dumbass...I can play the WMV file just fine on my Mac OSX box using Windows Media Player.
I hate Microsoft just as much as everyone, but as a video producer, I have to admit that the Windows Media codecs are probably the best on the market now. And you cant beat its ubiquity, arguments about how it became ubiquitous aside.
"Emusic pays royalties on everything their customers download. $10/month gets you full access to their collection of MP3s, uncorrupted by any "DRM"
...but corrupted by spectacularly awful 128k mp3 compression.
That being said, I am a subsccriber to eMusic and absolutely love it, if only for the wide selection of non-mainstream stuff. I just wish they had a clue in regards to mp3 compression.
I ditto the recommendation of FutureQuest. I've been with them for over 4 years now, after almost 8 years of hopping from Webcom, Hiway Technologies and Verio (ack). FQ is hands down, the best hosting service I've ever done business with. They run Linux, and they offer all of the things the OP wanted, and more. Server uptime and performance has never been a problem, either. I can't say enough good things about these guys (and im not getting paid to say that either).
What sold me on them initially was the complete lack of complaints (and unending praise from Perl/PHP developers like me) on thier user message boards. A hosting provider can post all the cool technical features of thier service on thier website, but it doesn't mean diddlysquat if your customer service sucks (IOW, Verio).
Terra, their admin, really knows what he is doing, and is extremely helpful and responsive with user tech. requests. God, he even installed ImageMagick , after much user prodding!
someone mod this guy up...this is the most fair and cogent argument I've seen that diverges from the typical Slashdot "Im a kid/student/poor-person and because of this, I'm not doing anything wrong or illegal by using Kazaa, etc" argument.
I'm sure most of us here both use and traffic in technically-illegal mp3's. But it's the intelligent ones that don't try to justify it as some sort of honorable, revolutionary act, because it isn't. Of course, that won't stop me from firing up Kazaa or my Easynews account to download an mp3 of something, but I am one of those people who actually does put my money where my mouth is, and buys the actual CD of an artist whose mp3's I've previously downloaded from the net (if I like it and listen to it regularly, that is).
Most of my pro-corporate, pro-majorlabel, pro-RIAA friends laugh in disbelief when I say this, but when they come over and take one look at my "real" CD collection, they promptly shut their sumg asses up.
The Sony GV-D1000 Video Walkman is a very cool, small portable DV deck (works with batteries and AC) that actually has a foldup LCD monitor that could easily fit into your pack...although I wouldnt take it on any moutain biking trips...its not built for rugged environments at all.
Several of the new Sony digital cameras allow unlimited recording onto solid-state memory (MemoryStick Pro) at 640x480. That's camcorder quality
Video dimensions != Video quality. You can make a 1024x768 video clip, but if it's compressed to all hell using a gross codec like Cinepak, it's nothing more than a crappy looking video with a large frame dimension
I'm not in the industry, but it seems to me that dumping video from a DV camera onto a computer involves no "digitizing". Aren't you just copying an MPEG stream off the tape into a file? You're limited only by the speed of the computer's tape drive. It's still linear, but it should be way faster than realtime.
It's semantics. Video editors call the transfer of video "digitizing"--whether its from an analog tape, or just copying bits from a digital tape.
No commercial DV deck or DV camera streams data off the DV tape faster than realtime that I'm aware of. I believe some of the newer DVCPRO systems has support for faster-than-realtime transfers, however.
Re:what is the application of a solid state camera
on
Solid-State DV Camcorder
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
for video, (which no one is going to watch faster than realtime anyway) tapes seem to be the best method yet since they are easily storeable, have less moving parts than hard disks, and have far more storage space (ratio wise) than solid state media.
No consumer may "watch" video fast than realtime, although *I* do every single day...I'm a video editor. And as an editor, anything that eliminates the time wasted in digitizing video from source tapes is worth it. Digitizing lineararly in realtime is so "1990's", and its amazing that 90% of us in the video industry are still doing it. BetacamSX is an exception, but nobody but news and sattelite videogeeks use that format. Moving clips from the SSD as if it were nothing more than a file is exactly the way video editing workflows should work, in 2003.
