Category Archives: Ideas

Ideas

Advice for ALL Journalists Pushed into the Autism Beat

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The following is quoted DM sent by me to a local reporter in the Boston area in late 2021. As of 2023, the unidentified reporter no longer works in the industry, as that individual has a school aged child diagnosed with said condition. The quoted paragraph may be modified to eliminate shorthand words seen in DMs.

“I think the best way when reporting on the subject is to always come off in a hopeful tone because ‘diagnosis were [used to] bring hope’ and for whatever reason in recent years a diagnosis makes people (or the families) hopeless.

2nd you can’t please every group. A lot of the ‘self advocates’ [or #ActuallyAutistic types] are on the higher end and they can’t be pleased. You’ll always have haters on social media sadly to say. For me I understand both sides, but I cannot think it’s even morally or ethically proper to assume anyone who can’t speak is not intelligent by any means. I have been exposed to many ‘lower functioning’ autistics and I can tell you there is brain processing going in there. I think it’s important to shine that light (the journalistic sense not the Autism Speaks sense) on the individuals and ensure they get a fair voice, especially by the journalists. No matter what functionality, they should have the same right for a comment like the ‘typicals do.”

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Commentary, Featured, Ideas, My Work, Uncategorized

Recommended Use of Referencing Time Zones (It’s Now Real “Standard” Time!)

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Sun makes you dumber. Or so according to the @MinifigNewsguy.  Why? people don’t think critically, they are more emotional and they can’t think in order. Right now Daylight Saving Time (sic) had ended overnight on 2:00 AM Eastern Standard Time on November 6th, following 2:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time, of which is how you “gain an hour of sleep”. Also as of this writing, the 2022 Midterm elections are a day away, and again it feels like a primary election weather wise.

Continue reading Recommended Use of Referencing Time Zones (It’s Now Real “Standard” Time!) →

Ideas

Do I love NH Media? No!

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As a lifelong NH resident, it’s not that I had moved from say New York City and came to New Hampshire and said “what’s this crappy media outlets?” I think part of it was I was blessed to had traveled to many markets in the U.S. and had always had some realization since middle school that the Boston and Manchester market was radically different. But I maybe I didn’t travel to enough markets to get a grasp.

Continue reading Do I love NH Media? No! →

Ideas, My Work

VLOG: How to protect Outdoor Lego from UV damage as long as possible

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LEGAL NOTE: It is not Anticipated or Expected that the lego company endorses this video; and is for adult users only. Like any plastics, Lego is not invincible from UV damage for being outdoors. On sunny days, you can see the age, on cloudy days they look more traditional.

In 2001 I visited Legoland California, and in 2019 I went there for the first time in 18 years. The Outdoor Miniland USA got baked in the sun and had received sun damage. Legoland Florida has only been opened for over a decade and there would be high suspicion that UV or heat damage could apply to Miniland objects. Legoland New York had opened in the midst of the pandemic in the Hudson Valley of NY, and it would be interesting to see how that Miniland fares overtime if the Legoland park managers had put trees and plants to protect bricks from extreme weather in the Northeast. This is the only way to protect your investment.

Ideas

Language Matters: “Filming”

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Language matters. I am working on my first Master lesson on the modern history of capturing and editing. For most younger millennials who have grown up on YouTube (of said platform once owned the tagline: Broadcast Yourself, with a logo more resemblance of a TV screen; many of the “influencers” are doing things without the traditional camcorders, but digital cameras, with 24 frames per second, and slow shutter like film.

I DO NOT like the word “filming” and I also I advocate for “taping” and “shooting”. Why?

Continue reading Language Matters: “Filming” →

Featured, Ideas, My Work, Uncategorized

FBF: Lighting Grid, BRCK-TV Miniland (2011)

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No pun intended for “Flashback” but this was of my first studio projects in minifig scale. It’s a variant of various special bricks and hinge pieces using crossed 1x plates. These things can be hard to build.

The BRCK-TV digs in Metro Miniland was the first station in the Minifig world to be in full 720p HD (later to be at 1080p), tapeless and mostly an IP based operation. It was modeled of KYW’s digs, when they relocated in 2007. the BRCK-TV studio was located in the Manchester Borough of Miniland and coincidentally if it was located in the real world, next to my least favorite Manchester, NH station.

BRCK-TV’s owner changed the following year and by early 2013, became a KCAL/KCBS setup, where BSBS-TV, Miniland’s Channel 2 would move in.

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Ideas, Uncategorized

The View on Non Linear Editing Systems, part three

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This feature focuses on two other guys, the ones I know the least.

