Two Terabyte Tape Capture

This morning I wrapped up my MiniDV tape capture project. I false
started on Pinnacle Studio prior to 2008 because of the general
instability, poorly scaleable storage strategy, and general lack of
personal satisfaction in being able to do anything with the gigs of
AVIs.

With iPhone, Apple TV, YouTube and 15/15 Mbit pipe and public/private
web resources, wireless...my video is where I want it when I want it.

I restarted my efforts the weekend I installed Mac OS X Leopard in
February on my MacBook Pro Intel 4GB with 17" screen. While I was in
King of Prussia at the Apple Store buying Leopard, I grabbed a 1TB
Western Digital Home Edition drive at Costco. Since then I got a total
of 4 drives, two for backups. The prices started at $279 and came down
to $229. One grand for 4TB of storage, quiet as a mouse, and take up
as much space as a six-pack of beer.

Using Drive Utility on Mac I formatted as Extended Journaled file
system using GUID partition table. I used Drive Utility to make
duplicates.

S5 Video 001
S5 Video 002 (backup)
S5 Video 003
S5 Video 004 (backup)

I kept one drive connected and patched off drive to Sony DCR-TRV900

I used iMovie 2008. It was a champ. Absolutely great program. Along
the way we even took some time to create some YouTube videos

StevensFive.TV

Battle of the Hoth Force
(trailer)

Has 12,000 views in 3 months and is upwards 2.0 on popularity
according to YouTube InSight.

In iMovie we have almost 1000 video events over nine years. I got the
Sony TRV 900 from a video production consultant in Florida on eBay for
$1800 and he only had used it for some cut-ins on one job. I mostly
used it with a high performance wide-angle 52mm lens and sometimes
used the 9m underwater housing sledding, snorkeling and in pools waves
and rain.

During capture something wore out on the camera. I was getting frame
drops and chirps. I had to send it out and it received a new head back
in April. Pretty much okay after that.

The MacBook would get pretty warm, especially during LP 90 minute
captures. I kept a Targus dual cooling fan USB powered pad underneath
and this helped. I had a few SP 90 minute tapes from Panasonic and LP
recordings on those were going beyond two hours and over 25GB. The
MacBook froze on two occasions and iMovie core'd fairly often after
capturing more than three tapes in a row. After the iMovie and Mac
OS updates in May and June I never had problems since.

My strategy for naming events was

YYYY, Description Of Event

It probably takes about 15-20 minutes per hour of video to organize:
splitting events, renaming, cleaning up 1 second clips which often
come from the capture and realize tinestamps of TODAY. The
organization of events in iMovie is very helpful. The is one bear trap
however. You cannot select a disk or year node in the event tree
without causing that entire scope of video thumbnails to display -
kill iMovie wait a long while.

A regretable shortcoming of my technique was lack of cross referencing
back to tape. I should have labelled tapes 001-1xx and kept this
value in the event name.

I am going to turn my attention back to Nikon Super Coolscan 5000 and
what is probably tens of thousands of negatives and slides to scan.
Since Tara and I mistakenly threw away our negative box from 1988-1997
I have a ton of photos to scan on the Epson. I am hunting for my 1080p
HD camera solution.

Hopefully we can knock out some videos each couple of weeks. Here is a
list of some special events I want to get to:

Marrying Tara at Villanova in 1994

Birth of Matthew, Jack and Jillian

Delta Rocket Launch with Jack

MTV Camera Tower at Live 8 Philadelphia

Presenting with James Gosling at JavaOne 2004

My live reaction to watching World Trade Center collapse

Driving in: Big Sur, Bangalore, France, Italy, Switzerland, Russia,
Japan, Czech Republic, mountains, golf carts, bikes, jeeps, auto-
rickshaws, limos, buses, go-carts, dirt roads, autobahn

Disney, Sea World, KeyWest, South Beach, Devon Horse Show, Valley
Forge, Muir Woods, Cape Cod, Central Park

Snorkeling, water slides, sledding, wagon rides, flying, para-sailing,
deep sea fishing, boating, fireworks, air shows, museums, soccer,
baseball, skiing, crabbing, fishing, singing

Subways, Buddist Temples, beaches, parks, zoos, trains, rainbows,
flora, fauna, airplanes, helicopters, Legos, "parachute-airplanes"

Blue Angels, Thunderbirds, Ground Zero, Air Force One

Weddings, births, birthdays, baptisms, eating, sleeping, laughing,
crying, partying, cooking, barfing, working, school plays, injury

India Austrailia Test Match (cricket)

Me 30 pounds more than I should be 99-04

NetDynamic, ObjectStrategy, Netscape, Sun Microsystems, Comcast

lots of people...