I think we can all agree that this is not something that will revolutionize or even affect the consumer video space. But for professionals, it's a great start towards the elimination of tape as an acquisition format.
Im trying to rack my brain here, but I could have sworn that there was some computer guy who once said something to the effect of "why would anyone need more than 640k of RAM?"
If I can recall, he was some guy who founded some famous software company or something....
I think you're missing the point. This is obviously a proof-of-concept camera, and I dont think anyone at Panasonic is expecting professionals to implement this right now in any serious, widescale way.
As a professional, I feel that Panasonic did the exact right thing in unveling this at NAB at this early stage, because it shows that an idea like this is more than feasible, given current technology, and I'll be willing to bet my old AU-65 MII deck that once the cost comes down on the memory units, and they implement this technology into a dockable back for pro cameras, professionals will flock to this like flies on shit. I imagine that eventually, the SSD unit will accept more convinenient and swappable "cube" units that each accept an array of memory cards that can be switched out like tapes. I doubt very much that you will be swapping out individual cards that you plug right into slots on the camera back.
I might remind you that there was a time, not so long ago, when audio guys on film shoots wouldn't let you pry their Nagra's from their cold dead hands. Now Deva's are the defacto standard for disk-based location audio recording. Some ideas are so good, that it's worth the pain of quick adaptation and adoption.
Anyone who has been to NAB generally generally comes home in a hypnotic trance, and as such, it's not unusual to say silly things like that "wow product" in a mantra-like fashion.
Besides, he starts out this article by saying the following:
"Today should be retitled Wow-day in honor of the magnificent things I saw today on the trade-show floor."
NAB nothing but a big (but fun as hell...at least for those in the video industry, like myself) industry "PR" jerkoff-fest, so it shouldnt be surprising that he would say some dopey shit like that.
AE lags in so many areas, particularly color (AE doesn't do float).
AE 5.x's 16bpc is a nice start though. Though I agree that float is direly needed. Synthetic Aperture makes a AE plugin called Color Finesse that works in float, and it is so goddamn fantastic...makes even the the native 16bpc AE color tools look like crap...
And to top that comment off, I find that it's physically easier to use the Mac versions of these key commands. With the Windows version, I find that I have to use my pinky to hit the control key and then awkwardly peck at the right key with my forefinger since the keys are separated by a longer distance. With the Apple+key combo, it's a more natural fit to how your fingers want to land on the keyboard.
Damn I wish I had mod points now...
This is a great point that never occurred to me until now. The Command key on Mac keyboards definitely make these repetitive shortcuts easier, as your thumb naturally rests on that key anyway. Switching to your pinky to hold down
"Control" on Windows is forever going to be annoying as hell for me, now that I am aware of this subtle Mac difference.:)
Then you're obviously just going along accepting the defaults, I've had decent media management since FCP 1.0 and never had an issue, all you do is set the capture scratch to your project dir, and name your clips when capturing.
ummm...no.
I didn't even mention FCP's absolutely stupid and annoying "Scratch Disk" convention (and not to mention the annoying-as-fuck way it defaults to the last scratch folders used with the last opened project, even if you're creating a new blank project), because pretty much everyone who uses FCP on a daily basis all knows it sucks and hates it.
You're obviously not familiar with the Media Manager tool I was referring to, or the sequence/project consolidation process. It seems like it should work, but it doesn't, and many people (including myself) have been burned very badly because we trusted that Apple would give us a Media Manager tool that actually works, when it really doesn't.
It's a very well known bone of contention among professional FCP editors.
FCP3 can be unpredictably unstable on OS-X sometimes. Rumor has it that there is still a lot of legacy Windows code in the FCP codebase (from way back when Final Cut was supposed to be Macromedia's cross-platform editing app) that is assumed to be completely gone in FCP4, as they rewrote the code from the ground up for OS-X.
