Cloud-TV brings you time-lapse footage of beautiful clouds.
The Cloud-TV experience is available as
- live stream on this website
- on DVD for home and commercial use
- as Stock Footage for use in your own projects
- as large scale art installations on screens and projections
Cloud-TV can be used as meditation aid, decorative artwork, scientific studies or to illustrate the passing of time in your own movies.
Cloud-TV started as a spin-off from The Book of Clouds, a collection of still images. Instead of posting only still images, I also shot short YouTube clips for occasional updates, which we thought would look great as a standalone project. Over the last two years, I’ve been shooting time-lapse clouds and have collected a large archive of material that I would like to share here with you. I’m currently shooting on both SD and HD, with more clips going into the library every week.
The inspiration for Cloud-TV came from an old German TV programme called Space Night, which showed Space Shuttle footage of Earth featuring a chilled-out soundtrack. It was on late at night as filler material, and I intend for Cloud-TV to work in the same way (hey, it’s cheap telly).
If you have any questions about this project and how I can help you utilise it, head over to the contact section and drop me a line.
FAQ / Credits / How did you do it?
I’m getting plenty of questions about many aspects of this project, including how to best shoot time-lapse footage, how to get live streaming video, and how to put it all together on one nasty website. Let me tell you about it:
- The footage is shot on Sony HDV and DV cameras, using a Firewire Connection that goes into a computer, running Adobe On Location. This software can take one picture every second, twice a second, once a minute, anything you want it to do. You can also shoot time-lapse footage using many digital stills cameras, like the wonderful Canon EOS 1Ds and the Remote Commander or attached computer running included software.
- I use Adobe Premiere CS Pro for editing, encoding and post production. You can also use Final Cut Pro if you’re on a Mac.
- Streaming Video Footage is brought to you by a service called Mogulus. You can either upload your own clips or import them from YouTube and broadcast them live. Mogulus has many nifty ins and outs, like ticker support for RSS feeds, branding, live camera connectivity – and it’s all free. Well worth a look.
- This Website is powered by an Open Source programme called Wordpress. It’s mainly used to host blogs on your own website, but it’s powerful and adaptable enough to put up an amazing looking website in minutes. You can get a free blog here and see how it works, or download the software and host it on your own server (provided you have hosting with MySQL enabled).
- The Template for this site layout is based on Aerodrome by Joe Fischler.
- Plugins used for the Cloud-TV experience are: Sociable to add social bookmarks, WP-ecommerce for the excellent shopping cart and direct download functionality, cformsII is used for the Contact Form, My Link Order and My Page Order for easier menu preparation within Wordpress.
- Music is an intergal part of the Cloud-TV experience. For the DVD version, I’ve decided to license music via the MCPRS. Due to licensing agreements, I am not allowed to use the same soundtrack for the live stream without paying extra royalties, unless I use exerpts. Hence I’ve written the longer songs myself using a very old Yamaha QY20 sequencer. Does the trick, and I’m glad to connect with the musical part of my brain.
- Web Hosting for the site is provided by Easyspace in Scotland, but there are many hosting services around.
- I’m using Filezilla for FTP uploads, and both Firefox and Internet Explorer 8 for testing.
If you have any other questions, please let me know and I’ll answer them as soon as I can.
A big THANK YOU to all Cloud-TV viewers for stopping by, and to all the people in the Open Source community who have worked very hard to make a project like this possible.