Ongoing Momentum

Comcast Interactive Media had a visitor today. I work with a great team who implements the Comcast.net portal and Fancast. I introduced our visitor to the technical community in a town hall meeting in CIM City.

From CIM People

"In the context of web technology how many folks have heard of TAXI?" (perhaps one person)

"How many people have heard of AJAX?" (everyone)

"A couple of years ago I was working on AJAX application architectures and JavaScript debuggers with another Sun Senior Staff Engnineer, Roberto Chinnici (Java web services lead), and I asked him whether he subscribed to this distributed MVC implementation pattern which was cropping up or a more RESTful decoupled approach. Roberto indicated the latter because his design center was 'TAXI'. He referred me to 2001 article defining TAXI."

"The foundation of strong software/systems engineering is proven architectural patterns and style. However, prior to the arrival of these patterns comes thought leadership."

"If you want to be the best engineer you can be, discover who the thought leaders are. Subscribe to their philosophy (their thinking) and most importantly resemble them. The best way to resemble thought leaders is the know them. Make it a goal to meet him or her, go to a conference or business and get connected. Question them."

"Many of you know that I promote REST style architecture and assert ATOM as our design center for read+Write web resources; I recommend systems like GData as strong examples that our implementations resemble. What you may not know that I try hard to resemble Tim Bray."

"I am happy to introduce Tim Bray, Director of Web Technology at Sun Microsystems. Tim will lead a discussion on current trends in network computing. Welcome Tim!"

LED Matrix in Comcast Center Lobby

This friday is the public grand opening of the Comcast Center. Friday
is also the day my group, Comcast Interactive Media, moves into the
floors adjacent to CIM City.

Starting this week if you visit the Comcast Center you will find a
massive high definition, very high contrast, LED matrix fully covering
the lobby wall above the elevator portals. I am guessing 9-10 meters
tall and assuming 1080p.

The fascinating thing is that one image displayed is a simulated wood
paneling which makes the screen appear to vanish.

I have an affinity to LED matrices because that was the display
platform I used for the Live8 call to action system back three years
ago. I am going to feel good each time I come into work. Perhaps when
I get exasperated at work I can go down to the lobby and listen to
some Linkin Park

The Wrong Platform

In an attempt to catch the 5:41 R5 Express to Wayne from Suburban
Station Thursday, I ended up going to the wrong platform. Most of the
time the Paoli R5 leaves from 4B platform. The exception is the 5:41
PM express which waits on the far platform 7B. Matthew's game was on
that night and I was trying to get to Immaculata for most of it. I
jogged pretty much from 2000 Market to platform 4B and the train
waiting there was the R7. When I rushed over to 7B, not only did the
closed train doors taunt me, but a few passengers got a good laugh as
they watched me rant and bitch to myself, weezing. What a grind.

Finding CIM City

With the help of an evil canine and a construction elevator CIM City
has been found. I checked out the 15th floor of the Comcast Center
earlier this week. Fantastic. The color reminds me of the orange red
carpets we had in our house in the mid 70s. Ironically, it seems to be
the same color in one of the Sun corporate brands. The can be nothing
more different than 2000 Market CIM floors and the new floors at the
Comcast Center.

Bring your vertical polarizing sun glasses!

Outsourcing Mother's Day

Started month four at Comcast today. I feel like I have been there a
year. The most precious resource I have these days is time. I am sure
that most of this issue is that I am in a very different pace in a
totally new job. In any case I am not finding time to get to all the
things I want to. I would have liked to help the children get
organized for Mother's Day but it was impossible. I enlisted a foreign
national to get this work done. Dani, our nanny, is creative and would
hardly consider it a task or chore to go to the mall. I told to just
take care of it.

Dani did a great job. Jack and Jillian helped pick out a #1 Mom
pendant and they made a T-shirt with handprints and a family cheer.

I did my part and let Tara sleep in a little and we all brought
breakfast up to her in bed. I cook breakfast weekends anyways so this
all worked out well. At this point any Mother's Day is better than
2001 when while retrieving flowers for Tara at Waterloo Gardens
Matthew feel on his face and cut his lip - I believe he screamed
until dinner that day.

FiOS STB Widget Platform

I was a friends loft in Phoenixville Saturday and he was showing me
the good and bad in the new FiOS TV set top box guide. The negative
was that it was too slow. Latency in the percieved results from a UI
gesture is always bad. Apple defeats these problems on Apple TV with
animations (wipes and fades and the ubiquitous spinner. The good parts
included search feature.

I noticed a top level menu item labelled "Widgets". Clicking this
raised a modal dialog asking for zip code. After submitting zip code a
traffic and weather widget showed up in header carosel. I think it
worked pretty good as STB platforms go. I can't see how this would
scale and hold a candle ever to an open widget platform with a more
capable UI engine, especially anything which is cross platform.