Adobe’s Premiere

Premiere dates as far back in the early 1990s, as the GUI train was at this point accelerating with no stoppage. Premiere developed by SuperMac in 1991, and was acquired by Adobe (the Not Invented or Not Innovated Here is Adobe’s informal tagline.) Trigger warning, I am no fan of Adobe, I find them to be extremely complex, shoplifting the competition and not getting properly accounted in the legal sense (look at the whole brohaha of Photoshop vs. Quantel’s Paintbox in the 90s.) . It’s not to say I use some of their products, because there really isn’t that many other choices. I am not a Creative Cloud customer either.

Continue reading The View on Non Linear Editing Systems, part three →

Ideas, Uncategorized

The View on Non Linear Editing Systems, part two

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I am breaking this subject up in multiple posts to focus on each company, some I know more than others. This one is on Apple

Apple Computer (1999)

Apple Computer in 1999 introduced an application called Final Cut Pro. It was just ten years before Apple was working with Avid to help them build a non linear editing system that made the CVX600 from Grass Valley, that was basically just a terminal that told tape decks specifically what timecodes to cut up video tape metaphorically – extremely jealous. Well by this point Apple would make Avid not just jealous technically, but even on Avid’s own balance sheet and market share.

Final Cut Pro was initially  supported on the Power Mac G3, the PowerBook G3 (Pismo and Wall Street models)  and likely the iMac DV models that came to market in 2000. The reason being the non iMac/iBook models did not have a minimal graphics processor or video RAM to make it possible to edit beyond basic cutups in iMovie for an example.

FCP was mostly software based. This means the big ol SCSI hard drives or big ol Avid Adrenaline boxes were illrelevant.  That FireWire port that was on your Macintosh was all you needed. If you a DV tape deck, or a camera to ingest into video was the I/O bus.

This is where Avid dropped the ball.

Remember in 1999, the Mac OS 9 (that infamous fragile operating system that morphed from the 9″ black and white monitor with  128K RAM just 15 years before) was released, so FCP predates OS X by a version or two. While FCP had some restrictions compared to Avid or Adobe, this lowered the barrier to entry.

Apple was a pioneer of making non linear formats easy to understand especially with QuickTime vs. MPEG 4, vs. baking it back to tape. Avid to this day is still a bit confusing.

Its not an understatement to say that Final Cut was the editing system for the rest of us™. By the mid 00s, Apple was seriously encroaching Avid’s base which was nearly half of the post production houses, but at the same time, Apple would blow it by 2011 with the introduction of FCPX, but yet Apple didn’t skip a beat, just pissing off long time customers.

Apple in recent history

FCP’s legacy  UI was a bit quirky, but not as complex as Avid, and for most FCP users, they were using other guys or did other things like graphic design, animations, etc. The dual screen support enabled people to put whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted, and not those silly windows that magically disappears when you least expected. Likewise the GUI skillset was of those who know GUIs inside and out, and there was seperation of what was a keyboard function and what was a mouse.

Like OS X, the “X” was basically demarcing the line of what’s old code (FCP 7 was the last of it’s legacy dating back to 1999, virtually 10 years old.) FCP was basically a fancier iMovie and unfortunately lowed the barrier to entry to what was becoming a growing market of social media content creators who never dealt with video editing, never mind the idea these people didn’t grow up watching broadcast or contemporary cable prior to the mid 00s.

FCP X is really designed for a MacBook and if you have  a MacPro, you’re above the minimal specs, especially if you have a dual screen. The UI is all in one window, if you want to extend it – good luck! The customization is a joke in everything. Apple won’t have to worry about a saturated market.

Any rational Mac fanboy would say that Apple’s better days is behind them, but they have a trillion dollar balance sheet, so it will take a few more screwups to really hit them financially.

Ideas, Uncategorized

The View on Non Linear Editing Systems

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This post is a mix on review, an overview and analysis of modern day non linear editing systems that’s after the infamous CMX600. I’m going to basically go one after another, where they came from, what they became and what’s the future and why people should be concerned. (The future isn’t bright afterall…)

Avid (Avid1/Media Composer/etc)

Short History

In the late 1980s, a company called Avid Technology was formed after the founder Bill Werner and his crew of people were developing a visual and graphically enhanced user interface. When he went to a Boston area editing house to make edits for his company Apollo (later to be sold out to HP) he thought he “computer editing” was a GUI computer with something people would expect today. While Werner didn’t tell an interviewer in 2010 specifically what “computer” it was, it was most likely he was inferring the CVX600. It had a terminal screen and editors would punch in time codes of the edits after viewing the edits before. Unlike what Werner et al would envison is a computer program that would show you the actual cut before committing it back to video tape as a master.

The original Avids were designed and were going to be based off Apollo workstations. At the 1988 SIGGRAPH show, the Avid team inspired the people at Apple, and a rep from Apple contacted the Avid people and when they returned back to the East Coast, there were a bunch of boxes blocking the entry of their offices with then-branded Federal Express packages.

