I've been a Gmail user since day one, and have converted all my personal email over to it, so I'm a big fan of Gmail. However I think the whole "you shouldn't NEED to delete messsages with Gmail" is a retarded, fanboy argument.
Archiving the message certainly sweeps it out of view, but it's the digital equivalent of throwing a rug over garbage in a corner of your room. Sure, you cant see it, but it will eventually stink up the whole joint if you don't toss it out for good.
Being that one of Gmail's most touted features is its powerful search mechanism, it should be obvious that the less useless data that exists in the search database, more relevant your search results are going to be.
Why in the hell do you want to keep messages that you KNOW you never want to see again? It makes absolutely no sense, and is one of the stupidest Gmail advocacy points I've ever heard.
Mouse gestures are highly overrated and still only used by a MINORITY.
Spoken like someone who has never used mouse gestures for more than 10 minutes in his life.
Get a clue. Just because you're a geek that already is set in thier ways ("with my gmail account, this doesnt matter to me", "blah, i prefer a seperate client", etc etc), doesn't minimize the significance and design advantages that a browser like Opera offers. Perhaps you miss the significance to the "bigger picture" that integrated Bittorrent support would bring? Sure, a standalone client like Azureus will always be preferable for us hardcore p2p'ers, but the avergae joe/Jane doesn't give a fuck about things like that. They want to point, click, and have shit happen. And they want said shit to happen out of the box, without having to search for obscure "extensions".
As a former Firefox bigot, and now an Opera convert (there is no better browser currently on the Mac...even better than Safari/Saft...and FF on the Mac is just a fucking joke, although I prefer using FF on my Windows machines), the only thing I regret about making the "switch" is the loss of several wonderful FF extensions like Greasemonkey, Bugmenot, FlashGot and Adblock. But thats why I've made the choice of keeping FF around for when I need those features. For everyday browsing, however, Opera just kills Firefox. And I really like the fact that out of the box it retains 90% of the workhorse features that initially attracted so many of us to Firefox and its extensions (control over tab sessions & arrangement, mouse gestures, etc).
Judge Opera for what it Is, not what it ISN'T. Firefox tries to be all things to all people, which is great, but it leads to the "extensions" equivalent of "DLL-hell", especially when a new build of Firefox is released. Opera, on the other hand, just works. And i never have to worry that its basic functionality will break when an incremental update of the software happens...which we can all honestly admit is one of FF's greatest liabiities.
(By the way--in the interest of fairness--regardless of what other doofus Opera fanboys in this thread have mentioned, Firefox still wipes the floor with Opera when it comes to adblocking and page manipulation. Yes, Opera can technically do these things, but I sure as fuck aint hacking through stupid.INI files in order to achieve a weak simulation of what can be achieved with just a few simple mouseclicks in FF)
on-line editing (live tv shows etc) compared to off-line editing (editing movies etc)
Ummm...no.
"Offline editing" refers to the "rough edit" stage of the editing process, where major story, pacing and rough graphic decisions are made, oftentimes with low-resolution compressed footage, so the offline editor can have as much of the source material available as possible, since this is where most of the important edit decisions are made.
"On-line" editing refers to the "finishing" stage of the editing process, where an "online editor" takes the result of of the offline edit via an EDL (edit decision list....or visually refers to, via a "window burn" timecode reference tape) , and basically pretties it up for final mastering (i.e. shot-by-shot color correction, tightening up edits, compositing, final graphics, etc etc).
In the 80's and 90's the online edit phase generally took place on a linear (ergo, uncompressed) edit system to ensure the highest picture quality. Ironically enough, the online editor often used EDLs generated from non-linear offline systems such as the Avid.
The terms have nothing to do with genres. TV shows have online and offline editors, and so do many motion pictures.
Caps Lock is indispensable in Adobe After Effects
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
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· Score: 1
I'm a motion graphics designer, and use the Caps Lock key dozens of times, every hour, as it is the mechanism which disables unecessary screen-updating and re-renders when working in a composition.
The only time I hate Caps Lock is when entering passwords in the dark.
Dont ask me why I'd ever need to do that, you dont wanna know:P
2) I click on the canvas to type, and I get some "Gimp Text Editor" window popup! How totally useless. I want to type directly onto the canvas. Not have YET ANOTHER WINDOW open up with a preview on the canvas.
3) I can't select parts of a single line of text to change the effect, which means doing a new bit of text for every change in style. i.e., text effects should be editable within a single text box.
In all fairness, even Photoshop didn't resolve these two interface issues until version 6.0. They are both very irritating, I agree.
As a long-time GIMP user (after giving up on Photoshop), I'm tempted to find a windows box somewhere and write a "Photoshop from the eyes of a GIMP user" article. Let's see how 'intuitive' PS really is.
Please do this. Balance is always good to have.
Just make sure to make your article can be publically commented on.
Finally let's not forget crossplatform! That means more than just WINDOZE, Adobe. Get it? How about now? DUh............
Three words: Supply and Demand.
Why do you think Adobe dropped Macintosh support for Premiere, as well as for it's new DVD and audio editing software? There's a lot of devoted Mac users who would buy Mac versions of those products...the problem is there wouldn't be ENOUGH of them to justify the development cost. What part of this simple equation do you not understand? Adobe is in business to make money, and being that they are a publically traded company, they are legally *obliged* to not jerk themselves and thier shareholder's money off on "good will" things like making a Linux version of Photoshop.
Let's not even talk about how many fonts PS can handle (hint: under 1000!) What kind of "professional" crap is that?!?!
It's understandable that you ask this question, since it's obvious you're not a "professional" Photoshop user or graphic designer.
