Merry Christmas y'all

Just a quick update to wish everyone back home a Merry Christmas. :o)

BBC Bitesize want me ...

... well, actually, they want one of my photographs.

I know its a bit of a minor event when you consider the context, and how many photos they'll be using, but still ... it's nice to be asked ;o)

Here's a snippet from the email I got:

My name is Dave Percy and I am a Researcher at GCSE Bitesize at the BBC. GCSE Bitesize is a revision website used by 16 year olds revising for their GCSE examinations in the United Kingdom.

www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize

We are making a Flash picture slideshow to accompany poetry audio for students to revise GCSE English. We would very much like to include your picture, ‘Passing Clouds', which can be found here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/olitee/127211251/

to accompany the poem ‘Sonnet' by John Clare which can be found here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/english_literature/poetryclare/1clare_sonnetsubjectrev2.shtml

Your picture would accompany audio of the line:

'I love to see the summer beaming forth
And white wool sack clouds sailing to the north'

So there you go ... :o)

HD Here I Come!

Ah, at last ... a post where I can geek out:

I visited IBC this week in Amsterdam (Flickr Photos), and was blown away by the high-def goodies on show.

I got back thinking that it was finally time to take the plunge, and upgrade the edit suite to fully support HD.

We already have an AJA-IO for input and output from FCP, so the first logical choice was something from the same company that offered HD. AJA have recently announced the ioHD, which is an amazing little portable HD capture and playback device. It follows the same basic design as the IO, in that everything is handled via a single Firewire link (in this case, FW800).

Apart from being a little dissapointed it didn't offer uncompressed or 4:4:4 editing (the IO is only 4:2:2), I figure it was still the best option from AJA, given that the Kona 3 card was SDI only ...

... that is, until I found this:

Blackmagic Design's Multibridge Eclipse was finally confirmed to be shipping only a few days ago, and with the same pricetag as the AJA-ioHD, you get far more for your money.

Not only does the box offer full 4:4:4 editing, support for ProRes422, and 2K HD ... it also has a fantastic array of analogue and digital input/output options.

If you're thinking of buying the AJA-ioHD, check this product out first. You loose the portability of the IO, but you gain an incredibly low-latency system that offers all the connectivity of the IO, but with additional support for 2K, 4:4:4 and hardware support for the RT Extreme timeline in FCP.

I've ordered mine today, and they're scheduled to be in Europe in the next few weeks, so I'll let you know how I get on.

In the meantime, I think my existing AJA-IO must have seen me browsing the brochure, as it's decided to completely die on me. What incredible timing! I would say I'm lucky that I was ready to upgrade anyway, but with at least 4 weeks to wait for the Blackmagic box, I'm going to have to be technically creative with the upcoming film festivals. Eeek!

Anyway. I've geeked out, and I feel a little better for it. I'll have some more geeking to do tomorrow, as I'll be buying a nice 42" 1080-line HD LCD monitor to go with this setup. Oh, how I love my job!

Goodbye Old, Hello New

Yes, yes, yes ... I change the design of my blog more often than I change my socks, which explains why everyone has been avoiding me lately :o)

Hello again! It's been a long time, but as you can see from my last few posts - I've been a bit busy. Quite a bit has changed. I've moved house, got married ... ok, so that's about it - but it took up a lot of time!

In a lame attempt to rejuvinate my blog, I thought I'd upgrade it to one of the newer Blogger templates. Can anyone spot the difference? Hmm.

The other problem I've encountered is a feeling of guilt every time I've wanted to post some highly geeky comments about some new gadget (say ... an iPod Touch) alongside earlier postings about my wedding. It just didn't seem right ...

... but I've since got over all that rubbish, so lets get back to some geeky posting ;o)

Speak to you soon,

Oli.

I'm married!

First of all, sorry for not posting to this thing in ages. I've been a bit busy with the topic of this post!

Secondly, to any strange people who are still checking this site after so many months, I thought it was worth a post:

I'M MARRIED! We were Mr. T and Miss. T ... we are now Mr & Mrs T ... how very exciting! If you fancy having a nosey, just click on the image above to view the album.

Oh, and yes - I know my blog has restarted the wedding countdown clock. One day I'll get rid of it ;o)

Oli.

Home Sweet Home

Hello. I'm back. I just thought I'd post a quick snap from my new home. Very yellow isn't it?

