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.
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.
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.
Over the last three years I have not been shy about airing criticism of the newest wave of low-cost flash memory camcorders shooting alleged high-definition video. My critique has largely rested upon video quality being lower than established tape-based HDV camcorders and the difficulty of editing footage shot in the highly compressed AVCHD format.
Kodak Zi6 HD camcorder
The last time I posted on the topic was about a year ago when I took on Kodak’s entry into the field with the first HD camcorder priced under $200 the Zi6. I started to warm to the concept based upon the low price which then also makes higher quality videography more widely accessible. I never had a chance to get my hands on a Zi6 until very recently when I was in a store to check out a different model of inexpensive HD camcorder, which I’ll get to in a moment. The Zi6 takes on the Flip camcorder style form factor. That is, it’s shaped like a bar-style cellphone, with a lens on one side and a screen on the other. The controls are largely limited to record, stop and play with the intent to keep operation simple and easy.
Finally this year I began seriously to consider taking the plunge with one of these small HD camcorders. There were two motivations. First, I realized that I barely used my miniDV camcorder any more, bogged down by its relatively large size and the hassle of having to capture tapes in real-time. Second, I tried to make some videos using my digital camera. While the camera’s specs say it shoots video in a resolution equivalent to full standard definition DV (640×480) I found the resulting footage to be really lacking in quality. On top of that, the video files were recorded in a relatively inefficient and obsolete format.
Although the simplicity of the Flip-style camcorders hold some appeal for me, I’m really not sure I can be satisfied with their lack of manual adjustments, zoom and other basic camcorder settings. I recognize how the average user probably doesn’t care and doesn’t miss them, and that the Flip brand camcorders have succeeded because they deliver good video with absolute operational simplicity. But I’m a bit more of a power user than that.
My Xacti CG10 and it's box in Radio Shack red
Then I got wind of Sanyo’s newest and least expensive camcorder in their Xacti line, the VPC-CG10. I was enticed by both the price, under $200, and the fact that it has a real optical 5x zoom. Sanyo advertises the model as a “Dual Camera” because it is both a 10 megapixel still camera in addition to shooting 720p HD video. I learned that the Radio Shack near work had the Xacti and a few other low-cost HD cams in stock and stopped in on my way home to check them out. Read more »
That’s the next crucial step in educational video online: developing a common standard for cataloging, organizing, and sharing content, regardless of platform. We already have a model in libraries, which have common standards for cataloging physical assets such as books and discs. The successes and failures of this decades-long process should provide direction and insight for educational video.
Chris Jackson noted that URIPlay, an open-source project that MetaBroadcast has been working on with the BBC’s backing, started as an interface project but has ended up as a metadata play.
“Our core goal is to help people find moving images,” said Jackson, “but we’ve found we had to move well beyond user interfaces to the creation effective metadata tools and interfaces. We compared ‘closed code’ and ‘open code’ and realized that the pain threshold would be about the same initially for either type, but that the data range/quality of metadata could increase significantly if our open source code was used by the larger open source community. Our open software code revolves around metadata scraping and parsing.”
Although it all sounds a little technical, what’s at hand here is creating, storing and sharing data about video files so that the media itself is easier to find and use. The real trick is being able to search based upon more criteria than just titles or filenames, which often doesn’t result in much when video files are given names like “video01.mov.”
Searchability is accessibility and is truly one of the next most important steps in the development of online education, especially a more democratic online education.
I’ll be writing about more educational topics here at mediageek as that is what I do for a living and because I think the world of educational media is very connected to independent media and media freedom. Like so many disciplines, these worlds are too often siloed into their own self-contained universes, without a lot of cross-pollination. It looks like the Open Video Conference was one venue where the boundaries were crossed. I wish I could have gone, but I hope there will be more conferences like it.
Although the delay of the DTV transition to June 12 has taken a little wind out of the sails for the potential of a massive rude awakening for an American public unprepared for the sudden obsolescence of their analog TVs, the transition is still going to happen. While more households will have obtained DTV converter boxes (and that’s a good thing), the transition nevertheless will leave a huge swath of temporarily vacant spectrum ripe for the exploiting.
