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I mentioned some of the "features" of the room I stayed at in Missouri when I went to my uncle's wedding. I thought I might show you a few of them.
Who needs little bars of soap...
When you can have a "soap system"?
Ducks, the new "high art".
Quail, the other form of "high art".
Fake plastic plant #1
Fake plastic plants #2 and #3
Obviously I was spoiled by my stay in Las Vegas.
I wrote this on:
Friday, May 28, 2004 - 10:05pm (Central Time)
In all likelyhood, you won't be able to read this until I get back to Los Angeles. This place is literally in the middle of nowhere. There's no internet access here as far as I can tell. Though there is a port on the phone that looks like I might be able to plug a modem into. But since I don't have dialup access that's not helping me. Maybe my dad has dialup. I might be able to post this stuff from his computer.
I can't get service on my cell phone. (In fact my cousin is really pissed about that because her husband is in boot camp. He can only call her one day a week for 10 minutes and she probably won't be able to receive his call.) There is not just one, but three plastic plants in my tiny little room. And I have pictures of ducks and quail adorning the walls.
You know how you go into any hotel room anywhere and there are little individually wrapped soaps, little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and the little shower cap? Not here. None of it. In fact the only soap I have in my room is one of those dispensers of liquid soap mounted to the wall like you get in gas station bathrooms.
It's definitely an unusual place. When I checked in, I had to pay my entire bill up front. Someone please tell me if I'm crazy for thinking this is strange. As far as I've ever experienced, you check into a hotel and give them a credit card for security. They check to make sure that you can actually pay to stay there. But you don't settle the bill until you check out. Not here. Money up front.
The few things that have been going my way so far are the travel times. The flight to Memphis was only 3.5 hours. (I forgot about figuring in the timezone difference.) And the drive to Missouri was also 3.5 hours. So that was a nice change from what I was expecting.
Well, I am completely wiped out. It's 10pm here. Only 8pm on the West Coast but all this traveling left me tired. I think I'll try to read. I'm betting I get through about 4 pages before I fall asleep.
Tomorrow morning I'm getting up quite early to go to the airport. I'm flying to Memphis, TN for my uncle's wedding. The 5 hour flight to Memphis isn't the truly fun part though. The truly fun part is the 4 hour drive I have to make after the 5 hour flight to get into the remote part of Missouri where this is actually taking place. In fact I'm staying at a hotel that is half-an-hour drive from the place where the wedding is being held because that's the closest hotel.
I have to say that I like living in the "big city". Or at least in a suburb of it. I don't get this whole living out in the middle of nowhere business.
A couple of years ago my dad gave me a little hand-held GPS for Christmas. He also gave me some mapping / route planning software that interfaces with it. It's only Windows unfortunately which means I have to fire up the ol' Virtual PC to do things and use a USB to Serial Port adapter to download the information to the GPS but I'm thinking it's going to save my butt on this drive.
I'm trying to figure out the best route to take. The automatic one it's calculated is basically the same one I got from Yahoo Maps. It's a ton of little State and US Highways. 194 miles: 3 hours, 42 minutes. Or there's the way that I was told in the directions, I-55 North to US 60 East. 246 miles: 3 hours, 55 minutes.
Fifty miles farther but only 13 minutes longer. One major freeway and one major highway or the equivalent of the back roads?
When I was a junior in high school we had to read Steinbeck's "Travels With Charley" and Least Heat-Moon's "Blue Highways". I liked "TWC" but I fell in love with "Blue Highways". There's something romantic about just getting up and going. Experiencing real life as it happens, not loading up your truck with every amenity possible.
Of course at this point I'm just trying to get in and out, and not get lost. Plus I've been informed that I'm expected to be at the 6pm dinner. So it'll probably end up being the longer but more sure route.
Whatever I choose, I don't really know what the internet situation is going to be like when I get there. I have a cable modem at my place through the local cable company so I don't have dial-up any more. (When I first got it, Earthlink provided the internet layer, so I could use their dial-up. But now Charter is in control.) When I went to Las Vegas last month I had everything I needed right in my room. Broadband internet access and a printer to plug into. I just don't know about Small Town, Missouri. Needless to say, there might not be any updates until I get back to Los Angeles on Sunday night.
The things we do for family.
Well the third season of "Star Trek: Enterprise" has come to an end and we're left wondering how Captain Archer escaped from the exploding Xindi weapon and wound up on what is apparantly 1940s Earth with an alien dressed up as a Nazi. That one came out completely from left field. Hopefully it'll be a cool and interesting little mystery to solve at the start of Season 4.
I was a bit disappointed to see yet another "action hero outruns the big explosion" scene. Please. This has to stop. I can't even begin to count the number of movies and TV shows this is in. No more. Diving for cover: fine. Ducking around a corner or behind a solid object: fine. Running faster than an enormous fireball and shockwave: completely stupid and so over used that people should be ashamed to even think of including it in a storyline.
