Sony Vegas Platinum 9, released a few days ago, is the most flexible consumer video editor out there. To me, it’s the best bang for the buck editor for the $85 it costs. Sony added full customization support on its h.264 encoder now, it has full 1920×1080 read/write AVCHD support, better HDV support and more. If you are looking for a cheap editor that’s full featured and not “dumb and drop” like iMovie or Ulead, then this is the one for you.

I have two problems with Platinum 9 though:

1. The newly added “new project” wizard. I think the wizard was a good idea, but the screen where it asks you what kind of project you want (e.g. DVD, Blu-Ray etc), is the worst thing ever. I really don’t understand how Sony could make such a tragic usability and technical error. You see, it’s very easy for someone to pick the DVD option while his/her source video is HD. Problem is, when this person comes back to that project weeks or months later and wants an HD export, several elements in the timeline will not automatically adjust to the new resolution (e.g. the text frame sizes must be changed manually throughout the video if the project properties change). Let alone that most people don’t know in the first place that they must adjust the project properties before export in HD (and that can lead to massive quality loss). Heck, there’s not even a 1920×1080 option in that list! To add to that, editing in a non-native resolution/frame rate, has up to 50% speed decrease in overall performance. So what the hell was Sony thinking when introduced this wizard that asks what your target export is? Don’t they know that people export in more than one formats/targets? Don’t they know that most people don’t even use the project properties so they won’t go change them before exporting in HD? Don’t they know that performance goes down? Thankfully, for those few of us who know, there is still the “match media” icon in the project properties dialog. Moral of the story: always edit in the native properties of your video. Decide how to export at the very end. All Sony needed to do in the wizard was to launch the “match media” procedure instead of the “how do you want to export” dialog. On a mixed-format project, all it was needed was to ask the user to “match” a file that represents the dominant format of the project.

2. After enough bickering, Sony added 1920×1080 AVCHD export in the free update v9.0a (the original v9.0 didn’t support this). Unfortunately, the AVCHD “custom” export screen still doesn’t let you specify 24p even if it easily could let you do that (23.976 frame rate and progressive field order, that is). Consumer camcorders like the Panasonic SD9 support such formats. While this omission doesn’t affect everybody, there is no workaround.

If Sony fixes these two issues, I think we are looking at a near-perfect consumer editor.

Here in Greece I am using the IBM T23, with the latest Ubuntu Linux in it. It generally works ok, but wifi and dialup is a pain in the ass. While I never had a problem with my netgear pcmcia wifi card in the USA, we had to set the router’s channel number to 6 from 12 in order to get the laptop to connect in Greece. It would just refuse to connect otherwise, and we even tried with another usb wifi stick, that was bought in Greece. It seems that somehow Linux keeps as default internally the channel number of the country you first use wifi with, and if you travel, well, bad luck for you.

As for dialup, it connects once every 5-6 retries, it somehow misses the mark to get an IP and DNS from the server. And don’t let me start about the troubles we had with Linux trying to copy from an SD card 4 GBs of data to a usb fat32 external drive. Apparently it never “sync” after the copy, and so files were never really copied. Or something.

Every few months I am getting this “chill” to leave OSX and XP behind and go with Linux. But every time, Linux will somehow let me down with a very specific kind of bugs. It’s the kind of bugs that are only getting fixed when the developers have project managers and closed down teams, rather than random developers at random countries working on their own.

[I am reposting this as it somehow has disappeared form the DB]

My internet connection is very flaky here in Greece. I used to have access to a shared wifi hotspot a few days ago that suddenly stopped working, so I am now with a prepaid 5 Euro internet connection called “net” (20 hours of connectivity per month). Apparently, to make that working with our Ubuntu Linux laptop (IBM T23) and the “martian” winmodem driver, I needed to install GnomePPP (gnome-networking doesn’t stay connected), enable its “stupid mode” option (whatever the hell that is), and add the forthnet gateway and two DNS IP addresses. Only then it connects correctly and stays connected. Hopefully this will help some users.

I wrote in a hurry two months ago about how I shot my first music video, but having already shot my second one, I have done some adjustments into my workflow, which I will share with you below. As I have explained in the past, nearly all the professional music videos are slowed-down, even when they don’t look like they are. And of course you don’t need lots of money to shoot a music video, you can do it on a budget.

1. Acquire the audio CD of the song you want to shoot a video for. Compressed audio formats like MP3, OGG, and AAC won’t work correctly, you will end up with an A/V sync issue eventually, so get the original audio CD. Load the CD into iTunes. Go to “preferences”, “advanced”, and “importing” and change the importing format to WAVE like this:

Then, rip the CD with these settings via iTunes. The ripping will create a .wav file on your iTunes library folder, usually somewhere around here: C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents\My Music\iTunes\iTunes Music\ for Windows, or somewhere on your ~/Music/ folder if you are on a Mac.

