Here’s one of the cheapest PCs that it’s good enough to be used as a dedicated Video Station by the average Joe. Originally, I was going to give a different suggestions for DV editing and HDV/AVCHD editing requirements, but the price difference is so small these days, but that it didn’t make any sense. So, I went with DELL, and their “Small & Medium Business” category. There, I went for this model (Vostro 200 Mini Tower with 2 GB RAM, 20″ screen, 160 GB HDD, DVD burner, 2.2Ghz Core2Duo CPU, WinXP, on board graphics/sound). I only needed to add to the default configuration an “IEEE 1394 Adapter card with Cable” for firewire, and the “Dell A225 2.0 Speakers”. Overall price according to their current pricing is $679.

Alternatively you could go for this one (add 2 GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, firewire, speakers) which will cost overall $459 (no monitor). Yes, it’s a Celeron, but it’s not a slow Celeron. According to Wikipedia, the “Celeron 420 is the only single-core Conroe-L Celeron that has its Thermal diode and Extended(Enhanced) HALT State enabled. In Enhanced HALT State the processor consumes 8W compared to the 35W of its normal operation.” So if you are environmental friendly, short on money, and you don’t mind leaving your PC overnight to encode, this might be the model for you. Christmas is coming, buy yourself a present.

Then, I would suggest you buy Vegas Movie Studio ($80) if you use plain miniDV, or Vegas Platinum if you need HD support ($120, 24p support). There you are, a very powerful machine and editing software for under a grand. For those who want Vista, don’t. Video editing apps work better under XP.

And B&H now sells the Canon HV20 for $750, with a $150 gift card (which is a good discount if you want to buy the wide-angle lens for the HV20 later), so if you are into upgrading your video stuff, maybe now it’s the time.

I love baby pigs, they are so incredibly cute! And goats, and sheep and ponies too. My online friend Tim posted a nice farm video that he shot with his HV20:

And his other video is impressive, good work with stop motion animation:

For years I’ve been ranting against organized religions, but I was never comfortable calling myself either an agnostic or an atheist. I couldn’t fit on any of the two types. Tonight, I finally figured out what I truly am.

I am an atheist Christian. Or better yet, an atheist humanist.

I live by the core teachings of Christianity which is forgiveness, love, and occasionally being the good Samaritan when the opportunity arises. I try hard to be what someone would call a “good person”. And at the same time, I don’t believe in the existance of God, or any supernatural power for that matter, or the fairytales of Jesus Christ coming back from the dead (nice trick Peter).

“Religion” should just be a way of life, a code of conduct, a guidance on ethics (as long as these ethics are not abusive or narrow-minded). The old stories, the clergy and the churches never had and will never have a place in my life (or death).

Update: Apparently some have similar beliefs too (not necessarily exactly the same).

Two days ago it was my mother’s name day, the St Barbara day, which is celebrated by many Christian churches. I called her to wish her for the day, as ‘name days’ in the Greek culture are more important than birthdays.

I think I’ve never heard my mother being so happy. She was blurbing, she was making jokes, her voice was dancing left and right. And it wasn’t because of the name day, no. It was because she’s close to freedom. A freedom that she didn’t enjoy for 35 years now. Close to life itself.

My parents filed for divorce last month. Hopefully, the divorce will get finalized this coming May.

I am happy for both of them, and I only wish it had happened much, much sooner.

A few days ago the Cineform guys announced their plans for a hardware encoder via HDMI which would feature the Cineform lossless encoder on a chip. The product does not exist yet, but this can be a pretty cool solution for both pros and consumers with an HDMI-capable camera. Users of the HV20 for example can use it to capture fully progressive HD at 1920×1080/24/30p rather than at the default HDV interlaced 1440×1080/60i or at the so much hated PF24 format. If the price is right, I’ll get one.

Additionally, they now offer discounts of their pulldown-removal NeoHDV/HD utilities for the HV20 users in particular. These utilities are the most convenient way currently to go around the pulldown removal annoyance.

Let’s assume an Indian young man. He originally comes from a village where young boys and girls are betrothed to each other at age around 6 or 7 and get married when older, all arranged by their families. Before the wedding occurs, the young man goes to the university in a big city. He interacts with other Indian cultures as well as the western culture. When he comes back to the village, he proclaims that he doesn’t want to get married by arrangement, he wants to meet someone on his own. He has a fight with his parents about the shame he brings to the family, and he takes off and never comes back — although he occasionally calls his mother in secret.

Through her, he learns that the girl he was supposed to marry, never got married. Young men are already married in the surrounding villages, and the only people who show interest are very old men whose previous wives are dead. The young woman only has basic education so she doesn’t have the luxury to also take off to a big city and find a good or respectable job. She was brought up to be a wife.

So, what the young man should do? Should he just go on with his life and just do what he believes in and ignore the trouble his decision brought on both families, should he show mercy and marry her, or is there another, middle solution? Like, trying to take her away from the village, pay for her education and feed her until she can stand on her own feet? What if her parents don’t like this idea and he has to take drastic measures (like, taking her away regardless) that can cause legal action against him?

What would you do?

