The FIBA 2006 is over and yesterday was the day where I recuperated by sitting in the sun in the morning and editing a short video clip in the afternoon. Both were nice occupations to unwind from the past three weeks.
it’s been fun and all that remains from this work is a highlights tape filled with cheerleaders. Next time I hope to be at the event in person rather than on the sidelines.
That’s the hardest I’ve ever worked. starting the day at ten and continuing on till 2 am on an early night and four am last night. I spent 17 hours working on projects and now I’m exhausted.
in the morning I had to finish the documentary, then have a meeting about multicam before once again working on the multicam. After those two pieces of work, there was the DVD authoring for both projects, the log files and finally the analysis. It’s so much work but as a thank you I could walk around and enjoy that other people were still under pressure. I’m so happy I finished the work early in the day.
It’s current madness in the library and I need to sleep for a while.
My Finale Year Project is Finished.
Yesterday I handed in my penultimate essay.
There are two main assignments remaining. the first of these is a tech case study which should be fun to do. I already have an idea of a topic that I know fairly well. with the second it’s the dissertation and I should really spend a few hours progressing with that.
I had one of those classic nights on Saturday. You begin with the idea that you’re simply going to drop into the cinema and watch a film before going home and watching the lunar eclipse from the relatively low light pollution of the area around the halls.
This plan disintegrated as a friend encouraged me to stay out and go out clubbing instead. I knew I had the penultimate essay to finish. Most people hate the night bus because it’s so full of weird people, some are just drunk, others are in worse states and finally some are amusing.
On occasion you’ll enter the bus and a girl will offer you some crisps and you won’t say know, to which someone next to you asks whether you’re really going to accept them. Later on you understand that it’s the brother joking around.
In other cases you’ll find that it’s like a plane cabin. If you’ve ever flown easyjet and got up to go to the front of the cabin you’ll know the sight. it’s that of two hundred people having a nap. It’s a soothing sight to see so many relaxed people.
Occasionaly some people get cold so you lend them their jacket and you walk them home before rushing home to finish your essay rather than taking the time to get to know more about them.
There are a lot of people that hate the stop at Sudbury but having lived there last year I know a little secret. That there’s a 24 hour shop where you can buy jaffa cakes and lipton ice tea for the second part of the journey.
What I enjoyed most about saturday was the people I met on the bus journey home.
My editing machine has a minimum of things installed on it. Final Cut Pro and related software, nothing else. The point is that when I am editing I am dedicated to that single task. I take breaks when it is rendering or when I need time to digest the edit so far.
When I was editing over a decade ago I would mark 10 in and out points and then go and drink some ice tea while the machine assembled the footage. Later when I moved to desktop editing I would let the computer render and take a break. Today with the current system taking breaks is based on scene completion.
That’s how a friend and I worked on our fiction film over a period of weeks. Right now the rough cut is ready. We need to add music, improve the sound, colour correct and more but at least a big step was taken.
Is your internet connection slow, do pages take a long time to load, do you visit certain sites more than others? If your answer to any of these is yes then I suggest that you download Netsonic, a program I have tested which works well, since I’ve installed it my browsing is much faster.
At first it’s normal for the netsonic program to seem a little slower but once you’ve started using it and it some files are cached the surfing speed will be far greater since pages which are constantly visited load faster. There is also another function on it which allows you to pre-fetch pages which are kept in a cache file
When you visit a webpage there is sometimes a lot of text meaning that you will spend some time reading this text, as you spend time reading the page the modem and the line aren’t been used which is when netsonic comes in. This program is designed to follow the links on different pages and download the pages without you feeling that the connection is slower because it does it when you’re not using the modem, for instance when reading a long text.
If you have had a hotmail account such as I used to use before you visit this page and you begin to be frustrated at spending quite some time online. What netsonic does is cache pages such that the login page for example loads immediatley as well as certain frames load as soon as you get into the account.
Another way it’s worth is shown is when you’re looking through the school’s online magasine, for example coming to read new articles, if there is a page which you like then as the structure of this magazine will remain the same you can get to the page you want in thirty seconds on a 26,000 modem. This means you have more time to enjoy the page and ultimatly a lower phone bill.
When I started using comptuers they were nothing more than ega displays with the large floppy disks and games were text based. As I grew older so the games grew to be more complex, from 2d to 3d and then the quality improved.
The television of my youth was limited to five channels and by the 90’s had expanded to twenty plus channels. By 2000 the number had exploded to several hundred channels and that’s just counting the English ones.
The media have progressed. I am in constant contact with everyone by mobile phone for over a decade. I have had minidisk players, i’ve had phones and I’ve had a television in my room.
Now the mobile phone I have replaces all these devices if I so wish. The ipod replaces the radio and the television, the phone replaces the laptop, the minitel and the fax machine.
I have access to the world’s media within two clicks of a mouse, which is no more than a trackpad on an ibook.
Video editing is far simpler. When I wanted to learn to edit I remember that you’d need to get two player/recorders and a third device to control the two machines. We bought Adobe Premiere and the Miro dc30+ and there it was. I spent a weekend learning to edit with pictures of the Mer des Glaces, a glacier in the French Alpes.
Since then I upgraded through the years and my laptop can do all this seamlessly.
We discussed video on demand years ago and that idea was novel, was something which would be hard to implement. Today video on demand is so easy it’s syndicated via RSS feeds. I get my televisual experience via downloaded streams on a daily basis. Radio on demand is certainly here and doing well.
In this week in media one of the presenters said that in the near future media content would become more valuable than oil. It’s an interesting idea.
Are media studies a mickey mouse course when you’ve got free newspapers, you can watch television whilst commuting to and from work? When you share your pictures with friends around the world and computing is no longer the realm of the computer geek I think we’re in the Golden age of media studies and that it may have been one of the most interesting topics to study with the exponential growth of media outlets.
1.1 The three months to the end of December 2006 (Q4) saw over 1,000,000 net household conversions to digital television (DTV) in the UK, following on from 800,000 additions in the previous Q3. Growth was driven by another strong quarter for digital terrestrial television (DTT), with total sales of DTT equipment reaching 2.4 million.
1.2 The digital cable and satellite platforms also added over 300,000 households between them during the quarter. This means that 77.2% of households now receive digital television services on their primary set, up 3.9 percentage points from the previous quarter.
1.3 With a further 1.4% of households subscribing to analogue cable, the total number of homes receiving multi-channel television at the end of Q4 2006 stood at 78.6%.
What this means is that narrowcasting is no longer within the grasp of early adopters but slowly getting into the hands of the everyday public. As more people have more choice so their viewing habits and choices will be different.
At the same time television is getting a lot of competition from online resources, especially for programs that are aired in territory months earlier than in others.