Lone Locust Productions

Phil Glover 1931-2012

2012-01-21T12:59:21Z

Yesterday, after an accident with a dead pine tree, my father, concerned that his life had deteriorated to the point where he’d be either mentally or physically impaired and a permanent burden to his family, committed suicide.

That we, his family – that I, his only child – would have accepted that burden without complaint is without question. He knew that and so he chose not to involve us in the decision he made about his life.

I cannot change that.

I can say, in my mind and in my principles – those that he instilled in me – that he had every right to do what he did. Everyone does. (No. Everyone should have the right to choose the point where they feel life offers more suffering than it does benefits. I say “should” because our laws, made by well-meaning but misguided busybodies, say we don’t have that right. A discussion for another time.)

In my mind I know those things, but that does not close the hole in my heart. I weep for my loss. I weep more for the loss my children feel and for the things they’ll never share with or know about a man who loved them more than anything else in the world.

That I cannot ever fill that hole is certain, but I have begun chronicling my father’s life as best I can and will be posting parts of it here online.

Here then iS the preface:

When information is no longer refreshed and maintained, it starts to deteriorate. When a primary source is lost, only the secondary traces remain.

Amongst so many other things, I lost a primary source of information yesterday with the death of my father, Phil Glover.

Never again will I hear about the fantastic the pizza from the Bottlecap Inn in Miami, FL in the 1950’s, or about how a misspelling in the local newspaper earned my dad the nickname, “Flip” or how a random automobile license plate and a blizzard lead to my birth.

My father’s story has come to an end, and parts of it has been told, in pieces, over 47 years, to me.

For my entire life, I’ve been keenly aware of the disconnect between first and secondhand recollection of a life’s story. My mother died when I was shy of 3 years old. I have had no memory of her for as long as I can remember, and I know so little of her story as to be nothing more than a paragraph or two on a page, and even that is contradictory.

Virtually, my only source for that info was my father and he either didn’t know, or didn’t care to discuss it much. I admit, I never pressed him on it because I thought it might be painful for him and my mother was really nothing more than a stranger to me. She was a loss to me intellectually rather than emotionally. I knew I should feel it, but I didn’t really feel it.

My father, on the other hand, has been the one fixed-point throughout my entire life. At any point in my lifetime, until yesterday, he was always there for me to reach out to for help, advice or just an ear to bend.

Did I take that for granted? I hope not. I think my dad knew how much I loved and appreciated him, even though neither of us said it very often.

Now I find myself thinking not about my loss, but that of my kids. They lost a man who loved them more than anything in the world and they can never know him as well as I did. No one else alive could.

The kids are older than I was when my mother died, but younger than when my grandparents (who helped raise me after that) died. My memories of them are varied, but I realize how little I knew of them either. My loss.

What memories they’ll hold of their “papa” I can only guess.

This is the start of my attempt to record that which I know about my father.

When information is no longer refreshed and maintained, it starts to deteriorate.

For my kids and for myself, this is the story of my father, Phil Glover, 1931-2012.

Vlogging iMovie on the iPad 2

2011-04-17T13:02:44Z

Recently I posted my thoughts on iMovie on the iPad 2. I an exercise of complete redundancy, here’s are those same thoughts (more or less) in video form.

iMovie for iPad2

2011-04-15T18:13:37Z

Some time back, I wrote a review of iMovie on the iPhone 4. This was shortly after the app was first available and I didn’t give it a very good review. It was buggy, limited and difficult to control with precision.

Now, with the advent of the iPad 2, Apple has revamped iMovie to be a universal iPhone 4/iPad 2 app. I’ve recently had the opportunity to try out the iPad version in a real-world situation.

We recently had an employee appreciation event at my work and a co-worker and I used our iPhone 4′s to record video and pictures of the event. I then proceeded, at the event, to edit the video on my iPad.

Combined with editing my last vlog entry, I reel I have a good basic grasp of the new iPad iMovie experience.