What was ironic at the time, System Software 6 was on the horizon, mutitasking was a joke at the time, and multi-threaded protection was not available till OS X, more than a decade later. The Apple developers worked in lock step with Avid at this time writing code while Avid was writing drivers to make their system work on the Macs. According to Bill Werner, the tests that were actually performed, were the theoretical results, and the tests clearly resulted on the theoretical which never happens with any code then or now.  The tolerable tests were 15 frames per second, and write speeds under a megabyte (which was a for the time.)

Since Apple was never planning to get into the NLE business, they gave Avid any surplus Mac Apple had in their inventory and by 1990, the AVID/1 was marketed. It was marketed as turnkey solution by Avid, with modified Macintosh hardware (legit legally) as it was based off the Macintosh IIx, and later versions would be based on newer Macintosh hardware. By the mid 1990s, they would port their stuff over to PCs and would go through all the major changes by Apple. At one point they had half the editing suites in market share, but by 1999 Apple really disrupted the entire NLE ecosystem.

Avid today

Avid is still around, albeit a much nimbler company. They finally got into the software business, and by 2010 they relocated to southern Middlesex County, just a mile north of the Burlington Mall in a suburban office park.

Their current product is called Media Composer, and if you take out the branding of the versioning, it’s likely based on a 9th revision to the overall MC code; however there was another version of their editing systems that kinda conflicts with the modern day MC, and I am no Avid expert, and the original AVID/1 code probably has no connection to the code of the modern day systems.

The application is literally world of it’s own. It reminds me of Lotus Notes/Domino. I am not bashing Notes or Avid, but it’s closest metaphor I can describe. Avid’s platform never conformed into the GUI frameworks of both Windows or Macs, but that’s OK, because for an application like MC, you want to avoid the borders of the application.

The technical history of Avid I have heard from their salespeople (one I have known for over 14 plus years) was the application was designed around film, and yet the user interface is designed for people who have used personal computers, while Apple was designed solely for filmmakers who never used a PC.

My brain is complex, and often gets confused to what’s a clickable button, what is a keyboard function, and the Avid interface (this is MC version 2018, before the big UI redux introduced at the last NAB Show, the year before the pandemic.) There is two types of GUI users, one who mouses around, cheating their way through, and one knows the operating systems GUI inside and out.

Another confusing and mixed signals is since AVID/1, is the strongly suggested dual display setup, to move windows (such as Clips and Sequences); where it’s somewhat used, but not seldom or frequent.  Another quirk (or feature) is various windows that will appear upon request, one notorious example is the Effect Editor, if a user goes to the menu or hits a button, the Effect Editor will appear as long as you do not move the Timeline, but the moment you do it disappears! The way to move the timeline with keeping the Effect Editor pane, I should say, is to find a small timeline like element on the top of that pane, because it’s not a window in my standards.

Because Avid’s interface is an app of it’s own (going as far back as the original AVID1, unless the user is well trained in Avid’s GUI without certification, you’re kinda SOL. I am saying specifically, radio buttons, clickable buttons, what function can be a keyboard shortcut, etc. This is an extension to a written post recently defending a GUI even if you use the mouse half the time. Avid’s GUI is not explicit of where the line is drawn of what function is mouse mandatory vs. keyboard shortcut. 

With no offense, it’s easy to say that Werner was and is an engineer’s engineer. There is a lot of vagueness and yet there black and white. This why a lot of my edits had been really hap-hazard in quality before I had a dedicated direct support staff who worked in the business with decades of Avid experience.

Avid in the near future

Unless Avid can get their crap together, and migrate away from the stereotypical 2010 mindset of hardware, and trying to get influencers into a platform they may never heard of, which I think would be cool, it will be a long road for them to grow back to where they were in the height in the mid 00s. What makes Apple and Adobe successful is that they use all the hardware inside their supported versions of their software. Avid’s approach is publishing a recommended hardware list, and spec of third party components like specific NVIDIA boards is kinda not the approach now.

Avid should stand out from the crowd and continue to support multiple displays. In the beginning, Avid took advantage of Apple’s then defacto I/O platform called NuBus and made it virtually mandatory to have dual displays. Because everyone apparently carries MacBook Pros, the idea of having multiple displays from the two other A companies, must mean Avid should follow suit. I think that’s going too far. While I have not tried 2019 just yet, I think if Avid follows the average, it will be lousy.  I think fixing quirks would be a better option. I also think it should be easier to edit multiple effects per track. There’s instances where you may have an upside down clip, that also needs some other effect, and it shouldn’t be a complete complex situation to promote/demote, step in or out to basically flip an iPhone video and insert some color correction without taking out the rotation, etc.

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