Thursday, August 19, 2004
The end is the beginning...
Well, I've kind of been putting this off, but here is the deal. I've had a shift of focus, and so I think this blog will have to change as well. What's been up with me? Let's see...
The biggest thing was going to the World Yo-yo Contest two weekends ago. You can read my long thoughts about it here. As I mention in that, it was really an incredible experience where I was hanging out with all these people I knew online or from the past or even people I had never known of, and felt right at home. I also had people coming out of nowhere to say how much my sites had helped them. And these are sites that I've barely updated for some time now....
Something that happened a while ago was getting rid of cable in an effort to put more money into savings. Did I miss watching Cartoon Network, with the various new shows all the time? Did I miss the experiance Screen Savers, a live tech show? Did I miss random indy and classic movies on IFC, Sundance, and TCM? The answer to all of those is yes, but at the same time, I find myself with more time to do other things.
I hadn't read a novel in ages, and my DVDs and comics were in a major backlog. Did you know that I still haven't read a single issue from FCBD? This all leads into similar thinking for the comics experience online. I do enjoy seeing the latest news and reading up on blogs, but I think it was getting out of hand. Do I really need to read 20+ blogs a day? Do I need to read 5+ message boards? Do I really care about what new creative team is on Avengers and what the online community thinks about it? No... not when it is taking so much time that I'm not even reading much material that is being commented on...
So, it is time to refocus and figure out what is really important to me. All of you in the comics blogosphere are really great, and I've enjoyed being a part of it, especially back when the bookstore and manga issues were just starting to become noticed. I'm not going to drop out of things completely, and would still like to meet a lot of you in person, get to a comic convention, and all of that. But I think I really need to scale things back until I can find a happy medium. People have mentioned in the comments and e-mail about how they've found the blog to be informative, and I hate to cut those people out, but I also feel like I can really contribute more to the yo-yo world right now, and also that the amount of information I was trying to absorb before was starting to overwhelm me. I was starting to feel kind of lost at times, trying to squeeze into my head every little thing going on in the comic/manga world. Already, some interesting things have happened:
First I managed how to capture video from the camcorder I'm borrowing, using the firewire on my computer. Had to get a cable and at first my front port wasn't setup correctly. I also found a nice capture program called WinDV, which is free but has nice features. A realtime preview window, can start and stop the camera, reports any dropped frames, and even saves separate timestamped files whenever a scene changes (using the timecode in the tape).
From there, I experimented with XviD (an opensource MPEG-4 codec) , in order to get Worlds freestyles online in a nice form. I ended up with 3minute 720x480 videos at 25MB in size. Not bad at all! I also just found the Unofficial XviD FAQ, which is the first one I've found which explains each option and isn't totally out of date. I'll be in much better shape for future encodes now...
Now, the key was how to get these videos I made online. GReg of Infinite Illusions graciously hosts my yo-yo site, along with many others, but right after worlds his server was totally swamped. People were trying to have mirror sites for some videos out there, but either way someone was going to get their bandwith totally nailed...
I recently discovered the wonders of Bittorrent, and I realized that might be the key. I found a public tracker and used TorrentSpy to make some torrents. I made a page using a different host (since GReg's was so overloaded, you couldn't even d/l a torrent file), seeded, and the rest was history. I'm really happy with how it turned out. After a while, I thought that BT works better with big condensed data, so I made a torrent with all the files from one division (17 freestyles) in one 430MB file. That worked out great and over 120 people have downloaded it now, which is something like 50gigs transfered without kill someone's host. Now I'm going to see if I can do it with the rest of the divisions and then after everything dies down, put them all up on a normal host without BT.
I started reading the novel of Battle Royale (in english), and am really enjoying it. I started reading it on the plane during my trip and add almost halfway through it now. I had an old yo-yo friend over the other night and we got to hang out for a while, which was really nice.
I also plan on starting to make a clip video of worlds, put to music. That'll take a lot of work, and I'm still not sure if I'm going to try to get a program like Premiere or perhaps try to learn the AVID system here at work. I have 12 hours of footage to work with, though, so I think I can make something fun at least. :)
Oh, and speaking of all that footage, I want to back up all the native DV footage on computer, for when I don't have access to the camera itself anymore. It comes out to 13.1gigs per tape, so 157.2gigs total. I have 240GB of hard drive space, but obviously I don't want all of that on there. Now that I have a DVD burner, the solution seems obvious. It'll all fit on something like 35dvds. Wouldn't that be super-expensive? I was thinking of when DVD burners first came out and media was like $10 a disc. I knew it came down, but now how much. Newegg has a Ritek 50pk(4x DVD+R) that I got for $28 (now $29). That's a little over $0.50 a disc and it is aparantly it is high quality RICOJPNR01 discs. I'm not so concerned on the speed end, but it sounds like these will burn at least at 6x and maybe 8x. There's even a 100pk for $46. I also just found out about the freeware DVDIdentifier which should help me confirm if all is well.
