When I hear people raving excitedly about a new social networking thing, I always go and look, just because I love these things.  I love connecting with other people, and finding things in common.  I just do, and always have.  Recently, though, I’ve started to notice a problem.

When I arrive at a new site, I register as “ids” if I get there first, or “smithi1″ or “idzni” if not.  Then I try and figure out what it is for.  This is where the problem comes in.  Blogging was obvious to me.  Twitter, pretty much so although I initially underestimated the value of it.  Virtual worlds, well… I’d been dying for those to exist since I first started talking about them in 1988 (along with certain other people – who know who they are!)  I understood last.fm pretty quickly, and Facebook and MySpace weren’t very difficult either.

However, the reason that I’m writing this is that I just signed up to blip.fm, and I can’t figure out what it is for.  This is not a unique occurrence, and I am experiencing it more and more often as I explore new and ever more esoteric social networking sites (are the obvious ideas all taken?) .  I mean, blip.fm looks very much as though it was influenced by Twitter, and it’s very obviously about music.  Here are some things that I *have* figured out about it:

• I can search for a song and “blip” it, and if the site knows about it then I get to enter my thoughts on it into a text box, and then the site plays it to me somehow.  Subsequently, the song appears in my list of blipped songs.
• I can embed the song, along with my comments, in another web page – presumably I can also do this with anyone’s songs or comments.

• I can add people as favourites, and get a twitter-like page with the aggregation of all their blipped songs on it.
• I can press play and start listening to all the songs on any page which works like a sort of playlist.  Presumably the speed of my listening is a lot slower than the content provided by multiple people blipping, so my playback will fall behind.  Or something.
• It’s almost like I’m a DJ.  Or something.

Perhaps I’m just getting stupider with age, but these individual features don’t seem to me to hang together in a coherent whole.  What I need is an enthusiastic friend who gets it to excitedly tell me about why it’s so great.  They could give me the two or three patterns for using it that illustrate why it’s good.  That approach is very effective for me on those occasions when I am coming to a new thing via an enthusiastic friend, and I quite often do it in the other direction when I’m enthusiastic about something.

Wouldn’t it be great if blip.fm (and the rest) provided the “enthusiastic friend” explanation somewhere.  Perhaps they could put it in the FAQ, as an answer to the question at the top of this post.

“What’s it for?”

Update, 01:20am: From Annie Ok, the one liner I needed: “it’s for posting songs to twitter”.  So you get it to tweet when you blip – that single fact made it all come into focus.  Thanks, Annie!

I’ve been working on another machinima project.

For over a year now, I’ve been doing these things on and off. I’ve learned a lot, mostly by being incredibly frustrated for extended periods of time.

Throughout all of this time, I have used Snapz Pro X to capture the movie clips from Second Life, or whatever other virtual world platform I was using. This product is indispensable, and yet it has provided me with some of my most miserable moments. You see, Snapz has a dangerous propensity to lose all the data that you just captured with it.

The main reason is that it is simultaneously inflexible and intolerant when it comes to disk space. Inflexible because it contains no options allowing the user to save output to any drive except the boot drive. Snapz creates a temporary capture file as it is going along, and then it encodes this into the final output format. This process requires up to twice as much disk space as either of these files require on their own. Intolerant, because if you run out of space on your primary disk, Snapz bins all your work. That’s it. Bye bye. See you later.

So I decided to try an alternative piece of capture software called iShowU.

In many ways, this software seemed to be the answer to my prayers. It offers useful and easily configurable profiles for capture. The save file is produced immediately after capture finishes – no hanging around. Finally, it only uses one lot of disk space. If there’s 1Gb left on the disk you can stop capture, and know that saving your work will require no further space. Oh, and joy of joys – you can configure where the final output is sent, and where the temporary files are kept.

After joyously using this for a brief period, I noticed that Second Life was running unusually slowly while I was capturing it. An investigation revealed, perhaps obviously, that some of the benefit of iShowU was coming at a cost. So I did a quick and dirty test.

A quick look at Activity Monitor while capturing reveals that Snapz uses about 2.5% of a CPU on my MacBook Pro to capture at 1280×720 (it’s a 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo).

The same test for iShowU reveals that it is using more than an entire CPU for its capture at the same resolution and target frame rate.

When it is capturing, Snapz Pro is obviously writing its output into a file with very little compression. All the CPU requirement comes afterwards for the encoding. iShowU achieves its greater convenience by doing the processing at capture time, but of course that has a major impact on the application being captured. This is probably tolerable for capturing Safari or Mail or other less demanding applications, but not for Second Life, or games.

So I guess I’m going to end up putting up with Snapz and its idiosyncrasies for a while yet. I’m just going to cross my fingers for the provision of additional preferences so that I can tell it where to put its files.

Apple released iLife ‘08 recently. It’s been broadly well received, with the very notable and vociferous exception of iMovie ‘08 which has suffered from the severe disapprobation of the commentariat (thanks to Alastair Campbell for that term, by the way). iMovie power users everywhere are up in arms about all the stuff that is missing or different, compared with iMovie ‘06, the previous version.

You see, the thing is this. Apple ditched the whole way of thinking and working that underpinned the previous version. Someone at Apple decided, correctly in my opinion, that iMovie ‘06 was too hard to use for your average non-technical user. They decided to change the direction of iMovie to cater for this kind of user – which arguably is who the iLife apps should be targeted at.

Apple’s aim, therefore, was to make it very quick and easy to import a movie from your camera and edit it. Having done this, it they wanted it to be very easy to publish the movie so that people can watch it. With the exception of publishing to iDVD, they succeeded very well at satisfying those requirements. It’s to their credit that they simplified, rather than just adding bloat. There’s more than enough bloat already in the world of software.