NO "professional" user worth his or her salt loads up 1000 fonts for use in apps like Photoshop. It's not a Photoshop issue, it's an operating system issue. It's just plain stupid to have that many fonts loaded up at once, because it completely bogs down your entire system (and in many cases, will cause the entire system to lock up, as I discovered on a client's brand-spankin' new Dual Mac G4 with OS X). Professional graphic designers and layout artists use font management software like Adobe Type Manager or Extensis Portfolio to dynamically load the fonts they need *only* when they need it
Anyway, show me PS running on a multi-user remote server and I promise I will from this day forward only state that PS sucks just "some", not "a lot", mkay?
Show me someone who really needs or wants to run PS on a "multi-user remote server" and I promise I will from this day forward state that you are only "somewhat" clueless, and not "totally" clueless.
"mkay"? dear god, thats so dumb.
Photoshop is a ripoff, even if you have a company to pay for each "upgrade"
This is subjective of course, but as I said before, Adobe is a *business*, so it makes sense that they want to make money. Charging for "upgrades" pays for the hundreds of developers and marketing droids that help to make PS the world-class application that it is today. Adobe knows that people are locked in to thier software (although, unlike Micro$oft crap, people are generally locked into Adobe's stuff willingly, simply because they actually produce quality products.), and so they can charge for upgrades without hesitation. And end users will generally pay for these upgrades because most of them will be able to pay for the upgrade with just one or two jobs.
No...i am NOT a shill for Adobe, btw. I just have a very low tolerance for ignorant zealotry
Just a though...have you ever used Linux at all? or seen anyone else using it? I enjoy using my Photoshop 7 in Linux. Ever tried using Photoshop 7 behind an old pentium 1? Well i do, setup a linux box which is fairly fast with PS7 and wine and X11 and XDMCP; setup a LAN(100mbps or 1000mbps); setup another box with only X11 on it and with network connectivity to the LAN; connect to box1 on it's XDMCP service and hoppa, using PS7 on a slower machine which the PS7 is actually running on the other box. Talking about using my computers efficiently...instead of buying another blazing fast machine to have a colleage to work on.
That's cool and all, but you seem to miss the point, which is that people--in this case, graphic designers--who have REAL lives and have REAL work to get done can't (and shouldn't) be bothered with such unnecessary geekiness. There's really no point to that, other than to say that you CAN do it. And just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean that you SHOULD do it, obviously. Why dick around with that sort of thing when you can go out and buy a sub-$1000 PC and run Photoshop natively?
This is basically what the parent poster was getting at, namely that OSS projects that attempt to achieve parity with "mainstream", defacto standard programs (mostly in the field of creative content...things like MySQL, Apache, etc. are definitely exceptions) more often than not fail to penetrate that established mainstream, simply because great programming skills and great graphic/UI design skills are for the most part, mutually exclusive. Not to mention the fact that OSS developers and a great majority of OSS devotees generally don't think like end-users do. They have the patience to put up with convoluted installation procedures, quirky UI's, and stability issues, because they understand the underlying motivation and values that drives open source development.
The average user, on the other hand, has absolutely no reason to use Linux or the GIMP or any other open-source alternative to what "everyone else" uses, if said alternatives don't offer what they need or want NOW. Even things as superficial as product version numbering makes a difference. NOBODY in the "real world" would take a product seriously that took as long as it did to reach a v1.0 status like the GIMP. That's why it's foolish to lambaste Photoshop users who criticize the GIMP for sucking so bad, because you further alienate them from considering OSS in the future, when a product like the GIMP may have finally achieved parity with Photoshop. You can't convert non-geeks with non-geek values to "our" side by forcing our values on them. What makes sense to people like us is completely foreign to them, and theres no sense in trying to argue that point.
For what it is, and where it came from, the GIMP is a great piece of software. I'd never use it myself, but I am still very sympathetic to it, because I share the ideals that drive the open source movement. But I'm just not so disingenuous as to claim that it's a truly viable alternative to Photoshop, while denigrating it's critics, like so many OSS zealots on Slashdot do.
Where I think Gimp does score is scripting. ICBW here, and the last Photoshop I touched was v4, but does Photoshop yet have anything as powerful as script-fu - that is open to the average end user? Does it plug into real, powerful, flexible, general-purpose scripting languages?
For example; cooltext.com has been running now for over five years. What it does isn't exactly in-depth; but think about it - a web-site that automates one of the commonest noddy-tasks that novice users want - for free.
Photoshop is fully scriptable, via JavaScript, Applescript and/or VB. Granted, it's one of the unheralded features of the product (Photoshop "Actions", introduced in PS 5, IIRC, gets all the limelight from the "average" PS user), but it's very powerful. There is a very large online user community that shares actions and scripts on sites like the Adobe Studio Exchange, etc.
Of course, the Photoshop scripting interface doesn't have the geek glamour that Script-Fu might have, but the only reason for that is that there is little-to-no demand for a Scheme based scripting interface for Photoshop. Although, ironically enough, a kick-ass Python based scripting plugin called "Useful Things" exists for Adobe After Effects, and it has truly revolutionized the usefulness of the product.
The problem with the tabbed Google interface was that too many clickable elements were in the same space. I frequently found myself clicking on something other than the "Groups" tag by mistake, for example.
This puzzles me. I've never seen this to be a problem. Sure, I have in the past accidentally hit the "Google" logo when i meant to click on the "Groups" tab or whatnot, but not hardly enough to warrant a UI change.
I hate the new design, because it requires more (and accurate) mouse movement to switch between the actual search results and the search result types.
I also see it as a problem for Google users who dont even know that they can target thier search terms to different areas, such as Groups, News, etc. Most people I know have link-blindness, and gloss over the text links at the top. The old version was much better, because the section links/tabs were clearly obvious (and easier to click).