First, the good.

iMovie has become considerably more stable. They’ve added more themes, more upload options and improved the audio editing, including the ability to record narration.

Using it on the iPad is a huge improvement over using it on the iPhone. With a larger work (and touch) area, grabbing and trimming clips with precision is much easier. In fact, the interface metaphor of iMovie on the Mac now seems obviously originally intended to be finger driven rather than mouse driven. iMovie on the iPad just feels like a logical way to edit.

Now, the bad.

All that said, it still comes up short in too many areas.

There are more themes, but they’re still just as restrictive. You can only pick one theme and its elements, and the only thing that does is give you a style for the titles (opening/closing/middle), one style of transition fits all. You have a choice of a hard cut, a cross-dissolve or the theme’s one transition.

Change the theme and all of the theme transitions change to the new theme — which can be desirable or not desirable, depending on the circumstances.

I wish Apple would get their upload options on the same page. For example, iMovie on the iPad can upload directly to YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo and CNN’s iReport but not Apple’s own MobileMe!. iMovie on the Mac allows upload all of those and MobileMe.

You can, of course, save your video to the Camera Roll on the iPad, in which case you can upload it to MobileMe and YouTube, but not Vimeo, Facebook or iReport.

While designed mainly for photographs, Apple seems to want people to store and organize their video files in iPhoto or Aperture, but they can only upload to MobileMe, Facebook and Flickr.

Apple really needs to get on the ball and work this out. Naturally, I only noticed it because I wanted to upload my finished video to MobileMe and realized I couldn’t without intermediary steps.

You can now control the volume of clips, and even see their waveform, but you can’t, as far as I can tell, replace the audio from one clip with the audio from another. You can lay down sound effects or record narration. It does a great job, you select the location you want the narration to start, hit record and it backs up, gives a count down and begins recording while showing you the video. This is just how it is done in the Mac version of iMovie and it’s really easy.

Narration audio appears as separate audio tracks on the timeline… As do sound effects, if you add them… but, adding music is a totally confusing experience. Most of the time, if you select a music track, it’s laid down as a background track, but sometimes, and I can’t find the pattern, it’s laid down as a separate audio track, just like narration and sound effects.

I’ve tried every combination I can think of tapping, untapping, positioning, turning wave forms on and off, and I can’t consistently get it to add audio as a separate track.

I also couldn’t find anything online to suggest you even can add songs as tracks – although I know from experience that you can. (See picture showing a background track, SFX and a music track.)

The next area I’ll complain about is the “bin” for unedited video. iMovie will display in the upper left-hand corner all the video clips in your camera roll or imported video using the camera connection kit (very handy handy indeed if you want to shoot with one or more iPhones.)

The bin is sorted newest to oldest and shows you a timeline of the videos, but there’s no information about them and you can’t play them to see what they are. You can select the clip and trim the beginning and ending, and that will show you the screen at the trim point in the viewer, but the visual info only. It isn’t really “scrubbing” and you can’t hear the clip.

Consider recording an interview, you might have a bin that looks like this:

Without being able to play the clips, or using a slate to mark them, it’s damn near impossible to tell them apart.

There’s also no mechanism for organizing the clips. If you could toss them into subfolders or sub projects, add some explanatory metadata or description or even mark them as “favorites” or “rejected” as you can in iMovie on the Mac, it would be much more manageable. As it is, it’s a trial and error process of you inserting clips and then removing them from the timeline until you find the right one. Unless the clips are very visually distinct, this is extremely painful.

Finally, if there’s one thing that is the most frustrating about iMovie on the iPad, it’s the lack of editing options.

Typically in editing you have the basic “assembly” process, which is laying clips one after the other into the timeline. This recreates the process of linear editing from the olden times of video tape. Often a rough cut of a video, using master shots can be created this way. iMovie has no problem with this.