Back in December I blogged about a Pittsburgh-based project called The End of Television which planned an unlicensed analog TV broadcast of submitted videos on the original transition day of Feb. 17. I contacted Ian F. Page for an interview on the radioshow. At that point the transition was still more than two months off, so he suggested we do something over email, saving a phone interview for closer to the transition. Then Congress delayed our fun, but Ian didn’t give up — he just delayed the End of Television until June 12, too.
Ian was kind enough to still agree to do the email interview to explain the motivation behind The End of Television, and its relationship to other unlicensed broadcasting.
mediageek (mg): Please tell me the inspiration for the End of Television project.
Ian F. Page (IFP): I first heard about the transition to digital television a year and a half ago. The idea actually came up because some one explained to me that the streets would be littered with TVs and that there were specific protocols for recycling TVs. I had been thinking about ways to watch videos alternative to screenings and I began making a video that I wanted to show on TV. I had a burgeoning interest in electronics and after a little collaboration discovered that I could accomplish building a transmitter.
mg: Why is the transition to digital television significant, and why did you choose to mark it in this way, with an unlicensed broadcast?
IFP: I have always enjoyed moments in my life where some mandate or alteration in the daily round comes down from the mountain and WE have to adjust. I remember one day in high school when I overheard a classmate talking about how his cable company had switched the numbers of such and such channels. He was riled up about it. It is a totally insignificant change that somehow agitates the self-programmed thoughtlessness. It gives us a glimpse of the human behind the machine, a glimpse at the power of a medium, whatever that machine or medium might be. Daylight savings is another example, or when the fare for the subway goes up, or New Year’s eve. I like these moments and June 12th is another one of them.
I find the June 12th switch amusing in that the switch cannot happen unless people get involved with their televisions, so a passive medium gets a little physical attention. It is also amusing because the whole ordeal shows our faith in everything digital, the event is a nice marker on the way to accepting anything and everything more efficient and newer. The political activity behind the switch is also a loud declaration that TV is a right, not a luxury. The delay was a very interesting revelation for me, to read speculations and think about what it would be like if people didn’t have TV anymore. It brought back a conversation that I hadn’t heard in a while and from, what I read, the debate was really polarized.
mg: Is the project a political statement?
IFP: I am not approaching it in a political way at all, but the project leads to an interesting idea – the privatization of the electromagnetic spectrum. The idea of owning or trespassing on a person’s radio waves is silly to me. I do not think that someone or some corporation should be able to own a frequency. At the same time I do understand the need for regulation and allocation, since so many lives rely on communications.
Companies own wavelengths, like colors for example. John Deere green is just a wavelength like 88.3FM and both are private. The problem is that the frequencies for the public are ever decreasing. There was never any massive preservation projects for the electromagnetic spectrum like there was for parks, so now experimenters are confined to small frequencies. So if you want to experiment with radio waves and not become a ham radio operator, it is inevitable that you trespass.
mg: What relationship, if any, does the project have to unlicensed or pirate radio?
IFP: It is similar, the difference is only that I am modulating a video signal and audio signal onto a radio wave, rather than just an audio signal. That, and it is at a different frequency, but otherwise they are the same.
mg: Are you willing to share the technical details of your broadcast set up?
IFP: The set up is mostly commercial equipment and some modified ham radio equipment, nothing out of reach.
mg: How many submissions have you received? Can you tell us about any of the more interesting ones?
IFP: To date there are over 30 hours of footage, with more submissions coming in hopefully. The submission deadline is May 25th. I was excited to receive a submission from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE, a local filmmaker who is getting involved in the project. The video is something he has wanted to have on TV for a while now and we are glad to give his work the setting it needs.
mg: Finally, besides the obvious need to delay the debut of the project, is there any other affect the June delay of the digital TV transition has?
IFP: The delay revealed to me the elaborate process a bill has to go through to get passed. It also means not as many stations will be turning off at one moment, which potentially lessens the impact of the project on the viewing audience, since there are more people prepared to receive digital television and not analog. Other than that, it is pretty much the same.
Who knew the Library of Congress has a robotic system for the automated digitization of VHS and 3/4″ Umatic videocassettes? I sure didn’t, but I’m glad I took a last-minute opportunity yesterday to learn about the LoC’s film and video digitization and preservation facilities and efforts as part of an event on the Northwestern campus (where I work) called Screen Cultures: A Symposium on Moving Image Collections and Historiography.
