Samsung T-10 PMP

You know, I just seem to keep holding out hope for an iPod killer. In some ways, this player does come closer than most any out there. Nice form factor, beautiful display, and great sound that I feel is superior to most iPods. What did finally cause me to pull the trigger and buy this thing is bluetooth support. Not just for headphones, though it does do that, but you can actually take calls via bluetooth from your mobile phone!

What could possibly be wrong here? Well, it's the podcast support. Samsung lumps them together with a general RSS feed grabber and calls them "datacasts". While it does work, you can't create playlists of the "datacasts" and only episodes of the same podcast will play continuously. This is a similar problem to Zune's implementation of podcasts.
The Zune is also quite a good player, but like the Samsung, the podcast support is seriously flawed. If music and pictures (and video to some extent) are of interest to you, this is a great player. If however you're a podcast fan as I am, you may be best served by Apple.

HD DVD has lost the war

As if one more final nail was needed in this coffin, Onkyo announces their departure from the now vacant HD DVD camp. It's pretty amazing how quickly this format has fallen. I've never seen anything like this, and I've lived through quite a number of formats in my lifetime. I will say one thing. This has nothing to do with which format is better in terms of technology.

Ah I was so pleased back when I received the brand new Toshiba HD-DVD player some months back. What a gorgeous image it produces. Has it now gone the way of a Betamax? Well, no. It still of course plays standard DVD discs, and is in fact, the performance of the upscaler is among the best I have seen on any player.

Sure, I wouldn't pay that much now for just an upscaling player, but I have paid well more for units in the past that didn't even have HDMI! Gasp!! There will no doubt be some good bargains on existing HD DVD movies as well.

1234 and resolution

I once was taken away many a time by a music video. I witnessed the dawn of MTV. Of course, many of the videos of that time look more than a bit dated now. I've watched few in recent years, but still love music. I'm not so old that I can't appreciate this enjoyable tune by Fiest.

These days, not quite as many music videos stand out in my mind. Perhaps it's a curse of inexhaustible budgets, and music that's a little bit less than inspired. If you watch TV at all, you've seen a snippet of this one. It's part of the Ad for the new Apple Nano. A great choice on Apple's part, as this thing is catchy to the point of infective! I do think it's a great work, and worthy of the attention. It's very well produced, a great pop song, and it will probably be stuck in your head for a good while once you hear it.

Now for the rant. Once upon a time, 320 X 240 pixels would fill your computer screen. In time, it would cover just one quarter of the your display. And so the progression goes. Now that same video is about two inches across on my present display.

Yes, you can of course click a button on the Youtube player, as with most any other streaming video provider, and make it fill your screen. The resulting video looks much like the vintage Fisher Price video camera some of us have a fondness for. And what was the name of this camera? Pixelvision!

Could the problem be that the music companies are afraid that the video will be pirated? Very possibly so. It is certainly not an issue of storage space, as hard drives are so ridiculously inexpensive. Perhaps it's a consideration for the bandwidth impaired? No, as it's possible to encode multiple bandwidth streams in most every delivery medium on the planet. And no, it's definitely not a limitation of Flash, as you can find some amazing examples of high resolution Flash videos on the interwebs.

Could it be greed? Could it be fear? Both? It's hard to say. I do think that sites like YouTube should consider moving into this century. My eyesight isn't as sharp as it once was, and I don't enjoy postage stamps as I once did.

A new camera from Sony

It seems that Sony drops a new camera every time I turn around these days. This one has a couple of interesting features that make stand out a bit. For one thing, it's a shoulder mount cam, and the second puzzler is that it's projected to sell for about $1900. It's probably safe to say that this camera won't feel as robust as some of the good old DSR series units. I don't see how they could pull that off for in price range. Some will no doubt remember the dubious shoulder mount Panasonic cams
that sold for about as much.

It sports a 6.1 megapixel 1/2 inch CMOS sensor. Actually, Sony calls it a "1/2.9 inch sensor", which I've never quite figured out what the deal with that is. We saw this on the little PDX-10, which had a "1/4.9 inch CCD sensor". What a great little camera that was.