Despite my aversion to that particular cliche, I'd rather watch an episode of any flavor of Star Trek then pretty much anything else on TV. Reality shows? Yeah, right. Sitcoms? No thanks.
"Enterprise" can't hold a candle to the all-time best Star Trek series ever, "Deep Space Nine", but it's still pretty good. They need more Jeffrey Combs though. I don't care if he comes shows up playing Herbert West, Re-Animator. (Actually that might be kind of cool.) He was awesome as Inspector Brunt and Weyoun on "DS9". He's awesome as Shran. We just need more.
Now I did notice a weird slip. Or maybe it's not so weird. Maybe it's a hint of what's to come next season. When T'Pol made her entry in the Starlog as Acting Captain, she said the year was 2152. Not 2154 like it's been all season long. Of course this could point to yet another reset button time traveling thing. And what a struggling show does not need is a "the whole last season was just a dream" story--or in this case meant nothing because time traveling made sure that whole thing never happened.
Anyway, it's was a pretty cool show though. It'll be on again Sunday night if you missed it tonight. You can even catch up what happened this season over at the official Star Trek website.
I've picked up some work helping finish up a movie that'll be a big summer release in July. Today I was conforming predubs, which is quite cool for me. I need to spend more time editing. My official title (not on this show, I'm just helping out on it) is First Assistant Sound Editor. You can think of me as the general manager of a store, while the Supervising Sound Editor is the owner. Or in the way I prefer to think of it: I'm Commander Riker to Cameron's Captain Picard. Basically I lead the away team missions and look quite dashing in my beard from Season 2 on.
Maybe someday I'll be able to say more stuff about movies I'm working on, while I'm working on them. But not today. Today as most days I'm just a little cog in a very large wheel. Don't get me wrong, I love the work I do. Playing with computers all day long. Recording cool sounds and doing weird stuff to them with effect processing units and special software. I find it fun.
It isn't really all that glamorous though. I was just talking to a friend about this yesterday. There is the mystique about this town that I've noticed when talking with people from other places--like when I'm visiting my family in Boston. "Oh! You work in Hollywood! How exciting!" is a typical kind of response I get from people. And yes, it's exciting but not in the way people would think. It's exciting because I'm doing what I love to do. It would be the same for someone who loves teaching, or accounting, or whatever career they really get into. It's not like I hang out with Steven Spielberg all day and tell him how his next movie should feature a monkey and a robot battling to the death on distant planet run by the decendents of ancient ninjas who were abducted by aliens a thousand years ago. (Though now that I think about it, that would be pretty sweet.)
Occasionally I meet actors when they come to a stage to record ADR if I'm not busy with something else. But that's usually nothing more than a "Hello, nice to meet you." Perhaps a handshake. When I worked on "Down With Love" I was able to go up to Renee Zellweger and after the the customary, "Nice to meet you," I did get in a "Could you sign this please." But only because she needed to sign her Exhibit G so that she could get paid. (And actually it was Sarah Paulson playing Vikki Hiller who I found so enchanting on that picture. Shaking hands with her was like a dream come true. Sarah, if you ever happen to read this, go ahead and click on that "Email Me" link in the corner.)
Mostly it's about playing with computers. And collecting lots of electronic gear. It's definitely a job for boys who like toys. (Or girls. Girls who like toys, I mean. Sexual preference has very little bearing on job satisfaction in the sound industry.)
This just in from Reuters:
Homer's ancient Greek poem "The Iliad," ... has been compressed for a new generation too lazy to see the film let alone read....Book Two is reduced to just 24 words of 'messenger speak', losing some of the lyricism of the original....
The translation, designed to publicize Microsoft's messenger product, is not written in Homer's dactylic hexameters but it does use 'emoticons' -- little faces or images -- to emphasize intense moments.
In other news:
Warner Brothers has just admitted that this "emoticon" version was the basis for its movie, "Troy".
Both Wednesday and Thursday night I saw Sleater-Kinney play El Rey here in Los Angeles. (I've mentioned this already.) They are such a great band. There had been some talk on the wordsandguitar mailing list that someone had recorded the Wednesday show. This morning I decided to check it out.
For those who aren't in the know, the SK Depot is an FTP site with lots of live material from Sleater-Kinney. (If you want to check it out, I suggest you take a look at the mailing list for the latest address, username and password. It changes occasionally.) So I popped in over there and downloaded the show. I noticed that there were a lot of shows in a .shn format. I wasn't familiar with it so I decided to do some research.
Now, hours later I gotten into the audiophile groove.
After I wrote my initial analysis of Apple's Lossless Codec, I got a lot of traffic from websites like Furthur Network and the Grateful Dead mailing list. I didn't investigate things too far then, but now I kind wish I'd looked into it more since today I wound up on many of those sites that linked to me.
