It looks like my challenge for 2010 is to see how many simultaneous writing projects I can keep up. What I’m learning so far is that the projects involving other people seem to gain my attention better than my nine-year-old blog here. Also, I enrolled in distance education certificate program that is also soaking up quite a few hours a week.
However, if you’re interested here’s some of the things I’ve written recently elsewhere.
At Radio Survivor I’ve discussed two of my favorite commercial radio stations, WDHA and WXRT. Yes, despite my undying loyalty to college, community and public radio, there have been a few commercial stations that rise above and make it into my radios once in a while.
Seems that photography is a topic the moves me to write at the ‘geek. So let me get in a quick post about a simple little device that has blown me away, pun intended.
I’ve been shooting, developing and scanning my own black and white film for about two years now. And one of the biggest problems with the DIY method is dust on my negatives. I’ve tried all sorts of methods to keep it at bay. The one that worked the best was canned air, but it’s not particularly environmentally friendly.
Then I heard that a number of DIY photographers swear by Giotto’s Rocket Blower, which is a completely analog solution, if you will. Really, it’s just a big hand-operated bulb blower shaped like a rocket so you can easily set it down.
I’ve had this roll of film that I did a horrible job of developing and drying. I was in a rush and wasn’t careful and just botched it badly. When I first went to scan it the negative was so dirty and messed up that I got too frustrated only got about half-way through. Finally, today I decided to give the rest of the roll another shot wiping it down with an anti-static cloth and blowing off dust with the Rocket Blower.
Holy crap! This neg turned out as clean as anything I’ve ever scanned myself. I had to clone out only a few specs of dust in Photoshop. Pre-Rocket Blower I would have to spend several minutes hunting down specs and tiny hair-like dust particles.
It’s also great for cleaning keyboards or anything where you need to blow some dust out easily, but careful. In that way it’s better than canned air because you have much more control and are less likely to blow dust into something delicate when cleaning electronics. It’s nice to discover that sometimes the simple things work best.
One of the biggest problems with most electronics product reviews is that the reviewer has a very limited amount of time to use and get to know a particular item. That’s why so many digital camera and camcorder reviews rest on technical specifications and relatively easy to measure qualities like resolution, image noise and sharpness. No doubt these are important aspects of any cam’s performance, but you can design a camera that has great tech specs but is also a pain to use.
That’s why I’m taking this opportunity to write about my Sanyo Xacti VPC-CG10 pocket camcorder, which I bought back in July. Although I had a positive opinion about the cam when I first wrote about it, I’d only had it for three weeks. Six months of regular use really makes the difference between an interesting toy and a useful tool. If a camcorder or other gadget proves to be too difficult, fiddly or simply un-user-friendly it’s likely to find a home at the bottom of a drawer or closet by the end of the year.
As one might guess from the very fact that I’m writing this update, I’m quite happy with this little camcorder after a half-year of use. Having a full 720p HD camcorder that fits into a small bag or large pocket is still really amazing. One of the features that moved me to choose the CG10 over one of the Flip or Kodak HD cams is its true 5x zoom lens. Though it’s hard to maintain a steady hand when zoomed all the way out, having the extra reach has really made the camera much more useful for me.
As a result, I think I’ve shot more video in my free time this year than I have in years. I’ve owned two miniDV camcorders over the last decade. While each got used, their relative bulk and reliance on tape meant that they still only were trotted out when I was absolutely planning on shooting video. By contrast, I’ve taken to carrying around the CG10 in my bag and shooting a little video whenever the moment strikes. Being able to easily import it to my computer as a file rather than capturing miniDV tape in real time means that I’ve been much more likely to actually edit and share my videos, too.
I’ve really come to like the CG10’s pistol-grip form-factor, finding it much easier to hold steady, especially with two hands, than the Flip-style camcorders. Yet, operating the zoom control is fiddly, making it nearly impossible to zoom smoothly. That’s one area where you can really notice the operational difference between an inexpensive pocket camcorder and a bigger, more sophisticated model.
Like I mentioned, I do really like having a 5x zoom lens at my disposal, with a focal range equivalent of 38 to 190mm on a 35mm camera. The quality of the lens seems about par for an inexpensive point-and-shoot camera. That is, it’s plenty sharp in the center of the image, but gets soft on the edges. It also shows some barrel distortion at its widest setting, causing horizontal lines to bow down at the edges. With video I find this less of a problem than with still pictures. But these flaws really aren’t bad for such an inexpensive camcorder.
