A better video digitizing setup

At work almost daily now, I've been converting analog video (TV commercials on VHS tapes) to digital format. This allows for quick distribution and review of TV commercials by clients and colleagues in other countries. We have been using a pretty crappy external video capture device called Video Blaster MovieMaker by Creative Labs (the Sound Blaster people). MovieMaker's slow USB 1.1 interface is probably partly to blame but the software bundle is horrible as well.

The most irritating thing about the MovieMaker video-capturing software is that after you click the Record button no less than 10 seconds pass before it actually starts recording video to disk! The user-interface is quite poor as well. Videos are saved in MPEG-1 format.

To edit the MPEG-1 files, Ulead's VideoStudio is included. It has probably the worst user-interface I've ever seen — if not for the tooltips, it'd be impossible to even get started without referring to the manual. For me just needing to cut out unwanted video from the start and ending of raw video clips, the most frustrating thing is that when you move the marker to a point in the video on the slider bar (to try and pinpoint the lead-in and lead-out points), there's huge delay before it shows you what frame you're at. Sometimes the delay can be 10 to 15 seconds long. There's also no button to step up or down a few frames at a time — you have to use the marker on the slider bar which is difficult to move precisely in small increments.

After the videos are edited, I use Discreet cleaner software to convert the MPEG-1 files to Windows Media Video (WMV) format which usually halves the file size while maintaining good quality. I like cleaner but it's slow.

So basically, I've been investigating a better solution. I sought advice from Eric Lin, our IT Manager in Taiwan who's very knowledgable about this kind of stuff, and he recommended TMPGEnc and PowerDirector Pro. I tried TMPGEnc's MPEG tools (File => MPEG Tools => Merge & Cut) and it worked superbly — simple and fast with the right controls! So now TMPGEnc will replace VideoStudio.

I didn't try PowerDirector Pro but I remembered reading about Microsoft's media tools. I dug around Microsoft's site and found Windows Media Encoder 7.1. Within a 5 minutes I had it installed and had quickly and easily converted an MPEG file to WMV format. Oh, I will need to figure out how I can batch process several files at a time but I'm sure that'll be easy. So now Windows Media Encoder will replace cleaner. By the way, I also came across Canopus ProCoder which is direct competitor to cleaner.

I'm pretty happy with my 2 newly-discovered software tools. I'm sure they'll improve my workflow and I can't wait to try them out at work. I certainly wouldn't mind a better video capture device (either an external FireWire device or a AGP- or PCI-based video card) and new Pentium 4-powered PC too though!

Quick links:

TMPGEnc - AVI to MPEG-1/2 converter and MPEG-1/2 editor (free for personal or non-commercial use)

Windows Media Encoder 7.1 - converts and encodes video into Windows Media formats (e.g. WMV, ASF) and more

Windows Media Encoder 9 is at Release Candidate stage.

CyberLink PowerDirector Pro - digital video editing ($95.95 download, $99.95 physical shipment)

Discreet cleaner - digital video encoding/conversion (cleaner 5 for Windows - $529.99, cleaner 6 for Mac - $599.99)

Canopus Procoder - digital video encoding/conversion ($699.00)

Video of Justin babbling

My favorite Justin video clip!... Justin babbling to himself on November 2, 2002 (at around 7-1/2 months old):

• QuickTime Progressive format (1.2MB)


• Windows Media Video format (1MB)

Took this using my Canon PowerShot G1 digital (still) camera. Converted the original AVI file to MOV and WMV formats using Discreet cleaner.

Poor Justin's caught a cold!

Top photo is of Justin tonight feeling miserable with a runny, stuffy nose and a cough... Poor baby! He's still as active as ever though and he's still able to smile! Photo below is of him showing off his big smile on Saturday, November 16th. His first signs of a cold were a fever and cough, last Thursday. His fever went away on Friday but then his nose became conjested and runny and his cough got worse over the weekend. Mommy took him to see Dr. RuLin Fuong this afternoon.

