It's Devo on Aspirin!

Everybody's heard the old surf tune "Pipeline", but have you ever actually seen the Chantays play it? And on Lawrence Welk yet! This is a hoot. Dig the fancy footwork.

"Terriers" Has Been Canceled

Just to let the faithful few know, it's official. The best show on TV has been canceled after just one season. Figures though. Is there anybody, any TV network owners, anyone in Hollyweird that's satisfied with making a living instead of a killing? Is there some crime in California law that says you can't just produce really great shows that make a decent living for yourselves and actually be respected by normal humans with an IQ in the upper half of the population? Must you throw away all things good and esteemed if they make just a little less money for you than something moronic that sells a few more sponsored products? FX Network—you're pathetic.

Sony Vegas Contrast Problem

I mentioned in a previous post that I've been trying out Vegas for video editing and have been pondering switching to it from Adobe Premiere. There are some things I really like about using Vegas to edit with. In some ways the GUI is much more sensible. But one big drawback with Vegas is that it has a contrast problem. The video preview window is simply lacking in contrast, and I'm not the first person to notice it. I did some googling and found a few posts on the net where other people have noticed this going back at least three years. Surely someone must have notified Sony about this by now. Why haven't they fixed it after all this time? That's the type of thing that just infuriates me. Any program can have a bug, and all of them do at some point. What separates the good software companies from the bad is how quickly they offer a patch to fix it. Sony loses some serious points over this one.

How on earth are you supposed to do basic video editing things like color correction when the contrast is off? Here's an example of how bad it is. The tree on the left is a screen capture from the preview window in Vegas. The tree on the right is from Magix Movie Edit Pro (and it looks the same there as it does in any other editor or Windows Media Player).

I must have close to 15 or 20 programs that use a video preview window for various things, and every one of them looks the same except for Vegas. Switching between programs becomes a real pain if I have to change the contrast on my monitor every time I enter and leave Vegas. It simply makes the software unusable. On to something else....

Sony HVR-V1U Low Light Test

This Sony camcorder has a low light rating of 4-lux. That's not particularly good; however, Sony is well-known for having gain circuits that are outstanding and produce very little noise. I have found this to be true. For the test, I shot some footage at night here in my little bedroom studio using nothing but a small Bescor 50-watt LED light attached to the shoe with the cam on a tripod about 6-feet away.

It's a cold shoe, but the light runs off its own batteries. This is just about the largest light you'll ever see attached to a camcorder shoe, but 50-watts is still very little light. It's good for doing outdoor nighttime interviews in a pinch, but that's about it. I traded a small mixer to a guy on Ebay for it.

The light wouldn't scoot all the way back on the shoe though without bumping into the microphone, so I had to get an adapter (also made by Bescor) to lift it up higher. Chances are I'll end up using the adapter more than the light because it's also good for mounting an LCD monitor and getting it up out of the way in the same fashion.

The footage was shot in 1080P at 24A with cinema tones. Here are a couple of stills. You can click on them to enlarge (like most of the photos in my blogs), but keep in mind that these are full-frame HD, so they're very large, but nice.

The Bishop's Wife

Looking for a good Christmas holiday movie? The Christmas Story, It's A Wonderful Life, Scrooge, Miracle on 34th Street—those have been the big Christmas movies traditionally. Try The Bishop's Wife. I don't know why this movie hasn't been as popular as those others. It stars Cary Grant as an angel trying to help out a Bishop and his wife over the holidays. A great movie! Now playing at Hulu.

Getting Rid of Oxidation From Windows

Have you ever seen a dirty window that wouldn't come clean no matter how much you scrubbed? Chances are you have metal screens and oxidation. We used to call it screen burn years ago. It's where rain makes those screens rust (which is why metal screens always look brown and dirty), and then that rust gets carried to the windows where it more or less rusts to the windows and becomes a part of them.

I've always used some special mail-order chemicals to get it off, but I recently tried something on a lark that works really well on removing rust from windows. Believe it ot not, it's brake dust remover. It won't get rid of hard water deposits, but it sure cuts through oxidation. You might have to scrub a bit with a light duty scouring pad, but it'll work just fine.

File under: "The Buckaroo's Helpful Hint of the Day."

What You Should Know About Going to Windows 7/64-bit

Since everyone will undoubtedly go to a 64-bit platform eventually, I thought I'd let you in on what to expect. Everyone's biggest worry is whether their older 32-bit programs will get the kiss of death. My experience has been that some will work on a 64-bit OS just fine. Others will work if you run them in XP Mode (you have to right click on a program and choose to run it as administrator). A few others won't work at all, although I'm told that they may if you're using the Professional version of Windows 7. That enables you to download the free "Virtual Machine" app from MS. It basically does something along the lines of partitioning part of your hard drive as XP 32-bit, and then installs those troublesome programs to that partition. Sounds like quite a hassle to me, so I haven't done this. Also, if you have the Home edition of W-7, I'm sure there must be some 3rd party software that will do what virtual machine does except with your Home edition.

Most of my older programs run fine. Believe it or not, I had trouble with Word 2000, but I still had a copy of Word 97, and that actually runs okay. My old version of Premiere 6.5 wouldn't install, but I wanted to go to another NLE anyway. The drivers for my nearly ten year old scanner wouldn't install either. Scanners are cheap though, so I just bought a new one. If you're an old hand at making and uploading web pages, you'll be happy to know that the ancient, venerable WS_FTP95 LE still works like a champ.

All in all it hasn't been too bad. It's like learning to swim. You just have to jump in and start splashing. You'll get where you're going eventually. There's gonna be some cost involved, but what are you going to do? Things change. I made my last machine build last over seven years. I can't complain. I got my money's worth.