I really dont see what "technical" prowess has to do with the ability to produce exceptional "content". Go listen to a Steely Dan, Yngwie Malmsteen or Kenny G CD if you don't agree.
If anything, technically oriented people generally create more mediocre content (at least visually and aurally) than non-technical people. Look no further than the Amiga zealots for proof of this.
Amiga users are by necessity, "techies". Back in the early to mid-90's, when Amiga graphics and animation tools were in fact superior to offerings on the Macintosh and Windows, the vast majority of stuff created by Amiga users were ubercheesy. They all had the technical stuff down, they just had no design sense.
Look at Slashdot for fark's sake...it's one of the most poorly designed sites (both visually and UI-wise) on the net!
OK, this post wasn't originally intended as Flamebait, but I won't protest if it gets modded as such;)
Of course, buying a different guitar for each tuning quickly become cost-prohibitive, so this is a great compromise for those guitarists who like to use multiple tunings and who don't have lucrative contracts with major record labels.
Sonic Youth was traveling with a literal quiver of guitars tuned to different tunings MANY years before they got signed to Geffen, and were just a highly-obscure "art rock" band.
Of course, many of thier guitars were pawn-shop cheapies, but it really doesn't seem to matter in the quality of thier end product, because the amazing sounds they got from these tunings always superseded traditional notions of what a "good" guitar is supposed to sound like.
Bron-Yr-Aur...an absolutely beautiful guitar tuning! A friend of mine, who didnt know that Jimmy Page used an alternate tuning on that song, taught himself how to play it in STANDARD tuning! He picked up my guitar one day, and started playing it...totally freaked me out, and said "how the hell did you re-tune my guitar so quickly!?!?!?"
Another beautiful tuning that Page used a lot is DADGAD (heard on "Black Mountain Side" and a myriad of other folk songs). It's my absolute favorite alt. tuning.
Not entirely accurate. Almost every "alternative" band in the past 5 years has made heavy use of alternative tunings. Korn, Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Barenaked Ladies, Goo Goo Dolls, and the Wallflowers, just to name a few off the top of my head.
Thank you for using the word "alternative" in quotation marks, especially in the context of the bands you mentioned.
I wouldn't call what lame nu-metal acts (like Linkin Park, Korn, Limp Bizkit, etc) use as "alternate tunings". This totally weak and shallow genre is almost totally based on drop-D tuning (not what i would consider a true "alternate tuning"...although im well aware that Korn uses some non-standard tunings...still doesnt change the fact that they absolutely suck), where you can get admittedly cool sounding riffs simply by rolling your finger up and down the low E and A strings. Bo-ring.
It's totally cliched to mention Sonic Youth when talking about alternate guitar tunings, but it's for a good reason. Just listen to "Daydream Nation" or "Sister" (for starters), and you will hear excellent examples of alternate tuning in action. These albums simply do not sound anything like "normal" guitar based albums, primarily because of their use of true alternate tunings. And they aren't just tuning a string up/down here or there, they actually do things like stringing with unison string gauges, which gives you sounds that simply cant be achieved by tuning a standard string set to a different tuning.
The only problem with Sonic Youth, of course, is that for every brilliant song they write, there's 10 utterly worthless tunes that surround it.
And If bands like BNL and Goo Goo Dolls use alternate tunings, I'll be damned if it makes any difference to thier music. I just dont hear it...then again, I'll also be damned if i actually go out and buy a BNL or Goo Goo Dolls record, so I am open to being proven wrong on this point.
Good post... except for the 'not widely used' part. Drop D tuning is pretty common in songs by the Rolling Stones, Guns 'N Roses, Nirvana, etc.
Always a pain in the neck to switch, especially for those of us who are lazy and use electronic tuning aids.
Not to sound like a snob (of course, a disclaimer like this probably means i am a snob:P), but switching to drop-D takes no more than 5 seconds if you know how to tune a guitar and can hear relative pitch.
It's not difficult at all to drop the low-E to a D by matching (an octave down, of course) to the open-D string...and dropping the high-E (if you play true drop-D tuning) is as simple as matching it to the 3rd fret of the B-string.
Not really a pain in the ass at all. You really should free yourself of the chains of using electronic tuners. They're great in the recording studio, but when playing on stage, being in tune with the rest of the band at any given moment is more important.
It is true that they added Flyer as an NLE, but I never heard of anybody actually using that professionally. For editing, everybody used Avid at the time (and mostly still does).
Not to be a bandwagon jumper, but as the other A/C's here have already said, you are utterly ignorant.
The Toaster Flyer was used by hundreds of corporate and industrial videographers, as well as countless event videographers (weddings, etc). It actually boasted one of the best compression codecs that existed at the time (the Wavelet based VTASC codec), that was at least as good as Avid's highest quality AVR levels.
The Flyer was also used as the non-linear system of choice at the '96 Olympics in Atlanta, for on-site news packages and the like. In fact, there were numerous Avid systems available on site, but the Flyer reportedly became the favorite system after word got around as to how easy it was to use, how fast it worked (i.e. no rendering, unlike the Avid Media Composers) and the quality of the output.
It was also used on the Tonight Show (soon after Jay Leno took over the show) very extensively for realtime graphics, roll-ins and effects.
You used to be able to buy a $100 box at radio shack that did analog A-B mixes and effects. Basically the same thing.
No, not basically the same thing.