Then you move onto the more complicated editing. “Inserting” takes a secondary clip and inserts it into the middle of the master track, by splitting and pushing the two halves of the master apart. iMovie has no problem with this, although it appears you have to manually split the master track at the place you want the insert.

Next up is an “overwrite”, which is similar to an insert except that the master track isn’t pushed apart, instead a chunk of the master, of the same duration as the secondary clip is removed and replaced with the secondary clip. This simulates what’s called an “A B Roll” and is useful when switching between multiple camera recording the same event. With an overwrite edit, you may also wish to only overwrite the video only, the audio only or both. This is the real power of the overwrite and it’s sadly missing in iMovie.

You can also achieve much the same effect with a “superimposition” or “overlay” which represents “stacking” one layer of video over the top of another concurrent piece of video. Since this isn’t available in iMovie either, there is no good way to do a two-camera shoot.

Insert editing is inadequate to the task because not only is it more difficult to synchronize, but you cannot mix the audio tracks. (For a live event you would typically designate one camera’s audio as the master audio and discard the audio from the other camera.)

Overall, the promise of iMovie on the iPad is amazing, but the implementation, for an Apple product, is remarkably short-sighted. It’s as if their programmers never actually bothered to try editing anything beyond the demo videos Apple uses in their promotions.

For $5 you can hardly complain, but still… It isn’t good enough. They need to roll out most, if not all, of the basic feature set of iMovie for the Mac.

I’ll vlog about it later, but I shan’t edit it with iMovie on the iPad.

- Posted from my iPad 2.

iPad 2 Thoughts

2011-04-11T05:38:21Z

Another in my wacky series of vlogs, this time discussing the iPad 2. Edited entirely on the iPad 2.

A Day With the Potawatomi

2011-04-05T01:29:14Z

I spend the day with my tribe. Yes, I have a tribe.

Logitech Harmony 700 Remote – Review

2011-03-28T05:44:57Z

This time I’m looking at my new Logitech Harmony 700 Universal Remote.

Aussie Pasty (vlog)

2011-03-27T16:32:11Z

My experiment of combining two great tastes, the Cornish Pasty and the Australian Meat Pie, into the hybrid Aussie Pasty.

Too Lazy to Blog – Don’t Watch this video

2011-03-27T15:43:47Z

Seriously, I’m just not blogging enough lately, so I’ve decided to experiment with vlogging instead. I’ve got the camera with me all the time, so why not?

Answer: This video right here. Wow, how tedious. Don’t bother watching, it’s terrible, but it gets the preface out of the way. The next one is much better.

Primeval – S04E02 – Review

2011-01-23T05:07:38Z

I got nothing.

The current series of Primeval is so ordinary that I have neither strong positive or negative feelings towards it. They aren’t screwing things up badly like they did last season, neither are they making me interested like they did in the first season. I’ve watched through this episode 3 times and still I’ve got nothing, so I decided to try my Fusion Patrol approach. I watch the show, take notes, fill in some comments and hope I have something to say.

Timeline/Notes

00:00 Five years ago a woman captures a bizarre baby anomaly animal and flushes it down the toilet. Yeah. I’m believing that. Looked too big to flush. Perhaps some kids would like to try some experimenting and report back to me on that one. What is the maximum size lizard you can flush. My guess is you’ll need to live in Australia or Indonesia to try that one.

00:04 Philip, “We’re poised on a new dawn” – hhhmmmmmmmm, New Dawn, that sounds fishy. What kind of scientific advancement is he hoping to get? Is it just an understanding of time, or is he perhaps trying to control time?

00:05 Danny Quinn still has a locker. They just keep reminding us about the missing Danny. Once again that seems to indicate Danny isn’t really gone yet.

00:06 Lot of old dumpy buildings in London, aren’t there? Actually, this looks like the same building they shot in during the second series.

00:07 Perky chick (what’s her name?) gives Conner the key to her apartment. Suspicious? Forward? Clueless? Not sure which. Isn’t she perky, though?