There seems to be three main lossless audio codecs that are the most popular: FLAC, Shorten (.shn), and APE. I'm sure there are many others, including Apple's, but those are the ones that I encountered the most in my research today. There are also lots of other articles, webpages and whole websites dedicated to these things. I'm going to focus on the Macintosh OS X side of things. Though others might find a few things interesting.
If you encounter files in any of these formats you need to know how to deal with them. (As a side note: audio files compressed with a lossless codec are really good. They're larger than MP3s but they sound exactly the same as the CD, DAT, or other media they were made from.)
iTunes only supports Apple's Lossless encoder, so if you want to play the files you'll need MacAmp Lite X. Unfortunately development on this program stopped years ago. Fortunately Josh over at The Arctic Lounge has archived the last versions of MacAmp Lite X including the FLAC and Shorten plug-ins.
Maybe you don't want to listen to those files in MacAmp. Maybe you want to listen to them in iTunes or your iPod. Then you'll have to convert them. Scott Brown has written a great GUI for the command line versions of the FLAC, Shorten, and APE converters called xACT. With this you can easily decode your files into AIFFs or WAVs. And from there you can make MP3s, AACs, or Apple Lossless Files in iTunes. (Set the encoder you want to use in the "Importing" section of the Preferences. Highlight the AIFF or WAV files to convert and select "Convert Selection" from the Advanced menu.)
Another side note: there are many different methods for converting CDs or AIFFs or other audio into MP3s. Many people consider the LAME encoder to be the absolute best. This is not the encoder that Apple uses in iTunes. Blacktree has released their iTunes-LAME Encoder for those of you who want the best sounding audio possible in a lossy format.
I downloaded several lossless Sleater-Kinney shows from the Depot and converted them to Apple's Lossless format so that I could listen to them on my iPod. Here are some of the statistics:
Los Angeles, CA 05-19-2004 - 70:24
712.3 MB AIFF / 372.2 MB SHN / 337.9 MB ALC (1 / 0.52 / 0.47)
Berkeley, CA 05-31-1997 - 40:15
407.1 MB AIFF / 216.5 MB FLAC / 200.5 MB ALC (1 / 0.53 / 0.49)
San Francisco, CA 08-07-1998 - 57:08
578 MB AIFF / 338.3 MB FLAC / 339.1 MB ALC (1 / 0.59 / 0.59)
San Francisco, CA 07-01-1999 - 73:17
741.7 MB AIFF / 413 MB FLAC / 416.6 MB ALC (1 / 0.56 / 0.56)
Cambridge, MA 05-17-2000 - 76:51
777.4 MB AIFF / 505.1 MB FLAC / 508.7 ALC (1 / 0.65 / 0.65)
This shows several important things.
And now the cool part...
There's tons of lossless audio out there on the net for you to download. I'm not talking about Kazaa or other sharing networks where you are illegally downloading copyrighted material from other people's computers. I'm talking about live concert recordings (bootlegs) of bands that don't mind fans sharing the love. Of course a lot of it is jam bands: Grateful Dead, Phish, Rusted Root, Widespread Panic, and the like. You need to look around a bit more to find other bands, but it's there. Have fun with it.
Resources:
Dear Pixies,
Please play a concert in Los Angeles. (Coachella and Lollapalooza don't count.) I think you are the coolest band ever. And you are totally sweet. If you do this I will be your best friend.
Thanks,
Jon
Last night I was able to make it to the Sleater Kinney show at El Rey. It was very cool. Quasi opened for them. Yes, Janet is doing double-duty on drums for both bands. This show is part of their "mini" tour before they go into the studio to record their next album.
They tried out 4 new songs at the show and I have to say, Sleater Kinney has really grown up. They've always shown a talent as very strong songwriters. But gone are the days are the sweetly simple tunes like "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone." They have been moving more and more in this direction with every album. The new songs are extremely musically complex with lots of different changes in tempo and time signature throughout.
It's great to see a band mature so nicely. As my friend, Dave, remarked at the show. "The Sleater Kinney audience isn't the same as I used to see. There's a lot of guys hanging out here." It's true. They're not the riot grrl band they started out as. They are now politically and socially minded indie rockstars. They still have an important message in many of their songs. It's just aimed at a larger audience.
You can check out their tour diary on their website. Thankfully I get to see them again tonight.
Let me tell you a little story:
Cameron and I have offices on the Fox Studios lot in Century City. That's where we do our sound work. We are in one of the older buildings. If you look at early pictures of the studio from the 1930s you can see our building.
When we moved in in 2002, our building definitely needed some work. We spent time cleaning things up but it still wasn't great. Thankfully our amazing building manager, Mike, came up with some money to fix the place up and in July 2003, we moved out of our rooms while the entire building was redone. New carpet. New paint. New bathroom. It's looks pretty sharp now.
Cameron and I temporarily shared a large office in another building for the few weeks it took the workers to finish the job.