2. Install Audacity 1.3x from here. Load Audacity, and then open into that audio editor the .wav file that was ripped earlier via iTunes. Click “Effects” and select “Change speed”. Make the audio’s speed 25% faster like this:

Then, save the audio back as wave (.wav) with a different file name via Audacity.

3. Go back to iTunes. Load the sped up version of the song created by Audacity above to iTunes by adding it to the iTunes music library. Place an empty writable CD-R on your optical drive. Place the sped up song on the “Burn” playlist of iTunes. Burn the song as an audio CD twice. Keep one copy, and give one copy to the band to rehearse the speed up version a few days before the actual shooting.

4. When the shooting day arrives, use a portable audio CD player to get the singer to lipsync, or if you are shooting in the band’s rehearsal space, use their audio CD player which is possibly hooked into big speakers. Shoot your video with that sped up audio. If you are using a Canon camera, use “Cinemode” and “neutral color” to make the video look as desaturated as possible (the duller it looks, the better it color grades in post processing). Do a lot of takes. Shoot in 1080/50i if you use a PAL camera, or in 1080/60i or PF30 if you use an NTSC camera. I suggest that you don’t shoot in 24p, because by the moment you slow-down the video on step #6, you will need all the frames you can get to make it look smooth. Don’t worry, it won’t look like home video because of the slow-down involved. 1080/60i or PF30 are the best ways to shoot (compared to PAL modes or 24p) because the kind of slow down we do here is perfect mathematically: 60i/2=30/25%=24p. What this formula means is this: “After you de-interlace a 60i stream, you get 30p. Because we make that 30p stream 25% slower on step #6, we get a true 24p frame rate across time”. And that’s the frame rate we export at the end of step #8. If you are concerned about 60i having too high of a shutter speed, consider using PF30 (found on all new Canon HD cameras), which is as good as 60i in terms of the “mathematics” involved, but it uses lower shutter speeds. I would be using PF30 for my music video projects if my HV20 supported that. In fact, I hereby declare the Canon HV30 the best consumer HD camera right now to shoot music videos, because of its PF30 shooting mode and overall quality.

5. When the shooting is all done and you are ready to start editing, load the footage on your video editor. I will use Sony Vegas for my tutorial here, but Premiere and FCE/FCP are equally capable. Copy away to the video’s project folder, and place in the audio track, the originally ripped .wav file (not the sped up one, but the normal one you ripped on step #1). On Vegas, it’s very important to have the right project settings before you start editing. Click “File”, then “Project Properties”, and a new dialog will pop up. In there, click the right outmost icon called “Match Media”, the one that looks like a yellow folder. From there, select one of the files you will be editing with, and click “open”. Make sure “none/progressive” is always selected in the “field order” option, and for quality select “Best”. If you shot interlaced (e.g. in 50i or 60i), make sure that for the “de-interlacing method” you select “interpolate”. For NTSC 60i HDV for example, it would look like this (you can safely ignore additional settings not shown in my screenshot but found on Vegas Pro instead of Platinum).

6. Then, place a take of your footage (hint: dragging a clip from the project media tab to the timeline with the right mouse click rather than the left, allows you to place in the track the video across the timeline without its accompanied audio). Right click on the clip event in the timeline, click “properties”, check “disable resample”, and change the “playback rate” to 0.800. This change has effectively made the video slower now, which will sync perfectly to the non-sped up song. Now, left-click on the right side of the video take and drag it to the right to make the video longer. Stop when a little arrow appears, as in the picture below. We need to do that extra step because when we changed the playback speed to the slower 0.800x, Vegas doesn’t automatically resize the video in the timeline to fit the whole take.

7. Add more of your takes on different video tracks and adjust them as in step #6. Then, try to sync up the audio and video on each of these takes. It will take some practice, but it’s possible. On Vegas, if you select a clip in the timeline and then you keep the ALT key pressed while also pressing the numbers 1 or 3 in the enabled numerical keypad, it will move that clip frame by frame left or right in the timeline, so that can help you be more accurate with the audio syncing. You can even “lock” a clip in the timeline so you don’t move it accidentally while editing. Then, edit away. Be aggressive with cutting scenes, as rock videos require quick change of shots. Slow-down even more some shots that don’t require syncing. Color grade aggressively too at the very end.

8. Export in 24p (that is, 23.976 frame rate), progressive field order. I suggest h.264 at 4 mbps for video codec, and AAC 128kbps for audio, with the MP4 container at 1280×720 resolution for HD, or at 874×480 if you shot in widescreen miniDV SD. This exporting also makes the video compatible with AppleTV, Vimeo, XBoX360 and PS3, so it would be easier to enjoy it in on an HDTV.

Now, go help your favorite local rock band!

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.

Some shit is flowing around about breaking compatibility for GTK+ 3.0. Imendio should stay clear of library code if that’s what they want to do. Thankfully, there are people who do get it, like Miguel de Icaza and Morten Welinder.