00:09 Rex is back. I hope he doesn’t feature in any more episodes. He’s such a technically stupid creature, that thing certainly couldn’t flap his wings and fly.

00:09 New guy (What’s his name?) is chatting with old guy (Is that an old Danny?) Clearly New Guy is spying for him.

00:10 We have our first fatality! Construction worker for dinner! It took 10 minutes for a fatality… this show is really slowing down.

00:11 Perky Girl’s apartment is nice. ARC must pay well well. At least she uses Macs.

00:14 Conner’s old friend, Duncan, has really moved up in the world, living rough and homeless and he has a collection of dinosaur poo! Nah, he’s not obsessing about the whole “best friend killed by dodo” thing at all.

00:20 Perky Girl has the hots for Becker!

00:21 “Are you (Abby) his (Connor’s) girlfriend?” “Wow, there’s hope for us all!” Best line in the entire series, although, I’m noticing that Abby is aging pretty fast, she’s never going to age well like Claudia Brown/Jenny Lewis. PLEASE bring Jenny back! At least we have Perky Girl.

00:24 It’s a Boar Croc (Kaprosuchus)

00:26 Abby has commandeered a boat. On what authority can she commandeer a boat? Do they carry ID?

00:27 Only the second killing. Not much of a body count. Ho hum

00:29 Becker to the rescue! Ever notice how the ARC has a team of crack military types, but none of them do anything except Becker?

00:30 Container breaks free with creature inside, falls 30+ feet… and the animal is still alive. Rubbish! Do we have to discuss the cube/square law?

00:32 I’m so glad the guys running this container port have stacked the containers in a convenient labyrinth pattern.

00:34 One utterly useless ARC soldier dead! Body count: 3

00:37 Conner has his job back! Was it ever in doubt? Wonder why they bothered with that subplot? Was it just to kill time?

00:39 Becker might have the hots for Perky Girl… and why not?

00:43 …and it’s all over. 43 minutes? That’s short!

Primeval – S04E01 – Review

2011-01-18T01:39:01Z

All this tweeting and podcasting and suddenly I just don’t have time to review new science fictions shows – or, if I do, I do it on the podcast. That just doesn’t seem right, and one of the staples of my blog has always been reviewing episodes of Primeval. Pity they cancelled it, isn’t it?

Ah, but they didn’t, nearly two years later, Primeval is back. Is it better than before?

For those perhaps not in the loop, Primeval, an ITV science fiction program about temporal anomalies opening corridors between different times and the present, often allowing nasties such as dinosaurs into our own time, ran for 3 successful – if dubiously plotted and scientifically inaccurate – seasons, but, the global economic crisis combined with ITV financial difficulties lead to cost-cutting measures. Primeval, a CGI-heavy series, had to go, but creative financing has brought the show back to our screens. (Well, back to some people’s screens, anyway.)

Synopsis

At the end of the previous series, Danny Quinn, team leader at the Anomaly Research Center (the ARC) was trapped, perhaps forever, in the Pleistocene, having defeated Helen Cutter’s evil plans to destroy mankind. Helen had been killed by a velociraptor that had followed them through the anomaly and Quinn was cut off.

Meanwhile, Abby and Conner had been trapped in the Cretaceous, also with little hope of an anomaly opening on its own.

One year later, with a Spinosaur on their trail, Conner and Abby find Helen Cutter’s anomaly control device and manage to return to the present day, brining a Spinosaur with them. They find themselves face-to-face with the new ARC team and must all work together to stop the Spinosaur.

Analysis

Typically the analysis section of these reviews is where I rip the piss-poor science and ridiculous temporal-plotting, but this episode is something new… there’s really nothing in it. It’s a straight-forward melodrama with no twists or turns and, once past the notion of the anomalies and creatures traveling through time there’s nothing in that to pick on, either.

There are a couple things to note, first, the ARC has been turned into a “public/private partnership” and new character, Philip, Nobel-prize winning genius and inventor of the room-temperature super-conductor now seems to co-own the ARC, and is clearly in a superior position – if equal on paper – with Ben Miller’s returning character of Lester.

