James’ World

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.

Stephen Zilles, Standards Architect, Adobe Systems, gave a talk tonite at IMUG on “Vertical Text on the World Wide Web” about W3C text formatting standards, such as CSS, SVG and XSL, for various languages.

Some interesting examples are Mongolian, which is written top to bottom, and Japanese, which can be written top to bottom or right to left, or tate-chu-yoko (horizontal within vertical), commonly used with numbers. Line-breaking may be codified in JIS X 4051. Ogham and Batak are bottom-to-top languages, which is not specifically supported.

Text formatting can include direction, rotation and transform properties, glyph orientation, line height and width.

Asian printing often uses rotation of English characters to conform to the block progression that started with vertical Chinese or Japanese, for example.

Thanks to Apple for hosting the meeting.

W3C Documents (Membership Required)

There was a meetup tonite for Twiki users from 5:30 pm to 8:00 pm at the Plug and Play Tech Center, 440 North Wolfe Road, Sunnyvale, CA 94085.

I attended most of it, though 5:30 pm is pretty early for most people to leave work and drive there. Nonetheless, turnout was good, with over 30 audience members plus staff from twiki.net, the company providing support for Twiki.

The format was a slide show, followed by a very energetic community evangelist who got the audience involved.

Several members of other local Bay User perl and linux user groups dropped in.

Twiki is notable in offering many plugins that combine to create a very feature-rich wiki. For example, it’s possible to embed twiki spreadsheets, forms or do programming in twiki pages.

I’ve used twiki, confluence, mediawiki and trac. I’d say twiki is my favorite for complex wikis.

The pizza was not great, although it was nice of them to serve both soft drinks and wine.

Karl Hong, from Sun., gave a talk on the OpenOffice.org Internationalization (I18N) Framework at IMUG.

Although ICU is a comprehensive i18n API today, it was not mature enough for most of OpenOffice’s development history. So at this point OpenOffice is about 90% custom i18n API and 10% ICU. George Rhoten, from IBM, was available to provide commentary on areas where ICU had matured, for example the calendar features and transliteration.

Karl mentioned that a lot of features in OpenOffice were added to remain competitive with features in Microsoft Office. Unicode normalization has not been a requested or supported feature yet.

After the talk, Karl showed a live demo of OpenOffice rendering and transliterating Simplified and Traditional Chinese. He also showed mixed Chinese and Hebrew BiDi issues. The Japanese search dialog in Impress is pretty amazing to look at.

Thanks again to Apple for hosting the meeting!

Brian McConnell from the worldwidelexicon.org project talked about their Open Source localization project at IMUG tonite.

The team is now 5 guys, some developers in Russia with i18n experience. Most are volunteers, some are paid.

WordPress users can install a WordPress plugin to get automatic translation for postings if available.

There is also a PHP API available for other apps.

Maybe other plugins available later, like Drupal.

Community content sites always have problems with vandals.

So far the strategy is to ignore vandals and they’ll go away, because active measures like banning “raises the ante.” Also pages are closed off to updates after a while.

Features include:

• use IP address and accept lang header to decide which languages to enable
• searchable on google
• also option to close it and make it private
• consumers can pay translators via paypal
• translation from any language to any language
• can fork language variants

Brian is looking for sponsors: both money and hosting are welcome. CMS plugin authors are also very welcome.

Afterward I wandered around the Cypress Hotel for awhile. Seems very nice.

The gym and business centers are open 24 hours. The gym is small, but does have dumbbells to 50 pounds and a few cardio machines. The business center has 2 Macs with Bootcamp to dual-boot OS X and Windows.

The Park Place Restaurant serves food until 11 pm and closes at 12 am. The hotel has WiFi throughout for guests.

Thanks to Apple for hosting the meeting once again.

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

Another good talk at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group, this time by Tapio Tolvanen of Nokia Finland. He talked about the hardware and software (Tablet OS) behind their excellent PDAs, the 770 and 800.

The Nokia 800 is a Debian distro using GTK, SDL and Pango for i18n. It can run C, C++ and Python. The 800 has host USB, WiFi and BlueTooth. It plays video well using mplayer, runs Opera 9.5 and a Skype client.

Nokia’s plan is to get the 770 and 800 into the hands of developers to prepare for a larger consumer market.

Newer versions of Internet Tablet OS don’t work on the older 770 as the hardware is different.

I have a feeling that the 800 will have stiff competition with the $399 iPhone.

Thanks to Symantec/Veritas for hosting the meeting.

wikipedia: Nokia 770 Internet Tablet
wikipedia: Nokia 800 Internet Tablet
nokia770.com

Some users prefer the 770 because the battery lasts twice as long as the 800. Some hours are building 6.5 Watt/hour external battery packs to compensate.

Cricket Liu, Vice-President of Architecture, Infoblox gave a good talk on “Securing Internet Name Servers” at the Silicon Valley Linux Users’ Group tonite.

Cricket is the author of the O’Reilly book DNS and BIND, and also the DNS & BIND Cookbook.

He discussed both general issues with securing DNS, as well as specific historical attacks such as unrelated record data cache poisoning and a couple of DNS DoS attacks.

The Microsoft 48-hour DNS failure overview was entertaining. One of their technicians misconfigured a router, cutting off their 4 DNS servers from the Internet. Then when they fixed the router, their Windows-based DNS servers fell over from the load. Then a DoS attack on the one router (single point of failure) cut them off again. Verisign noticed that their root server was getting a lot more traffic than normal, and that was mostly due to queries for microsoft.com and update.microsoft.com.

Also, BIND supports 64k zone transfers, which can crash some versions of Microsoft DSN servers, which only expect up to 16k.

He went over some basic configuration recommendations, like splitting authoritative and recursive nameservers onto separate hosts for easier secure configuration and performance, disabling BIND’s version response, and enabling zone transfers only for slaves.

Cricket described how root servers don’t use a single nameserver. Root servers use BGP anycast to do geographically distributed nameservers for nearest lookup, with load-balancing at individual colos across dozens of servers.

He commented that djbdns is remarkable in some ways, but outdated now if you want to use newer DNS features. Also, you may need to separate IP addresses if you want both authoritative and recursive queries, which is overkill for an intranet.

He also demonstrated the free Cricket Liu’s DNS Advisor tool while pointing it at a few public web sites. It does 50 checks on publicly-available nameservers.

Cricket recommends Rob Thomas’ secure bind template.

My understanding is that initially Cricket got heavily involved with DNS at HP.

Cricket and Matt Larsen joined Verisign when Verisign bought their small company, Acme Byte and Wire, several years ago. Cricket spent a year at Verisign, then joined Infoblox a few years ago. Infoblox is an east-coast company that got involved in creating and selling appliances for various purposes, now including DNS and DHCP. Matt is still at Verisign as a Principal Engineer.

The advantage of using an Infoblox DNS appliance is to use a convenient UI for advanced configuration like TSIG mgmt. and load balancing, and to gain the performance benefits of using an optimized appliance.