Your little $100 Radio Shack box did not have a built-in, realtime alpha-keyed 35-nanosecond Character Generator (a resolution that, while pretty lame by today's standards, was considered "broadcast quality" back in the early 90's). In fact, this is the one thing that even a 14 year old Video Toaster/still/ does better than most prosumer and professional desktop digital video systems today. I wish I still had one in my studio for just this purpose (excellent for creating realtime "bugs", lower-thirds and scrolling credits)
That $100 Radio Shack box also did not have GPI control or a fully scriptable ARexx interface, which enabled automation and interprocess interaction. This was definitely one of the Amiga's greatest strengths, IMO. Not even Applescript approached the depth of ARexx on the Amiga, where there seemed to be a unwritten, yet strongly accepted cultural rule among developers to provide an extensive ARexx "port" in all thier applications, so that end-users could expand on the functionality of the original application. There were hundreds of Toaster specific public-domain ARexx scripts written and distributed through BBS's and eventually the web.
Uh, let me guess: The original implementors had added tons of helpful comments like/* this fucking sucks, rewrite asap */ in the code -
I would hazard to guess (or at least, I would like to think that it's true) that that specific comment was excised from the VERY TOP of all the ToasterPaint source...dear lord, that had to have been the CRAPPIEST paint package, ever.
Sorry to tell you- but the toaster was/is full broadcast quality
You do, of course, understand that "broadcast quality" is a completely meaningless term, right?
Probably the only thing that defines "broadcast quality" is the ability to conform to FCC specs for over-the-air broadcast of a video signal (i.e. subcarrier bandwidth, "legal" chroma/luma levels, etc). It's an objective engineering term at best, and definitely NOT a subjective visual judgement.
That being said, as a former user of the Video Toaster in a professional environment, I can say that as great and liberating as the original VT was, the video quality left much to be desired. Being that the Toaster was a native composite video I/O device (third party hacks like the Y/C Plus notwithstanding), you could never really achieve the same raw video quality of a component video signal (i.e. BetaSP or MII) or an S-Video signal. No matter how good your "I" was, the "O" was always composite-video, and doing an A/B comparison between the source input and the toaster output would show a VERY obvious (and often horrific) degradation of video-signal quality. In fact, it was often significant enough that many of our (generally) clueless clients would notice it with thier own eyes.
And yet, the Toaster was still "broadcast quality", because it adhered to FCC and NTSC broadcast specs, regardless of the fact that the video signal output from a Video Toaster would have a noticeable difference in visual quality from a standard component-video (IOW, BetaSP) workflow.
A common joke among broadcast engineers is that all the crappy home videos shown on America's Funniest Videos are ipso facto, "broadcast quality", simply because they are being shown on a broadcast television network.
Of course, back then (we're talking the early 90's, after all), digital video was a nascent technology, so there wasn't much to compare the Toaster to in terms of quality, so these shortcomings were often overlooked in light of the Toaster's overall functional advantages. It's very similar to the growing mass acceptance of Final Cut Pro, which still has MANY glaring deficiencies that call into question its "Pro" moniker, but are overlooked/excused because of it's general feature-set.
I was downloading and playing mp3's back in 1996 on my el-crappo Cyrix 486 DX2/80 box...Winamp could not reliably play 128kb mp3's at all, so the de-facto standard player for poor souls like me who couldnt afford a better box was WinPlay, which played them back with ease.
So you're saying DV isn't SD? What "SD" format pray tell were you acquiring on, which cameras were you using and what phase of the production pipeline did this "shootout" occur?
The DV format (as well as any other format) is only as good as the quality of the glass (many popular MiniDV cameras have shitty-as-hell stock lenses) and skill of the operator behind it. There is no doubt that straight out of the box, a prosumer MiniDV camera (like a Canon XL1 or Sony PD150) cannot hold a candle to a DVW700 or something. In fact, this is one of the reasons why this supposed "MiniDV" revolution gives the DV format a bad name among certain jaded professionals (which I will admit to have being before leaving my previous employer to start my own production company...I used to be a BetaSP/Digibeta bigot myself), because there are a lot of rank amateurs out there, getting shit on TV with MiniDV without taking the time to properly massage the footage so it looks as good as something shot on BetaSP or Digibeta.
In case you havent been paying attention, I am a major proponent of performing color-correction of VERY single DV clip in one's project before it goes out to mastering. It's not only a good practice, regardless of format, but it really helps DV footage shot on prosumer equpiment.
What do you mean by "professional grade editing suite?" My local CBS station uses DV for editing local commercials and news, you can see the difference in quality between their DV productions and work done on full uncompressed SD edit suites.
DV as a format can look just as good as Digital Betacam. It's not the format, it's the talent of the people using the format. I use Mini-DV for 99% of my current productions, and I have producers and fellow editors asking me if the footage in my projects was acquired on Digibeta. This is because I know how to work the DV format so it looks better than the average amateur DV videographers final edits (color correction, for one...it's the single most important thing you can do to make your DV footage look "broadcast quality"---a stupid term, btw)
Hardware is another issue. If you're just doing amateur work, DV will be fine,
Of course, you should know by now that this is wrong. DV is not "just for amateur work". Of course, you cant beat the quality of an uncompressed 4:2:2 stream, but color-corrected 4:1:1 DV footage can look just as good as Digibeta acquired footage, provided your DV camera has a top-quality lens and a talented camera operator behind it. I would agree that if youre doing high-profile spots, especially with a lot of motion graphics and keying and compsiting effects, then stay away from DV (blue/greenscreen keying in DV is absolutely horrendous). But it doesn't sound like the OP is doing things like that. For corporate, industrial and even most broadcast projects, MiniDV and talent are more than sufficient.
Face it, Apple owns the pro editing market. There are some competitors like Avid and Combustion
not to be overly pedantic, but Discreet Combustion is not a competitor to Apple's editing products. A competitor to Shake, maybe, but it definitely doesnt belong in the same argument as Avid and Final Cut Pro.