Another feature that drew me to the CG10 was the availability of manual focus, exposure, white balance and sensitivity/ISO. In practice I use the manual exposure, white balance and ISO quite a bit. Especially with video it’s nice to be able to set these at the start and then not worry about the video suddenly getting darker or lighter due to small ambient light changes. The manual controls themselves are buried in menus, but you can set up the camera’s little joystick control to shortcut to four different manual controls. I have mine set so that pushing left adjusts ISO, pushing right adjusts focus, pushing down adjusts exposure compensation and pushing up turns the flash on and off. While I like this ability to customize controls, the joystick itself is kind of tiny and easy to accidentally trigger. The camera mostly doesn’t let you change these settings while recording. On the one hand this doesn’t let you adjust settings as conditions change. But on the other you also can’t accidentally change exposure in the middle of a shot, either.
Much more so than a Flip or Kodak pocket cam, the Sanyo rewards an experienced shooter because of the relative flexibility of its manual controls. Even a lot of more expensive tape, hard drive and memory-card based camcorders from bigger brands don’t let you adjust exposure manually. It does take some time and fooling around to set up the camera the way you want it to function. But once it’s done, it’s done.
Prior to buying the CG10 I had been wary of hard drive and memory-card based camcorders, especially HD cams, because of the challenges presented by working with their highly compressed files. Therefore I was happy to find that the .mp4 files from the Xacti played in Quicktime without any processing. They also import right into iMovie ‘08 without a problem, letting you get right to editing immediately. The big drawback with iMovie ‘08 is that you can’t export a full 720p (1280×720) video. It only gives you a 960×540, which is kind of “near-HD.” I don’t have access to the most recent iMovie ‘09, so I don’t know if the situation improves with the newer version.
Still, iMovie ‘08 is one of the worst versions of iMovie, and so I find it useful only for short cuts-only projects. For more complex editing I use Final Cut Express (FCE). Unfortunately FCE doesn’t not like to let you start editing the CG10’s .mp4 files right away, forcing you to render once you do any editing at all, adding lots of waiting to any project.
Luckily I found a very simple workaround that lets me use the CG10’s footage in FCE much more quickly. Using the free video transcoding program MPEG Streamclip I’m able to convert the Xacti’s .mp4 files into Quicktime .mov files in the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) very quickly. On my two-year-old MacBook Pro the conversion runs at about 10x real-time, which is significantly faster than FCE’s rendering time. While the AIC files are bigger than the .mp4 files, the AIC codec is native to FCE, so there’s no long rendering waits.
Since I’m primarily a Mac guy, I haven’t tried the Xacti’s footage with Windows. I’m interested to hear from any readers who have Windows experience to share.
After six months of using this little camcorder I can say I’m quite satisfied. It’s one main deficit is that it doesn’t have a microphone input. At the same time I haven’t yet had a project where that presented the problem. The built-in stereo mics are actually quite impressive, and you can hear in this video I shot of Chicago’s Environmental Encroachment marching band:
I’m not sure that the CG10 is the best camcorder for the newbie or someone who isn’t at all interested in manual controls. Out of the box the camcorder is set up to be pretty annoying, with a dumbed-down menu and lots of unnecessary beeping. But, then again, I think most digital cameras come that way. So, perhaps it’s less of an issue than I’ve supposed. I’m pretty sure it’s still the only under-$200 pocket camcorder with a real optical zoom lens, which is its other big selling point.
It’s completely unreasonable to expect a $200 pocket camcorder to perform like a $1000 model. Yet I’m very impressed with the CG10 overall. As an experienced videophile I’ve learned to work around its limitations, while appreciating the convenience of having a video camera with me much more often. And with such a low price-point, I’m more willing to carry it around to events and other places where I might hesitate to bring a more expensive camera.
I must admit I’m quite curious to see where these little pocket HD cams are going next.
The annual Consumer Electronics Show has come and gone, with the usual array of new gadgets ranging from the cool to useless, to vaporware. Over at RadioSurvivor I covered some of the news relating to radio. Along with radio and a metric ton of iPod/iPhone accessories, there were some new vinyl playback devices at CES, too.
Bloggers seemed particularly excited by the Crosley Revolution turntable, which, as Retro-Thing points out, is a knock-off of the 1980s Audio-Technica AT-727 Sound Burger record player. Although R-T’s James Graheme recalls that it has “an almost mythic reputation for high-quality sound,” my own recollection is that they were fiddly and mediocre at best. Sony had its own versions of the platter-less record player in the 80s, too, the PS-F5 and PS-F9. Because their unusual design both have also achieve a near-mythic status. But mythic does not necessarily mean good.
