O'Reilly Digital Media

Motion DSP’s new Ikena system, announced today, looks to perform some astonishing cleanup on cruddy-looking, overcompressed videos.

The initial Linux-based product (including hardware) will set you back $30,000, but this type of interpolation-based cleaning will certainly trickle down into affordable systems before too long. Check out the examples at MotionDSP.com and prepare to be amazed.

I particularly like how the demos use Lego-ized YouTube videos to make their point. So many times, I’ll see an embedded YouTube link and not even feel like clicking it because the preview looks so ghastly. (In a related vein, here’s a recent tutorial I wrote on using CSS and JavaScript to make high-quality poster movies.)

Some things are just basic, and you do them daily right? Like showering, flossing your teeth, locking your front door (unless you live in one of ‘those’ small towns where that’s still not necessary). Right in line with this list should be backing up your hard drive regularly. It’s one of those things that’s just absolutely necessary, especially if you work from home and don’t have an IT department that handles that function automatically. The more critical your data to your work and your life (depending on what you have on your hard drive), the more frequently you should back up your files.

I know we’ve all heard this a thousand times, but allow me to interrupt our regularly scheduled program to remind you for the thousand and first time — it’s really really important to DO it. My favorite tool for the job is the SmartDisk Firelite FireWire external hard drive (comes in multiple sizes). There are lots of other options of course, including the SanDisk Cruzer Mini (also comes in a range of sizes) for quick back-ups of key files on the fly. These drives have never been more affordable, and they offer a form of insurance and peace of mind that is worth every penny. Personally I do a double back-up where I have both my external hard drive and my laptop synched with what’s on my desktop machine so that whenever I do back-up, I’m doubly protected. Do yourself a favor, and make regular offerings to the “back up gods”. End of PSA.

I was chatting with my pal Craig Syverson about video podcasting. During our conversation, he recounted a story for me about a client who wanted help selecting a video camera for his video podcast. Instead of answering the client’s question with a run-down of the latest and greatest HD video cameras, Craig informed the client that he should be paying attention to the audio first, and then the video.

One of the most interesting technologies at the recent Audio Engineering Society show wasn’t accompanied by pulsing LEDs or Bavarian vacuum tubes. In a simple booth, CEntrance was showing its Universal Driver (UD), a $79 piece of software that enhances FireWire audio and MIDI on Windows.

In addition to low latency (reportedly 5ms roundtrip), UD supports device aggregation, which lets Windows users combine multiple FireWire audio interfaces into a single logical unit. (Mac users got this capability in OS 10.4 Tiger.) At the booth, CEntrance Managing Director Michael Goodman fed the 24 outputs of an Alesis ADAT HD24 hard-disk recorder into Mackie 12- and 16-channel mixers, then routed the mixers’ FireWire outputs into Steinberg Cubase.

In other words, the UD software combined two FireWire audio interfaces into one. For anyone who dislikes throwing away old gear simply because they need more I/O, this is a welcome step forward. I’ve mentioned UD before; it’s good to see that the number of supported devices and formats continues to increase.

Recently I installed Microsoft Vista Release Candidate 2 on my MacBookPro using Paralells.

So far it seems to be fast, stable and very attractive. So far I’ve only been running Office 2007, FrontPage 2003 and Firefox, but I plan on installing a 3D CAD program soon to really stress it out. I must say that I’m just doing this because I’m a total tech geek and I just want to see how it works. I’m VERY happy with the Mac OS and I don’t see myself using Windows Vista for any real work.

The installation was pretty straight forward and I didn’t have any problems untill after the install and Vista was running, I could not get it to recognize my network card. I ended up going to my other computer and downloading a Realtek RTL8029 driver (that what Parallels emulates) and then burning that driver to a CD ROM and putting in my MacBookPro and manually installing driver from the CD ROM. After that it worked like a charm.

My MacBookPro is the 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo with 2 GB of RAM.

If you are going to try this, make sure you have the version of Parallels that support Vista available here

A lot of people are shooting in the RAW fromat, but a lot of people are still asking why they should. I shoot almost exclusively in RAW and recently I was shooting in what Derrick Story calls “Stupid Mode”, not paying any attention to my camer’s settings and RAW saved me.

I think this shot really demonstrates the power of shooting in the RAW format.

