09:27 – The biology book is complete and off to the MAKE production crew. We’re finished with it, other than a QC pass or two, where we’ll do a quick check of the PDFs before the book actually goes to the printer. Amazon says the book will be available on 22 April, and I suspect that’s pretty accurate.
I’m off now to finish putting together purchase orders for the biology kits and more chemistry kits. Once I get those issued, it’ll be back to work on the forensics book re-write.
I see that there are Greek riots scheduled for today. Merkel cut Greece loose months ago, and it’s finally coming home to roost. As I predicted months ago, that 30% “haircut” for Greek bondholders turned into 50% and now appears likely to reach 80%, nominally. In fact, as I said, it’s actually going to be a 100% writedown, as Greece rapidly heads toward complete bankruptcy, with Portugal not far behind and Spain and Italy in the on-deck circle. The dominoes are starting to topple.
The fallout from the collapse of the euro isn’t likely to affect the US as deeply as some people seem to fear. US banks have very limited exposure to European debt, and exports to Europe are a fairly minor part of overall US production. Although clearly the exposure varies from state to state, on average US states probably do less than 2% of their business with Europe. Even if that disappears entirely, which it obviously won’t, the impact on US businesses will be relatively minor. The same can’t be said for China, however. China, which is leveraged out the wazoo, exports a large percentage of its overall production to Europe, and that export business is declining fast. That loss is already approaching levels that are catastrophic for China, and it looks like it can only get worse. Expect to see Chinese goods get cheaper as China tries desperately to keep exports up by increasing volumes to the US.
One of the wonders as the future unfolds, is that the computer age (or maybe it is also connected with the economy) is not giving me more free time, but rather, is forcing me to learn to do the technical stuff that I never had to touch over the years–indeed, was not even able to touch in the union shops I worked in.
Video is very, very complex. And there is little agreement on standards, nor is there one clear-cut best way to accomplish various video tasks.
We are asked to turn out a variety of videos in different formats and types. Typically, we record a live ‘interview’ with a person onto mini-DV tape, backed up by Hi-8 DV tape, then transfer that tape to a DVD with the date and time stamp of the recording visible, or “burned-in” to the DVD (“burned-in” means it cannot be turned off). Those interviews are seldom less than 3 hours, and some can last up to 10 hours.
Sometimes, we are asked for as many as 10 to 12 copies of the same interview. Usually, we transfer the DV tape to a DVD recorder in real time, then use Roxio’s Popcorn in a Mac and DVDShrink in PC’s to turn out duplicates of the original DVD. Once ripped (typically less than 10 minutes), a standard-length DVD takes about 10 minutes to burn each copy. We recently had to make 7 copies of a series of 6 DVD’s. Making the 7 duplicates, took about 6 hours using the Mac and a PC.
More and more frequently, we are asked to do standards conversions. Usually, this means converting a DV-AVI file to MPEG-1, so our clients can use their own software to edit ‘clips’ of the interviews to present to others for viewing in a courtroom. MPEG-1 is a very dumbed-down technical standard, but there are no legal copyrights associated with that format, so it is free for software producers to include in their editing and presentation packages for attorneys.
Recently, we have been getting more requests to edit the clips for our clients. That has led me to do a lot of experimenting with various video editing packages. It is really a nightmare to deal with what comes in to us. Some are CD’s with MPEG-1; others are DVD’s, often with non-standard video or audio; and in one recent case, a VHS tape. Getting all this to work together is often a nightmare. Some clients want the finished product on DVD with chapter menus to select the clip; others want the clips as data files they can put on their laptop hard drive, and play from there in the court. Almost all courts in big cities now have video playback capability to large screen monitors hung strategically from courtroom ceilings.
Converting video and audio from one standard to another, almost always involves significant degradation of either the video, the audio, or both. Rarely do we get to work with our own high-quality video through to the final clips presented in court. Often, our own video comes back to us for further work, after having been converted from our original DVD format, and will be further degraded by the conversions we will have to do, to deliver the needed finished product.
I will have more on the software end of this, but there is one program I recently found, which is pretty amazing. Since we must deliver video that displays the time stamp of the original video recording, there is nobody I have found who knows how to do this any way but by playing into a DVD recorder with the DV playback machine set to display the time stamp in the video.
