Radified News for April, 2001
30apr01 - Posted the Radified Guide to Programs .. after being in the Coming Soon category for far too long. See here.
I have a few articles started for a new Coming Soon article. The one receiving the best response is titled, Digital vs Analog. I have some interesting ideas for distinguishing the new concept that has ushered in a new age, with new possibilities.
I also cleaned up the Digital Warrior article.
28apr01 - Transferred many image links to a separate page titled Images of Technolust. See here. More bandwidth-friendly main page, less clutter. Goal is a main page <100KB.
27apr01 - Posted an About page. See here.
26apr01 - Saw the movie, Along came a Spider (starring Morgan Freeman) yesterday. I heard many positive reports, so perhaps my expectations were too high, cuz I was a little disappointed.
Good story, but parts were unbelievable .. like when he guessed the correct password to the computer .. puh-leaze! I can't even remember my own passwords sometimes. Still worth seeing.
I updated my guide to Ripping & encoding. With capacities of today's hard drives growing so large, and their prices falling so low, more people are opting for loss-less compression .. with something like Monkey's Audio (makes .ape files).
I noticed that Monkey's added a link to my guide on their Links page (very bottom of page). They just released v3.88_b3 yesterday. Grab it here (free).
24apr01 - Updated my Guide to programs. See here.
23apr01 - Families of Columbine victims sue media companies for US$5 Billion .. before 2-year statute of limitations expires. Most of the companies sued are those who manufacture & distribute video games .. a US$20 Billion a year industry. [I had a link to an article posted by the Denver Post, but they've since archived it.]
Yesterday I learned how to create a password-protected web page .. with some copy-n-paste Java code. See here.
The latest buzz about Windows XP is here.
22apr01 - While testing the new video-editing package from Matrox, Wendy thru together a short (7-min) movie of some footage of us climbing HalfDome last summer. Pretty cool. Check it out -> here.
The Real video file is encoded to broadband streaming specs, for better quality. Anything encoded small enough to stream over a dial-up connection has horrible quality.
I have some pics of the climb posted on my site. See the link labeled Climb Half Dome, to your right, under the heading Personal.
21apr01 - I created a separate Win2000 boot, dedicated solely for video-editing with Premiere v6, and the new Matrox Video Tools v3.0 that was released just yesterday. This is the big upgrade that we've been waiting for .. for over a year.
MVT 3.0 adds support for Win2K (yee-hah!), real-time keyframeable crop & colorization settings .. 16x9 wide-screen editing .. new batch-capture functions (via Matrox Media Tools). They've also worked around the 64MB AGP aperture limitation of the Intel 815e chipset (we have the CUSL2).
Wendy's been doing preliminary testing. She says it's just like editing with the Avid. MVT 3.0 offers a trim-mode, which Avid has. She says it's "noticeably speedier". More later after we put it thru its paces. So far, she's very pleased with MVT 3.0. For more, see here.
Everything installed flawlessly. We now have a triple-boot: one Win2K boot dedicated solely for video-editing. A WinME boot dedicated solely for video-editing, and a 2nd Win2K boot for all normal PC functions.
For her next project, she wants to do a visual rendering of this poem.
20apr01 - We saw our first-ever digital-projection movie yesterday: Spy Kids (at the Irvine Spectrum). Ever since Wendy began grad school at USC, we've been watching to see how digital cinema affects the movie industry.
During her first day of classes, over a year ago, she received a hand-out from the Dean of the School of Cinema-Television, discussing e-cinema (see here). I remember reading the hand-out, and wondering how long it would be before digital projection arrived in local theaters.
There are two main players in the Digital Projection arena: Texas Instruments & JVC (stock speculators take note). We saw Spy Kids on a TI unit. The picture looked sharp & clear. The audio rocked.
I didn't realize we were viewing digital projection until see the words *Texas Instruments* flash on the screen during the opening intro.
Wendy just finished editing her first film on an Avid Media Composer (at school) a few days ago. After editing her previous film on a ancient contraption called a flatbed, it's become painfully clear that non-linear editing (NLE) is so much easier (& faster) to use.
This is how all films used to be edited (on a flatbed). It's slow & tedious work .. searching thru miles of footage to find the right shot, snipping & splicing. NLE allows the filmmaker to try many more *versions* of a film .. to see what works best .. than is possible with conventional film editing.
If you love technology like I do, you'd love to see the (new) Avid editing room at USC. It's always dark, so the monitors are easy to see. Eight editing stations fill the room comfortably - one in each corner, facing outward. Four more face inward, at a center island.
