Exactly. I work in television and appreciate the value of a good lens, which is usually more expensive than the camera head, epsecially when you're talking about the big sports lenses with tons of zoom.
When you are putting a tiny, sub-optimal lens in front of a CCD the size of your fingernail, then trying to fix 7,000,000 pixels on it, your image is *going* to look like crap. For best image quality, you need to funnel as much light onto each pixel as possible. That means a larger lens, a larger CCD, and a smaller pixel count. That's why broadcast television cameras are so large.
Yes! I wish someone would make a silent mouse. Especially for those late night sessions that keep everyone within earshot awake, like when Half-Life 2 came out.
of course, the setting was a bizarre alternate-universe where photons don't rebound off solid surfaces to create the phenomena called "ambient illumination".
This is the reason I don't like the "fully dynamic lighting" craze. The lighting is far too harsh (especially the razor-sharp shadows) and there's no radiosity. I think the optimal compromise is static lightmaps for most of the lighting, with dynamic shadows that work by subtracting from the lightmap, plus a few fully dynamic lights for flashlights and other really dynamic sources.
2D or 3D, it's just a medium. The fact that all these wildly successful movies have been released by studios that happen to work in 3D doesn't mean that 2D is on the way out. It just means that nobody with any particular storytelling talent has set out to make a 2D animated film.
Shrek 1 was a ton better than Shrek 2, and even 1 wasn't all that good for me. 2 just sucked, typical money-grabbing sequel. Toy Story 2 was proof that you can make a sequel as good as, or even better than the original. PDI/Dreamworks just doesn't have the story-telling flair that Pixar has consistently demonstrated. Not to mention that PDI is trying way too hard to be Pixar for their own good.
Amen! I work as a television cameraman, and can attest that no matter how good your camera is, it's useless without a good lens on the front.
A good HD lens for sports will run you about $1-200,000, and it's worth every penny. We're talking about enough zoom power to go tight on someone's face from a hundred yards away while still resolving effective HD resolution. That takes an unbelievable amount of precision in its manufacture.
One of my favorite TV stories is about a camera behind the plate at a baseball venue. Foul tip, ball smashes straight into the lens. They plonk down a hundred grand for another one. Next game, same thing happens.
Nowadays, they have someone else put a camera there and take a feed from them. =D
DSPs are "okay." As in, a non-musician will probably not notice it. But it's still not *quite* there. In a studio situation I think it's possible to get away with them, but I've never heard a simulation-driven amp that really sounded good live.
Please tell me you use pedals for your distortion... Solid state distortion blows and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone with ears who disagrees.
If you only play clean, or you don't actually play any gigs, I can see you getting away with a solid-state amp, but tubes distort much more nicely than transistors.
Snapping. Ability to type in a timecode and have it put your audio cursor at that timecode. Stuff like that. I don't actually use Audition, I use CEP, but Audition is what CEP became, so I used that as the example.
Probably the best way to do it would be to replace the knob with a simple text box that you could click and drag to change the value as well as click and type to change.
Audacity is a joke even for a casual user. Just like The GIMP, the UI is braindead and it lacks some of the most *BASIC* features essential for an audio editor. I'd rather pay $300 for Adobe Audition than try to make anything decent with Audacity.
I believe the iRiver iFP-800 and possibly the 700 series portables can work as USB mass storage devices with a firmware upgrade.
It really is worth it ripping to FLAC. If you want to put something on a portable, just encode yourself an MP3 or OGG. Too big? Just lower the bitrate you used. No worrying about transcoding artifacts.
1) It sounds better. Just use your ears, it achieves transparency at the lowest bitrate of any lossy format, and sounds better at non-transparent bitrates.
2) It's free. The inclusion of Vorbis support in a portable doesn't cost the developer any more than the actual cost of implementation. No licensing issues, no patents, no hassle.
Personally, I rip all of my music to my computer in lossless FLAC format. Why not, I have a 250 GB hard drive. =D From there I can transcode it to whatever I need for portable use or internet distribution (before you ask, it's my band's music). For portable I choose Vorbis, you just get more bang for your bitrate. For internet I do both a VBR MP3 and a Vorbis file, for universal compatibility and sound quality respectively.
This was literally the first thing I learned on my first ridiculously underpaid "for-the-experience" TV shoot. It was an audition for a reality show for NBC.