Let me just make a side note here that Fox Studios is home to 20th Century Fox FIlm Studios, Fox Television, Fox Home Entertainment, and the various Fox Cable News and Sports channels. Because of this many production companies have offices on the lot: Ten Thirteen Productions you might remember from "The X-Files", Steven Bochco who created "NYPD Blue", and Joss Whedon's company, Mutant Enemy, that brought us "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and "Angel".
Now back to our story...
In a drawer in a desk in the room that Cameron and I shared, I found these. And they're awesome:
Thank you, Angelia, for your "500 Reasons I'm A B/A Shipper [Buffy/Angel Relationshipper] And Always Will Be."
Today was a very busy day at work. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother to plan things out ahead of time. It always changes. Of course I'd rather be organized about my job and have to modify my plans, then rely on total chaos. Chaos theory makes good quirky movie characters as played by Jeff Goldblum. It's makes real life a pain in the ass if you have deal with it.
Yesterday the plan was that we had to turn over our work by early Saturday morning for a screening on Monday. About lunch time today we found out that now the screening is Friday so the editorial is due Thursday at noon. Ouch.
Cameron's been cutting away like a mad man. I got all those new sound effects we recorded yesterday mastered and added into the library. They worked out great with this picture. I spent a large chunk of the day today auditioning sound from the library ahead of Cameron and handing him lists so that by the time he got to areas he needed to cut, I had already narrowed things down for him. Trying to speed this whole process up.
Tomorrow we're in early for more. I hope I don't have to miss the Sleater Kinney show tomorrow night.
In celebration of my going back to work, I'm going to let you in on a little secret...
I'm on the "S.W.A.T." DVD. Yeah, you know the movie. Colin Farrell, Sam Jackson & LL Cool J. You can see me out in the desert recording guns for the movie.
That little featurette tells you a little bit about what we do. Plus there's some cool scene breakdowns where you can listen to how we divide up the sounds for predubbing. (It'll work in stereo, but a 5.1 speaker setup really shows off our stuff.)
I had my first day back at work today. It was exhausting. Not that a ton of stuff happened. The first day after a chunk of time off is always tough. Inevitably during my free time I slip in the habit of staying up as late as I want and sleeping until whenever I feel like getting out of bed. When I'm working I usually follow a strict regemin of getting up at 6am and going to bed somewhere between 10pm and 11pm. These two schedules clash hard those first few days back to work.
We spent a couple hours in a spotting session for the movie we're working on. The picture editor wants us to punch up the sound a bit before he shows the cut to the director on Monday. So a lot of it was fast forward through sections. "This is fine. Our temp FX are working here." That kind of thing. Then there'd be moments like, "This car chase is ok, but it's not great. See if you can help it a bit."
It's a 7 reel show right now. Typically reels are no more than 20 minutes long. Most dramatic features are 6 reels at release and most comedies are 5. It's not uncommon early on for a show to be a little long while they figure out what's working and what's not.
I got the videotapes and loaded the first 4 reels in the computer. And I converted the OMF exports of the editor's audio tracks to Pro Tools sessions. (Tomorrow morning I'll have to finish loading the other videos.)
We set up a Pro Tools system at Cameron's house several months ago, and moved certain things from the office there because we weren't working for awhile. We knew we had to bring some of that back to get this job done so we took off about 3pm to go back to his house and gather those drives and CDs up.
We also had to record some sound effects that the editor wanted after the spotting session. So we spent several hours in the afternoon rolling cans along the floor, making hinges squeak, and bumping luggage around on the sidewalk. Tomorrow I'll load that DAT into the computer and master the sound effects we recorded.
It's good to be back, and tomorrow will be fun. After getting all that new material into the computer, my job is to figure out all the backgrounds that are necessary and cut them into place.
I just finished reading "Crossroads of Twilight" by Robert Jordan, the tenth book in his Wheel of Time series. Damn! This series is really good, and there aren't anymore books to read yet. I'm having a hard time figuring out how large it will be by the time he's finally done. At this point it would seem that it could easily reach 20 books. Massive.
Well there is one more book, "New Spring", which came out in hardcover in January. That one is a prequel novel though. I still want to read it, but it takes place 20 years or so before "The Eye Of The World". There was a lot of frustration from readers over Jordan's release of this latest book, and I can understand. He's left nearly every major character in a cliff hanger at the end of "Crossroads" and then he goes and releases a novel that doesn't continue the story.
I'll just have to be patient, but it's difficult. It will very likely be a year before Robert Jordan releases another book. And it could be much longer.
(What can I say? I'm more of an AppleScripter than a programmer.)
I've been playing with the new Movable Type 3. It's pretty great. For those of you who haven't seen this yet, Six Apart has changed their licensing plan for the software from what was announced a few days ago.
Old Plan
New Plan
Plus you can add 1 author and 1 blog to any paid license for $10.
It's pretty friendly now. After seeing this new plan and thinking about it, I've decided to stick with Movable Type. In fact I've already paid for my license. I haven't updated this site yet. I'm testing the new version out in the background first and will bring the new version online when I'm ready.
