Watching the kickoff event right now-- you know it's screwed up when it takes three hours to explain the competition, and for the adults to get an idea of the rules and how it's scored.
I watched an hour or so of one of the FIRST competitions on Nasa TV. It left a bad taste in my mouth. I mean, they're provided with virtually all of the interesting parts. How do you learn from this? Does one learn how to design a car if they're given a working engine, a transmission, wheels, a chassis, and they just have to put it together?
In my opinion, the kids would learn more if corporations got out of it. It's always apparent when some kid brings a project to school that you know his parents put together for him, and that's what this looks like. What's the point? Sit the kid down in front of a couple hours of junkyard wars, give them a Lego mindstorm set (at the most) and then let them do the work.
And all the cheering just makes it a little too much like those friday night high school football games. uh, thanks, but no.
I suffered through this same process, trying to figure out the best way to get a good digital transfer. After much research, I went with a company in California, used to the be called The Transfer Station and is now Film and Video Transfers, Inc..
You can get a Super 8 transfer on a Rank Cintel machine done there (with color correction) for $150 per hour. (half hour increments). This is really a professional transfer. Places like pro8 charge $250 per hour. F&V will also clean your films and splice them together so that you don't have to deal with all those 50 ft reels anymore.
They did 24 reels for me, a mix of super 8 and regular 8 for $260. This included the two Mini DV tapes, and FedEx shipping back to me. I compared the results with an older VHS transfer I had done, and it was like day and night. Great stuff.
I did a digital duplication of the Mini DV tapes, and I'm putting the original film and a minidv copy in the safe deposit box, while I work on editing the Mini DV footage on the PC and then have it transfered to DVD. Maybe at lifeclips.com?
Do a search on Deja News for The Transfer Station... They've gotten lots of good mentions. I don't work for them, just happy with their work.
The guy who submitted this story "Bondheadguy"
resolves to RobJMcCready@yahoo.com... A quick
search on "Rob McCready" yields a University of
Toronto grad student (or maybe former grad student
now) who is developing hardware based face
recognition equipment. Check out
This link...
Now you can make your own decision about helping him out (or not).
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Watching the kickoff event right now-- you know it's screwed up when it takes three hours to explain the competition, and for the adults to get an idea of the rules and how it's scored.
In my opinion, the kids would learn more if corporations got out of it. It's always apparent when some kid brings a project to school that you know his parents put together for him, and that's what this looks like. What's the point? Sit the kid down in front of a couple hours of junkyard wars, give them a Lego mindstorm set (at the most) and then let them do the work.
And all the cheering just makes it a little too much like those friday night high school football games. uh, thanks, but no.
You can get a Super 8 transfer on a Rank Cintel machine done there (with color correction) for $150 per hour. (half hour increments). This is really a professional transfer. Places like pro8 charge $250 per hour. F&V will also clean your films and splice them together so that you don't have to deal with all those 50 ft reels anymore.
They did 24 reels for me, a mix of super 8 and regular 8 for $260. This included the two Mini DV tapes, and FedEx shipping back to me. I compared the results with an older VHS transfer I had done, and it was like day and night. Great stuff.
I did a digital duplication of the Mini DV tapes, and I'm putting the original film and a minidv copy in the safe deposit box, while I work on editing the Mini DV footage on the PC and then have it transfered to DVD. Maybe at lifeclips.com?
Do a search on Deja News for The Transfer Station... They've gotten lots of good mentions. I don't work for them, just happy with their work.
Now you can make your own decision about helping him out (or not).