Each editing station has 3 full-sized monitors, hooked to several boxes that look like large PCs .. with dozens of lights illuminating the darkness .. red, green, yellow. There's always people editing in there. You can look over their shoulder and watch them work. Some editors ask, "What do you think of that cut?". Others say, "You're making me nervous." =)
At home she edits with Adobe Premiere v6.0 on a real-time editing system based upon the Matrox RT2000. Just today, Matrox came out with Matrox Video Tools v3.0, which (finally) has support for Win2000. I'm downloading it now .. a whopping 220MB. Nice connection .. coming in at 300KB/s .. the hub is lit up like a Christmas tree.
Will check it out this weekend. We've been waiting for this update for over a year.
19apr01 - US hackers attack Chinese web sites. Unhappy with the recent spy plane fiasco, the hacker group known as PoizonBOxover has defaced 100 Chinese web sites this month. Read more here (Wired).
To see the love notes that PoizonBOx hackers posted on Chinese sites, which read, PoizonBOx against China's servers (on the background of a red Chinese flag) go here (German site) and click on the links labeled mirror (under the heading Archive).
Chinese hackers vow to retaliate, beginning May 1st, in an all-out assault on US websites & networks .. coinciding with two major Chinese holidays.
Reminds me of Dr. Strangelove.
18apr01 - Received an email yesterday from the person at Microsoft who leads testing for Audio, Video & Streaming apps for the Windows group. He said, "I checked out your site & was impressed. If you find any bugs in Windows XP with any of your AVS applications, please email me."
I currently have beta2 installed (on a blazing 36LZX SCSI drive). WinXP has a v. slick 'feel' to it - even more so than W2K - but I haven't played with it much, cuz I can't get the drivers to install for my CardDeluxe sound card .. and it sux not have any sound/music.
I've traded several emails with tech sppt at Digital Audio Labs. They had me try a few things, but nothing worked. Since XP is still in beta, they're in no big hurry to fix. For all other hardware, W2K drivers work fine.
Nevertheless, I was flattered that someone at MS would want my input. Maybe he can work with DAL to get the drivers to install. Everyone knows MS writes the best drivers.
17apr01 - The kids got a new game .. called Black & White. You can learn everything about it here - at a site called Planet Black & White. They've been staying up late .. 'til 2 or 3AM .. on school nights. Even later on the weekends. Talk about addictive.
Black & White is a ground-breaking new game, a god-simulator .. that's right, you play a god. All you see of yourself in the game is your hand (the hand of god). You can choose to be either a bad god (black) or a good god (white) .. hence the game's name.
B&W is a role-playing game. Typically, the kids prefer first-person shooter type games, like Counterstrike, Quake III Arena, and Unreal Tournament. B&W is the first role-playing game they really enjoy. For example, the never liked EverQuest very much.
We had a houseful of kids over this weekend .. couldn't get 'em off the PCs. They didn't even want to take a break when it came time to eat. Heard lots of cries, "I'm not hungry, mom." =)
B&W was developed by Lionhead Studios, based in Surrey, England. After 3 years in the making, countless delays, much hype & anticipation, it was finally released a few weeks ago.
I was surprised at how flawlessly it installed, and how stable it runs. Typically, game developers rush their wares to market, before giving coders adequate time to fix bugs (so they can begin generating revenue more quickly). Patches follow afterwards.
Not so with B&W. The game installed effortlessly & runs remarkably stable .. at least for the early parts of the game.
The game offers both a single-player, and a multi-player (online) option. The kids have not yet gone online .. as you begin the game by growing and developing your 'creature' .. one of 3 animals - a tiger, an ape, or a cow .. your physical representation on earth.
Most startling aspect of the game is the AI - artificial intelligence - of the creature. It learns as the game progresses.
16apr01 - Posted the Radified Recording & Editing Behemoth .. a (pro-sumer) system designed to record audio and edit video .. based on considerable personal research, but mostly from first-hand experience.
Back when I first delved into video-editing & audio-recording, a few years ago, there was little help to be found anywhere. Most of my lessons were learned the hard way. Audio-recording & video-editing are two of the coolest things you can do with a PC. See here.
13apr01 - Wendy updated her site today. I just checked the site's servers stat's, and discovered that hers uses twice the bandwidth that mine does. Video requires mucho bandwidth.
11apr01 - Posted a (quick-n-dirty) guide to ripping & encoding audio CDs .. for those interested in maximizing *quality*. See here.
09apr01 - Changed the splash page .. to this. Thoughts?.
03apr01 - Wendy posted a copy of the 3-person she scene she adapted from Paolo Coelho's The Alchemist. Eight minutes. See here.
Linkage to -> News for March, 2001
Linkage to -> News for May, 2001