Too busy to post?

Yeah, the big move, the new job, the househunting... And a new blog, of course. All have taking up a lot of my time - and taken me away from being able to post here.

And I have great new stories to tell you, too: hotel electronic key cards, my wife's GPS navigation system, my hand-held GPS, my new work technology.... But I'm going to have to put this blog on hold for now until things settle down I think. Same goes with my website, which needs updating in a serious way since the job and residency changes....

Could this be the way it begins? I get to "busy" to do about this stuff? Now, in ten years, will I realize I've been too busy for so long that I'm out of the loop? Maybe I've reached my adult-life tipping point...

Sony XD Cams and proxy video possibilities

So we got our new Sony XD cameras in at work (HD, woo-hoo!), along with new decks and lots of other fun new gear. Looking at the gear and thinking about what other bits 'n' pieces we might need, I suggested we get some big flash drives.

The idea that I had was that we could shoot on the XD cams and use the proxy video to do some cuts-only editing with the free Sony software that comes with the cameras (and is available online). The proxy video (low-res versions of the video files that are stored on the Blu-Ray discs that the camera records to) would fit nicely on a big drive, and then we could do some editing at home on our personal computers.

I was thinking specifically about some of our simpler programs and promo stuff, like the Adopt-A-Pet show. That show is mostly cuts-only, with a layer of graphics put on top for lower thirds and transitions. It'd be easy to do the first edit at home, bring in the EDL (edit decision list) and the proxy video, and then have our AVIDs at work reconcile the full-res video and build out the HD timeline. Basically, I'm hoping we'll have some tele-commuting capability as a result of having these new cameras. Not so much consumer technology, which is more the topic for this blog, but it's cutting-edge stuff just the same. Cool!

DVD burning

I got the National Capital Chesapeake Bay Regional Emmy Awards call for entries in the mail today. Looks like they've decided to leap forward with technology themselves. Entries this year are only accepted in DVD-R format, which means there's a new thing on my list of things to figure out.

So, I went on my AVID at work and got to it. I've been able to make straight records to DVD for a while, using a stand-alone DVD burner that's connected to a video player. That's lame, though, because it's always been that dumb blue menu with no chapters and all that. Not much going on today, so I decided to dig into the SONIC program that I got with our AVID install. Within only a couple hours of playing around I was able to make a fairly decent DVD! I had a nice menu with an animated background, six little chapter buttons with video running in little thumbnails, and all of the chaptering and whatnot seemed to work fine. The video quality was not what it should be (I used Sorenson Squeeze - I think that compressed things too much) and I couldn't quite get music on the menu for some reason.

These should be easy things to fix - I'll just export from the AVID differently and I should be able to figure out the menu music... Anyway, I'm generally pleased with my results, so I'm confident I will be able to get a DVD made for the Emmys before the January 26 deadline. Plus, I'll be able to send out completed programs and work samples on DVD now, too.