Apple doesnt own the pro editing market yet (although it does own the independent pro market--i.e. 1-10 employee "boutique" editing shops). But it IS true that Avid's days are numbered, as each release of FCP brings with it dozens of more reasons not to stick with Avid's overpriced products. I give them 2-3 years at the rate they are going, whereupon Apple WILL own the professional, mainstream editing market, while Avid will become the next Discreet or SGI, where it serves the super-highend market, yet has a fraction of the profitability of a company like Apple or Adobe.
I do agree with you that opensource video software is largely a waste of time if you want to do anything remotely professional.
I know it's not open source but it's free: http://www.avid.com/freeDV/index.asp It's limited in it's features but it's the industry standard interface(80% of Hollywood and TV is edited on Avid).
It also happens to be a complete piece of crap.
The OP was looking for a "professional" system, and Avid FreeDV is anything but. It is crippled to the point of uselessness by anyone other than someone who just wants to make a quick edit of thier dog running around in the yard.
The crippled interface/features in FreeDV will definitely NOT give you a taste of the "industry standard" Avid workflow.
Um... a single drive keeps the contents of your ENTIRE business at any given time? 1. raid5 a few drives together, you get >= the hdd space, plus, you have redundency!
There is absolutely nothing unusual about using a "single drive" in this situation. This is the norm. In video editing, redundancy is not a concern, sustained throughput is (although in many large video companies and "mission-critical" broadcast situations, redundant media arrays are used, but those are very rare exceptions).
If my main media drive crashes, it may be annoying as fuck, but its not a big deal because as long as you back up your main NLE project file/EDL, you can easily re-digitize all the media from the original DV tapes (or any properly timecoded source). The expense required to maintain a RAID5 is simply not worth it in 95% of video-production workflows. That money is better spent on simply striping all those drives together for greater throughput and diskspace.
While I agree with you that a redudant drive system would be ideal (i certainly wouldnt mind it), hardly anyone other than broadcasters do this, simply because its too expensive and theres really not much reason to.
Avid systems (with the possible exception of Avid XpressDV) are basically dead-end systems. If you can afford to upgrade your hardware and software a lot every year or so, then by all means, get an Avid. But if you want a basically "future-proof" system, Final Cut Pro basically has the edge. Hardware independent, and can pretty much do 90% of what an Avid can/used to do for well under $5k
And before you paint me a Mac/Final Cut nut, keep in mind that video production and editing has been my profession for the past 12 years. I Did the Avid thing, got sick of their horrible customer support and products with planned obsolescence. When Final Cut Pro finally became mature enough for professional use, I gave it a try, and have never looked back since. The fact that it runs on a Unix platform (where you can run Gimp/Cinepaint, etc. if you still want to embrace opensource video/graphics software into yor workflow) is an added bonus.
btw, I would like to know exactly WHICH used, "decent" Avid systems you are speaking of that can be had for $5k. You simply cant get an Media Composer for that much, and not even an old Avid Xpress/Meridian system for that much. Even many old ABVB based Avids cant be had for that much.
Slashdot Mirror
Archiving the message certainly sweeps it out of view, but it's the digital equivalent of throwing a rug over garbage in a corner of your room. Sure, you cant see it, but it will eventually stink up the whole joint if you don't toss it out for good.
Being that one of Gmail's most touted features is its powerful search mechanism, it should be obvious that the less useless data that exists in the search database, more relevant your search results are going to be.
Why in the hell do you want to keep messages that you KNOW you never want to see again? It makes absolutely no sense, and is one of the stupidest Gmail advocacy points I've ever heard.
As a former Firefox bigot, and now an Opera convert (there is no better browser currently on the Mac...even better than Safari/Saft...and FF on the Mac is just a fucking joke, although I prefer using FF on my Windows machines), the only thing I regret about making the "switch" is the loss of several wonderful FF extensions like Greasemonkey, Bugmenot, FlashGot and Adblock. But thats why I've made the choice of keeping FF around for when I need those features. For everyday browsing, however, Opera just kills Firefox. And I really like the fact that out of the box it retains 90% of the workhorse features that initially attracted so many of us to Firefox and its extensions (control over tab sessions & arrangement, mouse gestures, etc).
Judge Opera for what it Is, not what it ISN'T. Firefox tries to be all things to all people, which is great, but it leads to the "extensions" equivalent of "DLL-hell", especially when a new build of Firefox is released. Opera, on the other hand, just works. And i never have to worry that its basic functionality will break when an incremental update of the software happens...which we can all honestly admit is one of FF's greatest liabiities.
(By the way--in the interest of fairness--regardless of what other doofus Opera fanboys in this thread have mentioned, Firefox still wipes the floor with Opera when it comes to adblocking and page manipulation. Yes, Opera can technically do these things, but I sure as fuck aint hacking through stupid .INI files in order to achieve a weak simulation of what can be achieved with just a few simple mouseclicks in FF)
"On-line" editing refers to the "finishing" stage of the editing process, where an "online editor" takes the result of of the offline edit via an EDL (edit decision list....or visually refers to, via a "window burn" timecode reference tape) , and basically pretties it up for final mastering (i.e. shot-by-shot color correction, tightening up edits, compositing, final graphics, etc etc).
In the 80's and 90's the online edit phase generally took place on a linear (ergo, uncompressed) edit system to ensure the highest picture quality. Ironically enough, the online editor often used EDLs generated from non-linear offline systems such as the Avid.
The terms have nothing to do with genres. TV shows have online and offline editors, and so do many motion pictures.