Of the old crew, only Becker survived in the present, and he’s been made second-in-command to a new Irish guy who is so non-descript I have to wait for someone to call him by name before I can remember what it is. (OK, I just looked it up, his name is Matt.)

Matt has a secret, he seems to be collaborating with an elderly gentlemen and, if their remarks are to be believed, they’re working together to save the world, and Matt is searching for someone at the ARC.

My pet theory is that the old man is actually Danny Quinn, returned via anomaly to some point in the past and having lived his entire life waiting for this time. I’ve got nothing to support that; however, in the “summary” at the beginning of the episode, we saw the actors faces of Conner, Abby, even dead characters like Cutter and Helen, but we only ever saw the back of Danny Quinn’s head or a quick shot where his face was obscured. If the character has been written out of the show, why would they hide his face and not the others?

Considering it was such a long time coming, I’ve not got much to say about it.

Garmin 1490T GPS goes to DisneyLand

2010-12-05T23:46:45Z

A couple months ago, I purchased a Garmin 1490T GPS at Costco. Although I’ve wanted a car GPS for some time, but couldn’t justify it just for driving around Phoenix. The pending trip to DisneyLand, smack in the middle of the freeway hell that is the Los Angeles metropolitan area, was ample justification. While I’ve had the unit and have gotten very familiar with its operation, I didn’t want to review it until it had its trial by fire.

I’m pleased to report that the unit came through with flying colors, in fact, it exceeded my expectations at every level. There was only one instance when I took a wrong turn and, to be honest, it was entirely my own fault. I made an assumption that the GPS was wrong and… it turns out I was wrong and it was right. We’ll say no more about that.

The 1490T has a large touchscreen interface, but unlike the iPhone’s glass screen, the 1490T has a soft plastic screen, which isn’t very responsive compared to the iPhone. I found myself having to push extra times on the screen, particularly when entering text. Apart from that, the interface is logical and easy to navigate.

The unit comes equipped with the ability to speak street names, and has several “voices” it can use. I’ve chosen to use the female “British” voice, but there are both male and female voices in American, British and Australian accents. The accents aren’t particularly strong, but it was initially confusing by the British voice’s insistent to call on-ramps and off-ramps “slip roads”. It’s a term I’ve never heard.

The GPS can also use a variety of voices in other languages, as well as ones you create and load yourself; however, these voice give only generic instructions such as “turn right” instead of speaking the street names, as in “turn right on N Beaver Rd.”

In particular, the feature that turned out to be the most helpful was the “free” traffic updates. These updates are supplied by FM radio in major metropolitan areas and are ad-sponsored, and so periodically, ads for Red Lobster pop up (discretely) on the screen. The GPS takes your current route and compares it to the traffic database and arrives at a delay estimate, which is displayed on the screen. The GPS compares your current route, including traffic delays, against other routes to the same destination. If an alternate route is determined to be faster the GPS changes your route to avoid the problem.

I’d tested this a number of times in Phoenix and it was less than impressive. The unit would show me that there was a delay of several minutes, but would not re-route me. You can have it show you where the traffic problems are and even “force” it to avoid the traffic; however, in every instance it would complain it me, telling me this really was the best route and even if I told it to avoid anyway, it didn’t seem to do so.

If you know anything about the route from Phoenix to Los Angeles, you’ll know there aren’t any practical alternatives to Interstate I-10. Once you’ve gotten a certain distance outside of Phoenix (around 400th Ave), I-10 is the only choice for crossing the vast wasteland in any kind of direct route. Other alternatives take you hundreds of miles out of the way.

As we left town on I-10, at around 130th Ave, the traffic delay indicator started to go crazy. FIrst it read 10 minutes delay, then 20, 30, 45 and finally 53 minutes before it announced it was recalculating due to severe traffic. It then routed us along a series of byways as we got progressively farther out into the middle of nowhere and it finally returned us to I-10 at 339th Ave, at which point we could see there was a major construction project and that traffic was backed up in both directions as far as the eye could see.