The whole Export entries and Import entries function works really well. I'm able to work with an exact copy of this site in my test site with those functions. Maybe these functions have always worked well. I don't know. I never had to use them before. I'm impressed that it brings over Comments as well. I'm guessing it would do the same for Trackbacks but no one's ever done a Trackback ping to my site so I don't know.
The new Comment Management is exactly what I was looking for. It makes me very happy.
I'm also glad that they've switched to XHTML. There's actually a few bugs with the default templates. They don't validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I've already put in a report about this to Six Apart along with a couple of other fixes they could do to make it possible to do XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Strict, or XHTML 1.1 right out of the box. All the end user would have to do is put in the appropriate DOCTYPE in the template.
One other important point: they consider a weblog to be the actual site that you're looking at. So if for example you're using another weblog to feed a blog roll to your weblog, that's still only one weblog as far as licensing is concerned. That's very cool of them.
Ok, I'm off to do some more playing. Plus I have to finish reading "Crossroads of Twilight" this weekend. I don't want to be distracted when I go back to work on Monday.
Back to work on Monday. Woohoo! Bad news. We're on a week to week basis. So I've got one week of work guaranteed and we'll just see from there. Hey, work is work. I'm not complaining. And since I can make as much in a week doing sound as I can in a month on the state's unemployment, it'll be a nice little cash influx every once in a while until we can get on another show fulltime.
I wish the unemployed versus employed timing was a little better with this extra super bonus hardware trade-in from Digidesign. The offer ends on June 30. I might have to bite the bullet and bring my Mix Plus up to an HD 2 Accel.
The thing that everyone who has one of these websites was talking about yesterday is the new version of Movable Type. Six Apart, the company that makes the software, unveiled Movable Type 3.0 Developer Edition complete with a new licensing scheme. The uproar began.
There's a few issues here. The first is that Movable Type has sort of been free for personal websites. They strongly encouraged you to donate $20, but basically free. The version was not stripped down in anyway. You could have basically as many blogs as you wanted with as many authors as you wanted all on that one piece of software running on a server. This is no longer the case.
Now they have a licensing plan for personal websites as such:
Now add to this the fact that prior to yesterday, Six Apart always maintained that MT3 would come in a free version and a Pro version. The Pro would obviously have many more features. Based on the information that they now have out about MT3, this no longer seems to be the case.
Many people were using Movable Type to publish many different weblogs with many different authors and now they're seeing that if they want to upgrade they're going to have to pay $100 or more to be able to do the same thing.
I can understand the anger and frustration. But I'm also a firm believer in paying for software. I own two copies of all my software for my two computers. Microsoft Office, Filemaker Pro, Toast, Pro Tools, etc. And having to buy lots of software for Post Production Sound, I definitely know that specialty stuff can be very expensive. Some of these companies might only sell 1000 copies of their software and they have employees to support with that. I've bought several pieces of audio software that are more than $1000 each. That's just the way it goes.
However there is a bit of a personal impact on this new Movable Type development. Literally a month ago I switched this website from iBlog to Movable Type. Right now it's setup with 1 author (me) and 1 blog (this one). Pretty easy. I'm clear to use the free version.
When you're developing changes to your website, really shouldn't play with the site itself. It's better to do a test mock-up and when that is correct, apply the changes to the original site. So you need 1 more blog for testing. 1 author, 2 blogs. Still clear.
Right now I have a fairly basic configuration of my website. I've always planned on adding in more functionality. If you look at a lot of Movable Type tutorials, you'll see that a lot of those say something like, "Make a new blog and delete all the templates." A lot of the ways that people have made Movable Type do what they want is with multiple blogs all being used by the main or actual blog itself. So I can do one of these and still be free.
And then comes in the question of multiple authors. I thought that one day my brother might want to run his own. Or maybe some friends would get together and do something. Or maybe we resurrect Right Turn Clyde. Who knows. The point is that suddenly I'm not sure if 5 weblogs is enough or 6 authors. Yes, it's not now, but do I want to lock myself into a piece of software when I find in 6 months that I need to support 20 authors and suddenly I'm looking at paying $600 for that.
I'm not quite sure what to do. I do know that when I switched to Movable Type, I had to set up a massive redirect page to handle the differences in filenames and directory structures. And that was with a site that got maybe 10 visitors a day and had about 50 entries. Now I'm getting about 40 visitors a day and I'm at nearly 90 entries, and to have to move that to a new system with new filenames and directories is a bit daunting.
I have a few things that I'd really like to be able to do with Movable Type (or with whatever my weblog software finally ends up being).
The first is better integration with BBEdit. If you're a Mac user and you haven't used BBEdit, you're missing out. Big time. (There's a piece of software I can say is completely worth the asking price.) I use BBEdit to write up my entries, check spelling (if I remember), and add all my XHTML markup. Then I copy and paste that into the MT New Entry webpage. It would be nice if it could be a bit more seamless. I already have an AppleScript in mind that would cut down on things a bit but it's not really integration. If anyone knows of something, I'd love to hear about it.