The FCP2/3 Media Manager works ok with simple projects (i.e. no nested timelines), but once you get even a tiny bit more complex than that, the thing just stupids out and completely disregards references to subclips, nests, etc. This basically makes it worthless for media consolidation, which sucks ass when you need to free up a large chunk of diskspace for more clips or projects. Another annoying thing is that once you drop a clip from the bin into the timeline, it totally loses all relationship with the master clip in the bin. This problem is ostensibly because FCP3 lacks any sort of internal clip database system, as is standard on Avid systems. The FCP4 feature list on the Apple site appears to give no indication that these problems have been resolved, but the addition of XML interchange is a nice touch. Although the damn thing should support the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) natively, it appears that it didn't make this release:(
2. "RealTime" performance was a joke
All my smug Apple-fanatic friends sent me countless emails regarding FCP3's supposed software-only "realtime" support back when it was first released. Well, anyone who uses FCP3 professionally knows very well that the its "realtime" capabilities are nothing more than PR hype. Realtime dissolves work nicely, but do anything more complex than that, and it's "Command-R time" (i.e. Render....Render...Render).
It's even more irritating how the most insignificant change to an effected clip's attributes will force you to rerender the whole damned clip, even if the change only affects a few frames of it.
It must have been very embarrassing for Apple when just a few months after the release of FCP3, Avid released XpressDV 3.0, which completely blew away FCP away as far as native realtime effects were concerned. Seeing XDV 3.0 perform a chroma-key with titles, color-correction and a superimposed 2nd clip--all simultaneously in realtime gave me an extremely large erection when I demo'ed it.
FCP3 also did not have the ability to perform realtime effects output to NTSC through the Firewire port, unlike Sonic Foundry Vegas, on Windows. Then again, to be fair, almost nobody's products except for Sonic Foundry offered this ability either.
3. 8 bit-per-channel color processing
Simply put, color correction and compositing in 8-bpc sucks ass. 10-bpc is quickly becoming a required feature in all professional video and compositing apps. In very happy that FCP4 now supports float space...this will definitely expand the product's acceptance in high-end circles.
4. Extremely poor audio features
FCP4's new 24-channel output is great fucking news. Up until now, people using FCP had to lay off multi-channel audio masters in multiple passes...that is so 1990's.
5. Lame-ola MPEG2 export
FCP3's MPEG-2 export used the native Quicktime MPEG-2 plugin, which works okay for simple stuff, but offered hardly any control over compression parameters at all. The new FCP4 export features will hopefully obviate the need for annoying and slow compression sessions using Cleaner6
6. No clip-context in the 3-way color corrector tool
The 3-way color correction in FCP3 was a great addition, but it still lacked the clip context features that are standard in the color-correction tools found in systems like Avid XpressDV 3.5 and Symphony. It's really difficult to color match a show from shot to shot without a side-by-side reference.
7. No time-remapping
Creating that annoying, herky jerky stop-start, MTV "Cribs" speedramp effect is a pain in the ass in FCP3. There's no builtin feature for remapping time, like in Adobe AfterEffects.
8. No user-definable keyboard shortcuts
Self explanatory. Some of FCP3's keyboard shortcuts are really dumb (the shortcuts for
The Steve Albini article is of course, spot on. The fact that it is almost 10 years old is remarkable, and it's a shame that things haven't changed much since then.
The flagship punkrock fanzine Maximum Rock 'N' Roll devoted an entire issue to this topic back in 1994, in a groundbreaking (at the time) issue entitled, "Major Labels: Some of your friends are already this fucked", and it should be required reading for anyone who wants to resist the corporatization of music.
Emusic is simply awesome! I've discovered many of my new favorite artists there (such as the abso-freakin-lutely stupendous Dutch electronic outfit known as "Solex"), and all the different genres of music that I've been able to sample and download have been more than worth the $10/month subscription fee.
I originally subscribed to Emusic in 2000 to take part in the "TMBG Unlimited" offer, which was a great ploy on Emusic's part to lure in all of us geeks who will buy *anything* They Might Be Giants commits to tape. The fact that all of TMBG's catalog (excluding the stuff they released on Elektra records, of course) is there should be enough to convince anyone of Emusic's coolness. The selection of Jazz stuff is really impressive too. Where else can you download all FIFTEEN discs of Thelonious Monk's "Complete Riverside Recordings" for just $10/month?
