I was watching “Journeyman” (NBC) on TV tonight, and then a character comes on screen, and I was thinking “wait, I know this guy…”. And it was my online friend Nathan Baesel. Apparently he also guest starred on last Friday’s episode of “Murder Women’s Club” (ABC) and the previous week’s “Numb3rs”. He didn’t blog about it at all though, so I had no idea about the last two shows. Needless to say that I was (positively) surprised to see him out of the blue on TV tonight. He did an amazing job on tonight’s episode of “Journeyman” btw (he played the bomber at a later age)!

NBC Universal chief flat-out said that Apple and iTunes had “destroyed the music business” in terms of pricing and that video was next unless “we take control.”

Given the fact that Warner wants to pull out of iTunes too, I can only say two things to Apple:

1. Ditch them first and go DRM-free indie all the way.
2. Add support for normal USB media players instead of just iPod, just so you increase your iTunes market share even more.

Then, these studios/majors will come back crying and begging for crumbs. Apple is strong enough to “educate” its users to prefer indie.

I grew up in Greece, in Epirus. Epirus is full of bare mountains and few trees. Most of it it’s eaten away by the goats and sheep. Naturally, when I want to go for vacations, I want to see the opposite of what I grew up with: trees, lots of green, rivers, fluffy animals etc.

JBQ on the other hand grew up in France, which has quite some green. And so he prefers to go to places like the Death Valley, Grand Canyon and anything else that looks like a complete desert to me. I don’t like anything that resembles deserts. Which is one of the reasons why I didn’t accompany him in his recent trip to Nevada, Arizona and Utah.

We have trouble finding places that we both enjoy for vacations, but thankfully seaports do it for both of us. For the next few years we have already discussed the possibility of visiting Alaska, Hawaii, and maybe a cruise trip from US to Europe.

1. Vegas requires that you have the right project settings, or it will not only be very slow to preview video, but it can mess up the output. So always know what your source video is (e.g. frame rate, frame size, aspect ratio etc) and immediately choose the right project settings upon creating a new project. Choose “progressive scan” in the field order and “interpolation” in the de-interlace method if you prefer to edit and export in a de-interlaced way.

2. It is much faster to encode when you have resized your images before you import them on Vegas. So for example, if your digicam is 10 megapixel, you will have to resize these pictures to the Vegas project size in order to ensure not only the best quality and speed, but also stability (some versions of Vegas have a bug where it eventually runs out of RAM on videos that have too many huge pictures in them). So, first download this batch resizing utility from Microsoft and install it. Then, you must find out the correct size you need to resize your pictures to. For example, if your pictures are 4:3 and your video is NTSC 720×480, then you should resize your pictures at 655×480 because the aspect ratio of NTSC video is 0.9091. For PAL it should be 768×576. These values are good for widescreen templates too. For HDV resize to 1620×1080. However, if you decide to resize in project properties size, that should be fine too (it depends how the video editor treats these images).

3. Use the “Best (Full)” preview quality in order to view how the video will actually be rendered. When using the default “preview (auto)” quality you don’t get to see resampling artifacts or if the de-interlacing is working or not. Use “preview (auto)” quality only when you simply want to quickly and speedy preview your clips. Also recommended is to right click on the preview window and uncheck the “scale video…” option and check the “simulate…” one. This way you get a more accurate view of how the video will look like when rendered out.

4. I found that 60i video converted to 30p looks better when the interlacing method is set to “interpolation” and when you right-click on clips that have horizontal panning and you go to their properties dialog and there you “disable resampling”. Resampling is useful for vertical pannings, but it can mess up the horizontal ones. This is useful also if you are doing stop motion animation work or fast/slow motion: it makes your footage to not have ghosting.

5. When you render out (especially for the PSP) use the “Best” quality in the project properties dialog. It takes longer to encode in “Best” quality, but if you are encoding in “Good” quality only there is a visible loss of quality if you have white text on black background on your video.