The second is a full comments management page. Having moved from iBlog, I was using Haloscan for comments. They had a page you could log into that showed all comments from all postings. You could make replies right from that page. You could also quickly make changes to many different comments from many different pages. Much easier than the page by page system that's in MT2.6.
The third would be dynamic sections. These could be blogrolls (lists of other blogs you like), books from Amazon, quotes of the day, whatever. But something that's easier to go in a change quickly. Maybe it means more Bookmarklets. I don't know. This is one area in particular where people used separate blogs to make it easier to update content.
And the fourth thing I would like to see is static pages. It's great that MT makes all this dynamic updating and commenting easy, but everyone needs static pages too. Again, people got around this with separate blogs, and again it starts cutting into the chance of a free MT3.
Maybe my hopes and desires are in the new Movable Type 3. I haven't downloaded it and tried it out. But another huge thing that's missing is the "Here's what's new in version 3" page that every other software publisher would have up. If Six Apart had that, I might know the answer to my question.
Update:
It seems that they do have a "What's New" page. It's just buried under Support instead of a big shiny link on the main page. According the the "What's New" page, they do have the comment management page I'm looking for. Yay! Not sure about the rest yet. (And I know that BBEdit integration really doesn't have anything to do with Six Apart themselves. I'd just like to see it.)
I stumbled across this very interesting weblog written by a female soldier in Iraq. It's cool to find someone in an extraordinary situation doing something that many of us would have trouble imagining ourselves doing, and yet talking about life in a very ordinary way.
It reminds you that we're all people--whether we're soldiers or Iraqi civilians or people back home reading about stuff online. We all have similar hopes and dreams. We all have things that annoy us or make us afraid. We're not all riding old ladies like donkeys or chopping people's heads off. Most of us are just regular people trying to live our lives the best we can.
Plus she's a Buffy fan! (Did I mention that I saw Sarah Michelle Gellar and her husband when I went to see "Hellboy"? They were sitting a few rows behind me.)
Some time around third grade, probably about 1983, I had my first encounter with Dungeons & Dragons. My friend Dave, his older brother John, and I would play it after school with some of the other kids in the neighborhood. I still remember the day my mom took me to the local hobby shop and I bought my very own copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set in the red box. John was the person who introduced me to J.R.R. Tolkien, and that year I read "The Hobbit" for the first time. We used to spend hours making characters--using the lists in the back of "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Silmarillion" for names--and playing adventures.
My brother and I had a babysitter, Tom, the one who first introduced me to MTV, who was in high school. He played but decided he was getting a bit old for the game so he sold me his copies of the original Dungeon Masters Guide, Players Handbook, and Monster Manual for $10. (In fact they're still packed away in a box in my mom's attic. Very recently she called and said, "I have this box of D&D stuff here. Can I get rid of it?" I practically choked and said, "No, I'll get it next time I'm back east.")
My mom was never very comfortable with me playing the game. At the time it was very much in the news as a stepping stone for kids to get into Satanism and eventually killing themselves. She had the book "Mazes and Monsters" in her room and at one point she even sat me down to watch the TV movie. Even a few years later when I started to get more into music and starting listening to bands like Motley Crue on the radio, she would leave newspaper clippings on my desk about kids who'd commited suicide supposedly because they listened to too much heavy metal or played a Judas Priest record backwards or some other nonsense.
She never stopped me from playing but we did have to have our "talks" every once in a while to make sure I was never taking things too far. I always told her that it was a learning experience because it taught good math skills. It wasn't much fun if you couldn't add up a bunch of numbers or figure out percentages in your head quickly. "Ok, the orc is attacking you and... uh... 2 and uh... rolled a 13... uh..."
Eventually I got too old for the game myself. Not in my heart really. But junior high is a tough time for anyone, and playing D&D with nerds was a good way to get beaten up. A lot. Thankfully SSI released their first gold box Dungeons & Dragons computer game "Pool of Radiance" about the same time. And that's when I switched from being a pen and paper player to a computer player. I've played pretty much every single D&D computer game that's come out since 1988, and a lot of other role playing games as well. (Knights of the Old Republic, totally sweet.)
Recently I've thought more about my time with D&D, and the controversies surrounding it, and was it really good at teaching math? A lot of it is because my friend Cameron has a son who's now 11. A few years ago he was way into Pokemon. Not too long ago it was Yu-Gi-Oh. And now he's been showing me websites with a Superhero action figure game. It made me think about the huge scare that tended to surround Dungeons & Dragons. Yu-Gi-Oh and these other battling monster games are not that different on a basic level. And yet they have mainstream acceptance. The main difference with D&D, at least the way that I see it, is that it is all about story telling, creative immersion, and most importantly about choices of morality. Those kinds of things are probably what really scared people, even if they hid behind denouncements of Satanism. (I found a lot of Christian websites talking about the evils of D&D while looking up links for this post.)
