James’ World

The so-called “California International Air Show Salinas” was this weekend at Salinas airport. Canadians seemed to be the only other international participants though.

I was fortunate enough to get a ride there from San Jose with a friend who was from the area and had been to the airshow before a few times.

It was interesting to pass through Gilroy and surrounding areas and see the housing and mall developments springing up. At one point we drove by a eucalytus forest.

We parked at Northridge Mall and took the free shuttle bus to and from the event.

I bought a “box seat” ticket for a steep $33. By box seat they literally mean you sit in chair in a boxed-off area out front. Great view, easy to hear the announcer. No shade whatsoever though.

The weather was great, and luckily the fog didn’t roll in this year and cancel the jet performances.

There wasn’t much international about it, though there was a CF18 and a Canadian jump team. The CF18 had to break off early with some kind of technical problem.

One fellow had both a Nikon 600mm and what looked to be a 500mm for his D300.

The static display included several piston warbirds, a restored Cessna 150L, and a 1948 Ercoupe. I think there was a car rally this weekend too, since there were a bunch of classic cars on display also.

There were 2 C-130s that you could enter, as well as Army recruitment displays inside trailer-trucks.

There were a bunch of aerobatic performances, including Sean Tucker, Julie Clark and a power-off performance.

Some of the jets included a FA-18 and a F-15E. There was a formation flight with a P-38. I was surprised to see each of the jets do a slow-flight pass, since I don’t remember seeing that in previous airshows.

The Thunderbirds put on a good show. It was interesting to be up that close and see the coordination team working together during the show.

Overall a very well-organized event and worth the trip.

I had lunch at Athena Grill today. It’s a cafeteria-style Greek restaurant in Santa Clara.

The mixed grill with chicken and lamb was excellent: fresh, hot and tasty. The greek salad was ok.

My friend had the vegetarian bean soup and a large greek salad. Great also.

Athena only offers street parking, so expect to hunt for parking and a lineup.

Athena Grill
1505 Space Park Drive
Santa Clara, CA 95054
48 567 9144

MacFilmmakers’ had 2 trainers present new product features.

Mark Spencer from Day Street Productions gave a talk on “Apple Motion workflow tips and tricks”.

Mark is a very polished trainer and a pleasure to listen to.

He said it took about 2 days to go through all the included library of effects and samples, so definitely take advantage of those.

Kevan O’Brien did a talk on “Adobe CS4 Production Suite, workflow with Final Cut Studio”.

The latest versions of Photoshop have some nice high dynamic range (HDR) type features for removing noise and changes. A demo of using several frames of a busy mall showed how to eliminate people (and their shadows) from the frame.

Context-aware stretching allows pre-selecting objects and just stretching the background, very handy in advertising graphics illustration with logos, etc.

The image processing demo of combining multiple images at different f-stops into a single in-focus frame was interesting.

Adobe Creative Suites come with a bunch of lesser-known utilities, including Soundbooth. It allows direct from camera to computer monitoring and recording plus …

Soundbooth can do voice recognition and transcription at 2x speed (twice real-time.) Apparently it is intended for authors targeting the web and who want text searchability.

There were some interesting new interoperability features like cut and paste of movie clips and metadata between Premier and Final Cut Pro demonstrated.

It’s great having so many features available today, but everybody mentioned getting lost in the menu options and changes from one version to the next.

Afterward there was a raffle for Adobe CS4 and some books.

Thanks to Kevin for the pizza break once again.