Here is a little program that will take an AVI file and ‘burn’ one of several things into a copy of the video file.
http://paul.glagla.free.fr/dvdate_en.htm
If you do any video work at all, I recommend downloading this little gem, which you might find useful at some point in the future. I have been looking for something like it for well over a year, now. It is also a software solution to providing viewing files with burned-in (visible) time-code, for producers and directors to make edit decision lists for programs from the time-code displayed while viewing. Previously, those had to be made by manual dubbing methods (like we currently use for the time stamp), or by using a DV playback machine that had a time-code reader built-in. The program offers full control over the placement of the superimposition, the type style, the border around the type, and the method of displaying the date. My hats off to the Frenchman who coded it.
Jeezum, Chuck, that is some complicated shit right there. I will stick with my RH blade server investigations, thank you very much. And feel like I am getting over like a big dog, too.
Video is very, very complex. And there is little agreement on standards, nor is there one clear-cut best way to accomplish various video tasks.
Thanks Chuck for your insights and confirmation of my frustration when dealing with video. While my needs are a fraction of your issues, I have also had to convert videos. I use a utility from ACDSee to do the conversion. There is probably loss as you say but my clients are not critical. The only thing I cannot do is convert film.
Along with my photography requirements I have also been called upon to work with some videos. Why I am chosen I can only guess it is because I know which end of the keyboard goes up. And that about summarizes my video editing skills.
I am getting better. My crowning acheivement thus far was taking our high quality video from my church (where the sound was not recorded) for an Easter special. I found someone that had DVR’ed the program from the markedly inferior cable broadcast but that had what I needed and that was sound.
I was able to figure out how to extract the audio from the DVR’ed copy by playing the DVR into a DVD and burning a copy. I had the video and audio. Now I had to just use the video from one source and combine with the audio from another source. I managed to figure out how to do that and get the audio synced to within about 1 frame. That offset was not enough for anyone to notice.
I have learned how to put together multiple video clips, input transitions, titles and chapter marks. I have a long way to go but I don’t consider it too bad consider no formal training and simply trial and error.
It has taught me enough to really appreciate live sports casts and what they are able to accomplish in a short amount of time when showing highlights just a few minutes after a game. It has also taught me that I really am glad I don’t do it for a living.
Yeah, I am not sure whether things are easier today, or more complex.
Most pro’s can see see it when video and audio are 2 frames off, but very few can tell 1 frame, unless there are other clues. The usual procedure is to go one way until it is noticeably off, then slip it the other way until it is noticeably off, then lock them so it is right in the middle of that slip difference.
Syncing up 2 tapes with the same audio (usually on isolated camera shoots, where each camera goes into a separate recorder) is normally done by syncing the audio tracks. You play both tapes with audio tracks up, while varying the sync one frame at a time, until the phase shift in the audio stops; then you know they are exactly in sync. Editors who have never done music, often do not know that trick.
Open source audio and video conversion programs are every bit as good as the ones you pay for these days — maybe even better. FFmpeg is probably the most widely used. However, if you have to go through more than one conversion, it makes a quality difference depending on which order they go through. But sometimes there is no control over that.
You can demux the audio from a DVD with a couple of different tools, so you did not actually have to copy that DVD — although that may still have been the easiest, considering that demuxing does not always keep things exactly in sync. One of the biggest pitfalls today, is that CD’s are 44.1khz audio sample rate, while DVD’s are 48khz audio rate. Not getting that correct means substantial time drift of audio getting out-of-sync with video, and/or audio playing substantially faster than it should when the video is playing normally.
Many very good editors have learned by trial and error, so you are not alone. There is very little useful documentation for editing software these days, which makes learning difficult.
And there is no substitute for making a test recording and playing it back for quality check, before recording the big show. We did that everyplace I ever worked, as a standard part of set-up. That might have caught your lack of audio being recorded. So lucky that someone else was recording it. We also rolled back-up machines on everything we recorded. Still do — even for the sessions with the lawyers. These days, that kind of protection is fairly cheap — easily affordable by a church that normally records the services anyway.
Chuck, do you know enough about video editing and processing to write a Tips n Tricks book? I’ll bet if you asked nicely, RBT could introduce you to an OReilly editor.