Again, I must argue that the “innovations” of linear-tracking and platter-less turntables in the 1980s contributed to the widely-held perception that vinyl provided low quality sound. I’m not so certain that these approaches were inherently wrong-headed. Rather, I’m inclined to blame their application in increasingly light-weight plastic components. That’s why none of these technologies have been seen again since the 1980s… until now, that is.
Shades of a proven, time-tested design.
CNet’s audio blogger Donald Bell demonstrates his understanding of this in his post on the new Audio-Technica USB turntable that is a knock-off of a much more proven design:
Compared with most of the flimsy, plastic, belt-driven, disposable toys that get passed off as turntables these days, my 1200 is a 20-pound metal beast that will probably outlive my grandchildren. …
the Audio Technica AT-LP120-USB ($429 list, $299 street) offers a shining ray of hope. Clearly built as an homage to the classic Technics SL-1200MK2, the AT-LP120-USB seemingly offers old-schoolers a way to straddle the analog and digital music realms in style.
Unfortunately Bell is one of few voices of reason outside the high fidelity press.
It’s a bit of shame that the simple, no-frills but high-quality designs like those from Pro-ject and Music Hall aren’t more widely available or covered. Myself, I rock a five-year-old Pro-Ject that shows no signs of fading. If one of the mass-merchandise manufacturers were to knock-off one of these, rather than a discredited 80’s plastic wonder, it would do a wonder for the nation’s ears and the long-term viability of vinyl.
Frankly, I’m a little amazed that the vinyl renaissance seems to be thriving as long as it has, especially given how many of the new turntables out there are a bad 80s flashback. Some might argue that the prevalence of MP3s has numbed the country’s ears to true fidelity. I don’t quite buy that argument. MP3s can actually sound pretty good on decent equipment, and the dominance of digital audio has trained us to be less tolerant of added noise.
My best guess is that the continuing vinyl resurgence is really based on sound quality, in as much as vinyl sounds simply different than CDs or MP3s, and can sound better on good equipment. I also think it’s due to the inherent physicality of the LP. It’s bigger size makes the whole album package somewhat more aesthetically pleasing than the CD jewel case. But the starker contrast stands out when compared to the intangible nature of MP3 files.
As someone who is enjoying the increased availability of new vinyl records, I guess I shouldn’t complain too loudly about the plastic turntables, since they appear to be sparking demand. I just hope that at least a few enthusiasts newly awakened to vinyl’s allure will listen past their entry-level IONs or Crosleys and consider a nice used or new turntable that will really let the music shine through (and will also last decades longer, I bet).
2009 was a rough year for the mediageek blog. I haven’t done an official count or anything, but I reckon that this year had fewer posts than any previous. I mean, I didn’t post anything new from Oct. 4 through Dec. 28, for Pete’s sake!
2010 brings changes for the mediageek world. The most significant is the end of the mediageek radioshow. The last episode aired live on New Year’s Eve and is online now. The final program was actually more than an hour long as it went to air, assisted with my great friend and frequent guest, John Anderson of DIYmedia.net. A (mostly) unedited version of the whole broadcast will go up on the radioshow website this coming Sunday. Tonight is my first Thursday evening without a radioshow to do (since Sept. 2008 the show was produced live on Thursdays at 9 pm on WNUR-FM).
Ending the radioshow was a difficult decision to make, but one that I feel good in making. After seven years in production I am proud of the shows I was able to produce, the topics I was able to cover and, especially, the fantastically interesting people I has the pleasure to interview. For as long as I am able I will keep the archives online for posterity, history and the benefit of the random googler.
I ended the show for many reasons, as I’ve explained on the program, with the primary one being that the weekly time commitment of 10 – 20 hours has really started to wear me down. On top of that, I feel like I can not keep up on the media policy and reform beat like I once did. Too many other things–including work–compete for my attention, and there is so much more information to keep track of. When I started the blog in 2000 and the radioshow in 2002 there was much less awareness of media policy, in general, and many fewer website, blogs and other outlets covering. I’m quite glad to say that the situation is very different today, even if the amount of radio coverage has grown only a little bit.
