http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/ Video technology news, reviews and opinions en-us 2012-12-07T12:12:50-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/380078.html After many years on UThink, this blog now lives at www.discretecosine.com. And it's semi-active again!... 2012-12-07T12:12:50-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/270299.html (This blog is still in hibernation, but I needed somewhere to post this) Reverse engineering is one of those wonderful topics, covering everything from simple "guess how this program works" problem solving, to poking at silicon with scanning electron microscopes.... 2011-01-21T14:49:30-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/236746.html DVEStore has done a great comparison of different types of microphones on video. Audio is a black art, and folks rarely put in the time to do A/B/C comparisons. We tend to just default to a set of mics... News 2010-06-03T13:08:29-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/232797.html 2010-04-29T12:41:47-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/229430.html Another year of NAB has come and gone. Making it out of Vegas with some remaining faith in humanity seems like a successful outcome. So, anything worth talking about at the show? First off, there's 3d. 3D is The... News 2010-04-15T10:48:11-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/219906.html Cough. Yeah. Remember this blog? Right then. Here's a new little app to add and remove caption tracks (SCC files) from Quicktime files. In theory you can do this with Quicktime Pro, but it doesn't seem to work so... News 2010-02-18T10:24:36-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/205521.html Sony today announced the NXCAM, an AVCHD-based "professional" camera which bears a striking resemblance to the EX1 and Z5U. You get 1080p exmor CMOS chips (presumably 1/3"?) and records AVCHD to the highly popular (sarcasm) Memory Stick media. Pricing... News 2009-11-18T12:25:40-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/199947.html Do you love AVCHD, but hate the long, disk consuming transcodes? Well, ClipWrap 2.0 is here, and it lets you turn your AVCHD mts files into Quicktime compatible mov files, with no transcoding, and no generation loss. Dig it.... News 2009-10-26T14:59:34-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/199100.html Sony has announced a couple new additions to the XDCamEX family - the PMW-350 and the PMW-EX1R. The 350 is a shouldermount camera with interchangeable lenses and 2/3" chips. That puts it somewhere between the 1/2" PDW-F355 and the... News 2009-10-21T15:10:19-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/198479.html So I've been playing with an interesting "feature" in PCP2 - the "chapterize" command generates different results when it can talk to the window server versus when it can't. In my case, it generates much better results in the... 2009-10-19T15:56:42-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/197899.html I've seen some hilariously uninformed posts about the new Apple iFrame specification. Let me take a minute to explain what it actually is. First off, as opposed to what the fellow in the Washington Post writes, it's not really... News 2009-10-15T10:18:03-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/197470.html Sure enough, Apple has announced iMovie 8.0.5 with support for the iFrame format. I win the prize!... News 2009-10-13T15:52:26-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/197411.html Sanyo has announced some 'A' revisions to their existing FH1 and HD2000 cameras, which add a new "iFrame" mode. It appears this is an i-frame only h264 mode, at a reduced 960x540 resolution. It's a very interesting idea -... News 2009-10-13T12:28:38-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/191975.html It appears that when embedding Quicktime in a webpage, being viewed by Safari 4 in Snow Leopard, Quicktime no longer passes cookies to the server. So, if you're having the Quicktime plugin load a file that uses cookie data to... 2009-09-19T22:33:09-06:00 http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/discretecosine/190610.html I've been working on documenting the REST api that PCP2 uses for client server communication as part of a new project. I thought it might be useful to other folks. Consider this a work in progress - I've only... 2009-09-11T10:19:40-06:00