Mac OS X's shortcomings and helpful add-ons

I love the power and flexibility that Mac OS X's Unix underpinnings bring to the system but I'm becoming increasingly frustrated by what the immature system lacks — especially from a usability standpoint — compared to Mac OS Classic and even Windows 98 and newer systems. I have been using OS X daily for about 4 months now and here's my long list of complaints (the first 6 are the most annoying to me):

1. Still very slow: even the latest 10.2.x "Jaguar" release is very sluggish and this affects usability
2. Column View sucks: must scroll horizontal and vertical and can't type to jump to select file/folder (very user-UNfriendly — a huge step backwards!)
3. Worse that you're forced to use Column View in all Open/Save dialog boxes (Default Folder X helps but I'd much prefer just old List View)
4. Dock sucks: Windows Taskbar is so much more usable than Apple's Dock — applications and minimized windows are much easier to identify in Windows Taskbar
5. Filename sorting doesn't work as it did in Mac OS Classic (or as in Windows), as most would want
6. Right-click on desktop to create a new folder and the new folder almost always appears behind another window or on the opposite side of the screen — never right where you click
7. Connect to Server (Command-K) is so much slower than old Chooser for finding shared Macs or AFP servers
8. Mounted AFP volumes often disconnect for no reason
9. After over 15 years of using Command-N to create a new folder, why change it now (especially to something that's hardly ever used)?
10. Get Info is sluggish, its disclosure triangles are not as efficient to use as tabs used in Windows (much smaller area to click on), and info for folders doesn't show number of items
11. Windows Explorer and Mac OS Classic's Finder are much more usable than OS X's Finder
12. Contextual menu dreadfully slow
13. Launching some applications and Preference Panes can be really slow (e.g. on my PowerBook G4/500MHz/768MB/OS 10.2.2 Calculator takes 5 seconds to launch)
14. Can't use contextual menu when dragging file/folder to intuitively move files in 1 step (yes, at least cutting and pasting files now works as it has for many years in Windows)
15. Why no Trash on the desktop? (thankfully Path Finder can bring this back)
16. Why no labels? (thankfully there's Labels X)
17. Why no WindowShade? (thankfully there's WindowShade X)
18. No submenu for System Preferences in Apple Menu to directly access Preference Panes (thankfully there's FruitMenu and many other 3rd-party add-ons that bring this back)
19. Apple Menu not customizable (again, thankfully there's FruitMenu)
20. No list of open applications like the old Application Menu to quickly switch active application — this is especially helpful if you always use a lot of applications (thankfully there's ASM)
21. Helpful Tooltips not as widely used and as responsive as in Windows
22. No current-path field in Finder windows — can't copy and paste paths to jump to location without 3rd-party add-ons (while you can Shift-Command-G, it's not as user-friendly and doesn't allow you to copy paths)
23. To confuse the new user even further, some features only work in Cocoa applications
24. No central place to cleanly add/remove programs like in Windows (no, opening the Application folder isn't the same)
25. No central place to change file-application associations
26. In Finder, to select a single file in List View (i.e. for deletion) you have to click on the tiny icon — you can't just click on the filename like you can in Mac OS Classic and Windows
27. No image/document preview in Finder windows — Windows 98 and newer have this very nice feature

Sure, for some of the above you can achieve same or similar functionality by using 3rd-party applications or system add-ons (or in a roundabout and/or non-intuitive way) but the 3rd-party add-ons cost money and likely make the system slower and less stable. Bottom line: system needs to be optimized much more and the user interface needs a serious overhaul.

(An aside: This period reminds me of the time Apple just switched to using PowerPC processors and so much was running in emulation — everything was slower on Apple's newest hardware. Applications needed to be rewritten to be "PowerPC native" and the system needed to be optimized much more. The situation only really got better around the time G3-based systems were introduced.)

After many hours of researching and testing (over the past 4 months) dozens of OS X add-ons that improve OS X's usability, here's my list of the best of them:

DiskSpy Solid ($5.00) - indicates network and hard disk activity, very helpful for troubleshooting

WindowShade X ($7.00) - brings back Mac OS Classic Window Shade functionality

Labels X ($7.00) - brings back Mac OS Classic file/folder (color) labeling

FruitMenu ($7.00) - brings back customizable Apple Menu functionality, submenus for System Preferences (and more)

Show Desktop ($5.00 donationware) - hides all open windows to show desktop (like 'Show Desktop' QuickLaunch item in Windows Taskbar)

Keyboard Maestro (Lite version free, regular version $20.00) - define keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys) for hiding all open applications, quitting all applications, activating a specific application, reconfigure Command-N for New Folder in Finder, and much more including program switcher and clipboard switcher