There's a Kikkoman Soy Sauce commercial on TV here in the US which is totally insane. A mother yells "Kids! Dinner!" and they all come running from where ever they are playing. Except it's some bizarro "Crouching Tiger" thing where they run across tree tops. It can't hold a candle to this one. (Thanks to Neil Gaiman for pointing it out.)
And speaking of bizarro... I was kind of hoping this guy was doing an absurdist website--a Real Ultimate Power ninja kind of thing. Unfortunately the more I read, the more I think he's just crazy.
Getting off with Game Controllers. I'm not sure what else to say. How come I never thought about this with the rumble packs and whatnot?
Since I haven't been working for the past few months, I've been spending much more time outdoors than I usually do. It mostly consists of reading books in a park, but it is still outdoors. So I have managed to develop somewhat of a tan. Considering my typical color is very white--"clear" might be the appropriate word--I consider myself to be quite tan right now.
So today I go over to a friend's house to watch the Laker game out at his pool. There's a bunch of people over. Drinks. Sandwiches. And the game. The whole thing. I don't really care to watch the game but it's fun to spend time with friends. I get there just as half-time ends and pull out my book to read while everyone else cheers. I'm thinking to myself, "It's no big deal. I'm tan. I don't need to worry so much about the sun."
Now it's few hours later. I'm back home. Writing this. Looking at my bright red arms and legs, saying to myself, "When will I ever learn?"
I finished up book 7 of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, "A Crown of Swords", and started on book 8.
I've said it before, but I'll say it again: this series is amazing. If you are a fan of fantasy your should read these books.
My only disappointment is that from what I've read of reviews from other people, the series isn't done yet. There are 10 books in the Wheel of Time. I'm clipping along at a nice pace and I figure that I should have them all done by about the beginning of June. I'll have read them all one right after another. It will be disappointing to then have to wait I don't know how many years for the next book to come out.
Today was Dana's birthday. For those of you who don't know, Dana is Cameron's wife. And for those of you who don't know who Cameron is, we work together doing sound. For the past several years we've always gone to Little Tony's, a local pizza place with red-and-white checked table cloths on the tables, for Dana's birthday.
This year had to be a little different. She likes to watch her TV and if there's one show that she would call her favorite, it would be "Friends". So this year her birthday consisted of take-out from Little Tony's and the series finale of "Friends". I can't say that I've ever really watched the show to any extent, so the finale didn't really mean much to me.
I gave Dana the complete series of "Freaks and Geeks" on DVD. All 18 episodes. We were both big fans of that show and very sad to see it go off the air. Of course after the big finale we had to put on the Halloween episode of "Freaks and Geeks". Bill dressing up as the Bionic Woman. Classic.
What? I can't hear you. Let me switch the phone to my bionic ear.
That show described my life in junior high and high school so well. Sam being a total awkward geek. Lindsay being really smart but wanting to hang out with the cool kids. Actually if you want to read a great book, Paul Feig, the creator of the show, wrote about his life growing up in "Kick Me: Adventures In Adolescence." You can find out what actually happened to Paul when he dressed up as a woman for Halloween. Or the time he thought everyone should know his dad was a war hero so he hung a captured Nazi flag in the front window. Hilarious stuff. (Not that Nazis are funny. Life isn't quite "Hogan's Heros." But I could definitely relate to the extreme mortification he always seemed to put himself through.)
Today I spent several hours teaching a friend Pro Tools 101. It was an unusual experience for me. I have taught people things before. My work study job through college was working in the various computer labs around campus teaching people how to use software they didn't know, and also doing telephone tech support. I had a lot of training in how to take a problem, break it down, and work through it in a logical progression. Plus I taught a series of classes on Pro Tools at AFI on three different school years. Teaching is something I'm some what familiar with.
This situation seemed different, at least to me. My friend has many more years in the sound business than I do. He works as a mixer. You can use Pro Tools to mix, but it's primary function, at least in Hollywood, is as an editorial system. My friend has a strong understanding of how post-sound works but we were dealing with the other aspect of it. The part that he doesn't do himself everyday at work. So most of the teaching was simply about which buttons to click, and which menus to select. He already had a firm grasp on "the why". He just needed to know "the how".
It's also a bit of a delicate situation. The sound industry has changed a lot in the eight years I've been doing it. When I first started, there were still companies cutting on 35mm film in a Moviola. Now it's all computers. Plus you can do a full 5.1 surround mix in Pro Tools itself. There are mixing jobs that people like my friend don't get anymore because the production company is unwilling to hire a couple of guys to sit in front of a $500,000 mixing console. They just want to pay an editor to work with a $20,000 computer. He and every other mixer in town has complained at some point that they lose work to people like me with our computers.