Shooting in RAW does not mean that you go out and take pictures in the nude! RAW is an image format that most all digital SLR cameras and even some newer point-and-shoot camera support. The raw format captures and saves every piece of information that the image sensor sees, it does no in-camera post processing and does not compress the image. A RAW file is exactly what the sensor “saw” when you pressed the shutter button.

I snapped the photo above on my way out of a water polo tournament I was shooting and I still had my camera set to shutter priority and a shutter speed of 1/640th to stop the action in the water… combine that with a slow telephoto lens (f/5) and the very dark shade this guy was laying in and you end up with an exposure that looks almost black (straight out of the camera) … a little adjusment of the exposure slider in Apple Aperture (or Adobe Camera Raw) and a “reject” photo is saved and turned into what I think is a really great shot tha captures an exhausted player napping on the grass.

You can try all day to do that with a JPG file and you might, in the end get results that are better than nothing, but you’ll never get the results that you would have if you had shot RAW.

Like they say … if the shot is important, Shoot RAW!

Until next time,

Keep shooting.

Allen Rockwell
Allen Rockwell Photography

While I was packing for my recent trip to Ireland, I mentioned to Derrick Story that I had three fully charged (proprietary) batteries ready for my Canon point-and-shoot. When he asked if I’d packed my charger, I said I thought that three batteries should be enough, but he insisted I take it. (His words, I believe were, “Wrongo.”) I’m writing this post in an act of public contrition for ever thinking otherwise.

Let’s face it, chargers don’t take up much room; mine has the collapsable plug that renders it about the size of a deck of cards. Since most chargers seem to be able to handle a range of voltage, I only needed a plug adapter (the thing that gives you the right number, size, and shape of prongs to fit in the Irish outlets) rather than a full converter. When I went through my first battery on my first full day of sightseeing, I knew I owed Derrick a Guinness. For my 10-day trip, I recharged twice, and had a fully charged battery in reserve at the end just in case.

Part of the fun of digital photography is the “play factor” and not having to worry about batteries is an integral part of that play. Sure you’ve got to shoot the requisite images: kissing the Blarney Stone (unnecessarily, I’m told), the amazing Cliffs of Mohar, the view from the top of the Guinness Storehouse. But I was also able to grab shots of the unexpected things along the way: the instructions to “Look Right” at the crosswalk, my host John’s dog Geoff imploring for bacon scraps, or a sign offering “Digital Camera Classes” in a small camera store window in Killybegs, Co. Donegal. If my last battery had been dying and I still had the Neolithic burial mounds at New Grange ahead on the itinerary, I may have hesitated to capture this guy who was just inexplicably happy to meet me.

It’s the little things, like a funny comparison shot of my 6′7″ friend Lars (whose second battery was on its last legs with 2 days to go) next to one of Ireland’s great crosses for size perspective, that make my experience uniquely mine.

Listen to Derrick; take your charger.

I try to post something here at O’Reilly every weekend. I usually review podcasting gear or give tech tips for podcasters. But today I want to write about something a little more intangible - quality.

Looking for some creepy soundscapes for Halloween? Check out the latest release from Darwin Chamber, 3D Halloween Sound FX 2006, which just hit the iTunes Store.

Chamber, aka Mark Greenfield, brings an unusual musical sensibility to his environmental soundtracks, thanks to his background in techno music and sound editing for TV and film.

Instead of simply pointing a mic at a rain forest, he collects numerous related sounds and weaves them into a flowing experience. Part of his process involves processing the sounds to simulate 3D. After listening to four of his CDs, I interviewed Chamber by e-mail to learn more about his technique and philosophy. Here’s an edited excerpt.

My colleagues at PaidContent.org shared some insights from a recent Steven Levy article in Newsweek regarding the iPod turniing five…….here are the most entertaining pieces:

iPods are cool and useful, but the fifth anniversary of the digital music player is getting an enormous hype party — the full cultural milestone treatment, sort of like when Tom Cruise turned 40. Newsweek is the center of the coverage, as you’d expect, since its senior editor Steven Levy has a new book out in which he identifies the iPod as “the perfect thing” and claims it “changed the world.” No dispassionate understatement there. Those who enjoy hagiography can read Levy’s book (sample overheated assertion: “At one point the universal goal of the literate was to write the Great American Novel. Then the Great American Screenplay. And now, the Great American iTunes Library.”), an interview with Steve Jobs in which Levy lobs the airiest of softballs (”What products do you consider cool?”), and a piece of analysis in which Levy finds the Zune inferior to the iPod even though “I haven’t handled the Zune device”.