USB Overdrive X ($20 shareware) - allows you to use any USB mouse with scrollwheel and right-button contextual-menu functionality (trackball, joystick, and gamepad support as well)

ASM ($15 shareware) - brings back Mac OS Classic application switcher menu (shows current application and allows switch to another open application from menu list)

wClock (donationware) - simple calendar in menubar

FileXaminer ($10.00) - better Finder "Get Info" (shows number of items in folder, edit file Type/Creator codes, permissions (and more)

111 new photos

Today I put up 111 new photos (in 4 new albums) in our Gallery section. Spent several hours late last night selecting those photos from probably 400-500 photos. By the way, I think I'll stick to using the term "photos", instead of "pictures", when referring to my digital photos. (Yes, silly, I know!) I still need to get that video I mentioned up... Need to do that AVI to QuickTime MOV conversion. Ah, probably tomorrow!

No time to sort through pictures

It's late Sunday evening now and I haven't gotten around to sorting through our latest pictures yet — around 250 of them. I wish the software would make it easier to help me mark the best pictures and then copy them into a separate folder so that I can downsample them using my Photoshop droplet. I use the ImageBrowser software that came with my Canon PowerShot G1 camera which is good in some areas and bad in others. ImageBuddy for Mac OS X and 9 has a neat grading system but when I tried it, importing pictures was slow (and why can't I just select a folder to work from?). It certainly shows some promise though. I do hope to get around to adding more photos to our Gallery section within the next few days.

By the way, I think I'm going to start to use the term "pictures" instead of "photos" when referring to pictures taken by my digital camera since the images are not actually recorded on light-sensitive photographic paper like traditional photographs are. "Digital photos" sounds okay though but it's too long. Still, "photos" implies a picture taken from a camera and not just a drawing or something like that. Hmmm... well, I guess I'm still undecided. What do you think?

Added Search and Revamp to Come

Shortly after upgrading Movable Type to 2.51 I was able to quickly add a search function (see down below to the right) by cutting and pasting the following code into my Main Index template:

<form method="get" action="<$MTCGIPath$><$MTSearchScript$>">
<input type="hidden" name="IncludeBlogs" value="<$MTBlogID$>" />
<label for="search" accesskey="4">Search this site:</label><br />
<input id="search" name="search" size="20" /><br />
<input type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

I also plan on revamping this layout which has never displayed properly on a Windows PC. Actually, it only works as I had planned on a Mac in Internet Explorer. On a PC, section borders don't align and my headings on the right lose their left border and margin. (If you're using a PC, here is what it's supposed to look like.)

I do most of my entries on an Apple PowerBook G4 laptop but I'm on my desktop PC now and I can see a huge difference in the colors as well. For instance, on my PowerBook the red photo in my masthead above closely matches the "thetoms" text but on my PC the photo is brighter and too saturated. I think the main reason for such a big difference in color is the display. Laptop screens in general are not as bright as desktop displays (both LCD and CRT types) and as a result colors are muted quite a bit. I noticed this before when I hooked up my PowerBook to my Sony LCD display — the external screen was much brighter with more contrast and the colors were much richer. When I redo my template, I'm going to be sure I use a desktop display. And I'll test the whole thing out on my PC as well!

I should add that sooner rather than later would be a good time for me to update my layout and templates since I've just refreshed my knowledge of HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) from a project I'm in the middle of working on — updating http://www.bbdo.com.hk with our new logo and corporate identity. To ensure compliance with our new corporate identity guidelines, I copied http://logo.bbdo.com (our new corporate identity site) almost exactly (coding is different though)!

Catching up

I've lots of catching up to do here. Got loads of digital photos I still need to sort through before I can create more albums. It's the sorting and selecting that takes so much time. I've been much busier at work so that's part of the reason for the lack of new content. It's been a long week (TGIF!) and I'm pretty tired so I probably won't get around to more of this until tomorrow.

Biggest Justin news of late: one of his teeth (lower central incisor, we think) has just surfaced.

Sadly he's not as "talkative" as he was a week or so ago. Is it because of his tooth?

Got a great Justin video clip that I'm going to put up tomorrow. Need to convert it to progressive QuickTime format first (from the original AVI format). Will use Discreet's Cleaner to do that. I've already converted to Microsoft's WMV format for emailing to my folks (Windows users). Conversion brought the file size down from 5.1MB (AVI) to 1.7MB (WMV) without degrading quality much.