Ya know, that’s another great idea from SteveF. Seriously, Chuck, you clearly know enuff for a book of the type that O’R does. And there are tons of folks out here who dig this stuff and wanna work it on the net six ways from Sunday. Could even be a sort of textbook for film schools.
To wit: and not far from the deep, dark backwoods of Vermont:
https://www.burlington.edu/content/student-films
Huh. Santorum. Who woulda thunk it…
I second (or third) the idea of a video book, though the effort is not to be underestimated.
Ron Paul came second, I think. I still have my fingers crossed.
It’s really a pretty odd primary season. This is the first time I recall it being *so* blatant that one candidate (Romney) had the blessings of the anointed, while the others were either utterly undesired (e.g., Paul, Cain), or just allowed to run to give the appearance of a contest (e.g., Gingrich, Santorum). It’s a pretty good bet that Santorum’s win yesterday was not in the script – guess somebody forgot to tell him that he is only a pro forma candidate.
It’s a shame Cain was eliminated. His 9-9-9 slogan was simple enough to appeal to a lot of people, and ethnicity would have been a non-issue. I wonder who really paid for the smear campaign?
What can I tell ya? I’m a genius. A savant. Or at least an idiot-savant. Or, ya know, maybe only the first half of that.
Tell me about it. On my first nonfiction book that I self-published I couldn’t believe the amount of fiddle-work to get it ready. I’ll reserve my opinion on editors (especially the junior editors with no particular skill or knowledge or anything) and the value of publishers. RBT and a couple other authors I know have had good experiences, but mine have been uniformly bad. Luck of the draw, perhaps.
As for Election 2012, jeez, can’t it just be over? Can’t all of the candidates (with the possible exception of Ron Paul) just catch fire and die already?
Mittens was always The Annointed One, despite the misgivings of the nabobs and potentates of the RNC and their masters. And his wacky religious cult persona and views probably won’t interfere with his multi-millionaire status and main objectives, to wit, keeping Wall Street and DOD real happy all the time, no matter the destruction of the rest of the country.
We have nobody.
Chuck, if you’d like to explore writing a book, email me. I’ll be happy to introduce you to Brian Jepson, who’s been my editor at O’Reilly/MAKE for a decade. I could see them being interested in doing such a book based around Cinelerra, OpenShot, ffMPEG, PiTiVi, and similar FOSS audio/video tools.
Syncing up 2 tapes with the same audio (usually on isolated camera shoots, where each camera goes into a separate recorder) is normally done by syncing the audio tracks.
Would have been nice but the quality video I needed had no audio at all so I had to sync using the video tracks.
And there is no substitute for making a test recording and playing it back for quality check, before recording the big show.
I had audio in the studio and was listening to the audio. Problem was in a box that was downstream from the mixer board and just before the DVD recorder. An audio distribution amp taht is downstream from the audio mixer had a switch set incorrectly and no audio was being output. That has been resolved as we now have a level monitor on the audio as it is going to the recording devices. Video is also monitored by watching the video as it comes out of the recording devices.
I use PowerDirector for editing and working with the videos. Reason I chose it was because it was 64 bit and was reasonably priced. I do have access to FinalCut Pro at the church. But I refuse to spend hours at the church when I would much rather edit the videos at home.
The biggest “light bulb” moment was when I realized that the video is nothing but layers. Higher numbered layers overlaying lower numbered layers. I do this in photography editing and it makes sense for the video. I have thusly been able to figure out the timeline and add layers and effects, including audio. Still the learning curve was steep and in my case an “Video Editing for Dummies” might have been a help.
I think I have the technical skills to do the editing fairly, by no means a professional level, but enough to get by. What I lack is the creative skill set. And I am still not sure I am over the dummy part.
“I had audio in the studio and was listening to the audio. Problem was in a box that was downstream from the mixer board and just before the DVD recorder.”
Reminds me of the time when I was still singing actively in a choir. Most every choir loves Mozart, and we have worked long and hard on Mozart’s Requiem. Came the premiere concert, and we were going to make a CD, and hired a professional to do the recording. Lots of setup, lots of testing, and came the concert.
You know when you’ve done it: you’ve given a great concert – everything went perfectly, the cathedral offered perfect acoustices – just ideal! Of course, the ending is now obvious: despite all the setup and testing, not a single note was recorded. Blank.
hired a professional to do the recording
Shit happens. I can screw things up as good as any professional. I had just taken over the operation of the broadcast studio and did not even know the distribution amp existed. Now I do. I learned from the error, fortunately an error from which I was able to recover.