We're all moved in now, with only a small number of boxes yet to unpack. Not bad going really!

If my move is news to you, don't worry - I'll be emailing you soon with the address and phone number.

Speak to y'all soon.

Almost there ...

I'm just about to go to bed for the very last time at Whitefield Cottage. Tomorrow is the final day of our move (sort of ... ).

One slight problem though: My broadband will take a week to get transferred to the new property, so you'll not hear or see anything from me in that time (hurrah! cries the internet :o).

I just wanted to say what a pleasure it's been blogging all this time from this room, at this desk, on top of this hill here. Soon I'll be blogging from another room, at most likley the same desk, and not the slightest sign of increased elevation relative to my neighbours.

Even my telephone number is changing ... so if you're used to contacting me on the old landline, from Tuesday morning there will be a new number. If you're supposed to call me on that number, you'll get the details soon. If you're not supposed to ring me - FOR GOD SAKE STOP CALLING! (That mainly applies to Kitchens Direct and all those people who are always 'calling on behalf' of some company - you know who you are!)

So then. There it is. Goodbye for a week. Keep the internet tidy whilst I'm away.

Oli.

Whitefield Cottage. 2007.

New Home

We've got the keys - it's all official!

The move starts tomorrow. Should I have started packing this up by now? :o)

Moving House!

Well, it's official. We're moving house!

Surprised? So are we. We started looking for possible new properties for 'after the wedding' ... but we found a place we loved so much that we simply had to go for it. I'm not going to tell you much about the new place ... that way it'll be a surprise!

So, not being allowed to upload photos of the new place, I'm afraid all I can offer is a photo of the current state of our living room!

So there you go. This may well be the only post for the month of April, as we're gonna be busy. I'll update you with anything interesting tho...

New Wedding Venue!

Don't worry, we're not moving the wedding ... but we are having the ceremony in a much fancier location. The hotel were concerned about the number of people we were trying to fit into here:



And admitted that it was their own fault for allowing us to book that venue ... so for no extra cost we're getting married in here:



It's about 10cm due north of the previous venue, but we'll make sure minibuses will be on hand for anyone who doesn't fancy the hike.

We've also booked the DJ, confirmed the itinerary for the day, discussed table decorations and top-table layout. All in all, not bad for 30 minutes work ;o)

Apple TV: Unboxing

Ok, ok ... so I promised unboxing photos, and I didn't deliver. I'm very sorry for upsetting the internet (aka. Phil). So, here we are:

Click here for all the photos...

How beautiful is that? I've not really had much time to play with it (more on the reasons in my next post), but what I have seen has impressed me. There's been a lot of talk since the Apple TV started shipping of it's lack of features, but its clear to me (if Apple follow their usual model) that this is only the beginning. The Apple TV is basically a small Apple computer running a streamlined version of OSX. A simple software update can easily add new functionality ... and I hope it does.

Out of the box, it does exactly what it said it would do. You can connect to as many iTunes libraries over the network as you'd like, and stream the content directly to your TV. Alternatively you can select one of those libraries, and set it up as a 'sync to' library. Once setup the Apple TV appears in the iTunes device list as if it were an iPod, and you manage it in much the same way. Cool! The benefit being that you can access whatever content you copy across to it without the need for your PC or Mac to be on.

Music play back is just as good as Frontrow, if not better. It's very slick, and quick to access anything. The way in which podcasts are presented is slightly different, and makes it easy to navigate through any subscriptions.

For movies, I can't really comment. I have some H.264 movie trailers that I downloaded a while ago from the Quicktime Trailers website. They're all 720p HD, and they playback quite happily over my 802.11G WiFi network. The quality is pretty impressive, and in fact it's the first decent HD content I've seen on my TV. I mention that to point out I have nothing to compare it to :o)

It's a shame that it doesn't (yet?) support the playback of MPEG-2 content. I was rather hoping to create an archive of films on my server so that I could recall them on demand, but maybe that feature will have to wait. I've been reading that several people have already hacked the Apple TV to playback XVid/DivX material. Hopefully MPEG-2 playback is not to far away. (Not that there's anything wrong with H.264 ... but transcoding all my MPEG-2 content would be a real pain, and loose some of the quality!)

Hmm ... what else? It's very pretty - did I mention that?

