Slashdot Mirror

It is a little more grey than you think:
"If you are recording someone without their knowledge in a public or semi-public place like a street or restaurant, the person whom you're recording may or may not have "an objectively reasonable expectation that no one is listening in or overhearing the conversation," and the reasonableness of the expectation would depend on the particular factual circumstances. Therefore, you cannot necessarily assume that you are in the clear simply because you are in a public place. "

Methinks an officer would object on principle... he does not want to be recorded.

http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guid...

and this is very interesting read too:

http://www.videomaker.com/arti...

and this:
http://www.rcfp.org/reporters-...

Although a credentialed reporter is going to get more leeway than an average citizen.

Maybe you didn't have any friends to swap tapes with?

Leave it to a Slashdotter to grasp at every possible chance to feel superior to people he doesn't know. But if by "swapping tapes" you mean copying them to blanks you bought at the store, then that's obviously not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the video sales market. I'm talking about going down to the video store and shelling out $35.95 for a brand-new VHS copy of Prizzi's Honor. Or are you claiming you were so rich you didn't have anything better to spend your money on? Most of the VHS tapes I saw in peoples homes were either A.) the huge-selling, high-volume titles I mentioned; B.) secondhand copies bought at video rental stores; or C.) taped off Cinemax or dubbed from rentals. Even if you did buy a few, you "swapped" the rest. Compare to DVDs, where they have copies of Kung Fu Panda and The Klumps on sale for $12 in the checkout aisle at Safeway. The people I knew who hoarded VHS tapes were anomalies -- mom's basement types. But if I saw one DVD in someone's house today I'd expect to find 30 more.

But hey, don't take my word for it:

In VHS’ peak sales year – 2001 – there was enough VHS tape stock manufactured to reach from the earth to the moon more than 987 times.
. . .
In 2002 annual world production of DVD surpassed VHS cassettes. And in 2003, DVD-Video sales increased to 12.1 billion while VHS sales dropped to 2.4 billion.

How do I know VHS tapes didn't sell as well as DVDs? Because nothing did.

That's sort of partially correct.

The way balanced audio works is via two signal conductors, and then a separate ground. That's probably the three wires that you're thinking of. Really the ground isn't part of the circuit (and sometimes the ground is intentionally broken to prevent loops), but it's why you have three pins in an XLR jack.

Basically, a balanced audio source will act like a 'push-pull' current source. Rather than simply having a voltage on a wire that varies in time, you have a continuous loop, and you 'push' down one side of the loop and 'pull' up on the other, or vice versa. If you were to hook an oscilloscope probe up to both sides of a balanced audio circuit while something was going down it, you'd find out that the signals on each side of the circuit are 180-degrees out of phase wrt each other. By convention, one of the signal lines is usually called the '+' side and one is called the '-' side,* with the '+' side usually being in-phase with the actual microphone input.

The advantage of this, over an unbalanced line, is common-mode rejection. If you use a transformer (or some type of modern transistorized circuit that simulates a transformer; op-amps acting like difference amplifiers also work well) on the receiving end of the circuit, you can basically 'throw away' any signal that's the same on *both sides* of the circuit. E.g., lets imagine that your balanced audio line is right next to a 60Hz power line. The 60Hz is going to get into the balanced line, but it's going to be the same on both the '+' and '-' sides, while the actual audio is going to be 180 degrees o.o.p. from one side to the other. This makes it easy to reject the interference: when you run the balanced audio into a 1:1 transformer, the 60Hz doesn't produce any current actually moving through the transformer's coils, and thus no output (or very little).

I'm not sure where balanced audio circuits originated. I think that it probably started with the phone company (which has been doing balanced loop circuits practically forever; in telco parlance the '+' and '-' are sometimes called 'tip' and 'ring' respectively, after their placement on old 1/4" jacks) and later migrated to studio audio and sound reinforcement later, rather than the other way around.

Some further reading on balanced audio:
http://www.videomaker.com/article/9732/ Good basic article, might make sense if my explanation doesn't.
http://www.tvtechnology.com/pages/s.0071/t.1585.html Also good, assumes more knowledge of electrical concepts (i.e. impedance).

* Some audio people insist on calling the '+' side of balanced audio connections "hot" and the '-' side "cold," which I think is stupid since they both carry signal (unlike, say, the 'hot' and 'neutral' in your power socket), but you hear it tossed around.

While I'm not sure that carrying a Mac Mini around is exactly the solution this guy is going to be looking for, it would be possible.

The data rate of Firewire is indeed 25 megabits per second, which turns out to be around 3.6 MB/s, well within the capability of the Mini. And he never said anything about wanting to transcode on the fly...and given that to people doing professional video, DV's quality is considered pretty minimal anyway, I'm not sure it's safe to assume that anything less would be acceptable.

What I think he should consider is a DV camera to hard drive 'direct box,' like this one. It allows you to connect a camera's digital output directly to a portable Firewire hard drive. Since the box doesn't contain the disks itself, you can just swap the drives for each project. At $1k, they're not cheap, but neither is anything that's designed for professional video production.

I think your confused on what linear vs. non-linear editing is.

read here: http://videomaker.com/scripts/article.cfm?id=2302

What your asking for is on-the-fly editing.

The world's cheapest 3CCD camcorder is just $699.

This looks like it's very similar to the more expensive version with still capability (which you really shouldn't bother with in a video camera). It was given a review which praised the image quality but admitted it didn't reach the peak of the top 3CCD camcorders.

I have to admit that I wasn't thrilled by the iSight camera's quality; a friend demoed it to me and my $500 Canon ZR-series video camera was much better. However, that might have been due to the extreme low light in her apartment.

That being said, I was able to try a LogiTech QuickCam on my PowerMac G4 at work and if my memory serves it worked just fine. I think the cheaper brands don't support the Mac, but the QuickCam's cheap enough and it does.

D

To the guy that said $60 was "pricey", don't bother reading this. Vegas is expensive. But if you compare the prices of "consumer" MiniDV cameras at around $500 or less, to "prosumer" ones in the thousands, anything under $1000 for DVD authoring should be considered a bargain (IMHO).

Check out this review. Now sold by Sony Pictures Digital Media Software, it's originally by Sonic Foundry, makers of some seriously kick-butt audio software. It's under $600, or about $800 if you get the version with the Dolby Certified AC-3 Encoder. Definitely worth checking out.

Now before you all flame me, he did say "prosumer" and that he would consider Windows software. Given those two consideration, I chose to ignore the cost factor :-) But seriously, for what you get, this is an incredible deal, as far as I'm conscerned. And if you're a student, check out Pricewatch for some great Academic version pricing. Even if you had to go with an older version, I'd recommend it.

If you are interested in making a Linux-based digital VCR, you should check out the work going into Linux video editing (it's basically the same thing, except you're capturing from TV instead of a camcorder) at http://millennium.diads.com/bdirks/v4l2 .htm

Larry Lemm
Associate Editor
Videomaker Magazine

If you are interested in making a Linux-based digital VCR, you should check out the work going into Linux video editing (it's basically the same thing, except you're capturing from TV instead of a camcorder) at http://millennium.diads.com/bdirks/v4l2 .htm

Larry Lemm
Associate Editor
Videomaker Magazine