It’s true that the iPod is fun and the iPod/iTunes software/iTunes store combo is quite efficient. But one of the reasons for the iPod’s dominance, which you can’t hear because the celebration is so loud, is that so many of the competing systems are terrible. That can’t last forever. Microsoft’s Zune may not be the one to challenge Apple’s digital-music supremacy, but if there’s anything true about digital-media industry, it’s that someone is always developing a better mousetrap. Let’s see what happens when Apple goes against a well-funded competitor with a good product and minimal switching cost. Granted, considering the quality of the competitors now, Apple may celebrate the tenth anniversary before that happens.

(Excerpted from PaidContent.org - 10.17.06)

Having observed a slew of MP3 players come and go over the last several years, and despite my many years of employment at Apple, I’m confident that someone will ultimately come up with a market-worthy competitor to the iPod; whether it’s Zune or not remains to be seen.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and
expecting different results. ”

-Benjamin Franklin

–Or Not.

I could stand it no more, so I did a little research, using the “World Wide Web,” where the digital media lives.

SO there’s this thing called Project Bar-B-Q, which i will be attending again this year, to my great delight. last year was the 10th anniversary, so “this one goes up to 11″ as they say; i expect it will be fun, productive, creative, and loud … what more could you ask for?

BBQ #9, however, was the year i was part of the “Lessons Learned” mobile audio session (aka “the color of suck”), which discussed the “we’ve been here before, and look, here we are again” ideas that have formed most of the topics of this blog so far. For those of you keeping track, we’re up to #4 Hardware Chaos.

I’ve used lots of voice processors in my career. I’ve been lucky enough to work at FM radio stations using Optimods. But most podcasters aren’t likely to look at $12,000 voice processing solution.

Thanks to Aphex, they won’t have to. At the recent Podcast & Portable Media Expo, I spent time in the Aphex booth playing with their award-winning, 230 Voice Processor. At $799 list price, it’s now on my must-have list for any serious podcasting studio.

During a long flight recently, I had to clean up some audio I had recorded for a podcast. Too many “ums” and “ahs” for my taste, so a little surgery was required. I fired up Rogue Amoeba’s Fission, and cut through 30 minutes of yak yak faster than bare feet running on hot sand.

That’s what this Universal Binary (Mac Intel and PowerPCs) sound editor focuses on: cutting audio. Sounds simple, and you probably already have a tool to handle that. But with Fission, I can open a MP3 file, snip out an offending segment, then save the edited file without recompressing it. Hmmm…. that is really handy.

OK, real life situation here: Say that I have a podcast that’s ready to go. It’s been recorded, edited, includes wrappers, and is compressed down to MP3 or MP4. I’m ready to go when I hear a squeaky door opening in the background that I missed before. Do I want to go back to the master mix, edit, then recompress? Nope. I just want to get rid of the squeak and upload it. Fission lets me quickly remove the offending audio, save, and be done. Just like that.

Another handy scenario is adding a closing fade to an audio track for a QuickTime slideshow. Normally I have a few hoops to jump through to accomplish this. With Fission, I open the audio track, crop it to the time length I need (say 2:30), move the scrubber to the last 5 seconds of the track, and click “Fade Out.” Now all I have to do is use the Save Audio command, and I have an edited file waiting for me on my desktop that didn’t have to be recompressed, and is ready to add to my slideshow.

You can download Fission for free and try a fully functional demo version. If you like it, and I’m sure you will, you can buy it for $32. But, if you already own Audio Hijack Pro, you can get a coupon for Fission that saves you $14. That means you can buy a nifty audio editor for $18. Give it a try.

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O’Reilly Digital Media

UPDATE, 2007-08-02: Our in-depth MR-1 review is now online. We also have a new discussion area at the end of the review, so please feel free to continue this conversation over there.

Breezing through the AES show press room last Friday, I saw something that made me want to rush down to the exhibit floor: a palm-size recorder with 1-bit, 2.8 megahertz resolution. Yep — Super Audio CD recording in your sweaty little hand.

Here’s a couple of images from the CD my dear old Dad is making of the plants in the Coffs Harbour Botanical garden, for release next month. The Wombat Berry is the sole member of the genus. Also, here is perhaps the only photo on the internet of the fruit of the Grease Nut Tree, which rejoices in the name Sh*twood.

Finally a fairly pretty one of the Gold-tipped bottlebrush, which are out at the moment.

