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.

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.

I went to Kihncert on the Green again this year in Discovery Meadow, downtown San Jose.

There was a great turnout of friendly folks who love to party and still love 80’s rock.

I listened to Starship, Night Ranger, and the Greg Kihn Band.

The acts this year weren’t able to surpass Foghat’s amazing set from last year, but the Greg Kihn Band came pretty close when playing a smoking version of “Jeopardy”. Ry Kihn really rocked.

I took about 200 photos with my Nikon D200 and 70-200mm/f2.8 lens and will post them shortly.

Looks like the way to go to archive data on CDs and DVDs is to use Taiyo-Yuden media with software that implements Reed-Solomon codes like dvdisaster and PAR1/PAR2 in a jewel-box in a controlled environment.

QuickPar
Parchive
wikipedia: Parchive
All About PAR
linux.com: Use dvdisaster to protect backups on optical media
How To Choose CD/DVD Archival Media
pcworld.com: Burning Questions: Ten Tips for Durable DVDs
CLIR PUB121: Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists

I went to Medan, Sumatra and Jakarta for the holidays on JAL, transiting in Tokyo.

Since I had an overnite transit stay in Tokyo, the new Japanese foreigner immigration rules that started in November applied to me and I had to be photographed and fingerprinted to enter the country. Not very welcoming. Just before the immigration counter your can stop at the Section “A” airlines help desk and get a free coupon for the JAL shuttle bus (33) and airline information.

Medan

The flight from Jakarta to Medan is only 2:15 hours, but my connecting flight was about 2 hours late.

Sun Plaza is one of my favorite malls in that area. Unfortunately, recently a distraught young woman had a phone argument with her boyfriend and jumped over a rail to her death in the marble courtyard. Now there are signs saying, “Jangan larangan.” - don’t lean. The rails are solid and chest-height on the average woman, so it wasn’t an accident that she fell.

In Carrefoure Mall there is a good photo store, Buana. It has all the latest Nikon and Canon prosumer bodies, and lenses up to 300mm/f4.

In Indonesia, it’s common for insane people to walk the streets naked. Until now I had never seen that, but this time I saw a naked man walking along a major road near YSR mall. Even Indonesian people along the street paused for the spectacle. (What’s funny is that Indonesian people think Westerners are crazy for walking around in the daytime due to the heat, pollution and often rain.)

A Chinese businessman leased the basement of YSR mall and built a 20-lane bowling alley, fitness gym and billiards complex. Quite nice really, though seldom busy.

I rented a Kijang for 350,000 Rp and went to Pantai Cermin (Mirror Beach) for an afternoon and took some photos. It’s 90 minutes from Medan and popular with locals. A small zoo and swimming pool are also adjacent to the beach.

My trip from Medan’s Polonia airport back to Jakarta was one of my toughest. I had a Sriwijaya airline ticket, and since they’re a new low-cost carrier they don’t have a real check-in counter. So I had to fight mobs of people for an hour to check-in without air-conditioning, then more of the same to check my bag. I ended up throwing out the clothes I was wearing that day. And of course they were late a couple hours.

Jakarta

I was fortunate to have quite good weather during my trip as many parts of the country had flooding. It rained only once, while I was sleeping.

A good taxi rate from the airport to much of Jakarta is 120,000 Rp including tolls. (Tolls are almost 20,000 Rp.)

I went to Plaza Semanggi for an evening. There’s a pretty serious RC helicopter shop there. In the cinema I watched the dreadful “Golden Compass.”

I had a 10-hour transit layover in Narita. After sleeping a little, I looked around some of the way over-priced duty-free stores (Akihabara Electronics uses retail prices) and did some web surfing in the Yahoo! lounge.

My seatmate back was a wonderful young Japanese woman who had previously studied at Cal State. For some reason they upgraded me to Executive Class, with 2 seats across, making life comfortable.

In my family, adults just give each other Christmas cards for the holidays. It helps to focus on seasonal sentiment instead of consumer materialism.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t do some personal shopping …

I picked up a Nikon D300 DSLR, Nikkor 14-24mm/f2.8 lens and iPod Touch 16 GB today.

Merry Christmas to me!

The CompactFlash Association website has some brief information on the UDMA support in new CF cards.

“DMA interface mode is included and reduces the processor power required to manage the CompactFlash data transfers. True IDE Ultra DMA 133 interface mode increases the CompactFlash interface maximum data transfer rate to 133MB/sec. This UDMA interface mode is well defined and tested by the usage on IDE hard disk drives. Faster PC-Card ATA UDMA memory modes are also included and can provide maximum interface data transfer rates up to 133MB/sec. With the UDMA feature, forward and backward compatibility is maintained with systems and CF cards even operating with the interface data transfer rate of 16MB/sec.”