I *do* agree, however, that they should be encoding thier stuff at bitrates higher than 128k. Some of the downloads, such as the Violent Femmes "Viva Wisconsin" sound pretty terrible at 128. But most of the other selections sound just fine for casual computer listening. Personally, I prefer having the actual CD, with cover art, liner notes and full fidelity, so I'll use Emusic as sort of a "preview" and then buy the "real thing" if I like it.
I'm a big fan of Amanda Wilde...for some reason, I find her on-air voice really annoying (she sounds like a typical AOR station "rock chick" DJ), but she plays an amazing variety of cool and obscure stuff.
I didn't realize it until after I posted my original message, but it looks like KEXP is winning the Slashdot popularity contest, so far!
I concur. WFMU has some of the coolest and wackiest programming on the planet. My favorite is Irwin and Michelle's Incorrect Music Hour, which is the show Dr. Demento just WISHES he could do.
The Antique Phonograph Music Program is pretty neat too. Where else but WFMU can you hear music being played on the radio, directly off of wax cylinders and old gramophones?
WFMU also archives virtually ALL of the radio shows (albeit in icky RealAudio format) in thier entirety. Way cool.
I'm actually a financial supporter of WFMU, even though I live in Honolulu. It (along with KEXP, WBAI, WMBR, KCRW, KTUH) is what keeps me sane at the office, when everyone else is listening to stupid, vapid Top-40 and corporate "alternative" radio stations.
Slashdot Mirror
dumbass...I can play the WMV file just fine on my Mac OSX box using Windows Media Player. I hate Microsoft just as much as everyone, but as a video producer, I have to admit that the Windows Media codecs are probably the best on the market now. And you cant beat its ubiquity, arguments about how it became ubiquitous aside.
That being said, I am a subsccriber to eMusic and absolutely love it, if only for the wide selection of non-mainstream stuff. I just wish they had a clue in regards to mp3 compression.
What sold me on them initially was the complete lack of complaints (and unending praise from Perl/PHP developers like me) on thier user message boards. A hosting provider can post all the cool technical features of thier service on thier website, but it doesn't mean diddlysquat if your customer service sucks (IOW, Verio).
Terra, their admin, really knows what he is doing, and is extremely helpful and responsive with user tech. requests. God, he even installed ImageMagick , after much user prodding!
You will NOT be sorry you went with FutureQuest.
My smug friends DO laugh at me for my awful tpying skills, though......
I'm sure most of us here both use and traffic in technically-illegal mp3's. But it's the intelligent ones that don't try to justify it as some sort of honorable, revolutionary act, because it isn't. Of course, that won't stop me from firing up Kazaa or my Easynews account to download an mp3 of something, but I am one of those people who actually does put my money where my mouth is, and buys the actual CD of an artist whose mp3's I've previously downloaded from the net (if I like it and listen to it regularly, that is).
Most of my pro-corporate, pro-majorlabel, pro-RIAA friends laugh in disbelief when I say this, but when they come over and take one look at my "real" CD collection , they promptly shut their sumg asses up.
Video dimensions != Video quality. You can make a 1024x768 video clip, but if it's compressed to all hell using a gross codec like Cinepak, it's nothing more than a crappy looking video with a large frame dimension
Since when do DVD players play back video with the DVCAM codec?
It's semantics. Video editors call the transfer of video "digitizing"--whether its from an analog tape, or just copying bits from a digital tape.
No commercial DV deck or DV camera streams data off the DV tape faster than realtime that I'm aware of. I believe some of the newer DVCPRO systems has support for faster-than-realtime transfers, however.
No consumer may "watch" video fast than realtime, although *I* do every single day...I'm a video editor. And as an editor, anything that eliminates the time wasted in digitizing video from source tapes is worth it. Digitizing lineararly in realtime is so "1990's", and its amazing that 90% of us in the video industry are still doing it. BetacamSX is an exception, but nobody but news and sattelite videogeeks use that format. Moving clips from the SSD as if it were nothing more than a file is exactly the way video editing workflows should work, in 2003.