One of the most brilliant products I saw at this week’s AES show was also one of the most affordable.

Podcasters face many challenges. One of those is a reputation for substandard audio production values. This reputation is in some cases, well deserved. Because the barrier to entry into podcasting is so low, many podcasters haven’t had to obtain the training or equipment necessary to bring their audio recording skills up to par.

And one of the first places podcasting newbies have trouble is maintaining a consistent audio level. Microphone variations, mic distance and technique problems, multiple audio sources, different voice characteristics, all contribute to peak loudness problems. Seasoned engineers know how to “ride” levels during recording to minimize these issues. But most podcasters don’t have the luxury of a seasoned engineering staff.

Gigavox Media, part of Doug Kaye’s IT Conversations Network, has come up with a free, solution to this problem for podcasters called the Levelator.

O’Reilly author Stephen Johnson did a lively, compelling presentation based on his book Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography Tuesday night at the SFDIG meeting. At the outset, Steve told the audience of 100 or so photographer-types he was going to base his two-hour talk on the book. (I admitted to Steve later that this made me a little anxious at first; I’m extremely proud of that book but it was an intense six months getting it out to the world, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to relive the entire experience compressed into one evening.) It proved, however, to be a terrific whirlwind tour of digital photography and a great chance for Steve to speak with great energy and enthusiasm about his passion. (Photo courtesy of O’Reilly Author Ken Milburn)

One of my favorite sections of the book, and of the talk, was on the evolution of digital imaging technology. Steve covered everything from spy pigeons with cameras around their necks in the early 20th century to the amazing photos being sent back today from NASA’s space-traveling devices.

Steve left for a workshop at Mono Lake yesterday, so I couldn’t hit him up for one of the cool space photos he uses in his presentation to post here. So I did a little sleuthing on the NASA images website (seriously DO NOT go there if you’ve used up your procrastination budget for the day and you find space imagery even the slightest bit compelling). NASA makes a ton of amazing photographs and video available for public use; you can even contact them for hi-res versions like Steve did for the book. The guidelines posted on the site are simple:

“NASA still images, audio files and video generally are not copyrighted. You may use NASA imagery, video and audio material for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits and Internet Web pages. This general permission extends to personal Web pages.”

Just for fun, here’s an image of Saturn from February 2006 taken by the Cassini Orbiter that was just posted today. This spectrally interpreted image was produced by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer team at the University of Arizona. The blue line across the equator is a head-on view of the rings. (Image Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona)

The always insightful Eliot Van Buskirk just posted an entertaining interview with Justin Frankel, the programmer behind Winamp, Gnutella, and some visionary new music programs like Reaper and NinJam. In the interview, Frankel shares his design philosophy, discusses his own music, and explains why DRM is a bad idea. He even reveals the origin of the mythical Winamp Llama.

When I reviewed NinJam for Make magazine a year ago, I was struck by how concise the interface was. Developers have been showing me Internet jamming applications for a decade, but NinJam was the first I’ve seen that embraces the demon latency and turns it into a musical tool. The parts you hear your remote bandmates play are multiple bars late, which—surprisingly—facilitates listening and responding.

For more on Reaper, see Peter Kirn’s overview at Create Digital Music.

(Click to enlarge.)

One of the best audio investments I’ve made was a pair of Sony MDR-V6 headphones. I bought my set for about $80 back around 1988 after noticing renowned recording engineer Roger Nichols checking mixes on his in the big L.A. studio where I worked. (I couldn’t afford the glorious Meyer HD-1 powered monitors Nichols was using, which cost $5,000 a pair when they finally came to market in ‘91.)

Eighteen years later, those MDR-V6s are still a part of my headphone lineup, although the fake leather on the ear pads has long since crumbled away, leaving just soft fabric. I love the way they collapse for travel yet still have large enough speakers to produce reasonable bass.

So I was interested to check out Sony’s latest pro headphones, the MDR-7509HDs. At $265 list, these are decidedly upscale. They come in a satin-lined box and include instructions for replacing the components, in the unlikely event they should wear out or break. The headband and ear cups are thickly padded and remain comfortable for hours despite the bulk. Sony’s new HD drivers reportedly extend the frequency response to a bat-like 80kHz (see specs table). The speakers are supposed to deliver a flatter midrange than previous models as well, for a more accurate, less fatiguing sound.

