Technology is...

I was looking for an external harddrive enclosure for my crappy laptop and I came accross this thing: It's a harddrive enclosure for a 2.5 HD(laptop hard drive). The cool thing is that it has video out and it can play Divx and vob's and all sorts of other video media. So you just copy your media files to it from your PC and then you take the drive with you to your friends or where ever and plug it into their TV and you can watch/listen to your media direct from the hard drive. Thats a pretty useful hard drive. Well that got me thinking and I thought, yeah but it'd be cooler if the thing was really portable, as in running off a recharable battery, and maybe even if it had a screen so you watch the movies on the go. Well, I heard of all those iRivers and PMP's(portable media players) out there so I figured it should be out there. Next I found this: This thing can act as a mass storage device(a hard drive) and it'll play just about any kind of video you can throw at it. You can take it on the go and watch movies, listen to mp3s, etc... Also, the really cool feature is it will record video. Hook it up to your tv or whatever and push record and it'll record to the video to the hard drive. It costs $450 for the 20GB model. But I actually found a 100GB version on ebay for around $300(selling out of China). Now that makes a really cool external hard drive. Note that this is the kind of thing that if I ever bought, would be played with for a week or two and then set aside probably. Still Technology is cool, especially since it's getting cheaper. Oh, one more....I really found this little thing entertaining: I mean, I guess it'd be pretty cool to reach in your pocket for your lighter and instead pull out darth maul fighting some jedi's in episode one but I can't really imagine anyone seriously watching a movie on this tiny thing. Moving on, I downloaded a live demo cd of a linux distro called Linspire and put it in my laptop(yeah, I have been too absorbed with things of a technical nature this week). It ran perfectly and installed all the right drivers for my laptop. In fact some of the drivers worked better, like my touchpad mouses scroll button worked, which hasn't worked in windows since I installed XP years ago(even with the latest driver). Also, the OS ran pretty fast for an os running off a CD. It was a pleasant change from the windows interface. I've been using a Mac OS X at work so I guess I was feeling like trying to escape Windows altogether for a while. I was looking for editing software and I ran accross Cinelerra: I had heard of it years ago but I didn't know it had grown so much. It's being touted as a full 64 bit HD editing and compositing solution. And the program itself is free, released under GPL. So, if you've got a linux box, go download it and tell me what you think. ...hmmm...the only person that I can think that might even have a linux box is someone like Dylan(that guy who fell off his motorcycle and broke his arm). Anyway, I think it's supposed to be more comparable to adobe premiere rather than something like Avid Xpress or FCP. The documentation looked sparse and I couldn't even see if it had a trim mode function. It would definately have to have frame match atleast before I used it. Speaking of editing, I have been using FCP exclusively at work and it's grown on me. The main complaint I had about it was the keyboard shortcuts are a little too cluttered. You have all your keys but then you have all your keys with a signifier, like alt, shift, command, control... Most of the main keys I use are two keys deep. And why in the world does apple make F9 and F10 the insert and overwrite keys when those keys are both used by the OS with Expose??? Luckily FCP 5's keys are remappable.(is that a word?). I made a keyboard configuration that is a little closer to my old Avid habbits: Benji_FCP.fcmap FCP timeline editing beats avids in many ways in my opinion. It is smart. Complicated trims and moving whole clusters of clips down and up the timeline is a breeze. All those fellow student editors that i went to school with at south seas, who's biggest problem always seemed to be getting audio/video clips out of sync would love FCP. Of course I find sometimes that FCP is too smart but those occasions are rare. The media is a little scary because it is just quicktime files that you could have scattered all over your hard drive in many possible locations...so if you don't bother keep track of those files and organize them then you can really screw yourself by deleting them. Also annoying is the fact that FCP's settings are scattered about into like four different places in the menu of the program. But by and by it's a powerful editing program and I reckon as an offline editor it'll catch up to and surpass Avid in the not too distant future. It many ways it already has. The reason I think it will surpass Avid is because it is a really innovative program with lots of changes and constant improvements. It seems they are listening to their editors and taking suggestion quite seriously. I think they are honestly trying to come up with the best possible editing app. Where as Avid is pretty stagnat...It doesn't seem they are trying to improve their interface at all. It's a damn good interface but believe me, it could use some improvments. Avid is like Microsoft. They aren't really inspired to evolve to reach a better and more innovative software anymore. It's like they think they are already the best and can't be beaten. Then every so often they'll see some other company come along with something promising and that might spur them into action. Why the heck did they buy Pinnacle? Well, anyway...this is wierd. I was going to blog about me walking to the laundry mat but instead I went off on technology. I shouldn't talk technology.

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Published:
9/05/2005 12:36:00 PM
by Benji