All in all, I have to say that for £199 it's a bargain. Not just for me, but NMeM would benefit from a modded version of this beast for HD video playback. The next cheapest alternative is about £300, so it's worth playing with. Just think ... all gallery-based AV playback at NMeM could be soon powered by Apple TVs ... that's would have to get Apple's attention, surely?!

Apple TV

According to the TNT website, my Apple TV has made it all the way from Hong Kong. As I write it's 'out for delivery' somewhere in Bradford.

Finally ... a reason to go to work :o)

Unpacking photos soon!

UPDATE: Crikey ... I've had no time to play with the thing tonight. We've been too busy viewing a new apartment we're thinking of moving into. It's all very exciting, but the Apple TV got left behind. Maybe tomorrow night. Apologies for my lack of committment! Aparently moving house takes priority over new gadget unboxing photos. Damn the female race!

:o)

Podcasting Apples

Well that was fun...

I've just returned from a meeting at Apple's Europe HQ in London about podcasting. Admittedly, it was a Apple-biased view towards the technology behind podcasting, and they made the sweeping claim that 'podcasting' was a merging of the two words 'iPod' and 'Broadcasting'. Hmm ... they say it like they own it!

The day long event took us through the many new an innovative ways podcasts are being used in education, the museum sector and plebs like you and I. It was interesting to see so many universities there, with worried looking IT staff who have obviously been tasked with 'catching up with the bigger uni's' before the start of September term.

What was encouraging is the reinforcement of how simple a podcast is - from a technical point of view. It's just an audio, video or other media file ... and a little bit of XML. OK, so I knew that before I went all the way to London (don't tell my boss!), but I had one of those lightbulb moments sat there in the conference room. A year or two ago I pretty much decided that NMeM wasn't going to be streaming any big videos from their website, as the money involved (i.e. renting space on an streaming media server) usually worked against the constraints of the project (i.e. a project with no money!). So, I resigned myself to thinking of lower-bandwidth ways of delivering content. Audio seemed the most sensible, since we could host the files on our own web server. This worked fine, but as podcasting became more and more popular, it seemed to make sense to wrap these audio files with the necessary podcast XML. That way people could subscribe, blah blah blah ... you get the picture.

My 'lightbulb' moment is that I've been looking at audio-only solutions for too many months now. Whilst I've had my head down the world has moved on, and video podcasting is becoming increasingly popular. So - why not go back to hosting full-length videos? With podcasting there's no media streaming to worry about. OK, yeah - so there's a hit on bandwidth if you have a particularly large file that proves to be very popular, but not to the point of crippling our server.

I have to admit though, I'm not sure I'd fancy watching a 90 minute interview or documentary on that tiny iPod screen. But still ... I have seen the light.

It was also interesting to note that pretty much any file can be embedded into a 'podcast'. In theory you can deliver PDF or even word documents to your subscribers. Not much use for what I had in mind, but a great idea for delivering educational packages.

And then ... Apple talked about Podcast Producer.

Podcast Producer - although it wasn't made terribly clear at their presentation - is a service that will ship with OSX Leopard Server, and it looks set to make podcast production (on a mass scale) much easier. You simply create templates (using XML) for each type of podcast (audio, video or otherwise), and once you're setup you can integrate the service into your 'production pipeline' (I put that phrase in quote marks, as it makes me cringe whenever I use it!). Then, in theory, you can simply post a finished file to the server, and it will not only set about encoding the various versions you want, but it'll also make use of Qmaster or XGrid to speed up the process. Cool!

So that got me thinking ... to the point of asking the technical representative from Apple,

"There seems to have been a lot of hard work and development poured into
creating a solid, scalable encoding solution ... for making tiny MP3 files. Is this
likely to be a technology that we'll see Final Cut Studio v6 making use of?".

He admitted that he had no idea what was going to be included in the next FCP release, but he did point out that Podcast Producer is extremely flexible, and is designed to fit into existing production workflows. That would explain the support for both QMaster and XGrid. But still, this new technology looks far to good to leave out of the Final Cut suite. We shall have to wait until NAB to find out if my guess is correct!

Anyway, regardless of NAB and Podcast Producer, NMeM looks set to take podcasting it's events a little more seriously if I have my way. Watch this space! ;o)

Seussical (the Musical)

Ah, the end is in sight.

Today will be a long day ... with a afternoon and evening performance of "Seussical", and then about 3 hours of work to get all our sound equipment out ...