The only time I hate Caps Lock is when entering passwords in the dark.
Dont ask me why I'd ever need to do that, you dont wanna know :P
In all fairness, even Photoshop didn't resolve these two interface issues until version 6.0. They are both very irritating, I agree.
Please do this. Balance is always good to have.
Just make sure to make your article can be publically commented on.
Why do you think Adobe dropped Macintosh support for Premiere, as well as for it's new DVD and audio editing software? There's a lot of devoted Mac users who would buy Mac versions of those products...the problem is there wouldn't be ENOUGH of them to justify the development cost. What part of this simple equation do you not understand? Adobe is in business to make money, and being that they are a publically traded company, they are legally *obliged* to not jerk themselves and thier shareholder's money off on "good will" things like making a Linux version of Photoshop.
It's understandable that you ask this question, since it's obvious you're not a "professional" Photoshop user or graphic designer.NO "professional" user worth his or her salt loads up 1000 fonts for use in apps like Photoshop. It's not a Photoshop issue, it's an operating system issue. It's just plain stupid to have that many fonts loaded up at once, because it completely bogs down your entire system (and in many cases, will cause the entire system to lock up, as I discovered on a client's brand-spankin' new Dual Mac G4 with OS X). Professional graphic designers and layout artists use font management software like Adobe Type Manager or Extensis Portfolio to dynamically load the fonts they need *only* when they need it
Show me someone who really needs or wants to run PS on a "multi-user remote server" and I promise I will from this day forward state that you are only "somewhat" clueless, and not "totally" clueless."mkay"? dear god, thats so dumb.
This is subjective of course, but as I said before, Adobe is a *business*, so it makes sense that they want to make money. Charging for "upgrades" pays for the hundreds of developers and marketing droids that help to make PS the world-class application that it is today. Adobe knows that people are locked in to thier software (although, unlike Micro$oft crap, people are generally locked into Adobe's stuff willingly, simply because they actually produce quality products.), and so they can charge for upgrades without hesitation. And end users will generally pay for these upgrades because most of them will be able to pay for the upgrade with just one or two jobs.No...i am NOT a shill for Adobe, btw. I just have a very low tolerance for ignorant zealotry
That's cool and all, but you seem to miss the point, which is that people--in this case, graphic designers--who have REAL lives and have REAL work to get done can't (and shouldn't) be bothered with such unnecessary geekiness. There's really no point to that, other than to say that you CAN do it. And just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean that you SHOULD do it, obviously. Why dick around with that sort of thing when you can go out and buy a sub-$1000 PC and run Photoshop natively?
This is basically what the parent poster was getting at, namely that OSS projects that attempt to achieve parity with "mainstream", defacto standard programs (mostly in the field of creative content...things like MySQL, Apache, etc. are definitely exceptions) more often than not fail to penetrate that established mainstream, simply because great programming skills and great graphic/UI design skills are for the most part, mutually exclusive. Not to mention the fact that OSS developers and a great majority of OSS devotees generally don't think like end-users do. They have the patience to put up with convoluted installation procedures, quirky UI's, and stability issues, because they understand the underlying motivation and values that drives open source development.
The average user, on the other hand, has absolutely no reason to use Linux or the GIMP or any other open-source alternative to what "everyone else" uses, if said alternatives don't offer what they need or want NOW. Even things as superficial as product version numbering makes a difference. NOBODY in the "real world" would take a product seriously that took as long as it did to reach a v1.0 status like the GIMP. That's why it's foolish to lambaste Photoshop users who criticize the GIMP for sucking so bad, because you further alienate them from considering OSS in the future, when a product like the GIMP may have finally achieved parity with Photoshop. You can't convert non-geeks with non-geek values to "our" side by forcing our values on them. What makes sense to people like us is completely foreign to them, and theres no sense in trying to argue that point.
For what it is, and where it came from, the GIMP is a great piece of software. I'd never use it myself, but I am still very sympathetic to it, because I share the ideals that drive the open source movement. But I'm just not so disingenuous as to claim that it's a truly viable alternative to Photoshop, while denigrating it's critics, like so many OSS zealots on Slashdot do.
For example; cooltext.com has been running now for over five years. What it does isn't exactly in-depth; but think about it - a web-site that automates one of the commonest noddy-tasks that novice users want - for free.
Photoshop is fully scriptable, via JavaScript, Applescript and/or VB. Granted, it's one of the unheralded features of the product (Photoshop "Actions", introduced in PS 5, IIRC, gets all the limelight from the "average" PS user), but it's very powerful. There is a very large online user community that shares actions and scripts on sites like the Adobe Studio Exchange, etc.
Of course, the Photoshop scripting interface doesn't have the geek glamour that Script-Fu might have, but the only reason for that is that there is little-to-no demand for a Scheme based scripting interface for Photoshop. Although, ironically enough, a kick-ass Python based scripting plugin called "Useful Things" exists for Adobe After Effects, and it has truly revolutionized the usefulness of the product.
This puzzles me. I've never seen this to be a problem. Sure, I have in the past accidentally hit the "Google" logo when i meant to click on the "Groups" tab or whatnot, but not hardly enough to warrant a UI change.
I hate the new design, because it requires more (and accurate) mouse movement to switch between the actual search results and the search result types. I also see it as a problem for Google users who dont even know that they can target thier search terms to different areas, such as Groups, News, etc. Most people I know have link-blindness, and gloss over the text links at the top. The old version was much better, because the section links/tabs were clearly obvious (and easier to click).
If anything, technically oriented people generally create more mediocre content (at least visually and aurally) than non-technical people. Look no further than the Amiga zealots for proof of this.
