The DTV transition is now complete. Seems quite a few folks still missed the message, and the FCC received quite a few calls. The real story is many people did just as they were instructed, but still have no picture.
A significant number of people don’t quite have their antenna situation in order. First of all, avoid these tiny “HD or DTV” amplified antenna toys. They’re overpriced and barely work. An amplifier is not the solution. Ironically, the best antennas for DTV are designs that are many years old. In fact, an old fashioned UHF antenna will work great. Rooftop antennas are the best. Radioshack still sells some that look like a series of “v” shaped elements, one after the other. These are the very same antenna designs that adorned rooptops of the 1960’s and 1970’s. If you can’t use an outdoor antenna, look for one of the designs that resembles an oven grill with one or more bow tie shaped metal elements. These are available from companies such as Winegard.
Winegard DTV antenna
Before you purchase, you should consult Antennaweb.org. This useful website can tell you if the antenna you’re considering is correct for your area, and even more importantly, which way it should be pointed. You see, unlike old analog television that shows a fuzzy image when the signal is weak, DTV will likely show nothing! I believe this is something that many are unaware of. If your equipment manuals are well written, (good luck there) they will make mention of this fact. Those who live in homes or buildings with metal in the structure, or are not in the visual siteline of the transmitter tower will likely have problems. Other than breaking down and getting cable or satelite service, you will likely need to install an external antenna.
If you were receiving a nice clear picture from your analog tuner, you’ll probably be just fine with DTV reception.
The official government DTV website
Antenna Web
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When looking to replace my dying Epson, I needed disc printing capabilities on a new printer just as I had on my old R320 Sylus Photo. It was a pretty good printer, but I place a high workload demand on devices that are really intended for consumer use. I still got my money’s worth more or less.
I decided to pull the trigger on an HP this time. I already own a multi fuction HP Laserjet, and it’s been a real workhorse. Nice aesthetics, and an impression of above average construction quality. A nice touch is the disc printing tray has a little storage slot right in the printer. In short, print quality is quite good on both discs and photo paper. Maybe a hair below the quality of the Epson, but very close. It is definitely much faster with better document quality.
What could be better? Well, let me tell you. While the hardware is better than expected, the software is terrible. I was stunned to find out you can only print to discs using HP templates. You cannot use your own designs. You cannot change the inner and outer diameter, change the alignment, or do much more than change small areas of text or photo inserts. The software seems intrusive and overly dumbed down. I finally discovered a third party ap that solved the problem. Unfortunately, I’m out another $30.
Bottom line is that it’s a good printer, but if you expect to print custom DVDs and CDs, you should add $30 to the price.
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Canon CD Printer
Like many of you, I use inkjet printers for DVD covers and Disc printing. As Epson has been the only printer manufacturer to offer disc printing in a low priced ink jet printer, I’ve pretty much ignored Canon in my printer purchases these past few years.
I’ve owned Canons before, and thought them to be quite good too. I then stumbled across this article on how to modify a Pixma series printer to print CDs and DVDs.
How in the heck is this possible? Well, it’s because Canon originally designed many of these printers with disc printing capabilities, and disabled them? Apparently some of the same printers are sold in foreign markets with the disc printing capability left intact. Why on earth would they do this? I have no idea.
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Posted May 15, 2009, under
video
This post in Gizmodo seems to think so. The writer does make some good points. I do think that disc based delivery will be a thing of the past way before Blu Ray players can displace all the standard DVD players out there.
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Posted May 8, 2009, under
video
Very interesting timeline of Sony product innovations. Some would probably be suprised how long ago some of these devices date back to.
A timeline of Sony products.
Posted April 29, 2009, under
video
This is not exactly an original idea. In fact it’s a simplification of a design from TeleprompterMirrors.com. One thing that was definitely a time saver was the frame. This was simply a wooden picture frame from Dollar General. The glass is actual beam splitter glass, or is also called a “first surface” mirror. You can even use plain old glass, but the performance is rather limited, and you have to shade the area behind the glasss almost completely.
I ended up bolting a Bogen hex tripod plate, rather than building the stand as in the example from the website. It made it necessary to have to carefully level it each time, but it’s also more portable. Here I’m using a Dell mini 9 with Prompt lite software.
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Sony Vegas Pro
I’ve used Vegas 8 for some time now, and I’ve been quite pleased with it. It’s pretty rock solid, and does almost everything I need. After an upgrade late last year to a quad core Intel 9550 based system, performance took another jump.