With the nearly 20 hours a week I’m reclaiming I want to do more writing. I want to kick things up here at the mediageek blog, and, especially over at the Radio Survivor blog. Radio Survivor was the idea of my co-blogger Matthew Lasar, and it’s dedicated to the passion and tough love for the medium of radio, on the air, on satellite and online. I am so lucky to be in his company along with our third co-blogger, Jennifer Waits, who is the foremost chronicler of college radio at the Spinning Indie blog. Writing for RadioSurvivor this year reminded me how powerful and enjoyable blogging can be. As I enter my second decade of blogging, I needed the kind of kick in the pants that comes from working alongside other super-talented bloggers.
Although I don’t mention it here very much, I also do some freelance writing for Streaming Media magazine. I write there about educational video online. This is a topic I’m quite passionate about, on top of it being my day job. I’m planning to write more about the use of video to enhance, democratize and improve education at Streaming Media and here at mediageek.
But don’t expect mediageek to become all about educational media. I’m still very passionate about media justice and democracy, along with the democratization of media production and access. These interests coincide with education quite well, I think. So the mediageek blog will continue to be a venue for me to write about these aspects of media. That includes posts about gear–like cameras and camcorders–along with posts about our media environment.
So, off we go into a new decade of blogging. Hope you’ll come along for the ride.
I’m not generally one for tooting my own horn, but here at the end of 2009 it looks like I was a good two years ahead of the curve when I predicted the cassette revival waayyyy back in February of 20022007. I must admit that my prediction was a bit tongue-in-cheek, not so much because I didn’t think it was possible or reasonable, but because my cynical side can’t help but be a little…er, cynical, about resurgences of technology recently considered passé or obsolete.
But the real cherry on top was stumbling across recent postsall about cassettes at Stereophile magazine, the home of super high-end audiophiles, where CD players can cost $17,000 and speakers require a second mortgage. Stereophile’s Stephen Mejias was himself spurred to think on the subject of tapes by a recent article by Calum Marsh in PopMatters, “Reconsidering the Revival of Cassette Tape Culture.” Critical as Marsh may be about this ferric oxide return, his very tackling of the subject admits one simple fact: a cassette revival indeed has occurred.
Aside from the fact of my first arrival, however, I’m rather ambivalent on the whole debate on whether or not the cassette revival is just crass indie-marketing sheathed in manufactured street-cred. For those with still serviceable cassette decks I guess it’s kind of nice to be able to get some new tunes that you didn’t have record yourself. At the same time, the reason I have working cassette decks is because I still have music on cassette not duplicated in another medium, and I still find albums on cassette that are expensive or nearly impossible to find in another medium. I guess these special cassette-only releases qualify, in a way, though by design, not happenstance.
It’s not like cassette-only labels are anything new. Labels like ROIR were cassette-only back in the 1980s, and many cassette-only labels have survived in the interim due to economics and ease of one-off duplication and distribution, if for no other reason. The only reason we can call it a trend now is that bands that otherwise have seen relative indie success distributing their music on CDs are turning to cassette labels for limited editions. If it was still mostly the domain of bedroom noise and industrial bands, we probably wouldn’t be reading about this trend in as mainstream a pub as Stereophile.
Now that indie rock collectors and other hip elites can snarf up limited tunes on cassette I’m wondering if we’ll start seeing more plastic fantastic decks show up in Target, and if the used market will inflate. If you’d taken my advice two years ago then you’d probably be sitting pretty on a nice deck that sold for hundreds in the 80s but that would’ve cost you $15. You’ll be spending more on a super-exclusive new tape by a bunch of bearded guys from Portland.
Now I’ll sit back and see if this hot new trend makes it all the way through 2010 and outlives being a trend, like the vinyl resurgence has. Meanwhile, I’ll remind you that my hipster trend-spotting consultancy is still in business, but my rates are going up fast.
Because the EE marching band is also a visual presence I took some photos and video [YouTubeVimeo] of the performance to give you a sense of what it’s like when the band plays out.
Big thanks go to my old friend and EE trombonist Dan Merlo for suggesting the idea, along with everyone in Environmental Encroachment for coming out to the show. Also, big thanks go to WNUR Airplay team members Lori Crasnic–for making all the arrangements to have the band in–and Lucas Seagall–for engineering the music portion of the show.
Independent media comes in all forms, next to ‘zines, podcasts and blogs there are trombones, drums and batons. In parades, clubs and gatherings of all types across the US, and across the world a fresh wave of marching bands are bringing musical chaos to the streets.
