jasonhenley

Automated Highway System

I hate driving to work, it pisses me off, the whole ritual seems so outdated. Mass transit also is lame, I don't want to spend time driving to bus station or train station or metro station. I want to be in my car and just going faster. Current highways technology is completely unacceptable. Highway travel is dangerous, it's slow and terribly inefficient. The technology I'd love to see during my lifetime is automated highways. If responsibility for the operation of cars is taken away from people and given to machine, we could improve safety, and arrival times. 

Of course to avoid massive technology vulnerabilities cars must be responsible for their own movements, no giant high speed conveyor belts. I think an automated highway would look very similar to our current highways. The only visible difference would be cars would move much faster, and they would automatically rearrange themselves to accommodate people getting on and off the highway in kind of a synchronized swimmer-esque dance.  Of course cars will still break down from time to time or hit some a deer or something but with the automated highway system there will be no dangerous and time consuming rubbernecking. All cars would share their speed and location information with each other which would improve emergency driving situations.

Of course there would be little incentive to develop this complicated and expensive technology in cars if there is no infrastructure to support it. This is why transportation technology changes so little over time. Automated cars don't seem to be a completely unreasonable hope. I bet this technology will be created for something random and then used for this. And once automated highways are available, everyone will think they are cool, the government will force us to use them, the speed limits will be adjusted to take advantage, and all will be wonderful.

Intro to Quicktime

Like any man oozing with sex appeal I've had video codecs on my mind for the past few weeks. Having finally taken the full plunge into HD video, I've had  to interact more often with various video formats which I think can be damn confusing. So today I thought I'd talk a moment about how Quicktime works.

Think about your home theater setup and all the various devices you hook up to it. There's DVD, Blu-ray, DVR, game consoles, CD players, MP3 players, etc. All of these devices function differently and all have their own specific uses. Media is created with a specific format in mind. If you were a musician, you wouldn't create your music album as a video game or a Blu-ray disc, that wouldn't make any sense, you'd create a CD or MP3. People who make music, movies, video games, TV all have their own very specific technological needs. The unifying factor within this popuri of devices is the TV and speakers. No matter what video will always show up on your TV and audio always plays through your speakers. This collection of audio/video equipment is collectively dubbed "The Home Theater."

Since imaginary equipment is so much fun, Imagine stripping down all the physical components from a home theater, you would be left with just software from the equi and data-only version of the home theater. Quicktime is the software only version of the home theater. The software's interface acts like a TV and speakers and its codecs act as unique devices, all you need to add is the media.

Pretend I want to play a Blu-ray disc at your house but you don't have a Blu-ray player. To play that media you are required to go out to a store and purchase a new device to make your home theater compatible with my media. In the purely digital world of Quicktime, physical devices are irrelevant, and acquiring updated technology is only a matter of a quick download and not and expensive purchase (sometimes). If you aquire media files but lack the software to handle them, you simply download those software instructions or codecs. The term codec refers to code/decode which basically means how audio/video is created assembled from data.

All Quicktime files carry the file extension .mov. Don't be confused into thinking that all .mov files are the same. All .mov means is that this particular file belongs in the digital home theater, it does not say anything about what kind of media it is. There is an obscenely large number of codecs for Quicktime and I still only understand a small handful of them, but for some reason I find this interesting.

Fun DVD facts to impress girls with

The first incarnation of DVD held 1.46GB on a single layered disc (referred to as DVD-1)  Over time the spec improved all the way up to the current 4.7GB (now referred to as DVD-5). Dual layered discs are an improvement of DVD-5 technology by allowing 8.54GB of space which has been achieved by the addition of a transparent layer of data (this is known as DVD-9). If you want to get crazy and who wouldn't, there are also a few DVD formats above DVD-9 which are basically double sided discs: 2 single layers (DVD-10), 1 single and 1 dual layer (DVD-14), or 2 dual layer (DVD-19).

Blu-ray also supports dual layers, there's a 25GB single layer disc version and a 50GB dual layer version.

HD DVD was supposed to offer a third layer but they lose. 

S.A.D.

I don't really understand Seasonal Affective Disorder. This stupid little problem is that the lack of sunlight during the winter months somehow causes season depression. My doctor told me that I have it and it seems that she is correct.  I spend the majority of my time inside no matter what time of year it is so what's different? And even during the winter months, I don't perceive the sunlight being any less then summer months. All I have to say is that SAD is stupid and annoying and I disrespect it thoroughly! 

 

Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort on 150 Anniversary of Orgin of Species

Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort have created a 150th anniversary edition of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. In their edition, Ray Comfort has included a 50 page intro which attempts to debunk the theory of evolution and connect it to the views of Adolf Hitler. According to them, this is a loop hole in which they can use to gain access to the minds of those who attend schools because schools already teach Darwin, and how could they turn down a good Chucky D book? Their presentation of this scheme to me comes across so desperate. After all this is coming from the same people that claim the banana is proof that god is the creator.