Amiga users are by necessity, "techies". Back in the early to mid-90's, when Amiga graphics and animation tools were in fact superior to offerings on the Macintosh and Windows, the vast majority of stuff created by Amiga users were ubercheesy. They all had the technical stuff down, they just had no design sense.
Look at Slashdot for fark's sake...it's one of the most poorly designed sites (both visually and UI-wise) on the net!
OK, this post wasn't originally intended as Flamebait, but I won't protest if it gets modded as such ;)
Of course, many of thier guitars were pawn-shop cheapies, but it really doesn't seem to matter in the quality of thier end product, because the amazing sounds they got from these tunings always superseded traditional notions of what a "good" guitar is supposed to sound like.
Another beautiful tuning that Page used a lot is DADGAD (heard on "Black Mountain Side" and a myriad of other folk songs). It's my absolute favorite alt. tuning.
I wouldn't call what lame nu-metal acts (like Linkin Park, Korn, Limp Bizkit, etc) use as "alternate tunings". This totally weak and shallow genre is almost totally based on drop-D tuning (not what i would consider a true "alternate tuning"...although im well aware that Korn uses some non-standard tunings...still doesnt change the fact that they absolutely suck), where you can get admittedly cool sounding riffs simply by rolling your finger up and down the low E and A strings. Bo-ring.
It's totally cliched to mention Sonic Youth when talking about alternate guitar tunings, but it's for a good reason. Just listen to "Daydream Nation" or "Sister" (for starters), and you will hear excellent examples of alternate tuning in action. These albums simply do not sound anything like "normal" guitar based albums, primarily because of their use of true alternate tunings. And they aren't just tuning a string up/down here or there, they actually do things like stringing with unison string gauges, which gives you sounds that simply cant be achieved by tuning a standard string set to a different tuning.
The only problem with Sonic Youth, of course, is that for every brilliant song they write, there's 10 utterly worthless tunes that surround it.
And If bands like BNL and Goo Goo Dolls use alternate tunings, I'll be damned if it makes any difference to thier music. I just dont hear it...then again, I'll also be damned if i actually go out and buy a BNL or Goo Goo Dolls record, so I am open to being proven wrong on this point.
It's not difficult at all to drop the low-E to a D by matching (an octave down, of course) to the open-D string...and dropping the high-E (if you play true drop-D tuning) is as simple as matching it to the 3rd fret of the B-string.
Not really a pain in the ass at all. You really should free yourself of the chains of using electronic tuners. They're great in the recording studio, but when playing on stage, being in tune with the rest of the band at any given moment is more important.
The Toaster Flyer was used by hundreds of corporate and industrial videographers, as well as countless event videographers (weddings, etc). It actually boasted one of the best compression codecs that existed at the time (the Wavelet based VTASC codec), that was at least as good as Avid's highest quality AVR levels.
The Flyer was also used as the non-linear system of choice at the '96 Olympics in Atlanta, for on-site news packages and the like. In fact, there were numerous Avid systems available on site, but the Flyer reportedly became the favorite system after word got around as to how easy it was to use, how fast it worked (i.e. no rendering, unlike the Avid Media Composers) and the quality of the output.
It was also used on the Tonight Show (soon after Jay Leno took over the show) very extensively for realtime graphics, roll-ins and effects.
Your little $100 Radio Shack box did not have a built-in, realtime alpha-keyed 35-nanosecond Character Generator (a resolution that, while pretty lame by today's standards, was considered "broadcast quality" back in the early 90's). In fact, this is the one thing that even a 14 year old Video Toaster /still/ does better than most prosumer and professional desktop digital video systems today. I wish I still had one in my studio for just this purpose (excellent for creating realtime "bugs", lower-thirds and scrolling credits)
That $100 Radio Shack box also did not have GPI control or a fully scriptable ARexx interface, which enabled automation and interprocess interaction. This was definitely one of the Amiga's greatest strengths, IMO. Not even Applescript approached the depth of ARexx on the Amiga, where there seemed to be a unwritten, yet strongly accepted cultural rule among developers to provide an extensive ARexx "port" in all thier applications, so that end-users could expand on the functionality of the original application. There were hundreds of Toaster specific public-domain ARexx scripts written and distributed through BBS's and eventually the web.
You do, of course, understand that "broadcast quality" is a completely meaningless term, right?
Probably the only thing that defines "broadcast quality" is the ability to conform to FCC specs for over-the-air broadcast of a video signal (i.e. subcarrier bandwidth, "legal" chroma/luma levels, etc). It's an objective engineering term at best, and definitely NOT a subjective visual judgement.
That being said, as a former user of the Video Toaster in a professional environment, I can say that as great and liberating as the original VT was, the video quality left much to be desired. Being that the Toaster was a native composite video I/O device (third party hacks like the Y/C Plus notwithstanding), you could never really achieve the same raw video quality of a component video signal (i.e. BetaSP or MII) or an S-Video signal. No matter how good your "I" was, the "O" was always composite-video, and doing an A/B comparison between the source input and the toaster output would show a VERY obvious (and often horrific) degradation of video-signal quality. In fact, it was often significant enough that many of our (generally) clueless clients would notice it with thier own eyes.
And yet, the Toaster was still "broadcast quality", because it adhered to FCC and NTSC broadcast specs, regardless of the fact that the video signal output from a Video Toaster would have a noticeable difference in visual quality from a standard component-video (IOW, BetaSP) workflow.
A common joke among broadcast engineers is that all the crappy home videos shown on America's Funniest Videos are ipso facto, "broadcast quality", simply because they are being shown on a broadcast television network.