Since then, I've probably wrapped tens of miles of cable. You get to appreciate over/under, especially when someone who doesn't know it wraps up a 500 foot triax or DT-12 cable the wrong way and you have to untangle it at the next shoot, when he's not there to face your wrath, of course. For the uninitiated, triax is like coax with another layer in it, used for camera cables. DT-12 is 12 channels of balanced audio in one snake which terminates in a medusa-like tangle of XLR connectors on each end.
It's not a figure 8, it's still a circle. It's difficult to explain in words, and almost as difficult to demonstrate. Best I can do is:
1) Start the cable in your right hand with the end facing away from you.
2) Grab the cable with your left hand, palm down, bring the two hands together, so the palms would touch if you weren't grabbing a bit of cable in each hand. That's your "over" loop.
3) Grab the cable same way as you did before, only now rotate your wrist 180 degrees to face your palm up while still holding the cable. This should cause the cable to form a loop. Bring your hands together again so the backs of your hands touch. That's your "under" loop.
4) Repeat.
This will only really work with cables that have a good coil to them. Professional audio and video cables are actually designed with a slight coiling tendency to make them easier to work with. Non-professional cables like power extension cords are the worst.
When you work in television they actually teach you the proper way to fold one of their typically 500+ foot cables. This is because if someone doesn't do it properly, you've got 500 feet of rat's next to untangle at your next shoot.
The biggest trick is, you don't simply coil it. That puts a twist in the cable over time and makes it hell to unwrap. Instead, every other coil is forwards or backwards.
I'm a musician and plopped down the cash for some Shure E5s for on-stage monitoring. They come with about 5 billion different ear tips that you can switch out to see which ones are the best for you. I've finally settled on the triple-flange ones, which are a bit of a pain to get in, but once you do, you get soooo much isolation it's not even funny, and they're fairly comfortable. Ultimate comfort, though, the expanding foam eartips. Can't even tell they're there, though not as much isolation.
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Exactly. I work in television and appreciate the value of a good lens, which is usually more expensive than the camera head, epsecially when you're talking about the big sports lenses with tons of zoom.
When you are putting a tiny, sub-optimal lens in front of a CCD the size of your fingernail, then trying to fix 7,000,000 pixels on it, your image is *going* to look like crap. For best image quality, you need to funnel as much light onto each pixel as possible. That means a larger lens, a larger CCD, and a smaller pixel count. That's why broadcast television cameras are so large.
Yes! I wish someone would make a silent mouse. Especially for those late night sessions that keep everyone within earshot awake, like when Half-Life 2 came out.
If he works at Valve, why doesn't Steam use a P2P content distribution method?
Ouch! Why couldn't they fingerprint your left hand, though? Because you would actually be holding the gun with your right?
of course, the setting was a bizarre alternate-universe where photons don't rebound off solid surfaces to create the phenomena called "ambient illumination".
This is the reason I don't like the "fully dynamic lighting" craze. The lighting is far too harsh (especially the razor-sharp shadows) and there's no radiosity. I think the optimal compromise is static lightmaps for most of the lighting, with dynamic shadows that work by subtracting from the lightmap, plus a few fully dynamic lights for flashlights and other really dynamic sources.
I wasn't really going for less chars, I was just trying to exploit the inherent humor value in using BASIC to control a spacecraft.
10 DIG 20 PICTURE 30 GOTO 10
In pro soccer, the ref stops the game whenever he feels like it. The rules only say the teams have to play at least 90 minutes.
2D or 3D, it's just a medium. The fact that all these wildly successful movies have been released by studios that happen to work in 3D doesn't mean that 2D is on the way out. It just means that nobody with any particular storytelling talent has set out to make a 2D animated film.
Shrek 1 was a ton better than Shrek 2, and even 1 wasn't all that good for me. 2 just sucked, typical money-grabbing sequel. Toy Story 2 was proof that you can make a sequel as good as, or even better than the original. PDI/Dreamworks just doesn't have the story-telling flair that Pixar has consistently demonstrated. Not to mention that PDI is trying way too hard to be Pixar for their own good.
Amen! I work as a television cameraman, and can attest that no matter how good your camera is, it's useless without a good lens on the front.
A good HD lens for sports will run you about $1-200,000, and it's worth every penny. We're talking about enough zoom power to go tight on someone's face from a hundred yards away while still resolving effective HD resolution. That takes an unbelievable amount of precision in its manufacture.