I was only able to attend one panel featuring NYU historian Dan Streible, organizer of the Orphan Film Symposium, and the LoC’s head of the Moving Image Section of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division, Mike Mashon. Streible discussed how preserved and digitized film materials helped him research his book Fight Pictures: A History of Boxing and Early Cinema. He emphasized how having access to higher-quality and resolution copies reveals details that help construct a more accurate history. Streible also noted that the existence of multiple copies in different formats tells stories about the intended purpose and audience for a film. For instance a 16mm copy of what was originally 35mm film may indicate that it was distributed for small-venue or even home screenings.
Motion Picture Paper Prints. Photo credit: haaaley/flickr
I was reminded about the existence of paper prints of early motion pictures that were made prior to 1912 when copyright law didn’t cover movies. In effect, creating these prints was a way for early studios to hack the copyright system, since only works that could be fixed on paper could be copyrighted. Thus, studios submitted these huge rolls of paper contact prints of their films to the Library of Congress so they would enjoy copyright protection.
In his presentation Mike Mashon showed off the digitizing and preservation resources housed at the new Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpepper, VA. There they have a specialized Kinetta Scanner (PDF: “Preserving Early Motion Picture History with the Kinetta Archival Scanner“) that digitizes the paper prints at a rate of 4 frames per second. Before this device was available, preservation and duplication had to be done by hand, photographing the prints frame-by-frame. Amazingly, the digitized paper prints can then be output back to optical film.
The LoC is digitizing all of their video and film assets using a lossless version of the Motion JPEG2000 codec. Unlike common video codecs like DV, AVCHD, H.264 and DVCProHD, the one the LoC is using throws away no image data, with only a moderate amount of lossless compression in order to shrink the data size. This means the LoC is retaining as much video quality as their digitizing equipment can capture, but it also means they’re storing a massive quantity of data. According to Mashon their data center is able to archive 8 petabytes on tape, with a copy on spinning discs for regular access.
In addition to the full quality MJPEG2000 files, the LoC is creating so-called “access” files for use by the public in MPEG2 (the same codec in DVDs). They’re moving to creating MPEG-4 files, which are more bandwidth efficient.
It was reassuring to learn that despite all this digitization the LoC plans on retaining and preserving original films, even ones on volatile nitrate stock, as long as they remain usable. However, when asked about retaining videotapes, Mashon acknowledged that space will become an issue and holding onto magnetic tape will be a lesser priority. One very practical reason for this is that videotape degrades more quickly than film or paper, often becoming unplayable in as little as twenty years.
The LoC makes digitized materials available for viewing in its reading room on Capitol Hill. I learned that members of the public can request materials to be digitized for viewing. If the material is in the public domain or licensed for distribution you can even take a copy home, provided you bring media suitable for copying it.
I can only imagine the cost of this enormous preservation effort, but I’m very glad that such investment is being made in retaining these valuable documents of our historical and cultural legacy.
The venerable Free Radio Berkeley has a (relatively) new video demonstrating all the parts in the air chain of a micropower unlicensed radio station, fresh from their Oakland, CA shop:
Last Tuesday’s presidential inauguration was one of those moments where I think all business except for vital functions like transit and public safety stopped all over the country as people tuned in to watch Obama’s swearing in. Another thing that stopped for a lot of people was the internet. Arguably this was one of the biggest, if not the biggest live streaming video events in the history of the event. It was also one of biggest tests for streaming video over the internet, and the results were decidedly mixed.
I was at work on Tuesday, where one of my responsibilities is providing instructional media support. As soon as I got in that morning I started getting requests from people all over our building to set them up to watch the inauguration. Now, the building I work in is poured concrete monstrosity that acts like a Faraday cage, successfully blocking reception of most broadcast signals. On top of that, there’s no cable TV in building. So I advised anyone who asked about getting a TV that they should consider viewing a live stream. Then I went to go set up a live stream in a large conference room with a video projector. At that moment I realized that maybe the live stream wasn’t going to work out so well, as it took many different attempts on several different sites before we could get anything to stream for more than a few seconds. That was around 30 minutes before the inauguration was set to begin.