I think we can all agree that this is not something that will revolutionize or even affect the consumer video space. But for professionals, it's a great start towards the elimination of tape as an acquisition format.
If I can recall, he was some guy who founded some famous software company or something....
As a professional, I feel that Panasonic did the exact right thing in unveling this at NAB at this early stage, because it shows that an idea like this is more than feasible, given current technology, and I'll be willing to bet my old AU-65 MII deck that once the cost comes down on the memory units, and they implement this technology into a dockable back for pro cameras, professionals will flock to this like flies on shit. I imagine that eventually, the SSD unit will accept more convinenient and swappable "cube" units that each accept an array of memory cards that can be switched out like tapes. I doubt very much that you will be swapping out individual cards that you plug right into slots on the camera back.
I might remind you that there was a time, not so long ago, when audio guys on film shoots wouldn't let you pry their Nagra's from their cold dead hands. Now Deva's are the defacto standard for disk-based location audio recording. Some ideas are so good, that it's worth the pain of quick adaptation and adoption.
The thing you're missing is that this records full resolution, 60 fields-per-second video with 48k/16 bit 2-channel audio. IOW, a REAL videocamera.
"Today should be retitled Wow-day in honor of the magnificent things I saw today on the trade-show floor."
NAB nothing but a big (but fun as hell...at least for those in the video industry, like myself) industry "PR" jerkoff-fest, so it shouldnt be surprising that he would say some dopey shit like that.
AE 5.x's 16bpc is a nice start though. Though I agree that float is direly needed. Synthetic Aperture makes a AE plugin called Color Finesse that works in float, and it is so goddamn fantastic...makes even the the native 16bpc AE color tools look like crap...
Damn I wish I had mod points now...
This is a great point that never occurred to me until now. The Command key on Mac keyboards definitely make these repetitive shortcuts easier, as your thumb naturally rests on that key anyway. Switching to your pinky to hold down "Control" on Windows is forever going to be annoying as hell for me, now that I am aware of this subtle Mac difference. :)
ummm...no.
I didn't even mention FCP's absolutely stupid and annoying "Scratch Disk" convention (and not to mention the annoying-as-fuck way it defaults to the last scratch folders used with the last opened project, even if you're creating a new blank project), because pretty much everyone who uses FCP on a daily basis all knows it sucks and hates it.
You're obviously not familiar with the Media Manager tool I was referring to, or the sequence/project consolidation process. It seems like it should work, but it doesn't, and many people (including myself) have been burned very badly because we trusted that Apple would give us a Media Manager tool that actually works, when it really doesn't.
It's a very well known bone of contention among professional FCP editors.
FCP3 can be unpredictably unstable on OS-X sometimes. Rumor has it that there is still a lot of legacy Windows code in the FCP codebase (from way back when Final Cut was supposed to be Macromedia's cross-platform editing app) that is assumed to be completely gone in FCP4, as they rewrote the code from the ground up for OS-X.
Lemme tell you...
1. Horrible Media Management
The FCP2/3 Media Manager works ok with simple projects (i.e. no nested timelines), but once you get even a tiny bit more complex than that, the thing just stupids out and completely disregards references to subclips, nests, etc. This basically makes it worthless for media consolidation, which sucks ass when you need to free up a large chunk of diskspace for more clips or projects. Another annoying thing is that once you drop a clip from the bin into the timeline, it totally loses all relationship with the master clip in the bin. This problem is ostensibly because FCP3 lacks any sort of internal clip database system, as is standard on Avid systems. The FCP4 feature list on the Apple site appears to give no indication that these problems have been resolved, but the addition of XML interchange is a nice touch. Although the damn thing should support the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) natively, it appears that it didn't make this release :(
2. "RealTime" performance was a joke
All my smug Apple-fanatic friends sent me countless emails regarding FCP3's supposed software-only "realtime" support back when it was first released. Well, anyone who uses FCP3 professionally knows very well that the its "realtime" capabilities are nothing more than PR hype. Realtime dissolves work nicely, but do anything more complex than that, and it's "Command-R time" (i.e. Render....Render...Render).
It's even more irritating how the most insignificant change to an effected clip's attributes will force you to rerender the whole damned clip, even if the change only affects a few frames of it.
