame!) or you can't install the addon for whatever reason, there are also some webpages that provide the same functionality without downloading or installing software.
Here's one.
The movies you see on YouTube, MySpace, etc. are encoded using Adobe (Macromedia) Flash, as Flash Movie files. Flash movie files have the extension ".flv". The software you use to download these Flash movies usually omits this filename extension, so you'll probably need to add the extension .flv to the downloaded file before you can play or edit it.
Most media players don't include native support for .flv.
VLC, however, is an excellent media player that does play flv's, along with just about any other audio or video format you can think of. Alternatively, you can download a
free, dedicated FLV player.
If you wish to convert the flv to other formats for viewing or editing (many video editing apps still don't include flv support either) then you'll need some conversion software. I often use
Total Video Converter. This is a shareware app with a fully functional 15-day trial period. After that time is up, you'll have to either pay to register the software or simply use
this s3r1al numb3r.
Now to answer your question of how I got the animated gif:
After downloading the .flv file, I used Total Video Converter to convert it to a series of still jpegs and output them into a folder.
After that, I imported the folder full of jpegs into Adobe ImageReady using File > Import > Folders as Frames
Once that was done, I went through the entire movie frame-by-frame and hand-edited it, cutting out all the portions that I didn't want, like the shots of Cartman on the couch.
Then I went back and removed every other frame to reduce the filesize. I did this several times, until I'd pared it down to a minimum, taking care to eliminate any redundant frames. Sometimes there would be like 5 identical frames in a row, and this is unnecessary in the gif format because the frame display time is variable..
Once I had edited my movie to its final version (more or less), I resized it to the dinky 100 x 100 pixel size limit for avatars on the PLA Forums (WTF, RBCP?). I had to adjust the "canvas size" to 100 x 100 and add some transparent space on the vertical dimension to avoid having the PLA Forums distort the movie into a square aspect ratio (again, RBCP, WTF?!?).
I saved the file as a gif using "Save Optimize As..." and watched the timing of the movie. By default, ImageReady puts no delay on any of the frames, so the animation went real fast and some of the action was too fast to be seen. So I went back and adjusted the timing of the various frames, saved it again as a gif to view the changes, and tweaked it again where needed until it flowed fairly smoothly and naturally.
Almost done! I set the optimization settings (in the "Optimize" palette) to eliminate dithering, minimize distortion and maximize the color palette of the finished gif.
Then I saved it, using "Save Optimize As..."
Finally, I uploaded it to Imageshack.us. Because it's being hosted offsite, this avoids RBCP's draconian rules regarding avatar filesize.
Whew!
That's all there is to it. I know it sounds like a lot of work because I'm a garrulous motherfucker, but the whole process really only took me about an hour and a half or so.