Of course, back then (we're talking the early 90's, after all), digital video was a nascent technology, so there wasn't much to compare the Toaster to in terms of quality, so these shortcomings were often overlooked in light of the Toaster's overall functional advantages. It's very similar to the growing mass acceptance of Final Cut Pro, which still has MANY glaring deficiencies that call into question its "Pro" moniker, but are overlooked/excused because of it's general feature-set.
I was downloading and playing mp3's back in 1996 on my el-crappo Cyrix 486 DX2/80 box...Winamp could not reliably play 128kb mp3's at all, so the de-facto standard player for poor souls like me who couldnt afford a better box was WinPlay, which played them back with ease.
So you're saying DV isn't SD? What "SD" format pray tell were you acquiring on, which cameras were you using and what phase of the production pipeline did this "shootout" occur?
The DV format (as well as any other format) is only as good as the quality of the glass (many popular MiniDV cameras have shitty-as-hell stock lenses) and skill of the operator behind it. There is no doubt that straight out of the box, a prosumer MiniDV camera (like a Canon XL1 or Sony PD150) cannot hold a candle to a DVW700 or something. In fact, this is one of the reasons why this supposed "MiniDV" revolution gives the DV format a bad name among certain jaded professionals (which I will admit to have being before leaving my previous employer to start my own production company...I used to be a BetaSP/Digibeta bigot myself), because there are a lot of rank amateurs out there, getting shit on TV with MiniDV without taking the time to properly massage the footage so it looks as good as something shot on BetaSP or Digibeta.
In case you havent been paying attention, I am a major proponent of performing color-correction of VERY single DV clip in one's project before it goes out to mastering. It's not only a good practice, regardless of format, but it really helps DV footage shot on prosumer equpiment.
DV as a format can look just as good as Digital Betacam. It's not the format, it's the talent of the people using the format. I use Mini-DV for 99% of my current productions, and I have producers and fellow editors asking me if the footage in my projects was acquired on Digibeta. This is because I know how to work the DV format so it looks better than the average amateur DV videographers final edits (color correction, for one...it's the single most important thing you can do to make your DV footage look "broadcast quality"---a stupid term, btw)
Hardware is another issue. If you're just doing amateur work, DV will be fine,
Of course, you should know by now that this is wrong. DV is not "just for amateur work". Of course, you cant beat the quality of an uncompressed 4:2:2 stream, but color-corrected 4:1:1 DV footage can look just as good as Digibeta acquired footage, provided your DV camera has a top-quality lens and a talented camera operator behind it. I would agree that if youre doing high-profile spots, especially with a lot of motion graphics and keying and compsiting effects, then stay away from DV (blue/greenscreen keying in DV is absolutely horrendous). But it doesn't sound like the OP is doing things like that. For corporate, industrial and even most broadcast projects, MiniDV and talent are more than sufficient.
Face it, Apple owns the pro editing market. There are some competitors like Avid and Combustion
not to be overly pedantic, but Discreet Combustion is not a competitor to Apple's editing products. A competitor to Shake, maybe, but it definitely doesnt belong in the same argument as Avid and Final Cut Pro.
Apple doesnt own the pro editing market yet (although it does own the independent pro market--i.e. 1-10 employee "boutique" editing shops). But it IS true that Avid's days are numbered, as each release of FCP brings with it dozens of more reasons not to stick with Avid's overpriced products. I give them 2-3 years at the rate they are going, whereupon Apple WILL own the professional, mainstream editing market, while Avid will become the next Discreet or SGI, where it serves the super-highend market, yet has a fraction of the profitability of a company like Apple or Adobe.
I do agree with you that opensource video software is largely a waste of time if you want to do anything remotely professional.
It also happens to be a complete piece of crap.
The OP was looking for a "professional" system, and Avid FreeDV is anything but. It is crippled to the point of uselessness by anyone other than someone who just wants to make a quick edit of thier dog running around in the yard.
The crippled interface/features in FreeDV will definitely NOT give you a taste of the "industry standard" Avid workflow.
There is absolutely nothing unusual about using a "single drive" in this situation. This is the norm. In video editing, redundancy is not a concern, sustained throughput is (although in many large video companies and "mission-critical" broadcast situations, redundant media arrays are used, but those are very rare exceptions).
If my main media drive crashes, it may be annoying as fuck, but its not a big deal because as long as you back up your main NLE project file/EDL, you can easily re-digitize all the media from the original DV tapes (or any properly timecoded source). The expense required to maintain a RAID5 is simply not worth it in 95% of video-production workflows. That money is better spent on simply striping all those drives together for greater throughput and diskspace.
While I agree with you that a redudant drive system would be ideal (i certainly wouldnt mind it), hardly anyone other than broadcasters do this, simply because its too expensive and theres really not much reason to.
Avid systems (with the possible exception of Avid XpressDV) are basically dead-end systems. If you can afford to upgrade your hardware and software a lot every year or so, then by all means, get an Avid. But if you want a basically "future-proof" system, Final Cut Pro basically has the edge. Hardware independent, and can pretty much do 90% of what an Avid can/used to do for well under $5k
And before you paint me a Mac/Final Cut nut, keep in mind that video production and editing has been my profession for the past 12 years. I Did the Avid thing, got sick of their horrible customer support and products with planned obsolescence. When Final Cut Pro finally became mature enough for professional use, I gave it a try, and have never looked back since. The fact that it runs on a Unix platform (where you can run Gimp/Cinepaint, etc. if you still want to embrace opensource video/graphics software into yor workflow) is an added bonus.
btw, I would like to know exactly WHICH used, "decent" Avid systems you are speaking of that can be had for $5k. You simply cant get an Media Composer for that much, and not even an old Avid Xpress/Meridian system for that much. Even many old ABVB based Avids cant be had for that much.