SteveF casually wrote “Tell me about it. On my first nonfiction book that I self-published I couldn’t believe the amount of fiddle-work to get it ready.”
Spill, Steve. If you’re a published fiction author, who writes there half as well as you write here, I would like to sample your wares. Ebooks are preferred these days. Any links to be had?
Heh. Well, first off, my published fiction is just on a handful of “small press” web sites, the kind which are ad-supported and which pay so little that I told them not to bother because it wasn’t worth the paperwork on my end. But it was decent practice in writing short stories and getting (generally positive) feedback, so in theory I’m writing a couple of short story collections for self publication. In practice, that’s on the back burner.
For non-fiction, my self-pub book is Wing Chun Forms, a martial arts reference book currently available only for e-readers. I’m working on two companion books and when they’re all done I’ll combine and reformat for print. After that I may finish up a couple of “programming as a profession” books which were accepted and then back-burnered by publishers.
Perhaps one day, then?
Until then, I’ve gone and purchased Wing Chun Forms, as my son is interested in martial arts, and Wing Chun is one of the disciplines he is interested in, but has no local access to.
During my servitude with Uncle, the interest for this stuff was all for Tae-Kwon-Do and Thai kick-boxing, both of which were largely taken up by African-American troops. For my exercise I humped an M60 and the ammo, along with an M79 and ITS ammo, when I was on air base defense and perimeter recon. The other exercise we won’t get into here, thank you very much.
Re: politics. I am not sad that Cain is out. I SURE do NOT want a national sales tax added to all that I already pay. 9-9-9 would end up more like 12-15-10. As far as who sicked the dogs on Cain — word here has been that it came from Romney’s camp. Romney is playing negative politics, no doubt about it. That works in the moment, but Romney is so open about it, that I believe people are thinking twice about him. I was making commercials long enough to learn that you play negatives VERY subtly, or it works against you.
Tuesday’s results were — IMO — influenced by an ABC/Reuters poll that came out over the
Super Bowlweekend, which indicated Obama would win handily if Romney were the candidate. Speaking of Populism, Romney IS the Elite’s elite, and the people are figuring that out. Romney is a Bill Clinton wanna-be, who never will be. He would be as unelectable as Bob Dole — the one person on the planet who could not beat Clinton — and Ron Paul, who is looking more and more like James Stockdale at every appearance. Who am I? What am I doing here?Republicans have got to close that country club and kick the members out. Romney won’t do it; maybe Santorum will.
Re: the pro’s making mistakes. In my business, it is not that real on-camera pro’s do not make mistakes, they just cover them seamlessly, so it does not look or sound like a mistake. On the production end, it is not that the pro’s don’t make mistakes, they just know immediately when there is one going on. Unless you have recording equipment with confirmation heads (practically non-existent these days) you really do not know whether it is actually going down or not. There is no substitute for a test cut and playback of the test on all recording machines before the show, and no substitute for a backup recorder, IMO. Of course, there are varying degrees of whether NOT getting the recording is acceptable. A one-time-only event — like a choir performance — needs a backup.
One of the problems with video in this digital era, is that consumer-grade equipment can lose frames of both video and audio. Sometimes lots of them. Tape is tried and true, and we still use it. And it is still the case that even pro field camera systems cannot record more than 20 minutes without stopping to switch memory cards. Tape has always been able to record at least an hour without stopping, if necessary.
Re: a book. My expertise is definitely not on the technical side, but on the production end. I can tell you how to set up a shoot, how to get a story out of the visual end, various production tricks for editing, but I will never be able to tell why some piece of software or some file will not play a particular scene.
Just today, I had to switch software editing programs for the current project, because the software I prefer stopped writing the proper header and key frame at the start of the excerpted file. Have no idea why, and no time to figure it out. All I know is that it is not a software configuration or codec problem.
Have tried a lot of Windows and Linux editing software over the last year, but I may be moving to Final Cut on a Mac. There is a real disconnect in terms of how today’s programmers visualize the tasks to be done and translate that into navigating through the work. IMO, there is no substitute for using timelines, and standard mark, cut, copy, paste methods used in text editing. For instance, why oh why, in order to trim — say — the first 10 seconds of a video event, would you grab the first frame and drag it 10 seconds into the timeline, instead of marking the first and last frames and hitting delete? But this is the way kids programming stuff today think.