[Note: Mikkel couldn’t get this blog entry up from Prague, so he asked me to post it for him—cw]

Cologne, Germany–I’m winding up a week at Photokina, the world’s largest photographic trade show held every two years here in Cologne. I spent a good deal of the week as a guest in the Adobe booth, talking up our Adobe Lightroom Iceland Adventure and showing off some of the tips and tricks we learned on our week long adventure in Iceland this summer.

I’m amazed at how many Europeans have already downloaded Lightroom Public Beta 4, which was made available two days before the show started on Tuesday. Several of the beta testers already knew more than I did about the recent release!

After talking and listening to others talk about their experiences with Beta 4, here are some critical features that need to be implemented before the final release:

• Interconnected magnification and scrolling views in the compare preview in Library. (Already available in Before/After preview in the Develop module.)

• Ability to select multiple formats for Export, like Image Processor in Photoshop. (At this time you can only choose 1 format at a time to export.)

• Ability to create multiple versions of the same image (black and white, high contrast, spilt tone, etc.) and maintain previews of each version in the Library. (Something like Versions in Photoshop Elements 4-5 for Windows.)

Other things I heard requested include:

• Ability to make multiple sizes of different images on the same page in the Print Module. (Like Picture Package in Photoshop)

• Email JPEGs command from within the application. (Like iView Pro, iPhoto and numerous other applications.)

• Stacks in Library mode that can contain multiple related images. (Like the feature found in Photoshop Elements 4.0 and 5.0 for Windows and like the stacks used by Apple Aperture.)

Several users–including me–experienced performance issues with the De-Noise feature in the Develop module and Spilt Toning (also in the Develop module). Several people complained of display issues with the Windows version, but I was assured that this problem has been fixed and the current download works fine.

Not all was work at the show, of course! I had the pleasure to meet up with Adventure team member Michael Reichmann, who showed me some impressive video blogs he posted from Cologne. Michael never stops amazing me. Addy Roff was at the show and so was Peter Krogh, two other Adventure team members. One night at Cologne brewery, Peter and I and Photoshop creator Thomas Knoll launched into an hour-long Geek discussion about Lightroom. I wish I could remember all the content…it was fascinating at the time. But, even after all the beers I do remember learning Peter is actually descended from Danish royalty. At least that is what I remembered he said…

Another night I also had the pleasure of meeting Photoshop Super Stars Katrin Eismann and Martin Evening, who were also special guests of Adobe. I really liked them; they both are so dedicated and professional in what they do.

Fred Shippey, my good friend, and tech editor for my book Shooting Digital (shown with me here), stopped by the Adobe booth often and encouraged me to drink more water. He’s a pro at trade shows; he worked for Kodak in the old days. Fred also wrote up a nice piece on the Adobe Lightroom Iceland Adventure for the Photokina Show Daily. Thanks Fred! Educator and fine art photographer Harris Fogel also stopped by the Adobe booth, but conflicting parties kept us from really spending time together.

I’m spending a few days with friends in Prague, then returning to San Francisco on Wednesday. Time to get to work on the Lightroom PDF Derrick Story and I are working on together. [Ahem, good idea, Mikkel!—cw, aka “Your Editor”] I certainly picked up a lot of useful tips I’m anxious to share with everyone.

One of my very favorite companies folded this past week Network Live. Network Live was started by Kevin Wall, who had been executive producer of both Live Aid in 1985 and Live 8 in 2005 with Bob Geldof. Network Live was a phenomenal concept where a ‘live’ concert would be re-distributed across multiple platforms in real time (or delayed); and with heavyweight partners like AOL, XM Radio, AEG, Cingular, and DirecTV it seemed destined for success. As someone who’s passionate about models around “Concerts of the Future”, I was confident this was well-positioned. However, all good things must come to an end. It seems that the company may not have pulled in sufficient revenues quickly enough to satisfy its investors; and as its initial one-year contracts with the partners referenced above came to an end, they began to pull out. Another challenge was surely the knotty issues of dealing with A-list artists, their labels, publishers, management, and everyone in their respective entourages who would have needed to fully cooperate.

That said, I believe in this model overall — and I remain confident that real-time, multi-platform deployment is a notion whose time has come. Sadly, this initial experiment has ended — but it has morphed into a venture called Control Room which will attempt to do something very related in partnership this time with MSN at the outset. The launch of Control Room is tomorrow, October 2nd. Stay tuned…….it’s sure to be worth checking out (I’m a big believer in Kevin Wall).