6. To preview frame by frame in the preview window use “ALT+arrow keys” left and right. To move a clip left or right by one frame each time in the timeline, make sure the num-lock is ON, and click the “1” or “3” keys on the numeric keypad.

7. It is not obvious how to remove a transition properly and the manual doesn’t mention it. Zoom-in in the transition, select it, right click it and select “transition properties”. From there, select the little “+x” icon next to the questionmark at the top of the dialog. This will remove the transition and won’t “convert to cut”, which has the bad habit of cutting down A/V parts of your clips or “convert to crossfade” that you might or might not want.

8. When capturing HDV video, Vegas has the bad habit of stopping the capturing if you moved your windows focus to another application. To change that, click the “Prefs” button on the “Capture” tab and uncheck the “Stop device on loss of focus”.

9. If you want to do slow motion work, record at 60i at 1/120th shutter speed, even if the rest of your project is 24p or shot on a different shutter speed. Recording as suggested will provide a smoother slow-motion video with Vegas.

10. Exporting for the TV requires an extra step or two for better color precision.

11. If you use Cineform’s own tools to capture/re-encode, Vegas Platinum 8.0 to 8.0c has a bug and won’t recognize the file format (all other versions/editions don’t have the bug). To go around the bug go to C:\Program Files\Sony\Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 8.0\, rename away the “cfhd.dll” file and restart Vegas Platinum 8. Vegas will now use Cineform’s own library instead of Sony’s for that file type and your files will be recognized. Vegas Platinum 8.0d+ has this bug fixed, so upgrade to it.

Vimeo HD now has 720p support. So users with HD cameras can upload their footage in 720p HD format. It looks fabulous, have a look here and go full screen with it.

I have a few problems with the whole thing though: they seem to re-encode at 24fps, even if you shot in 60i. For God’s sake, re-encode NTSC HD video at 29.97 fps, not 24 (unless it’s shot at 24). And I really, REALLY, hope that when they say “24 fps”, they actually mean 23.976, which is the correct IVTC 24p frame rate. Because if I record with my HV20 true progressive 24p at 23.976 (after removing pulldown) and these guys are re-encoding at 24fps instead after I upload my footage, they will mess up the A/V sync real good.

Also, make sure you do the following four things, like YouTube correctly does it:
1. De-interlace the material, if the uploaded footage is not de-interlaced, many users don’t know how to de-interlace (yes, youtube is able to detect and correct that).
2. If the audio is mono (which is very common if the videographer used an external microphone), re-encode as stereo.
3. Support WMV as Sony Vegas Movie Studio does not support any other HD “delivery format”, so users of Vegas won’t have another option.
4. Recognize and respect aspect ratios.

It’s little things like that this that still bring some value to Youtube: actual engineering. Although I must say, Vimeo looks promising to videographers like myself.

So not only Comcast is not net-neutral, not only they ban users for using more than ~120GB bandwidth per month, but now they are possibly caught lying. I don’t use Bittorrent, so I don’t care much, but it’s certainly not a good outlook for them. I do care about the banning of users though: just last month JBQ downloaded 10 GBs of PS3 (legal) game demos, all in one day. Sorry, but Comcast will have to go with the times, if they have a problem with it, let them talk to Sony and ask game companies to optimize their graphics and data more.

Update: Senators Want Probe on Content Blocking. Tell that to T-Mobile which blocks certain parts of the internet, including VoIP ports.

This story made the rounds yesterday. A lady is suing Universal for requesting the removal of her 0.29″ sec youtube family video that had a Prince song as a background score. Now, according to the law, that WAS a copyright infringement (no, there is no “fair use” for plain consumers, get over it).