I saw it coming with Quicken. DOS Quicken was intuitive, and programmed the same way Unix and DEC programmers thought. Quicken for Windows was like learning a new language — it was a whole different way of dealing with the information, and not at all intuitive — or like the DOS Quicken. But yet, today’s programmers claim the best software is so intuitive that it needs no manual. Then make it intuitive!
I am going to play around with Blender (a Dutch animation program that just happens to have video editing) before making a decision on moving back to Final Cut — which along with Avid, have been used in the editing suites I have worked in since the beginning of the decade.
The worst part of information about editing on the Internet, is that most of the so-called “tutorials” are made by people who readily admit they just started using the software a couple weeks ago, and say right out that they do not know why various things don’t work, or how to accomplish something complex.
Over the years, I worked with a lot of people who tried to keep their various techniques a secret, but I found out early on, that I could readily show people exactly how I accomplished something in my line of work, but they still could not do it as well as me. So I have never worried about letting people know how I do things. If they can do it better than me, then they ought to be exposed to success and a wider audience. But a book is not in my future. I have a good 6 years on our host, and while I can keep editing into the wee hours, I no longer have the stamina to keep the agenda I see our host reporting daily. Tom Syroid’s experience with the Outlook book was also pretty instructive, including the fact he is back to fixing big diesel truck tractors. Give me a good tech guy at the keyboard, and a nice comfy editing suite, a bunch of time code numbers, a spill-proof mug of decaf or Pepsi, and we’ll turn the lights down and make some TV. Or let me regress back to my teen years by sitting in the radio project’s studio and blather on about the music. But in the end, I would rather read a book than make one, thanks.
Now for something completely different. It takes no talent to edit in all the jump cuts in this, but it is cute and very, very Canadian. Counting black bears:
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=vJRDpTUIrJI&vq=medium
Meanwhile, back to another hour in the edit suite. Which — in this case — is also the office in my bedroom.
Chuck wrote:
Lots, and by that I mean LOTS of people need help with how to setup a shoot, how to get a story out of the visual end, and need to learn various tricks for editing, and the vast majority of them won’t care about the rest. Just saying!
BGrigg:
Thanks! Just bear in mind that you can’t learn martial arts solely from books. Without an instructor, books can give you a feel for what the style is like and help you figure out if it’s for you, but (without an instructor) that’s about it. With an instructor, books can be a great supplement or reference.
I quite agree, SteveF, but he has taken four years of Judo, one of Taekwondo and is currently switching to Karate, where the Sensei has Wing Chun experience, as the Taekwondo class is more or less a belt factory. He knows he can’t master the art with a book, but he can study it regardless.
Gotcha. Good to go.
And Tae Kwon Do, at least in the US, is less a belt factory than a money extraction machine. A TKD “master” (ie, mid-level black belt, ie, what I am in Wing Chun, but I don’t go around calling myself Master Steve) explained the business to me and showed how everything is designed to make money for the instructor and for the TKD hierarchy. At the time I was more disgusted than anything else but now I’m somewhat impressed, just as I’m somewhat impressed with Rattus rattus‘s indiscriminate consumption and survivability.
LOL, the Karate class is certainly a money extraction machine, and you’re probably right (don’t let it go to your head, as I’m often wrong!) about TKD being the same. Hard to tell the difference from this side of the wallet.
And Rattus Rattus has few peers. Most of them are in DC.
Huh. Back when I studied Shotokan, it wasn’t particularly expensive. There weren’t any belt mills back then, as far as I know. There were also a lot fewer kyu colors. And new students spent about the first six months learning how to get beaten up and tossed around.
I think Steve should insist on being addressed by his title, Master Steve. You guys can call me Beginner Bob.
That’s only when my wife and I are having alone time.
There are a few places where you can get a good deal. Judo and Jiu-Jitsu are both volunteer run in town, and offers only two classes per week for $70/mo, but conflict horribly with his schedule. The Karate class is $120/mo but has multiple classes that fit his schedule better. Such are the choices one must make.
With four years of Judo, he can handle getting tossed around! It’s the major reason I had him start there.