I can guarantee you that you'll get a better sounding track if you take it to my friend's dub stage, than if you hire me to do it in my computer. Unfortunately that's not always financially possible. So I was glad to help start him down that path to working with both systems.
Stereophile magazine has published an article on iTunes. Most of it is yet another rehash of new features of iTunes 4.5. However the most interesting point is that the New York branch of the Audio Engineering Society (AES) is gathering this month to discuss the impact of portable digital audio players like the iPod using compressed audio files on the sound of music.
It is an important topic. When we do the final mix for films, we go to a dub stage that looks like a theater with most of the seats pulled out and an enormous mix board in the middle of the room. The speakers on these stages sound far better than the ones in most movie theaters. When it comes time to do the DVD mix, sometimes near field speakers are placed on the stage. These might be Genelecs or Audix or some other high end speaker that sounds much better than your home theater setup. The point is we try to get the best sounding mix out of the best sounding speakers. And when we go from movie theater to home theater we try to accurately reproduce the ideal listening environment.
Another way to think of it is that you know a hundred dollar pair of headphones is going to sound a lot better than a ten dollar pair. When you're working with sound, whether it's music or films, you want it sound the best it can under the best possible situation. (And therefore it should sound as good as possible under less than ideal situations.)
But iTunes and iPods and the like present a different problem. We are no longer just talking about monitoring through different headphones or speakers. We are talking about reducing the quality of the sound before it even gets played back. By it's very nature, a compressed sound file is better at playing back certain frequencies, and worse at others. In my own personal observations, high frequency transients like the harmonics from cymbals are the first things to get thrown out in MP3s. So if you know that a lot of your listeners are going to be listening to MP3s versus CDs, do you start reducing those high end frequencies in your mix?
It's definitely something to think about and should be an interesting discussion.
What bridge have I been living under for the past few years? How did I miss these guys?
I went on a bit of a music shopping spree on Friday. I picked up "Swagger" and "Drunken Lullabies" by Flogging Molly. I'm still shocked that I never heard this LA band until recently. (Damn you, Clear Channel for making a radio station that I actually like!) Oh well, at least I finally found them. They play an amazing mix of traditional Irish ballads and jigs, sea chanteys, and punk rock. It's incredible stuff. "Swagger" is a fun, energetic album and even though I've only listened to a couple of tracks off "Drunken Lullabies" so far, it seems to be the same.
Loretta Lynn on the other hand is someone I have heard of, though I can't say I can name a single song by her. (Other than she is the subject of the movie "Coal Miner's Daughter" so I wouldn't be surprised if there's a song with the same name.) I'm not sure why "Van Lear Rose" caught my eye on the new releases list but I decided to read some reviews at Amazon and few other places. After several that started out along the lines of "I don't normally like country music but...", I decided to check it out. It's produced by Jack White of The White Stripes of all people. It's quite good. There's a raw feel to the songs that I like I lot more than the overly produced gloss that shines off those few tracks I've heard by Garth, Shania, and those other modern country acts.
I bought several other albums as well but I haven't listened to them yet, so I don't have much to say. But I'm looking forward to them: Eric Clapton's "Me and Mr. Johnson", Aerosmith's "Honkin' On Bobo", Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Fever To Tell" and Toots and the Maytals' "True Love".
A Pro Tools update for everyone.
I've said that we set up a Pro Tools system in an unsupported configuration to and have been testing it. You can get all the details on the system in my earlier post.
It works pretty darn well. We had our first big test Thursday and Friday with pulling sound effects from our new Soundminer database and sending them into Pro Tools to cut a very action intensive 5 minute scene. Guns, explosions, general mayhem. It worked beautifully. I don't remember the exact track count, but it was over 32 because at one point Cameron had to change the voice setting up to 64.
The one disappointing thing was the performance of the MJPEG A quicktime movie on the Aurora Igniter video card. It was a bit jerky. We checked the Info window while playing the movie in Quicktime Player and it wouldn't stay at a constant 24 fps. Occasionally it would speed up or slow down by about .5 fps. We didn't have time to tweak the settings so I can hopefully get that to perform better.
Plus it wasn't exactly the standard Quicktime file that we would normally playback for sound editorial. It wasn't loaded off a video tape like they normally are. This was the conversion from an Avid Quicktime that I mention in my last post. The image size was larger than I normally digitize at, and maybe that had something to do with the less the perfect playback.
In fact, the Avid Quicktime played back better even in Pro Tools with all those tracks of audio running too. The only downside to that was the movie could only display on the computer monitor and not on the video monitor. So Cameron used that to cut against instead of the MJPEG A picture.
We haven't really tried out the SCSI on this setup yet. This scene was cut off the internal hard drive (a standard HFS+ format, not journaled) and the digital picture was played back off a second internal hard drive.
It's not the be-all end-all, but it does seem that the Pro Tools 6.2.3 software works well with Mix hardware on a G4.
