BunkBlog

And

are really going to love this post…

Sure, I’m on vacation, but there must be something better to do with my time than play Dice Wars all night long, right?  Oh, there isn’t?  Cool.

OK, someone suggested I put together a quick tutorial or how-to on digital video creation.  Home videos have grown increasingly easy to record, and the output is so much better than the old super-8 film days, but it’s still not easy for some. So, without further ado, Gary’s Video Tutorial. It’s on a wiki, so if you have something useful to contribute, feel free.  I’ve still got to add something about titles and overlays.

I can’t imagine what one could add to the headline to make this story any more clear. Can you imagine buying one of these drives to play Blu-Ray movies in your new home theater PC and finding out that you can’t? Are they just encouraging piracy now by their total incompetence at this Digital Restrictions Manglement crap?

Just to prove what lovely and thoughtful human beings they are, the RIAA has introduced a motion in one of their extortion filesharing cases. The defendent has died, so they’re allowing the family sixty days to grieve before they sue the children. Anyone still think the RIAA is a reasonable group of people?

Stephen Colbert did a skit on The Daily Show last night. There were about 30 seconds of genius. See if you agree.

The following is somewhat reformatted from a recent discussion on Cnet about DVD camcorders.

I know many people are considering a digital camcorder for the first time, as their old 8mm and VHS-C cameras start to die. Many people think that a DVD camcorder is a great idea, because it’s so simple: just record to the disk, hit the “finished” button, and play it on a DVD player (although you’ll be recording about 20 minutes on that disk, not the two hours you expect from a full-sized DVD). That works great if you want the exact same capability you had with a simple analog video camera. If you want to produce nicer video, though, the story is quite different.
There are some people who don’t edit their videos, who don’t mind that their home videos look amateurish and contain fingers over lenses and heads blocking shots and poor audio. For those people, a DVD camcorder is a great fit. They neither want nor need the editing quality they are denied by recording in a lossy format; they need and want, however, the ease of taking their videos and dropping them in nearly any DVD player and watching them.

Recording to a DVD in DVD-standard formats means lossy compression and the joys of MPEG formats that anyone who has tried to edit an MPEG can understand. The MiniDV camcorders can dump uncompressed video to your computer, where you can delete the scenes that look bad, you can punch up the color balance and contrast, you can add a music soundtrack if you like. All these things are wonderful, and I do them with all my home videos, producing slick DVDs with titles and transitions and menus for my relatives. That niche is where I want to be.

DVD is a great medium to VIEW video with. It’s even a great medium to shoot video if you understand its limits.

DVDs and MiniDV and hard drives and flash memory all record digitally. So, talk of capacity should include RAW storage in bytes, not just in minutes. Any talk of minutes gets you embroiled in compression issues.

A MiniDV tape holds 13 gigabytes of data. An 8cm DVD (the smaller ones used in camcorders) holds 1.4 gigabytes. An expensive SD card holds 4 gigabytes. A hard-drive based camcorder holds (as of today) around 30 gigabytes. That’s the actual storage capacity, folks. Now, how much do each cost? Well, the best price per gigabyte is the tape, as it has been throughout digital media history.

The cheap nature of tapes convinced the DV forum to make DV standard very close to uncompressed. This makes it easy to edit without losing quality.

The low capacity of 8cm DVDs, and the need to make them compatible with DVD players, means that DVDs have the worst video quality (among hard drives, DV tape, and DVDs at least – some of the flash recorders are toys). The compatibility of DVDs is their greatest asset. Hit “done” on that camcorder, and two minutes later you can be watching your home movie on a big screen. Not so with tapes.

DVD format does have an inherent flaw – lossy compression.

Tapes still exist for every high-capacity recording system in use today. High-end video recorders use tape. High-end data backup systems use tape. The reason is simple: high density at low cost.

If the video was recorded to the DVD as an uncompressed video file (like the DV standard used on tapes), you’d swap disks every six minutes. Also, the DVDs would be DVD-ROM format, and wouldn’t play on your DVD player – which is the selling point for most DVD recording camcorder users.

When you export a DVD format video to edit it, you are taking an MPEG (with I, B, and P frames) and editing it into a different compression scheme for whatever your target system is. If it’s DVD again, you compress an MPEG to MPEG, each generation producing another set of MPEG compression artifacts.

So, you can get high capacity and high quality on tape. You can get easy compatibility with DVD. You can’t get both. If you want DVD-player compatibility, then the DVD camcorder format has an inherent flaw – MPEG.

The hard drive recorders, at least those that you see marketed for typical consumers, use compressed video because they don’t generally have removable hard drives. With a fixed disk, you want more capacity than a single tape, obviously. So, the JVC Everio and others have MPEG-compressed video and the same issues with editability as the DVDs.

To me, the DVD camcorder is to video what the point-and-shoot camera is to photography. Just because we geeks want the best quality and ease of editing, doesn’t mean that “good enough” matched with “really easy” is a bad thing. So, if you know what you want to do with your video, that makes all the difference in the world for what type of camcorder to buy.

