My favorite music channel on TV is Fuse. It is primarily about rock. Or used to be. Apparently, the new management now wants to add even more hip-hop/pop crap, movies and reality shows. Just like MTV did, that is. And look where that got MTV: very low ratings, way lower than they used to have 15 years ago when they turned their ship towards popularism.

JBQ was telling me a few months back how the Live 105 radio station in our Bay Area is one of the few remaining stations that play alternative rock. The scene is pretty much dead in New York for example. And I really don’t get that, because Alternative Rock is just so much catchier than most hip-hop songs out there (yes, it is). Indeed, looking at the charts, Staind’s new single “Believe” only made it to the #84 of the Billboard Hot 100, and consider that Staind are a huge name in the alternative rock scene!

The interesting thing is that most [white] people who browse online and are active youtubers/diggers and whatnot, are into alternative rock or hard rock. The same demographic that votes Obama that is. I guess we are not that many of us as I thought we were… Or it just happens that the same demographic are pirating more than others and so the alternative rock market got sterile.

On a semi-related note, the VJ of Fuse, Steven Smith, is hot.

I don’t understand why people spend so much energy and money on weddings and wedding photographers. I really don’t. The “basic” package for some pictures/video of a wedding is $600, and it can go as high as $10,000. And I ask you: why?

Why not hire a professional photographer for less than an hour, either before or during the ceremony, and pay like, $150, and be done with it? Then, you can use friends and family to snap more pictures or shoot video. This is how it was done in my wedding, and how it was pretty much done at my brother in law’s wedding. And it’s the logical thing to do.

I mean, on my wedding, we got some pictures and some video (my father in law shot parts of it). I’ve only watched the video once, and I look at the pictures quickly only when I happen to clean up the shelves (something that doesn’t happen very often). So why spend crazy money on that kind of thing? Vimeo is full of such over the top expensive wedding videos, that I personally don’t see the point of.

I mean, look at this video. If that’s not overkill, I don’t know what is. Mind you, I find the video really well done, and very artistic. But I wouldn’t pay for it. If the director wanted to use me as a model for such a video idea I would volunteer, but I wouldn’t pay to create a short film just because I am getting married.

I guess I really don’t believe in weddings. Marriage itself is not a bad thing (although it’s not necessary, it is useful in many ways), but the weddings in general, and all the culture that surrounds them are useless shit.

And please, don’t give me the excuse of “you shoot nice videos/pics so you can remember your wedding better”.

I don’t have Alzheimer’s, I remember my wedding. And even if I wasn’t, what the big deal is? I don’t love my husband more or less because of it.

A new online HD service is around, MotionBox. I tried it earlier today, and it’s really nice to see more services trying to make HD video more approachable to normal people rather than film geeks. Uploading videos was effortless and fast. You can attach your videos to collections, like Groups and playlists. They offer two kinds of accounts, Basic and Premium. The Basic account allows for a limited number of videos, while the Premium account does not even have a limit into the amount you upload!

Its more impressive feature is its online video editor. You upload your clips, you go to the “remix” area, and then you cut the way you want it to. There is no ability to add an additional audio track though, or other niceties, it’s just a straight forward “cut and glue” editor. MotionBox told me that the videos used in the editor are the original clips and not any re-encoded versions.

MotionBox is undoubtedly going to be compared to Vimeo, the darling of the filmmaking community. The first difference is that MotionBox is more about families rather than filmmakers. So I don’t think that the two sites compete directly. The second difference is that Vimeo already has a vibrant community, while MotionBox has limited ways of creating such communities. Additionally, MotionBox only required ~30 seconds to re-encode to 720p my 17-second Golden Gate Bridge video, while it took Vimeo about 2 minutes. MotionBox also supports AVCHD uploading via Adobe AIR, while Vimeo doesn’t. Finally, the embedded videos on web pages serve the HD version, while Vimeo limits embeds to SD.

Quality is better than Vimeo’s. Their SD re-encodings are clearly better, and their HD versions edge out Vimeo again albeit the difference is not as glaring as in the SD re-encodings. Additionally, MotionBox re-encodes HD video at 30fps, while Vimeo had to go back to 24p as maximum, because many users could not play it back smoothly on their computers. And this is true for MotionBox too. While it’s an answer to the prayers of Vimeo users who don’t want the 24p limitation, it does require a faster PC decoding these files.