When I returned to my office all attempts to get a stream there–whether from CNN, Ustream or even the CBC–resulted in failure. A few minutes after the ceremony began I received an email from our central IT network department, advising us that our multi-gigabit campus network had ground to a halt due to people watching the inauguration online. Looking at Twitter and the CNN live Facebook stream I saw that we were not alone, as folks all over the internet were finding it hard to get a reliable stream.
More illustrative of the difference is the number of people who were denied the ability to watch the inauguration due to capacity limits. That is, another 37 million people could have tuned in to the inauguration on broadcast, cable or satellite TV while still leaving capacity for 37 million more. Whereas on the internet 7 million appears to be the upper limit — past that nobody else could watch. Read more »
I have the sinking feeling that I might be forced to define my terms….
My pal Aj alerted me to this boingboing post about the news that Pioneer is ending production of laserdisc players. The funny thing is, I honestly didn’t think Pioneer was still making laserdisc players.
Image credit: Marcin Wichary / flickr
That’s not a joke. Although I’ve been a fan of the format, and new players are still available, I was under the impression that whatever you can buy are just backstock from the early 2000s.
I’ve had a laserdisc player since 1993, and currently have a collection of around 100 discs. Similarly to my vinyl collection, I cleaned up buying used discs around ‘97-’98 when DVD hit the market and the early adopter videophiles dumped their LD collections for the next big thing. In that crucial transition period there was quite a bit of debate amongst hardcore videophiles and home theater enthusiasts–a tiny population compared to today–about the comparative benefits and deficits of DVDs versus laserdisc.
Photo credit: Rockies / flickr
Perhaps the most infamous salvo in that particular battle came from indie filmmaker Kevin Smith in the original commentary track to the Criterion laserdisc release of his second film, “Chasing Amy.” (Yes, commentary tracks first debuted on laserdiscs taking advantage of their discrete analog and digital audio tracks, and Criterion got it’s start on laserdisc.) Smith begins his commentary–recorded around 1997–with, “Fuck DVD.” Words I’m sure he had to live down in just a few year.
Of course we now know that DVD soundly trounced laserdisc, which never grew past being a small cult format to begin with. While a lot of the late 90s debate sounded a lot like the analog vs. digital debate of the LP vs. CD argument, I think it’s safe to say that the relative charms of analog video in the form of laserdisc were not as alluring nor palpable as with vinyl records. I could go into a long dissertation on how that relates to the differences between audio and video recording (which is different than analog motion picture film), but I’ll spare you.
Photo credit: craig1black / flickr
Unlike VHS, cassettes, LPs and photographic film, I think laserdisc is really dead. While the machines that record and play those other formats may be less widely available than in their heyday, you can still buy blank media and new player/recorders. With laserdisc it’s been a good eight years or so since a new laserdisc release has been commercially available. Furthermore, it was never a consumer-recordable format, so no recording your own discs. Without a commercially available program on laserdisc, the player isn’t much use.
Now, there were thousand of movies and other programs released on laserdisc during the format’s 20+ year run, and there are still some films on laserdisc that have yet to see the light on DVD (though the number is dwindling). So if you have a decent laserdisc collection and a player, the format’s not dead to you.
But in the broader view, laserdisc must be declared a dead format . We won’t be seeing any new laserdisc releases, and I’d be surprised if there were any pressing plants still left in operation. Now there will be no more new players, when even enthusiasts like me thought they weren’t being made anyway. Read more »
mediageek status, radio, video | Paul | 
February 27, 2010 12:23 pm | 
Comments (0) 
I find the June 12th switch amusing in that the switch cannot happen unless people get involved with their televisions, so a passive medium gets a little physical attention. It is also amusing because the whole ordeal shows our faith in everything digital, the event is a nice marker on the way to accepting anything and everything more efficient and newer. The political activity behind the switch is also a loud declaration that TV is a right, not a luxury. The delay was a very interesting revelation for me, to read speculations and think about what it would be like if people didn’t have TV anymore. It brought back a conversation that I hadn’t heard in a while and from, what I read, the debate was really polarized.
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