One of my favorite TV stories is about a camera behind the plate at a baseball venue. Foul tip, ball smashes straight into the lens. They plonk down a hundred grand for another one. Next game, same thing happens.
Nowadays, they have someone else put a camera there and take a feed from them. =D
DSPs are "okay." As in, a non-musician will probably not notice it. But it's still not *quite* there. In a studio situation I think it's possible to get away with them, but I've never heard a simulation-driven amp that really sounded good live.
Please tell me you use pedals for your distortion... Solid state distortion blows and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone with ears who disagrees.
If you only play clean, or you don't actually play any gigs, I can see you getting away with a solid-state amp, but tubes distort much more nicely than transistors.
Snapping. Ability to type in a timecode and have it put your audio cursor at that timecode. Stuff like that. I don't actually use Audition, I use CEP, but Audition is what CEP became, so I used that as the example.
Probably the best way to do it would be to replace the knob with a simple text box that you could click and drag to change the value as well as click and type to change.
Audacity is a joke even for a casual user. Just like The GIMP, the UI is braindead and it lacks some of the most *BASIC* features essential for an audio editor. I'd rather pay $300 for Adobe Audition than try to make anything decent with Audacity.
I knew about this a couple weeks ago. Nice to see /. is on top of things, especially with regards to one of the most anticipated games this year.
Good to see it's working out for you. Happy listening.
I believe the iRiver iFP-800 and possibly the 700 series portables can work as USB mass storage devices with a firmware upgrade.
It really is worth it ripping to FLAC. If you want to put something on a portable, just encode yourself an MP3 or OGG. Too big? Just lower the bitrate you used. No worrying about transcoding artifacts.
Why Ogg is good:
1) It sounds better. Just use your ears, it achieves transparency at the lowest bitrate of any lossy format, and sounds better at non-transparent bitrates.
2) It's free. The inclusion of Vorbis support in a portable doesn't cost the developer any more than the actual cost of implementation. No licensing issues, no patents, no hassle.
Personally, I rip all of my music to my computer in lossless FLAC format. Why not, I have a 250 GB hard drive. =D From there I can transcode it to whatever I need for portable use or internet distribution (before you ask, it's my band's music). For portable I choose Vorbis, you just get more bang for your bitrate. For internet I do both a VBR MP3 and a Vorbis file, for universal compatibility and sound quality respectively.
This was literally the first thing I learned on my first ridiculously underpaid "for-the-experience" TV shoot. It was an audition for a reality show for NBC.
Since then, I've probably wrapped tens of miles of cable. You get to appreciate over/under, especially when someone who doesn't know it wraps up a 500 foot triax or DT-12 cable the wrong way and you have to untangle it at the next shoot, when he's not there to face your wrath, of course. For the uninitiated, triax is like coax with another layer in it, used for camera cables. DT-12 is 12 channels of balanced audio in one snake which terminates in a medusa-like tangle of XLR connectors on each end.
It's not a figure 8, it's still a circle. It's difficult to explain in words, and almost as difficult to demonstrate. Best I can do is:
1) Start the cable in your right hand with the end facing away from you.
2) Grab the cable with your left hand, palm down, bring the two hands together, so the palms would touch if you weren't grabbing a bit of cable in each hand. That's your "over" loop.
3) Grab the cable same way as you did before, only now rotate your wrist 180 degrees to face your palm up while still holding the cable. This should cause the cable to form a loop. Bring your hands together again so the backs of your hands touch. That's your "under" loop.
4) Repeat.
This will only really work with cables that have a good coil to them. Professional audio and video cables are actually designed with a slight coiling tendency to make them easier to work with. Non-professional cables like power extension cords are the worst.
When you work in television they actually teach you the proper way to fold one of their typically 500+ foot cables. This is because if someone doesn't do it properly, you've got 500 feet of rat's next to untangle at your next shoot.
The biggest trick is, you don't simply coil it. That puts a twist in the cable over time and makes it hell to unwrap. Instead, every other coil is forwards or backwards.
I'm a musician and plopped down the cash for some Shure E5s for on-stage monitoring. They come with about 5 billion different ear tips that you can switch out to see which ones are the best for you. I've finally settled on the triple-flange ones, which are a bit of a pain to get in, but once you do, you get soooo much isolation it's not even funny, and they're fairly comfortable. Ultimate comfort, though, the expanding foam eartips. Can't even tell they're there, though not as much isolation.