So anyway... I'm thinking for the near future, the blog will be somewhat light, with hopefully reviews of the comics/movies/manga that I'm reading, but I wouldn't expect much in the way of industry news commentary and linkblogging for a while. I may also strip down to reading ICv2 and Thought Balloons for now (and ignore stuff like the Bendis DC debacle), and expand again from there. I'll see how that goes...
I hope everyone else is doing well! Have patience and hopefully all will work out in the end...
The biggest thing was going to the World Yo-yo Contest two weekends ago. You can read my long thoughts about it here. As I mention in that, it was really an incredible experience where I was hanging out with all these people I knew online or from the past or even people I had never known of, and felt right at home. I also had people coming out of nowhere to say how much my sites had helped them. And these are sites that I've barely updated for some time now....
Something that happened a while ago was getting rid of cable in an effort to put more money into savings. Did I miss watching Cartoon Network, with the various new shows all the time? Did I miss the experiance Screen Savers, a live tech show? Did I miss random indy and classic movies on IFC, Sundance, and TCM? The answer to all of those is yes, but at the same time, I find myself with more time to do other things.
I hadn't read a novel in ages, and my DVDs and comics were in a major backlog. Did you know that I still haven't read a single issue from FCBD? This all leads into similar thinking for the comics experience online. I do enjoy seeing the latest news and reading up on blogs, but I think it was getting out of hand. Do I really need to read 20+ blogs a day? Do I need to read 5+ message boards? Do I really care about what new creative team is on Avengers and what the online community thinks about it? No... not when it is taking so much time that I'm not even reading much material that is being commented on...
So, it is time to refocus and figure out what is really important to me. All of you in the comics blogosphere are really great, and I've enjoyed being a part of it, especially back when the bookstore and manga issues were just starting to become noticed. I'm not going to drop out of things completely, and would still like to meet a lot of you in person, get to a comic convention, and all of that. But I think I really need to scale things back until I can find a happy medium. People have mentioned in the comments and e-mail about how they've found the blog to be informative, and I hate to cut those people out, but I also feel like I can really contribute more to the yo-yo world right now, and also that the amount of information I was trying to absorb before was starting to overwhelm me. I was starting to feel kind of lost at times, trying to squeeze into my head every little thing going on in the comic/manga world. Already, some interesting things have happened:
First I managed how to capture video from the camcorder I'm borrowing, using the firewire on my computer. Had to get a cable and at first my front port wasn't setup correctly. I also found a nice capture program called WinDV, which is free but has nice features. A realtime preview window, can start and stop the camera, reports any dropped frames, and even saves separate timestamped files whenever a scene changes (using the timecode in the tape).
From there, I experimented with XviD (an opensource MPEG-4 codec) , in order to get Worlds freestyles online in a nice form. I ended up with 3minute 720x480 videos at 25MB in size. Not bad at all! I also just found the Unofficial XviD FAQ, which is the first one I've found which explains each option and isn't totally out of date. I'll be in much better shape for future encodes now...
Now, the key was how to get these videos I made online. GReg of Infinite Illusions graciously hosts my yo-yo site, along with many others, but right after worlds his server was totally swamped. People were trying to have mirror sites for some videos out there, but either way someone was going to get their bandwith totally nailed...
I recently discovered the wonders of Bittorrent, and I realized that might be the key. I found a public tracker and used TorrentSpy to make some torrents. I made a page using a different host (since GReg's was so overloaded, you couldn't even d/l a torrent file), seeded, and the rest was history. I'm really happy with how it turned out. After a while, I thought that BT works better with big condensed data, so I made a torrent with all the files from one division (17 freestyles) in one 430MB file. That worked out great and over 120 people have downloaded it now, which is something like 50gigs transfered without kill someone's host. Now I'm going to see if I can do it with the rest of the divisions and then after everything dies down, put them all up on a normal host without BT.
I started reading the novel of Battle Royale (in english), and am really enjoying it. I started reading it on the plane during my trip and add almost halfway through it now. I had an old yo-yo friend over the other night and we got to hang out for a while, which was really nice.
I also plan on starting to make a clip video of worlds, put to music. That'll take a lot of work, and I'm still not sure if I'm going to try to get a program like Premiere or perhaps try to learn the AVID system here at work. I have 12 hours of footage to work with, though, so I think I can make something fun at least. :)
Oh, and speaking of all that footage, I want to back up all the native DV footage on computer, for when I don't have access to the camera itself anymore. It comes out to 13.1gigs per tape, so 157.2gigs total. I have 240GB of hard drive space, but obviously I don't want all of that on there. Now that I have a DVD burner, the solution seems obvious. It'll all fit on something like 35dvds. Wouldn't that be super-expensive? I was thinking of when DVD burners first came out and media was like $10 a disc. I knew it came down, but now how much. Newegg has a Ritek 50pk(4x DVD+R) that I got for $28 (now $29). That's a little over $0.50 a disc and it is aparantly it is high quality RICOJPNR01 discs. I'm not so concerned on the speed end, but it sounds like these will burn at least at 6x and maybe 8x. There's even a 100pk for $46. I also just found out about the freeware DVDIdentifier which should help me confirm if all is well.