Make your own, be a lemming!

After seeing the teaser trailer twice now, I figured I’d make an LJ userpic from the Transformers movie. Yes, it doesn’t come out until next July.

I love that in Nevada even the Republicans have a porn star running for governor. That state is freakin’ hilarious.

From the altfriday5:

1. How well do you understand your country*’s electoral system? Give us a quick summary of how it works. Diebold makes machines to count all the votes they can. The votes get counted in secret, via processes no citizen is allowed to know. Whichever corporation bought the most votes chooses the next President.
2. What, if anything, do you not like about your country’s electoral system? If you were in charge of reforming it, what would you change? The opacity.

3. What, if anything, do you like about your country’s electoral system?? Even small states get some vote. There is no legal way to keep anyone (non-felon, etc) from running for office.

4. Some countries use fixed dates for elections , and some allow them to be called as needed, within certain limits. Which do you think is the better system? Why? Fixed dates are what I’m used to, so the other system seems more chaotic to me.

5. Some countries use proportional representation and some use majoritarian (or some combination thereof). Which do you think is the better system? Why? I’d prefer a proportional system, as it requires more compromise and coalition-building, instead of just saying the 51% rule and the 49% shut up and color.

*Where “your country” = the one that you can vote in, or will be able to vote in when you are of age

The Questioner says: Don’t forget your links!

Dear people who change the resolution at work:

LCD monitors have one resolution.  That is all.  It is not debatable.  There is no judgement call, no opinion, no possibility of misunderstanding.  LCD panels have one fixed resolution.  Yes, they will sync up at lower resolutions (and sometimes higher, which must be seen to be believed).  But they will look like crap at anything but their native resolution or an even divisor thereof.  So, a panel of 1600×1200 resolution could look decent at 800×600.  But, a panel with resolution of 1280×1024 will not look good at 1152×864, no matter how much you may wish it to be so.

Thank you for not being a tool.

Yes, I do have too much time on my hands. Why do you ask?

The latest in “food you didn’t think anyone would be interested in” – hot pepper ice cream. According to one customer, “It tastes like fire with a side of fire.” Oh, that’s what I’m looking for in a cold tasty treat.

Here’s a fun game – run this Google search at random and see if you can spot the flaw in the music industry’s business plan. Today, they are suing Yahoo China. The BPI (UK version of RIAA) is suing AllofMP3, the only large online music service that is successful and can be used with any music player. A couple weeks ago, the RIAA sued YouTube users. They’ve sued dead people, little kids, people without computers…

Maybe suing your customers is not the best way to gain market share, eh? Do they honestly think they can strong-arm people into buying the latest shitty CD from Christina Milian or whichever interchangeable pop star they come up with next?

Read Little Heroes by Norman Spinrad – I’m pretty sure the recording industry of today is exactly like the recording industry he wrote about twenty years ago, just not as good at it as he portrayed.

So, anyone else see the slightest bit of similarity between the new ABC Family show Kyle XY and the dearly-missed Fox show John Doe? They both have no memory of themselves, fantastic abilities, woke up in the forest, set in Seattle but probably shot in Vancouver… Of course, in keeping with the usual way of doing things lately, ABC had to slap together a viral marketing campaign too. Like the Hanso Foundation from Lost, we have the Mada Corp, a shadowy group that claims to be all about doing good and yet has a secret blog hidden in the job search link where someone writes that “they” are coming to get him. With the implication of freaky experimentation, maybe there’s a dash of Dark Angel in there too.

My point? I don’t have one, just thought that Kyle XY was strangely reminiscent of other shows.

This case illustrates much that is incredibly wrong with the current de facto permanent copyright nonsense. A.A. Milne’s granddaughter is trying to wrest control of her dear grandpa’s “intellectual property” from the House of Mouse.

Clare Milne, who was not born when her grandfather died, sought to use a 1976 copyright law to terminate the prior licensing agreement and recapture ownership of the copyright.

So, exactly how does Clare’s assumption of her grandfather’s copyright in any way create an incentive for dear dead Mr. Milne to create more Pooh stories? Those darned zombie authors sure are busy.

Anyone else watching the BBC Series Two Doctor Who episodes?  Yeah, Usenet is a wonderful thing.

Could the foreshadowing have been any heavier at the end of “Fear Her” yesterday?  Dayum.

From the comedian Jimmy Dore:

Tattoos that go across the top of the butt…The female ass needs no dressing up. If I’m back there, I’m happy. You don’t put bumper stickers on a Rolls Royce.

I am amused. Sure, I’m easily amused, but still.

Is it strange that my random playlist generator created a list with “Crazy Bitch” and “You Can’t Fool Me” and “American Witch” in one hour?

Buckcherry’s Crazy Bitch rocks, by the way.

I can taste you on my lips
And smell you in my clothes
Cinnamon and sugary
And softly spoken lies