Discrete Cosine

Moving Along

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 12:12:50 -0600

After many years on UThink, this blog now lives at www.discretecosine.com. And it's semi-active again!...

An introduction to reverse engineering

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 14:49:30 -0600

(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....

A nice comparison of mics

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 13:08:29 -0600

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...

Presentation on the HTML5 video tag

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 12:41:47 -0600

A few weeks back, I was given the opportunity to present at MinneWebcon. My talk, " will be your friend" focused on the legal issues and implementation possibilities surrounding the HTML5 video tag. I've put my slides online, if...

NAB 2010 wrapup

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 10:48:11 -0600

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...

CaptionManager - easily add and remove captions from QT movies

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 10:24:36 -0600

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...

Sony Launches Less Useful Z5U

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:25:40 -0600

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...

ClipWrap 2.0 brings AVCHD support

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:59:34 -0600

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....

XDCam EX gets some friends

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:10:19 -0600

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...

Podcast Producer 2 tip - running xgrid jobs as logged in user

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:56:42 -0600

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...

Why iFrame is a good idea

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:18:03 -0600

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...

The other shoe drops

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 15:52:26 -0600

Sure enough, Apple has announced iMovie 8.0.5 with support for the iFrame format. I win the prize!...

New Sanyo cameras have editing in mind

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:28:38 -0600

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 -...

Quicktime Eats Cookies

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 22:33:09 -0600

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...

Podcast Producer 2 REST api

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:19:40 -0600

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...