Insurgent marching bands from around the globe are soon gathering in Boston for the Honk! Festival. One of those bands will be Chicago-based Environmental Encroachment. But before they head to Beantown EE is making a stop into the WNUR studios for an appearance on the mediageek radioshow.
As a Magic Circus Band, EE uses circus acrobatics, live music and costumes to create unique entertainment environments. At the same time they bring incredible marching band interpretations of classic and modern rock that you’ll never hear on a high school football field.
I find that Doug is articulating very clearly a lot of ideas that have also been rattling around my ahead for the last decade or so, but he’s made the effort to research them and flesh them out in print both in his book and in a growing series of columns and essays. What I like about his analytical approach is his willingness to attempt to get outside our contemporary assumptions about daily life and try to figure out when and how something, like the corporation, was brought into existence. I also appreciate that he’s willing to continue prodding at a question even when the answers are murky, showing a willingness to accept there are some apparent conflicts in the messy reality of daily life.
He recently wrote a piece for Publisher’s Weekly arguing that the publishing business is very ill-suited to corporate consolidation. He notes that book publishing is a sustainable business, but not a source of tremendous year-over-year growth of the sort a large corporation needs. But he remains sanguine about the future of publishing because the expert editors, publishers and writers haven’t gone away and are ready to rebuild the industry, perhaps with new independent houses.
I see some parallel with the radio business, although radio has been far more decimated than publishing. The root problem is the same: the large consolidating companies treated radio as a commodities business, seeking unreasonable profit growth that the business could not sustain. Radio differs from publishing in the fact that stations must be licensed and are therefore inherently limited in number, whereas publishing houses can be more easily started with less capital and require no licensing of any sort.
If new independents could start radio stations without having to try and pry licenses away from the likes of Clear Channel and Cumulus, I think we’d already be seeing some innovative rebooting of the industry. Unfortunately, radio is more like a neighborhood where the landowners have all let their properties get run down but refuse to sell them because scarcity still keeps the going rate artificially high.
In some sporadic cases we see innovation happening in public and community radio, where license holders can keep their stations sustainable but don’t have to rake in enormous profits. I just keep hoping that Clear Channel will finally bite the bullet and need to start shedding stations left and right, giving an opportunity for smaller, local and independent owners to get back into the game. Admittedly, it’s a more distant hope than the reinvigoration of the publishing industry, since another smaller consolidator, like CBS Radio, might choose to pack its stables, outbidding smaller players.
That’s the problem with licensing, and, to an extent, why the founding fathers organized against the Stamp Act of 1765. As it was designed, radio pretty much needs to be licensed because it was premised on scarcity partially imposed by the technological limits of 1927. But it’s not necessarily an inherent fact about radio. Perhaps the future of wireless communications will render this period of licensing a short historical anomaly. It’s an open question and no better than a 50/50 proposition right now.
Doug has his own relatively new radio show, The Media Squat, on the great noncommercial station, WFMU. In the interview we talked about his program and our shared challenged of trying to do an original weekly program on a completely volunteer, non-profit basis. That part of the interview will air on the next edition of mediageek. You can listen to it live on Thursday, Sept. 10, at 9 PM Central time on WNUR 89.3 FM in Chicago and online at http://www.wnur.org. Of course, the program will be archived online next week.
Anne Elizabeth Moore reports on independent musicians and media makers organizing right in Clear Channel’s own backyard:
“People in San Antonio have been doing media justice organizing for over 30 years,” the outspoken Latina activist and director of the Texas Media Empowerment Project DeAnne Cuellar explains. It makes perfect sense. One of the most renowned radio conglomerates in the world is spitting distance from your doorstep, and “you are nowhere on the radio at all,” as Cuellar puts it. This, plus the hour’s drive away from Austin, the so-called live music capital of the world, fosters a keen awareness of what locally consumed media could look like. …
Local 782’s approach is upfront and very clear. The group aims to organize local musicians, improve working conditions and the local music economy with socio-economic strategies, archive the diversity and history of music in San Antonio, and strive for solidarity throughout the music industry—especially among the working class.
Local music is local culture, and serves as a glue that ties people and communities together. Seems to me that musicians and artists in a lot of towns and cities could take a page from Local 782’s playbook, joining with existing truly local media, or working to create new local media opportunities.
mediageek status, radio, video | Paul | 
February 27, 2010 12:23 pm | 
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Now that indie rock collectors and other hip elites can snarf up limited tunes on cassette I’m wondering if we’ll start seeing more 
Insurgent marching bands from around the globe are soon gathering in Boston for the 
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