There was a second couple traveling in a different car about an hour behind us. They chose not to heed my warning and spent two hours stuck in the jam. For this event alone, the Garmin 1490T GPS has won a permanent place in my car on road trips.

I recommend this GPS.

A Time to Feel Small and a Time to Feel Special

2010-12-05T23:33:53Z

In this galaxy, there’s a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, three million million galaxies like this. And in all of that and perhaps more, only one of each of us. Don’t destroy the one named Kirk.

- Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy

Ol’ Doc McCoy may or may not have gotten his numbers wrong, but what he said ranks upon one of the most important thoughts ever spoken.

I was reminded of that quote earlier because I was doing some work on Fusion Patrol. I’ve been preparing a video with an interview with Ben and me and, because it was Fusion Patrol related, I tossed the most recent Fusion Patrol opening titles that I had onto the beginning of it.

What became immediately obvious was that the old, vintage credits, rendered in Adobe After Effects, were of a grossly lower video resolution than the footage being produced even by our iPhones, and so I set upon a project to develop an updated version at HD resolutions.

My first thought was to simply recreate the originals based on a new screen resolution, but I remembered that the old credits had been designed specifically for online videos – back in the day when bandwidth was slow and video codecs were considerably more inefficient. I had intentionally made the old credits simple to reduce artifacting and bandwidth usage.

I decided I would return to the constant theme that appeared in all the “TV” credits for Fusion Patrol: astronomical pictures from NASA.

I chose to use the single most incredible photographic image ever captured by mankind – the Hubble Ultra Deep Field [HUDF] image. Have you seen it?

The Hubble telescope looked at a tiny patch of sky. Image holding a piece of paper, 1mm square at your arm’s length. That’s how small of a piece of the sky the image is of, and it was chosen because there was nothing there. It’s a picture of the darkness that lies beyond our galaxy… and what did they find?

This:

Look at this picture for a while and marvel and the most amazing thing you’re ever likely to see. Click on it to see it much bigger. I can stare at this picture for hours and marvel at it.

On a very dark night, with the unaided eye, they say you can only see about 2,000 stars; 8,000 if you could every star visible from Earth (which you can’t because the Earth is in the way of some of them) but that’s not true when you get above the Earth’s atmosphere. That’s why we have the Hubble space telescope.

While you’re standing outside, if you stuck a little 1mm square of paper on thumbnail and then stretched out your arm in front of you, you’d be looking at approximately the amount of the sky being pictured in this photo – and it was chosen by the Hubble scientists because it is an empty patch of sky.

Look at that picture again. Virtually everything you see is a galaxy. 10,000 of them! You are staring through a tiny hole in the light pollution of the stars of the Milky Way galaxy into the abyss of the universe beyond. The farthest away are approximately 13 billion light years away.

This is the third time Hubble (and the most detailed) time Hubble has conducted this experiment in different locations, and each time is the same. The even distribution of matter throughout the universe is part of our understanding of the Big Bang, hard through it is to conceptualize unless you grasp that space/time itself is expanding rather than just the matter within.

Our galaxy has an estimated 200-400 billion stars, and you’re looking at 10,000 more galaxies. The estimate, based on these pictures, is that there must be between 100-200 billion galaxies.

In the face of it, we are unimaginably insignificant.

…and yet “…in all of that, and perhaps more, only one of each of us.” We are also incredibly unique.

“Don’t destroy the one named [insert your name here.]“

Flip Mino HD vs Kodak Zi8 and Apple iPad, iPhoto and iMovie

2010-12-05T23:11:23Z

Recently in conversation, the topic of using the Flip HD and the Kodak Zi8 mini-camcorders came up, and specifically, how well do they work with Apple products, like iMovie. As it happens, I own both the Flip and the Kodak camera, so I put down a few thoughts on them. For anyone who might find this comparison helpful, here then in a slightly edited and revised version of those thoughts.