I was looking at a copy of a video industry magazine, and saw an add for an accelerator card that bragged, “Render faster than realtime!” No only have I long been rendering faster than realtime in most formats, I’m now often in the 2X to 4X range. I just rendered an mpeg4 of about two and a half hours, and it was done in 30 minutes. Mind you, there wasn’t much filtering or fancy stuff on the timeline, but that’s still pretty hard to beat.
The exception however is definitely Windows Media. For whatever reason, it will only render at less than realtime. Fortunately, there’s less and less of a use for it. I avoid unless a client asks for it. Especially now that Adobe flash player can play H.264 files directly, there’s almost no need at all for wmv.
I think it would be interesting to see how the rendering engines perform in other NLEs on similar hardware. It might be tricky to do an apples to apples (no pun here) comparison, as project file formats would not be compatible.
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iPhone teleprompter
I just happened across this rather clever teleprompter for the iPhone and the Touch. I’ve used both off the shelf teleprompters, as well as cobbled together rigs, and this seems like a pretty darn good solution to me. It’s definitely more for close range work, as opposed to a larger studio application. It looks like a perfect solution for video podcasters.
It looks to be awaiting the grand anointing of the App store, but once it does I’ll be anxious to give it a try.
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Posted April 17, 2009, under
video
First let me say that my experience with Netflix overall has been good. In fact, they are probably single handedly responsible for the failure of Blockbuster. I liked Blockbuster once upon a time, and rented many a movie over the years. One day they decided to change the return policy to consider noon late, rather than 6pm as was previously observed. On this day, my video returned that afternoon was charged a late fee. I told the manager if they did not waive the fee, I would never return. They did not, and I never again entered their door.
One of the main reasons they were so easy to discard was the emergence of Netflix. A wonderful service that would mail DVDs to your door for a fixed monthly fee. As many as you could possibly watch! Well, here was in fact the first snag. They began to throttle some customers. I never encountered this myself, and don’t think it’s all that out of line. As long as it’s stated in the TOS, it’s fine with me.
Now the trend is to online delivery. This has been a goal for so many years, and the technology has finally caught up. Netflix now offers quite a bit of material for “instant viewing”. Well, if you are using Internet Explorerer, or one of a number of supported devices that is. They claim it works with Firefox 2.0+, but I have not been able to get instant viewing to work with Firefox 3.X. Some of the content is encoded at decent quality, and some not quite so much.
Is Netflix to blame? I don’t think so. Could be wrong here, but I suspect there are two causes of this problem. Stupidity, and DRM. It still amazes me that so many of the content providers still do not understand how this all works. Had they led the effort to deliver online at a reasonable fee, much of the piracy so many of these same folks complain about would be a non isssue. We saw the same dissapointing effort (or lack thereof) from the music industry in past years. TEN years or so after online music delivery has been underway, DRM has now been removed. Woo hoo!
The old folks that run the film industry need to take a good look at the real cause for declining sales. There was another technology they once feared. It seemed to spell doom for the entire movie industry back in the 1950s. It was called…. wait for it… television.
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The LED on camera light
This is the current state of my hand built LED on camera light. I would have posted some build pics, but I just didn’t think to take them. I do think that those out there who would be inclined to build such a thing would find it pretty simple.
Basically, I used a Luxeon Endor Star LED, a Luxdrive Buckpuck, a pot, and a switch. Currently, there is a battery holder inside with eight AA batteries. I intend to add a jack for an external battery pack. It does run quite a while on the AA batts, especially if you have it dimmed a bit.
The gray squares are simply velcro. I made a simple diffuser out of frosted plastic much like what you’d find in a “trapper-keeper”. It works fairly well, and doesn’t cost all that much light output. These emitters are extremenly bright, and you do not want to look at them directly when there under full power. In fact, they’re classed as class 2 lasers for this reason.
The star is quite simply bolted to the aluminum housing, which is an off the shelf “Bud box”. It’s more than sufficient to sink away the heat from the Luxeon. There’s a diffuser optic glued to the unit as well. You definitely want to solder up the star before you mount it. Otherwise, the heat from your iron will be pulled away by the heat transfer to the chassis.
Interestingly, this is actually a “warm white” LED. It more closely matches the color temperature of incandescent lighting than those blue/white high output LED’s most often used. While I’ve not actually measured the output, I would say it’s close to a 20 watt halogen.
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