It must have been very embarrassing for Apple when just a few months after the release of FCP3, Avid released XpressDV 3.0, which completely blew away FCP away as far as native realtime effects were concerned. Seeing XDV 3.0 perform a chroma-key with titles, color-correction and a superimposed 2nd clip--all simultaneously in realtime gave me an extremely large erection when I demo'ed it.
FCP3 also did not have the ability to perform realtime effects output to NTSC through the Firewire port, unlike Sonic Foundry Vegas, on Windows. Then again, to be fair, almost nobody's products except for Sonic Foundry offered this ability either.
3. 8 bit-per-channel color processing
Simply put, color correction and compositing in 8-bpc sucks ass. 10-bpc is quickly becoming a required feature in all professional video and compositing apps. In very happy that FCP4 now supports float space...this will definitely expand the product's acceptance in high-end circles.
4. Extremely poor audio features
FCP4's new 24-channel output is great fucking news. Up until now, people using FCP had to lay off multi-channel audio masters in multiple passes...that is so 1990's.
5. Lame-ola MPEG2 export
FCP3's MPEG-2 export used the native Quicktime MPEG-2 plugin, which works okay for simple stuff, but offered hardly any control over compression parameters at all. The new FCP4 export features will hopefully obviate the need for annoying and slow compression sessions using Cleaner6
6. No clip-context in the 3-way color corrector tool
The 3-way color correction in FCP3 was a great addition, but it still lacked the clip context features that are standard in the color-correction tools found in systems like Avid XpressDV 3.5 and Symphony. It's really difficult to color match a show from shot to shot without a side-by-side reference.
7. No time-remapping
Creating that annoying, herky jerky stop-start, MTV "Cribs" speedramp effect is a pain in the ass in FCP3. There's no builtin feature for remapping time, like in Adobe AfterEffects.
8. No user-definable keyboard shortcuts
Self explanatory. Some of FCP3's keyboard shortcuts are really dumb (the shortcuts for
The Steve Albini article is of course, spot on. The fact that it is almost 10 years old is remarkable, and it's a shame that things haven't changed much since then. The flagship punkrock fanzine Maximum Rock 'N' Roll devoted an entire issue to this topic back in 1994, in a groundbreaking (at the time) issue entitled, "Major Labels: Some of your friends are already this fucked", and it should be required reading for anyone who wants to resist the corporatization of music.
Phil Dirt's "Surf's Up" on KFJC..It really doesn't get any better than that!
(Score: +5, Way Cool)
I originally subscribed to Emusic in 2000 to take part in the "TMBG Unlimited" offer, which was a great ploy on Emusic's part to lure in all of us geeks who will buy *anything* They Might Be Giants commits to tape. The fact that all of TMBG's catalog (excluding the stuff they released on Elektra records, of course) is there should be enough to convince anyone of Emusic's coolness. The selection of Jazz stuff is really impressive too. Where else can you download all FIFTEEN discs of Thelonious Monk's "Complete Riverside Recordings" for just $10/month?
I *do* agree, however, that they should be encoding thier stuff at bitrates higher than 128k. Some of the downloads, such as the Violent Femmes "Viva Wisconsin" sound pretty terrible at 128. But most of the other selections sound just fine for casual computer listening. Personally, I prefer having the actual CD, with cover art, liner notes and full fidelity, so I'll use Emusic as sort of a "preview" and then buy the "real thing" if I like it.
I didn't realize it until after I posted my original message, but it looks like KEXP is winning the Slashdot popularity contest, so far!
The Antique Phonograph Music Program is pretty neat too. Where else but WFMU can you hear music being played on the radio, directly off of wax cylinders and old gramophones?
WFMU also archives virtually ALL of the radio shows (albeit in icky RealAudio format) in thier entirety. Way cool.
I'm actually a financial supporter of WFMU, even though I live in Honolulu. It (along with KEXP, WBAI, WMBR, KCRW, KTUH) is what keeps me sane at the office, when everyone else is listening to stupid, vapid Top-40 and corporate "alternative" radio stations.