I’ll start by saying that, as a camera, I prefer the Zi8 in virtually every way to the Flip HD with the exception of the shape of the bottom of its case, which is, I admit, a rather trivial – but valid – complaint.

As far as I can see, picture quality, macro ability, picture format options (30 or 60 fps, for example), SDHC card compatibility, spare battery capable, low-light ability… in every way, the Zi8 surpasses the Flip. It’s my “go to” HD camera – although I use my iPhone 4 often because it is always with me; however, as a camera, the iPhone 4 is still pretty limited.

My complaint about the “bottom” of the Zi8 is simply this: It’s rounded. Both have tripod sockets, but with the Flip, the flat bottom means you can, in a pinch, stand the camera on a table. The Zi8′s round bottom makes that virtually impossible, making a tripod mount absolutely necessary.

So, as a camera, the Zi8 is my preference, but if the question is: Which camera works best with a Mac (or, perhaps I should say, “Apple products” then I’d have to say that the Flip is somewhat more compatible.

iPad

First, let’s look how it works with the iPad.

I’m starting with the iPad because it is probably the most inflexible environment to use the camera with and supports a narrow range of formats as opposed to the Mac.

If you want to use a camera of any kind with the iPad, you must have the iPad Camera Connection Kit, which is a pair of dongles for the iPad. One is a USB dongle, which allows you to connect a standard USB cable to the iPad and then connect that to a camera, just as you might connect your camera to your computer. The other is an SD card reader, for plugging SD cards directly into your iPad. (These dongles can only be used to get stuff onto your iPad, not back off of it.)

Both the Flip and the Zi8 have built-in USB connectors so that they may be plugged into a computer without having to carry a cable. This is a great feature, but a little awkward depending on what other USB devices you have and the configuration of your computer. The Zi8′s is flexible and allows slightly greater freedom in connecting the camera to a computer. The Flip’s is fixed and I always have to disconnect all other USB devices from my MacBook Pro before I connect it. You could, of course, use an extension cable, but that defeats the purpose of having the connector built-in.

Using the camera connection kit USB Connector the Flip connects and the videos can be imported directly into the iPad. Under the same circumstances, the Zi8 causes the iPad to complain that it needs “too much current” and it will not recognize the device. Score one point for the Flip.

Using the camera connection kit SD Card Connector the Flip cannot connect because it doesn’t use SD cards. The Zi8′s cards are easily read and imported. Score one for the Zi8.

I’m going to make a note here that under each camera’s appropriate connection method, you can see thumbnails of the videos. That’s good because you sometimes don’t want to import every picture or video and you need to see a thumbnail to decide which ones to import.

However, once the videos have been imported into the iPad… you can no longer see the Zi8′s thumbnails… you get a generic icon that says “movie”. The Flip ones have thumbnails and can be watched on the iPad. You cannot see a thumbnail or play the Zi8 video on the iPad. That’s 2 points (thumbnail and playable video) for the Flip and non for the Zi8.

So, if you’re using the Flip with the iPad exclusively, I’d clearly recommend the Flip as the superior camera in terms of usability with the computer equipment. This is especially likely to be important if Apple ever releases iMovie for the iPad. Flip videos may be immediately editable. Zi8 videos almost certainly will not.

The Mac and iMovie

Let’s ignore everything I said about the iPad now and concentrate solely on the Mac. In this instances, I am referring to the iLife ’11 series of software. I was using them on older versions, but I’ll confine my remarks solely to the current version.

If you plug either camera in, iPhoto sees them as cameras and will import and play the videos. No problem and this is how I use both cameras, importing the videos directly into iPhoto ands then using them in iMovie from within iPhoto. They both work fine.