The hard part is keeping compatibility (something that even Apple doesn’t do right in between major OSX versions), and it seems that especially in the FOSS world, no one wants to do the hard things. In the world of Linux, coders should realize that it all comes down to “compatibility, compatibility, compatibility…” and not “developers, developers, developers…”.

A few days ago Gizmodo was making fun of Android’s calendar application, which indeed, from what I see in the emulator, is nothing to cheer about. However, Apple’s Calendar 2.0 is not perfect either: there is no “week view”, the repeat function does not have enough options, and when you press the “previous/next” horizontal-looking arrows to go to the previews/next month view, the calendar scrolls vertically rather than horizontally.

I guess we might get the perfect calendar app around the same time we will get Artificial Intelligence.

Over a year ago I wrote a review at OSNews for the IBM T23 Thinkpad. Back then, Ubuntu had severe bugs with this (ultra popular in its time) laptop model. But as I have promised that laptop to my little brother, I cleanly upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 last night. The default Ubuntu installation is now better than ever, as I had to change very few things to make it more usable (e.g. font sizes always irked me as to how big they are by default).

Anyways, all the severe bugs I had found with 7.04 are now fixed: including two suspend bugs, ethernet and USB bugs, and four S3 Savage ones. The laptop works perfectly by default (except the Lucent Winmodem). Overall speed is good too. Within an hour I had setup and configured 5 user accounts for myself, JBQ, my brother, his wife and a guest one.

The trouble started when I needed to make my old Prism54 WG511 PCMCIA card to work with the laptop. Apparently Ubuntu has both the drivers and firmware for this old ISL3890 chipset, but it didn’t work. Following advice from UbuntuForums, I had to blacklist the default 4 related drivers, download the Windows firmware and use Ndiswrapper instead. It then worked, but it was a pain.

The Lucent winmodem worked for the first time on this laptop too (my bro uses mostly dial-up). It works after you download the “-full” version of the “martian” driver: compile and install as per instructions the driver and then do a “modprobe martian_dev” and then a “martian_modem --daemon --mode 0666“. I then put these two commands on the /etc/rc.local file to force the modem to get started on each reboot. If someone upgrades the kernel the driver will have to get recompiled, which is why I made my brother a normal user and not an admin. Unless Ubuntu adds the martian driver to their -restricted kernel modules package, no one should touch the Ubuntu update manager…

Linux Hater has a great post about the sad state of 3D under Linux — even if 10 years have passed since we first start bitching about it. It’s amazing how slower than Windows XP all graphics-related operations are on Linux. From 3D games, to video decoding, and most recently experienced, Flash 9 decoding of a 720/24p video from Vimeo (about twice slower on a 1.6 Ghz CoreDuo than on my much older and slower P4 3Ghz that runs XP). The Lunix users will always blame commercial companies for “not optimizing for Linux”, but when everything is slower than XP, including OSS apps, something else is going on. And Linux Hater only touched the surface on this one.

This is the kind of stuff that prompt me to think that Gnome should initiate a complete “reboot” of the Linux desktop, integrating and re-writing everything that a desktop needs: from a new 3D interface and driver hook-up, to new sound engine, to a new window server, and only run the old X apps via either a rootless X server or just virtualization.

NYTimes wrote an article discussing the possibility of Microsoft writing a brand new OS that is not Windows-based.

First things first:
1. I am a huge proponent of backwards compatibility because in my agenda, the user comes first.
2. Writing a new, truly modern and revolutionary, OS will take Microsoft 10 years (including its maturitization time). Drivers will be scarce, adoption will be a pain (I know the drill, we’ve lost a green card because of it with BeOS).

Despite these huge undertakings and problems, I don’t think Windows has any life on its knees anymore. It’s a 25-30 years old architecture, patched all over. Vista sucked big time — at least in the UI level. I believe that Microsoft has only two options:

1. Use these new ideas they have in their R&D dpt, for a future modern OS and start writing a new OS as soon as possible, in PARALLEL to upcoming Windows 7. All previous versions of Windows should run through virtualization, first releases should include a Windows 7 virtualization version for free.
2. Forget the OS business. Keep supporting Windows after Windows 7 for 3-4 years, and then keep supporting it for specific PCs only, for a fee, for another 20-30 years (like Sun does for Solaris). Move to different business.

I wrote the other day that Gnome should do the same: re-invent the wheel. Not because Gnome 2.22 is bad, but because when you see the bigger picture, with Linux, X11 and all that shit that fuck us users for 15 years now, I believe there’s a need for a clean slate for Linux’s desktop in general too. I just saw Gnome as the project which will bring that change, rather than Gnome itself needing that change (I hope I am making some sense).

Same way with Windows, it’s just so much craft in there, that’s just painful. Either take the big decision and put billions into the development of a new modern OS, or get out of the OS business and just keep lightly supporting the last released OS.

If Microsoft won’t do that, then their OS division will die a SLOW death. It won’t be pretty for any project manager in that division.

UPDATE: Interesting.