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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Spokane Public Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week 07/19/2006 |
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Maybe I
should start calling my computer Hollywood, because now it’s making
movies I
recently made a trip to Mississippi to do research for a music special I’m
producing for KPBX on the great bluesman Mississippi John Hurt, and to play
at his music festival in Avalon, Ms. I figured
initially that I’d need a camera, a movie camera, and a voice recorder
for my trip, and I was dreading having to pack all that equipment as I wanted
to travel as lightly as possible. Way way back in the early 90’s I had bought a Canon
Digital camcorder for my business that had some of the earliest computer
graphics effects built in. It came in a carrying case which weighed about 12
pounds, and was big and bulky. It cost about $ 3500. It took pretty good
pictures with sound and I could transfer everything I shot down to video
tape. A few
years later I bought one of the earliest Intel digital cameras at Costco for
a couple hundred dollars, that could shoot pictures in 640X480 resolution, and even take 10 second movies without
sound. I’ve used this camera to the present day for web graphics, as
any picture on the web is supposed to be as small as possible. So I
started doing research on modern cameras and things, and finally came up with
a solution so small it’s incredible. I ended up buying a Samsung I6 PMP
– you see it’s not called a camera anymore. It’s
a personal media player, which means it’s a 6 megapixel camera, a
digital camcorder that takes movies you can download to your computer for
editing, it’s a voice recorder, an MP3 player so you can download tunes
to, a Media player which means you can copy movies off the internet and
download them to it, and it’s also an ocr
scanner which means you can take a picture of a page of text, and this
device’s software will convert it from a picture to a true editable
text file. The price
with an extra one gigabyte memory chip I bought for it was $ 350. It’s incredible that a tiny
device like this can do so many things – and I do mean tiny. It weighs
6 ounces, and is smaller than a pack of cigarettes – truly a James Bond
device. So I used
this single tiny device in Mississippi to take hundred of pictures, and to
make several performance and interview videos. I
decided to videorecord all my interviews rather
than just voice record them. I set the
default video picture resolution down to one megapixel,
and at this resolution with the memory card I would take over 5000
pictures. In the movie mode it
shoots105 minutes at 640X480 resolution with sound and saves it as an
mpeg4. Just to be safe when I was
down there, I uploaded all my pictures and moves to my website. When I
got home I copied all my pictures and movies to my computer, and started
editing. I realized right away I need some good movie editing software, and I
found it right on my computer in the form of Windows Moviemaker, which comes
with Windows xp. This easy
to learn free software program comes with editing capability, meaning you can
chop or split video parts, add special effects, transition fades, and titles
and a sound track. Just amazing – and it’s free
!! All you have to do is pay over a thousand dollars for a computer
that has the horsepower to run the program. I’ve
put an example of the movies I’ve shot on my Raw Bytes website along with this
transcript, and I’m heavily involved in learning more about this new
generation of camera devices and the art of moviemaking. Only problem is
– now my computer has a swelled head and thinks it’s a big shot
Hollywood producer. For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2006 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html PO Box 31522 Spokane, Wa 99223-1522 (509)624-7230 |
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