Sony claims that this is targeted at event videographers, and educational institutions. Perhaps this isn't an an issue for the latter, but I've been quite disappointed with the low light performance of several popular HDV camcorders. In fact, my old PD-150 blows most of them away on this. Sure it's only SD, but if the color is almost gone, and the grain is looking like 40 grit sandpaper, which would you rather watch? I'd love to see some footage from this cam in the same conditions that some of you are probably all too familiar with.

Via Engadget

User generated video: Money from the memes?

In a sea of user generated online video, where some are cute, and so many are just awful, once in a while you get a surprise. So much of what's found on YouTube, and many other online video sites these days is the work of amateurs. Some of these videos might only have meaning to friends and family. A clip of the baby's first steps for example. There's certainly nothing at all wrong with this, as it might be the only way Grandma and Grandpa can share the moment.

Then there are the inexplicable Internet "memes" such as the "Dramatic Chipmunk". If you've not yet seen the latest such craze, it's name is "Chocolate Rain". There's something about the latter that will stick with you like gum on a shoe. You have been warned.

Now and then, you find an example that stands out, and this "Flagpole Sitta" music video is definitely one of them. There's no shortage of alternate music videos for just about any song you can possibly think of. Unlike so many out there, this one is quite well done.

Is there any money in all of this? Well, perhaps, but if you need to pay the bills, you might want to start elsewhere. However, do you have your own Wikipedia entry? Hmmmmmm? Tay Zonday does! And the Eepy Bird folks actually made some real money from the wonderful "Diet Coke & Mentos" video. if you've not seen that one, you need to stop reading this and go click the previous link.

Better audio makes for better video

I was recently talking with a videographer friend. A great shooter with years of experience. Discussing a problem with low audio levels in editing, I asked if the audio was normalized and was compression used? The answer was no to both, and it turns out that this person was not really familiar with compressions, and how to use it.

In my experience, they're not alone. Good audio is crucial to video production. If the volume jumps dramatically between scenes, or some scenes are inaudible, the perception of your work is affected, and not in a good way either. Audio is so important that great sound can even improve the perceived quality of mediocre video.

First of all, normalize your video. This will justify the sound level so that the loudest peak is around 100%. Typically, right clicking on the audio event and selecting "normalize" will do the trick. Different editing apps vary on this, and may be adjustable. Secondly, set your track level so that the loudest portion doesn't exceed 0 db. In my example, I'm using Sony Vegas, but these steps are similar in most video and audio apps out there.

Apply a compressor plugin to the audio track, or as a non-realtime process to the audio event. In Vegas a compressor is already applied to the audio track, but it's set to a zero ratio (or amount) by default. Increase the amount (ratio) to around 3.5 to 4. Lower the threshold while playing the audio until the reduction indicator just begins to read about 2 or 3 db. The overall volume will usually decrease, unless you have auto gain compensate enabled. This is to be expected.

What's happening here is that when the audio level exceeds the threshold, it's reduced in volume by 4 times, or whatever the ratio is set to. This allows you to smooth out the very loud portions of the audio, and increase the quieter portions. And most importantly without exceeding zero db. This is to be avoided at all costs!

Experiment with threshold and ratio, and listen to the results. Don't get too carried away, or you'll have a dead one volume sounds as does virtually all pop music. I use third party compressors in most cases. Waves is one such provider of audio plugins. There are also some freebies out there, both in DirectX and VST versions.

UFO camping lights and the mic light

I ran across this thread on DVinfo.net recently about the "Mic Light" and the very similar "UFO Camping Light". It was implied in an earlier posting that the Flolight folks were simply reselling the same camp light for a good bit more money. Turns out they were refitting the units with LEDs of a more useable color temperature, and a higher quality. Having had experience with circuit board level work in the past, it seems pretty reasonable to me.

I have to admit that it's also tempting to get one of the cheapies just to play with. Although they are apparently too blue for indoor use, it would be nice to have a backup for when my batteries for the halogen light have bit the dust. Seems to me that with any LED based light, you would need a diffuser, or some other sort of softening control. Try looking into your LED flashlight for example. Even the single LED on my keychain light is blinding.