The Flip comes with some nasty video management software which is, at least, fully Mac compatible. I don’t like this software, but it does work. It is not necessary and can be ignored. On the other hand, this software also does the firmware updates to the Flip, so ignore it at your peril. There have been several updates since I bought the Flip. I do like the fact that the Flip has a planned mechanism for updating their firmware.

The Zi8 has none of that, and, as far as I can tell, no firmware updates since I bought it, nor does there seem to be a user-friendly way to do the updates when they do happen.

However, iMovie also has the capability to import directly from the camera, selecting only the clips you need, if you prefer to work that way. iMovie recognizes the Flip as a camera, it does not recognize the Zi8 as a camera. You have to get your Zi8 videos in from iPhoto or direct file import. Score one for Flip.

Otherwise, all things are about equal.

Conclusion

So… if I and my iPad were on the road without computer, and I need to view my videos, the Flip would be the better way to go.

On the Mac, since I use iPhoto to organize my videos anyway, this isn’t an issue and I use the same workflow for both cameras, therefore I prefer the better and more flexible Zi8 as a camera.

Some thoughts on the magic of the Magic Kingdom

2010-11-27T06:10:22Z

There’s a scene in the movie Nation Lampoon’s Vacation that I never saw coming. After fighting their way across the United States, through horrible tragedies, dead grandmothers & dogs, the Griswold family station wagon barrels into the completely empty parking lot of Wally World – a thinly disguised DisneyLand – only to discover the park was closed for maintenance.

At that moment, I sat transfixed. Someone else had been there, too. Someone else had felt the crushing defeat just as I had when I was nine years old in 1974. Unlike the Griswolds, my father and I barreled into the massive parking lot, not in a station wagon, but a vintage Porsche 356B, but just like them, the lot (which is now Disney’s California Adventure) was eerily empty. Back in those days, DisneyLand was closed one day a week, and no doubt many a well-meaning father delivered their excited children unto the doorstep of disappointment.

That has, perhaps, colored forever my perception of DisneyLand.

We went back in 1977, and, while I remember having fun, it wasn’t so much so that I’ve had any reason to go back until 2010.

And so now we’re here with our children and I’m having fun. It’s hard not to have when so many people around you, and especially your own children, are having a blast. Fun is infectious.

The analytical part of me is dissecting each ride, marveling that what was cutting edge 1955 technology is still very much in evidence and musing as to why the rides are supposed to be fun, but I must acknowledge that they are fun.

I am, perhaps, too jaded (or cynical, as some have said) to completely switch off Mr. Analytical and enjoy myself unreservedly as a kid might, but I can nonetheless enjoy it in my own way, and I can enjoy, and even empathize, seeing that unreservedly joy in my kids’ eyes, laughs and smiles.

Location:W Convention Way,Anaheim,United States

Fusion Patrol Follow-up

2010-10-31T12:09:01Z

It’s a long overdue update to my previous blog post about the tribulations of getting the audio right on the Fusion Patrol Podcast.

As last you may recall, I was testing Wiretap Anywhere from Ambrosia Software. Initial tests went very well and I subsequently purchased the software.

We’ve done several podcasts since then under a variety of conditions: our standard two-person editions and a couple three-person versions, once at three remote locations and another with two people being “in the studio” at my house and one at a remote location.

The results, to my ears, are outstanding. The quality of the audio (if not the actual content) is, I feel, on par or ahead of with the vast majority of amateur podcasts out there. We still have an issue in that Skype merges multiple remote sources into one, and I don’t know any way around that; however, Skype also seems to equalize them well enough that it isn’t too much of a problem.

In putting together our two-in-the-studio episode we did get some cross-over between the mics, which resulted in some echo problems, most of which I was able to remove in post-production.

Now I think it is time to move on to the next goal: increasing our audience size.

I’m not going to give numbers, but I’m frankly amazed at how many people do actually listen. It’s far more than could be accounted for than by “just my friends” but, at the same time, you couldn’t keep a radio program on the air with an audience of this size either.