However, what she has a problem with — and I agree with her wholeheartedly — is what this country has become: essentially, a policed nation. Her own words regarding what’s going on her mind when she shoots a family video:

“I’m constantly thinking about what’s going on in the background, what’s on the TV, what’s on the CD player, the characters on my kids’ clothes, the characters on the toys that they are playing with. I’m cognizant of what’s going on at every step, instead of focusing on my kids, which is where my attention should be.”

I am sorry, but she’s right. This copyright thingie just gets in the middle of our lives, it just takes away the fun factor. It’s just too much fucking shit to take into account each time. You can’t even take a dump anymore in this country without thinking if you are allowed to take a prank picture of it, in fear of using inappropriately and without permission the image of the designer toilet your ex-wife had installed.

Of course, this does not mean that copyright law should go extinct as some open source radicals think so (don’t forget that USA’s main exporting good is IP, maybe even more so than weapons), but it should ease up. That was my opinion all along regarding all these RIAA/MPAA/copyright happenings the last few years: ease up on the consumer. Give him/her the benefit of the doubt. Use such opportunities as advertising: e.g. modify the fair use clause to allow non-commercial uses of the works, as long as credit is given, or something.

I know that some will say that artists should dictate how their works should be used exactly, but all the artists I have met do NOT want the same measures and licenses that RIAA dictates. They don’t give a shit if you used their song with your home video — in fact, they like it (I actually asked Tyson just that, Drist‘s singer and front man, last Saturday).

Besides, that’s entertainment we are talking about, and that’s works that’s sold in droves, just like potatoes. No one dictates to me that the patented genetically modified Glykopatata potato must only be eaten in the oven with oregano and onions and no other way. No disrespect meant to artists by this, but people like Prince should get a clue. It’s people like him that drove me to only buy and listen to indie artists the last few months.

Let people live their lives alright. Stop policing every little fucking thing, no matter if you are the government, or RIAA or Sheriff Bob. Rewrite the copyright law if you have to (JBQ claims that “changing” or “adding” to the existing US copyright law is extremely difficult because it’s already bloated — he read it).

Update: Nice article on the current RIAA/major-label problem. At the end of the article the guy suggests 4 things that people should do to fight back, and I am glad I already do all 4 of them. The biggest thing is that I have stopped buying from major labels or from indie labels that are owned by the majors — and I usually buy from CDBaby where most of the profit goes to the artist directly.

I just read on Digg about Ugandans creating baskets out of plastic bags. While this might be a new thing to Westerners, it’s not new to me. When I was a kid my mother would get plastic bags, cut them in very thin strips and then she would knit rugs out of them. They served us very well as door mats. Each one would have a life time of about 3 months, but they are really fast to knit (about 1-2 days). When I saw that picture on the article, a kind of nostalgia of my childhood emerged (yes, we were poor).

While I have been using iTunes to sync my iPod and encode mp3s for years now, I was not extensively using it as a media player. Winamp had this role, until last week. As I wrote the other day, I finally put together my indie rock collection of 9 GBs, and I spent 3 days finding artwork and fixing meta-tags.

So when all was done, I needed to enjoy the whole thing. So I started playing the music, sorted by artist. At the end of the day, I turned off iTunes, put my PC to sleep and went to bed. The next day, I open again iTunes to continue listening to my music in order, but I was greeted by a negative surprise: iTunes doesn’t “remember” which song was the one last played. It loads the song library again from the beginning!

This was a big surprise to me, because simply, the iPod does remember when you put it on stand-by. Given the fact that iTunes doesn’t have a stand-by mode, and I don’t want it to eat all this RAM at all times (hey, sometimes I need lots of RAM for my video projects and so I need to conserve as much as I can), I need iTunes to remember. But it doesn’t…

Update: Finally, my iPhone review is up.

Have you actually seen some of these Verizon commercials on TV? One of them deals with a dad who lies to his family and keeps the best for himself, while another deals with drug dealers who want good coverage on places that police won’t reach them. That’s just on top of my head but I know that I have been growing a dislike on Verizon because of their commercials alone in the past year or so.