Ok, these guys are idiots. The new version of Flash came out and at last, it supports hardware scaling and h.264. So far so good. But when you try to download the Linux version you only get a binary tarball, yum and rpm. No DEB.

Look, I know that you can’t possibly support all the package management solutions out there, but when Ubuntu has over 25% of the Linux mind/market share (source: Google Trends and our common sense), then you ought to deliver a DEB package. Come on. What this tells me is that the Linux version of Flash is a “by the way” effort, a single engineer at a dark room, away from anyone else. An engineer that no one wants to talk to during lunch time either. Poor engineer.

Shame, shame on Sci-Fi Channel for producing such a laughable mini-series, the “Tin Man“. Sure, the Sci-Fi tele-movies are always low budget and cheap, BUT, there is a big “but”. Every December, when the big networks pause broadcasting of their TV series, Sci-Fi traditionally presents their original mini-series which is produced in the best way is possible — considering their low budget. Series like “Taken”, and “The Lost Room”, were very well done for example.

This year, Sci-Fi Channel decided to shoot the re-imagining of the Wizard of OZ. Let me tell you one thing: this thing SUCKS. It’s just terrible. It’s just BAD. It’s better than their cheap tele-movies, but much, much worse than you would expect from their December special. And it looks like Flash Gordon. Kinda like the same crew and locations were used.

I’ve written about it many times: GNU/Linux has no usable video editor. Either their UI sucks, or basic features are not there, or in most cases, they just crash every other minute, or all of the above. Or when you do start to like an editor (e.g. Avidemux2) but there is one single problem with it and its maintainers refuse to fix, well that’s pissing you off. I just don’t like any of the available solutions (sorry for saying this, ’cause two Linux video editor developers do read my blog).

You might interpret my needs as “Eugenia just asks for too much”, but this is not true. In reality, I need very few editing features! But I need them to be rock solid. And when I say rock solid, I mean it. The other aspect where I am demanding is in format support. I need 24p, I need good understanding of DV/HDV and pulldown options. Basically, what I need is rock solid support for various formats and transformations of these formats to other formats, but very BASIC video editing. You see, 99% of the people who use a video editor do NOT need more than what iMovie ’06 offers in terms of editing abilities. These features include:

* Ability to split events. Ability to re-arrange scenes/media in the timeline.
* Just three tracks: one for video, one for voice and one for music. Keep it simple both for the user and the developer.
* Ability to mute the audio tracks. Ability to change the volume on them by 0% (mute), 10%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%.
* Ability to cross fade the music track events (fixed duration).
* Just 5 classic transitions for video (fixed duration). Keep it simple.
* A filter plugin system. I need the following from the get go though: contrast, brightness, gamma, saturation, white balance correction with high/mid/low wheel support, like on Vegas/FCP. Nothing else by default.
* 5 text titles/credit pre-configured styles, either on top of a choice of solid colors or transparent on top of a scene/picture (can be a plugin too).
* Ability to also use pictures instead of just videos clips.

In terms of editing, THAT’S IT. Most people just don’t need more than that (and yes, “most” people that’s all they need)! And yet, not a single editor on Linux does that INTUITIVELY right now. Don’t these people ever used iMovie or Vegas? How do you even develop a video editor if you haven’t checked out how the competition does it?

But even if you go around the learning curve to do these simple things, chances are that you will stumble on crashes and other weird problems. For example, open an h.264 or full HD file on KDEnLive editor, kaboom! Kino does not even support HDV. And Cinelerra, which takes itself way too seriously, does not even support a SINGLE lossless codec (it tries to fool you with MJpeg)! Regarding the technical aspect of such an app I need rock solid import support, ability to “tell” the application if your project is progressive or not, what kind of aspect ratio each clip or the project should have, what frame rate exactly etc. And the preview window should be able to match the aspect ratio, to have the ability to resize the video inside it only at resolutions that divide exactly by 2 (instead of just stretching), and in the case of HD, it is imperative to have support for second monitors to be able to preview there in 1:1 size. And as for exporting, it should have enough templates for devices, DVD, youtube etc, but it should have also a custom mode that allows me to do all this. It should do the right kind of pulldown if needed (e.g. if you transform from NTSC to PAL or to 24p), it should de-interlace PROPERLY, it should have the right aspect ratio, it should support all sorts of codecs, including lossless. As you can see, the “format support” thing is much more difficult to implement than the “editing” part. Most users just want to put two shit clips together and not be bothered with complex editing, BUT, they need ROCK solid and CORRECT output. This is why I put more emphasis on the format support rather than the editing itself.

Diva, as I wrote in the past, was the only project that was going in the direction that I needed in terms of a “home video editor”. It had the look, the elegance, the usability of iMovie. But it’s a dead project. And nothing else has replaced it in elegance. Here’s a mockup of mine above, based on an old Diva screenshot, on how I would envision a Linux video editor that can be as good as iMovie ’06.

The Drist put up on their myspace page their new single, “Demonstrate the pain“. Have a listen! I am dying to shoot a promotional music video clip for them, but convincing their guitarist, Brian, ain’t easy. 😉