They also mention that CF cards are safe from airport X-ray machines.

UDMA CF normally supports programmed IO transfer (PIO) modes (which max out at 150x) and UDMA, which is 300x.

(The Lexar “x” speed rating describes minimum write speed capability where x=150KB/sec sustained write speed.)

Nikon has UDMA CF support in their latest camera bodies, the D300 and D3, while Canon doesn’t. Generally, Canon lags one generation of CF support from Nikon.

Regardless of which cameras you own, UDMA will speed up new card readers for copying files to your computer.

I use Sandisk and Lexar Pro CF cards. My Nikon D200 is noticeably faster at writing images to a CF card than Canon 30D because Nikon support PIO5 mode, and has a very large image buffer. (The D200’s large image buffer mean that CF speed is not that important to overall performance and any CF card is fine in practise.)

Lexar labels their new pro UDMA CF cards as “UDMA 300x.” They cost only a few dollars more than PIO-only cards.

Likely I will standardize on Lexar 8G UDMA this fall. I’ve had good experiences using Lexar cards and they always seem to be in stock at Fry’s Campbell.

Lexar Professional UDMA 300x CompactFlash
B&H: Lexar 8 GB UDMA CF
dpreview.com: Lexar 300x CompactFlash cards and new readers
Fake SanDisk Compact Flash card

Another great Mac Filmmakers’ meeting at Apple in Cupertino. The group has a blog now.

Red One Digital Video Camera

Torrey Loomis of Silverado Systems in Folsom (an Apple Reseller for pro filmmakers) brought a RED ONE camera system (serial number 00021) and gave a good presentation with actual footage.

Red One - 12 MP outsourced “Mysterium” sensor, 4k horizontal, rebored consumer still lenses (I’d guess Canon L lenses), goal is 4k projection, or shoot for DVD.

Camera body is about $25k including essential accessories, lens set is about 20k. $65k to 70k for complete package. Rental from Silverado is $2k/day, $4k/week, negotiable for longer.

redcode RAW is 4k wavelet compression.

60 to 72 fps for slow-mo, special effects like “300″ movie battle scene.

Supports shutter speeds 124-2000, 100-640 ISO, 320-500 is good, 1000 ISO for monitoring in dark.

4 fan settings: hot, silent, idle, other fan setting.
Has some overheating problems in Spain, but no shutdowns in field.

8 GB - 5 minutes of video (enough for most scenes), waiting for 32 GB CF for 19 minutes, can use hard drives.

redalert software - included.
redcine software - 5k - 7k.

Shorts shot with the Red One Camera:

Paranoid - posted in 40 hours, black spot blowouts, hard on actress makeup.
Crossing the Line - shot 2 days in NZ by Peter Jackson, 15 minute featurette, posted in 10 days.

On the other hand, Blair Witch project was shot on DV: good story, poor camera quality bugs you second time on 40′ screen.

reduser.net
creativecow

Fabulous Pizza Break

One guy had a YouTube decal’ed red Casio Exilim EX-S880 camera. He said video was better quality than his G2. Resolution was still 640×480 though. YouTube tie-in is good for Google to distribute upload software utility in box.

RED Gallery

Demo Reels

Taylor did another one of his useful updates on blogging, podcasting, RSS and free bandwidth hosting for videos:

- blip.tv, free good-quality encoding and hosting of video
- pameran.com
- grab flv formatted file from youtube
- Sony hc-7 hdv cam has remote, canon doesn’t. Likely because Sony can integrate their own chips better than licensees.
- itunes, ipods prefer MPEG4
- RSS publishing
- Obama Camp blog

Multi-lingual industrial DVD of blood glucose product manual was presented by Polish Ph.D.

He had some great tips on DVDs and mastering:

DVD+R in black envelope for masters. Don’t read the disc or bits change since self-made disks are basically burned into photo emulsion.

Taiyo Yuden is best medium, mostly a QA issue these days.
Mitsui, verbatim other mfgs.

- DVD10 double-sided single density NTSC and PAL disk
- print notes on aquaproof hub
- Final Cut Studio 2 pro-res from hdv, no AIC - don’t use imovie
- Mac Disk Utility to burn, 3x slower but bit-for-bit accurate
- your golden master dvd: don’t read it, don’t write on label
- HP 5280 all in one printer
- write with water-soluble ink, not sharpie which is acid-based
- Sony ZU1 video camera
- videotransform.com provides good service and are open-minded to special DVD runs
- certified Taiyo Yuden disk $1.50 each directly from Japan

Thanks to Apple for again hosting the meeting in their lovely Town Hall 4 theater.

Casio Next Generation Digital Camera