A few things need to be fixed though. For example, Motionbox allows you to download an MP4 h.264/AAC re-encoded file in the native resolution of the uploaded video, but the bitrate used is weird. For example, I got a 4.5 mbps for a 720p video re-encoding, and a 5.5 mbps re-encoding for a wide-VGA video. In the case of the VGA video, this is waste of bandwidth (it shouldn’t have been more than 1.5mbps). Plus, the video is encoded in some really high-level h.264, that even the VGA video doesn’t playback smoothly on my Quicktime! I believe that Motionbox should export a maximum of 720/25p video (just because AppleTV doesn’t do more), at low-complexity Baseline h.264, with a bitrate that’s variable depending on the resolution, so it’s compatible with the XBoX360, PS3 and AppleTV, in addition to Quicktime PC/Mac viewing. Their iPod export seems to be better in terms of bitrate/complexity. The original file is also download-able, if you have a free account with the service.

Another thing that irks me very badly at MotionBox is the fact that videos are downloading when you hit a page, even if you haven’t requested a play. This is really bad for Comcast users who use online video too much (like myself). The last thing I want is having Comcast closing down my internet account (don’t forget that from Oct 1st, Comcast is not unlimited).

Security needs tightening as well. The service did not request my current password to either change my password, or my email address.

I think that MotionBox can become a hit with families. It offers a way to burn and order DVDs, to “cut and glue” online, and share it with friends and family in a variety of ways. I think it has a nice future as a “family video sharing” service. To win some of Vimeo’s filmmaking crowd though, it needs to be more “hip”.

Ah, it feels good to be right.

After lots of whining on my blog back in March that “plasmas are overrated”, or “plasmas burn easier and consume too much power”, or that “whatever, I will still get an LCD”, now YET another test shows that Pioneer’s plasma TVs are far superior to any other TV in the market. Even Panasonic’s high end plasma TVs can’t touch the Pioneers. Of course, this landscape is going to change, as Pioneer will start offering LCDs too and start using Panasonic panels instead of creating their own like they do now. I expect Pioneer to lose its steam in the long run because of these decisions, but hey, people want crappy LCDs, and that’s what they are going to get.

As for the $3700 we paid for our Pioneer plasma TV, we got what we paid for. We have zero complaints. Alright, maybe one: their 24p processing (that makes pans smooth) is not fast enough for most 1080/24p footage, as the TV was probably mostly tested with DVDs rather than Blu-Rays. You get a kind of judder when the TV tries to smooth out pans on HD content. I expect newer models to have this resolved.

I got the inspiration from CoPilot, who showed how to do it with After Effects. I learned that making a graffiti with Sony Vegas Pro is not an easy task, it took me nearly 3 hours to make it look natural, and it’s still not perfect. It involved manual masking to create the writing effect (After Effects is more automated in this regard, although I didn’t use ProTitler), pan/crop, manipulation in the 3D plane for all video tracks, and a few color plugins.

Geeks.com sent over a few nice gadgets and computer parts for a review last week, so here we go. Read the rest of this entry »

People most of the times don’t know what they want. We see it in software all the time: we can have clients that ask this and that and some more of that, and all they really need is something else. This little comic here shows the situation 100% correctly.

Same thing is true with politics, and entertainment. I read a lot of crap today about how many people disliked the “Disturbia” music video of Rihanna. They found it “disturbing, and Rihanna was scary”, most people wrote. Well, duh! The song is called “Disturbia”, and you wanted to see SnowWhite petting puppies instead? No. That’s what you thought you wanted to see. If that video indeed disturbed you then the director did an AMAZING job. Hats off to him.

Same thing goes with some films. Some people attack certain actors (not just characters) because of their role as the film’s villain. They just start disliking the actor himself because of the role. Which means one thing and one thing only: that this is a kick ass actor. Examples include but not limited to: James Callis on Battlestar Galactica, and Giovanni Ribisi on “Flight of the Phoenix”.

* My Pegasos/Morphos machine is now donated to the Computer History Museum. I am very happy that this machine found a good home.

