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...