Richard Dawkins is asking for people to confiscate as many of these books as possible and remove the 50 page intro and then redistribute the actual Origin of Species unaltered.

Google Fast Flip

Google Labs just released with Fast Flip. It's a new way of interacting with news stories. The best way I can think of describing it is: You know how web browsers are now displaying bookmarks graphically with baby-sized previews of each web page? Well Google Flip is that idea but with news articles. You select the topic: World, Politics, Business, Science and Technology, Health etc. and Google Flip graphically shows you the websites (five at a time) and you an scroll forward to see even more. 

Once you settle on something that sounds interesting to you, you click on it and the article goes full screen, however the coolness doesn't stop there. Once you are brought into the website you selected, you sill have the ability to cycle (or flip)  through forward and backward other articles. It's supposed to make you feel like you are flipping through a magazine or newspaper. 

Play with it, it's pretty cool.

Cobra Crane I Plus

Ashley and I bought a Cobra Crane for our upcoming project. I'm so excited about this thing, I haven't got the appropriate speed down just yet, but here are some tests I did with it in our back yard.

Apple Color

In my high school video class a common question was, "Why do movies look so different then TV?" Usually the answer included stuff about the different frame rates, or aspect ratios, leaving out the one of the most unsung tasks, color grading. In my opinion, the major difference between the quality of movies and TV is color.

Ever since I started using non linear editing systems such as Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, or Avid, I've gone way overboard in messing around with color correction filters. I had great fun, but I wasn't very good at it. I basically knew that I just wanted my video to look different, never mind what that different was. Often people flesh tones would glow radio active red, or the sky would turn green - hey I was trying.

Eventually, I came to understand the 3-way color corrector filter in Final Cut Pro and my color effects started looking better.

Recently, Ashley and I upgraded to Final Cut Pro 7 in preparation for an upcoming project. In case you didn't read the title of this entry, Final Cut Studio now comes with Color. Color is professional color grading program which works seamlessly with Final Cut Pro. Color is not a filter, it's a full blown high end color grading software with stupidly awesome flexibility. Here are a few test shots I worked on.

 

Back when I was in college I was required to have my thesis film be professionally color corrected. For about $2000.00, my group and I sat in and watched as our colorist moved around the $900,000.00 suite to make our movie look cool (yea we asked how much the equipment cost). For only $1000.00 (or $300 for an upgrade) and some learning time, you can do yourself what we once paid so much for someone else to do.

Do you need it? If you only need to tweak color balance issues, maybe not. Like any new software, it takes effort to learn, and to start out I was really frustrated. I've spent several days watching online tutorials and today was the first I that really dove in and was happy with what I got.

For me the Final Cut Pro 3-way color corrector is a hard filter to let go of. However, if you dare move on, what's waiting for you inside of color is the freedom to make your shots look not just better but frighteningly good.  Here are some more of my test shots:

 

 

 

Not too happy with that washed out sky, why not change it to a bright blue? or fiery red? or maybe purple.... there's nothing stopping you!

For some reason the interface doesn't match anything else within Final Cut Studio. Personally I think it was an effort to make the program look more professional, because for some reason in this business, the more complex the program is, the more people are impressed by it and thus trust it. I think Apple is tired of people knocking on Final Cut's friendly looking interface so they sold out and put out a scary looking one.

Another strange tid-bit about the interface is that there are no sliders. When you want to change the values of something, you either have to enter it numerically, or hover the mouse over the tool and use the scroll wheel. At first I was really annoyed by this, but I've gotten into it. It kinda feels like your handling a physical knob or dial which makes it okay.

I have this short little two minute test project which I used to test Color. Upon finishing I had so much fun, that I completely started coloring it over again. If you're familiar with color correction, and are patient enough to give it a try, Color could really be a good move.

LaCie Little Big Disk

Over the past month we have been stocking up on new video equipment. Among our new upgrades we've bought the LaCie 1TB Little Big Disk, it's a baby-sized external drive. The device looks cool. It has a metal casing with a fun to watch bright blue status light. I have other LaCie drives and this one wins the "Coolest Blue Light Award". Alas it's only been hooked up for a couple of weeks and this new drive has failed. The drive will not mount or allow us to reformat. This stupid little drive cost about $400 and in less then a month it broke!  Don't buy this drive, it may look like a cute little baby, but this baby has a terminal illness.

Darlene the Sewing All Star

The Porta Brace case AR-PDMD660 (for our digital field recorder) just came in. When we opened it up we found a business card that let us know that out particular case was created by the "All Star Sewer" Darlene!

Darlene even signed it!

The good people at Porta Brace let us know about Darlene's favorite dish, her favorite thing about Vermont, and her favorite Porta Brace case.

Here's Darlene's favorite Porta Brace case.

We need more "All Stars" in this world.