* I hate software. I really do. When my new PC came in last week, I put back my old 21″ vertical display for web browsing to my older PC. However, because –as I had blog posted last year– nVidia GeForce’s driver didn’t support full acceleration for rotated displays, I had to download the latest one to see if they added such support. Well, they haven’t. But in any way, I had a new driver, so all was good. Until I loaded my Sony Vegas with “Magic Bullet for Editors 2.0″. When the GPU is enabled in Magic Bullet’s dialog, everything is rendering with a strong fucking red tint. I don’t know if Magic Bullet was relying on a bug that nVidia fixed in the meantime, or that nVidia introduced a new bug, but the point of the matter is, all my video projects were now useless. All my shots were red. Apparently, sometime in the last few months this problem was introduced so I went back to a December 2007 nvidia driver and it’s good again. It seems that most of the 17x versions introduce the problem, but the v169 doesn’t. Just so you know, the problem was only with “Magic Bullet for Editors 2.0″, not with the version of “Magic Bullet Movie Looks HD” that used to be supplied freely with Vegas, or with the new “Magic Bullet Suite” version.

Update: Motherfucking video drivers. Now Windows won’t go to sleep. The “stand by” option is now disabled! I never had this before.

* This morning while sleeping, I felt that someone was leaning on the side of my bed (JBQ was already at work btw). I got panicked and tried to move. I couldn’t move, I was paralyzed. Panicked some more. And then I shouted to my self: “MOVE”. And I moved, which woke me up. I looked around and there was no one there. So I fell back asleep. When back asleep, after seeing a normal dream, I felt that I was waking up because I was seeing a shadow on the bed, and it felt so real, but I managed to moved again (and wake up for real). That was the point that I realized that most of these alien abductions (if not all) are just what they seem to be: sleep disorders. You see, there was no chance in hell, that I could “see” a shadow on my bed, because I was sleeping at the time — even if I thought I wasn’t. Yes, it felt like it was real, because I was dreaming of myself sleeping in that bed — which is what I was doing. But when I deterministically ordered myself to move, I actually woke up for reals. Of course, the believers will always say that I wasn’t fully sleeping, and that I was seeing the shadow with “my third eye”. Or some bullshit like that.

* Mac fans disappointed in GTK+ port, says WebMonkey. How could they not be? The Lunix developers tried to “sell” their unpolished crap to Mac users. That shit can never fly in the Mac platform without some strong integration and beautification. So that’s a release that goes straight to /dev/null.

As a moderator of many channels at Vimeo, I get to watch a fair bit of HD videos uploaded daily by its users. One thing has stroke me in the last 8 months though, that’s pretty unsettling: most mini-stories written and directed by kids (and their friends), usually younger than 16 years old, are ALL end in death. Usually by a gunshot.

It’s one thing to watch 2-3 videos that are like that and let it be as “kids fooling around”, but when the huge majority of story-fied teenage videos end up with a gunshot, it’s very disturbing. Especially when to come to think of it from the point of view that the kids who actually do sit down and direct a story, are the most creative ones. So if the most creative of our kids are so violent and single-dimensional, what good are the rest ones?

I don’t want to sound like a 60 year old whining about the youth and where it’s heading, but truth is, there is definitely something wrong with the upbringing of these kids. I don’t believe that any kid from my class would have written such grim stories in that age. Also, please note that I am not against grim movies (heh, my own short story ends in death too), but there’s a difference between a deeper story that sadly ends in death, and a story written as a plot device for that death scene only.

Update: Here’s one today.

A few weeks ago Vimeo decided that uploaded videos that show computer games in action are to be banned. Many got seriously pissed off about this decision, as Vimeo was offering them a good 720p HD quality to upload their gaming videos. Vimeo argued that these videos are not art, plus, many computer games companies are arguing that they own the copyright of the images, and therefore Vimeo can’t allow such videos.

I am personally siding with Vimeo on this subject. These computer games are indeed copyrighted, along with all the images generated from them. As ludicrous this sounds, it’s how it is. Additionally, I don’t find these videos to be any kind of art — apart from the art of the gameplay ability itself. The gamer only offers the gameplay seen on these videos, and nothing else. On real videos, that you shoot with a camera, the shooter needs to take a lot of things into account, it’s a much more complicated affair than just enabling FRAPS to do the recording for you.

And honestly, I don’t see what this whole fascination of showing off yourself killing monsters is. What kind of self-expression is this?