I expect things like iDVD publishing to be added incrementally over time, as non chargeable updates to iMovie ‘08. I don’t expect to see timelines, timecode, audio track editing and other complicated stuff coming back. The problem with iMovie ‘06 was that it was neither a consumer app, nor a prosumer one. It was too hard for consumers to use, and too limited for the prosumers.

For the machinima that I’ve been involved with, I used (read: battled) iMovie ‘06 for a while, but subsequently upgraded to Final Cut Express, and have never looked back. Now, with this upgrade, I can finally use iMovie – in fact I have. I have published two videos of my family to the .Mac web gallery, in order to share them with family members.

Here’s a list of things that took me longer than editing either of these movies:

1. Picking the musical accompaniment to the videos;
2. Uploading the videos to .Mac;
3. Cooking tea for two tonight;
4. Writing this blog entry;
5. Watching Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on More 4 tonight.

Viva iMovie ‘08!

Technorati Tags: apple, avchd, finalcutexpress, imovie, video

I’ve been thinking about video.

As a long standing photographer, I’ve always looked askance at video. You only have to look at Youtube to know why. Video is even easier to do badly than photography. Bad zooming, wobbly handheld pictures, the loud voice of the operator from off camera, no attention to lighting. In addition, it’s very easy to slip over the fine line from participating in something to simply recording it. For these and other reasons I’ve always resisted. Last year, we bought a cheap video camera, and the results were sufficiently bad to confirm me in my scepticism of the medium.

Then machinima came into my life. Not gently, either. One minute I had this normal life, and the next I was spending hours and hours doing screen capture from Second Life and trying to edit it, and on tight deadlines too!

In a considerable hurry, I suddenly had to understand a whole lot of things about video – not least because the Apple video editing products I used (iMovie 6 and later Final Cut Express HD v3.5) only edit video formats. If it’s not PAL, NTSC, 720p or 1080i, those tools aren’t interested in it, and furthermore it takes hours and hours to convert captures into these formats from others. So I learned about video, and I learned how to edit video.

Given all this new experience, plus a certain amount of motivation generated by the imminent advent of the next Smith, I have decided to buy another video camera. I want it to be at least half decent, I want it to be HD, and we’re prepared to pay (some) more money than last time. So I started looking into it, and I’ve discovered that the world of consumer HD video is much more complex than I’d anticipated. I’ve ended up trying to decide between two very different cameras. These are the Panasonic HDC-SD1, which records video in AVCHD format to SDHC flash memory, and the Canon HV20, which records video in HDV format to tape. They both produce 1080i video, although the Canon has a 24p option that produces 1080p output at 24fps for a more film-like effect.

I should say, at this point, that while I’ve looked all over the Internet, the side that has generated the most credibility with me on this whole topic has been camcorderinfo.com. A lot of what I have learned has come from there.

The main consideration by a huge margin is format. At one time, consumer level HD cameras recorded to tape, using the HDV format. This is widely supported by editing tools, including the two Apple tools that I have access to. However, recording to hard disk or flash memory has now become a very practical alternative and for HD the manufacturers are starting to push the new AVCHD format, developed by Sony and Panasonic.

AVCHD is much less widely supported in editing tools – iMovie ‘08 and Final Cut Studio 2 support it, but (importantly to me) Final Cut Express doesn’t as yet. To compound the problems, there’s some doubt about AVCHD support on PowerPC Macs – Final Cut Studio definitely doesn’t support it on PowerPC, but I can’t find any hard info about iMovie ‘08. At any rate, such support for AVCHD as exists was introduced following the recent refreshes of Final Cut Studio and iMovie – it’s my uninformed guess that a refresh of Final Cut Express is in the pipeline and that this that will provide AVCHD support for that too. For the interim, there’s a $30 tool called Voltaic which will convert the AVCHD into Apple Intermediate Codec for editing in FCE.

AVCHD is based on H.264 compression and while it supports bitrates of up to 24Mbps, the HDC-SD1 can only output up to 13Mbps. HDV is based on mpeg-2 compression, and for 1080i video, the bitrate is 25Mbps. As H.264 is a far more modern and advanced compression algorithm, one might expect better results from it, but it turns out that in the comparison done by the folks at camcorderinfo.com, the Canon outperforms the Panasonic on picture quality maybe due to the lower 13Mbps bitrate cap.

So, based on the information I could find online, I produced the following comparison table to help me decide whether to go for tried and tested HDV to tape, or bleeding edge AVCHD to flash memory. It is weighted to reflect the particular things I care about.

[Google Spreadsheet version]

As can be seen, there’s really not a lot in it. I think this reflects the timing of the purchase. We’re in an uncomfortable transition period between tape and flash memory. Unfortunately, flash memory systems aren’t quite there yet, in terms of software support and hardware throughput, but tape is definitely on the way out. In a couple of years, I expect to see AVCHD cameras that beat the HDV stuff hands down. However, in many important ways the tape based HV20 has the edge.

Ultimately, though, I decided to opt for the shiny future – there are lots of very enthusiastic reviews of the SD1, as well as the more scientific and reserved commentary from the likes of camcorderinfo.com. In fact Steve Jobs enthused specifically about this camera during his recent presentation announcing the ‘08 versions of iLife and iWork.

What has really tipped it for me, though, is the personal element – I know myself, and I’m more likely to use it if it’s smaller and more portable, and much more likely to use it if it’s all new and sexy.

Watch this space…

Technorati Tags: apple, finalcutexpress, imovie, avchd, hd, video