We were watching some Audioslave, The White Stripes, and Oasis videos on Youtube tonight and I thought I check out iTunes to see if there’s a best-of album for Oasis. There is one such album, but it is not DRM-free, and it does not include the “Whatever” song which I like a lot. I ended up buying another album instead: Slade’s best-of, 21 songs for $9.99, DRM-free. A much better deal. Oasis have more songs that I like, but I am not willing to purchase under those terms.

C****m on Feel the Noizzzzze…

After buying me a beautiful necklace tonight, my JBQ took me out for an [expensive] dinner at a French restaurant. I told him that we should be careful how we spend money but he replied that he just doesn’t want to think about it because he is very stressed and calculating about work, and he just wants to relax and have some fun when he’s not working.

Eugenia: Maybe we should just move to Greece then. Nobody is stressed there, most people go to work whenever they feel like to, they have night life, live the good life — even with less money. We Greeks do nothing that we shouldn’t have to. We don’t invent anything either, we leave the cancer cure for the Americans to find. Then we import it.

JBQ: So you are telling me that you are retired as a nation. Hmmm…. it almost makes sense. You did what you had to do 2500 years ago and you lay back since then.

Eugenia: …

EA said that the iPhone is more powerful than the DS, and now Sega is saying that it’s just as powerful as the Dreamcast. It makes perfect business sense to me for Apple to create an addon controller that attaches to the port and adds buttons on both sides of the device, and what not. Then release an API for it too, and let people design or port games to it. Honestly, why not?

The NTSC HV20 cameras can record in 60i and PF24 modes, the PAL ones can do 50i and 25p, while the NTSC version of HV30 also adds PF30 support to the mix. The common question that Vegas users have is “which project properties should I use for each mode before I start editing?”. So, load the “project properties” dialog and follow the info below:

1. 60i or 50i
If you shot using the default mode of your camera, simply use the supplied HDV 1080i template for either 60i (NTSC) or 50i (PAL). I recommend the “interpolate” de-interlacing method though and the “best” quality.

2. PF30
If you shot in PF30 mode with your NTSC HV30 camera, select the HDV 1080/60i template, but change the “field order” to “progressive” and the de-interlacing method to “none”. Quality should always be “best”.

3. 25p
Select the HDV 1080/50i template, but change the “field order” to “progressive” and the de-interlacing method to “none”. Quality should always be “best”.

4. PF24
By default, PF24 is just 60i, not true 24p. But if you do the extra work to remove pulldown, you get a true progressive 24p stream which is and should be handled differently.
Case A: If you have not removed pulldown before you entered Vegas to start editing, then you should just use the supplied HDV 1080/60i template unmodified. I recommend the “interpolate” de-interlacing method for when exporting though.
Case B: If you have removed pulldown, then you use the HDV 1080/60i template, but change the “field order” to “progressive”, the de-interlacing method to “none”, and the frame rate to “23.976″ (type it exactly like this if it’s not available in the list).

Quality should always be set to “best”.

And of course, if you are using these non-standard recording modes a lot, you can “save” a new template under a new name in the project properties dialog, so you won’t have to change these options again in the future manually, but you just pick them up from the template listing.