So anyway... I'm thinking for the near future, the blog will be somewhat light, with hopefully reviews of the comics/movies/manga that I'm reading, but I wouldn't expect much in the way of industry news commentary and linkblogging for a while. I may also strip down to reading ICv2 and Thought Balloons for now (and ignore stuff like the Bendis DC debacle), and expand again from there. I'll see how that goes...
I hope everyone else is doing well! Have patience and hopefully all will work out in the end...
Thursday, August 05, 2004
Off to Worlds...
I'm all packed and off to Worlds. I should be back late Monday, so likely no blogging of any kind before that... wish me luck! :)
Wednesday, August 04, 2004
Magdalena's Brain gallery is up...
I've mentioned before that some of my co-workers are making a movie, and I'm happy to say that there is finally something to show online. Behold the Magdalena's Brain Gallery.
Keep in mind that these are low-quality pics at the moment, but the actual footage is in high-definition. I have to say that it is really impressive how it looks a real movie. When you just see a set without all the lighting set up, it really isn't the same as seeing the finished product the camera sees.
Editing is still going on, so I can't wait to see how it all comes together in the end. Exciting stuff... :)
Daleks WILL be in new Dr Who series!
Yes! this is great news. It just wouldn't have been the same without them...
Exterminate!
Exterminate!
Exterminate!
Exterminate!
Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Me, a filmmaker?
Well, thursday is when I finally go to the World Yo-yo Contest for the first time. This would be exciting by itself... my second time traveling anywhere by plane, first time in Florida (Orlando), and three days of hanging out with friends from a bunch of different countries.
However, one of my friends at work offered to let me bring his digital camcorder! This opens up quite a lot of possibilities... I have a bad memory in general, and am not the best with approaching people, so having a camera could be really cool. Now, plenty of other people will be there filming, so it won't be something all that unique in that respect.
However, I'd like to do what I've seen in some other videos, which is document more than just the freestyles and peoples' individual tricks. If I can manage to tape getting ready at home, stuff at the airport (I'm sure we'll all be yoing to pass the time if they let us), people just hanging out, etc. I think that'd be really cool. :)
Of course then I'd have to try to edit it all together, which is scary..heh. But maybe I could even use the Avid here at work to edit it, which would be really cool. I guess I'll have to see how that all works out.
I might also experiment with putting a couple of the freestyles up via Bittorrent just to see how that goes. I know there are various free trackers out there, so I should be able to throw something out there and save GReg (who hosts my site) some bandwidth... ;)
However, one of my friends at work offered to let me bring his digital camcorder! This opens up quite a lot of possibilities... I have a bad memory in general, and am not the best with approaching people, so having a camera could be really cool. Now, plenty of other people will be there filming, so it won't be something all that unique in that respect.
However, I'd like to do what I've seen in some other videos, which is document more than just the freestyles and peoples' individual tricks. If I can manage to tape getting ready at home, stuff at the airport (I'm sure we'll all be yoing to pass the time if they let us), people just hanging out, etc. I think that'd be really cool. :)
Of course then I'd have to try to edit it all together, which is scary..heh. But maybe I could even use the Avid here at work to edit it, which would be really cool. I guess I'll have to see how that all works out.
I might also experiment with putting a couple of the freestyles up via Bittorrent just to see how that goes. I know there are various free trackers out there, so I should be able to throw something out there and save GReg (who hosts my site) some bandwidth... ;)
Cutting the cable...
Well, in an effort to save some more money, we decided to go and get rid of cable entirely. Dropping down to basic was a consideration.. that's just $10 a month, but I was really curious how it'd be with no TV at all. The two big TVs have no antennas at the moment, so a little b&w in the kitchen is the only one that can even get the local news at the moment.
I think it'll work out pretty good in the end. There's certainly plenty of backlog as far as dvds, books, comics, etc. go and it is really easy to get involved in stuff on TV, finding time sucked away (though the internet is worse..heh).
This likely won't be permanant, and it'll be nice to get back Sundance/IFC/TCM and On-Demand at that point, but I do think it is a good experiment to try out for now. :)
As an interesting off-set, we just burned through three coupons for Hollywood video which let us rent 9 movies for $9 in total. Reviews coming up on some of those soon...
I think it'll work out pretty good in the end. There's certainly plenty of backlog as far as dvds, books, comics, etc. go and it is really easy to get involved in stuff on TV, finding time sucked away (though the internet is worse..heh).
This likely won't be permanant, and it'll be nice to get back Sundance/IFC/TCM and On-Demand at that point, but I do think it is a good experiment to try out for now. :)
As an interesting off-set, we just burned through three coupons for Hollywood video which let us rent 9 movies for $9 in total. Reviews coming up on some of those soon...