... but then it will be over. It feels like we've done six solid weeks of theatre shows, which in a way we have. It will be nice to get up tomorrow morning, and to not have to think about radiomics, mixdowns or batteries for once!

See y'all soon.

BBC: "Petrol firms say fuel not faulty"

This is an odd story ...

I can't quite work out whether there is genuinely something wrong with the fuel from these petrol stations, or whether it's the result of the BBC saying "Hey, there's something wrong with fuel across the country ... anyone having trouble with their cars lately?" ... and of course receiving thousands of emails saying "Yes."

The thing is, if they'd asked the same question two months ago, they'd have probably got the same number of results. There's a nice map here of where those emails are coming from:



Complete with the the following statement:

"... the map shows clearly that motorists are reporting that petrol stations all
over the country have been hit"

Erm ... no. The map clearly shows that motorists all over the country are whining about problems with their cars ... as they do every day of the week. I wish they wouldn't jump to conclusions so quickly.

Then again ... Miss. T's car has been having the symptoms described by many for the last two weeks. Loss of power, cut-outs and sluggish performance. Maybe there is something wrong with our fuel.

Hmm. Thank goodness I have a diesel ;o)

BBC: "Net firms tackle Vista headache"

Don't you just love the BBC's technology reporting? I frequently ridicule it here ;o)

This article appeared today, and it got me thinking. The article appears biased towards the ISP's complaint that Microsoft Windows Vista has 'broken' their software...

I'm sorry, but Windows Vista is a significant update to the Windows series, and it's changed many of the ways it handles system-level stuff ... such as networking. In fact, networking was one of the major focuses of the update!

This is an operating system that has been in beta for over a year now, and developers have had ample time to update their software. You'd have thought that these multi-million pound broadband companies such as Virgin, would have realised that some of their customers would be using Windows Vista as of February, and would have checked that their install CDs worked? Clearly not :o)

It almost sounds like I'm sympathising with Microsoft, which is rare. I'm not really ... it just frustrates me when global press organisations report on technology issues such as these, and point the finger of blame at the wrong person. Bah!

(I'm going to make a very good Grumpy Old Man, aren't I? :o)

February - Done.

Hello again.

Sorry, February has been a very busy month for me with three musical's to engineer the sound for, (A pantomime, West Side Story, and Seussical). I'm about half-way through the last one and my life should return to normality on Sunday (YAY!).

See you all soon...

"Vista Dawns ... The World Yawns"

Well, there you have it ... hello, by the way. Sorry it's been a while, I've been busy!

Microsoft officially launched Windows Vista to the public yesterday. Did anyone feel the earth move?

In the past I've always looked forward to a new release of Windows. Either because I'm sick of all the problems with the current version, or I just fancy a change of scenery. I've even upgraded my PC in preparation for the release. However, after reading all the info on Microsoft's website ... and various opinions in forums ... I find myself underwhelmed by the whole thing. Yes, it's nice to have the latest OS, but on this occasion I'm willing to wait.

Apart from Vista not appearing to be THAT groundbreaking, there appears to be a load of extra 'security' features that I'm simply not interested in. There's been a lot of talk about DRM, and it's integration into the OS (great news for the film and music industry ... bad news for us); there's been talk about the terms and conditions surrounding the 'upgrade' version of Vista ... which apparently disables your old Windows XP product key, so you can't even dual-boot XP/Vista in the short term (unless you fork out the extra for the full product)...

... and then there's one of the primary reasons I own my PC: Gaming. All initial tests show Vista to be a slow performer when it comes to games. Yes, I know Vista ships with the latest DirectX-10, but there are very few games ready to take advantage of that yet.

All in all ... I'm going to wait this one out for a while.

What struck me as funny is this: I'd never do this with a Mac! If I could get hold of a final copy of Lepoard a week before its launch ... I'd take a day off work to install it! Ho hum. I think my conversion is complete. I bow to the almighty Apple Inc.

Whilst I'm on the subject, I had to laugh at this article on MSNBC.com:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16873608/

If you scroll down to the 'Related Content' inset, there's a link marked "Discuss: Which is better - Mac of Microsoft?". If you're using a Mac and click on that link, you get a message telling you the forum software is only compatible with Internet Explorer! Ah, what fun :o)

Until next time....

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone!