* Posts by LowRez

6 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Nov 2011

ABC storage project adrift in 'brown ocean'

LowRez

They need consistent concurrent 500MB/s to 800MB/s

For most fast turn around edit jobs a high quality H.265 reference stream in the edit suite would be fine. Finishing and colour grading a drama production would require the very high data rates you mentioned. Nvidia did an excellent demo a few years back with Maya 3D being hosted remotely in "the cloud". The 3D artist accessed Maya via a remote desktop app on a local thin client. You just rented GPU/CPU/Storage as per project requirements. The ABC glitch/freeze issues are probably derived from the project brief itself. Having full res video available anywhere anytime sounds good in a sales pitch but most TV post workflows can easily accommodate downloading full res footage prior to the edit session commencing.

A HDS spokesperson said "We need to consider the format of media being used and how it has evolved over 50 years."

No you don't. Just digitise it. What they did 50 years ago is irelevant.

Sony sends muso stratowards on vintage TV set

LowRez

Good Question

One trick that could have been employed to help smooth out the shots would have been to shoot at a very fast frame rate. Say 200 frames per second. Then back in the edit suite you would play the footage back at the broadcast standard rate of 25 frames per second. This would provide a smoother shot. If the shots were still too jumpy you could add digital retiming effects in post to increase this effect. Extra stability could also be added by shooting at a higher resolution than the desired output broadcast resolution of 1920x1080 or 1280x720. Normal practice would be to place some fluro dots on the corners of the TV and shoot at say 4K. Back in post you would track the location of these dots within each frame. This gives you the jerky path of each dot over the duration of the shot. As you are outputting to 1920x1080 you place your 4K shot under a 1920x1080 output layer. Now all you have to do is keep the tracking points centred within your 1920x1080 frame. You have several hundred pixels of overscan in each direction on you jerky 4k layer to soak up the jerky movement.

Its really late at night here and I only glanced at the video as the music didn't grab me. So with that taken into account my call is that most of this video is tricked in post. Yes some of the closer to earth shots are probably real but with the orbit shots etc it would be much easier to create them in post. They would also look better than a few Go Pros hanging off a weather balloon. Sure the director did launch two gutted TV's tied to weather balloons and some of these shots were interspersed in the final video. The rest were made entirely in post.

Turnbull's digital transformation office DOES SOMETHING

LowRez

Bugger

Simon please don't hold them publicly accountable for producing little or nothing. Doing nothing is cheaper and the end product will be of superior quality.

CURSE YOU, 'streaming' music services! I want a bloody CD

LowRez

Re: Alistair - glad it's not just me!

A work mate came around to our house a few months back accompanied by his 8 year old daughter. I was putting a record on at the time and his daughter asked "what is that strange black round thing" I explained to her that it was vinyl record." What does a record do?". So I explained to her that it contained recorded music. The 8 year olds mouth nearly hit the ground. "Wow, thats amazing it must contain so much music". She then shyly pulled out her ipod and said that her music collection was only this big. The poor girl left our place very confused after being told that a record only contained about 60min of music.

Ha ha, Osborne, these Gov 2.0 web wranglers have wiped out UK debt

LowRez
Facepalm

Sorry to say to have to say this Ben

From Bens Terrets Gov 2.0 Blog

Ben Terrett - "The new typeface doesn’t work perfectly everywhere"

To solve this issue I would investigate your teams inability to implement the simplest (And I mean simplest) html, css and web-font tags.

Ben Terrett - "On release the font wasn’t caching on every page, we fixed that yesterday. We told browsers to cache the font so that it doesn’t have to be reloaded on every request Making sure the page only loads the fonts it needs to speed up load times"

This is Web Server / Web Browser interaction 101. Hardly worth blogging about Ben. Has anyone one on your team has ever built a website before?

Ben Terrett - "The hinting stuff is harder to fix but we’re working on that now and you should see improvements with every release over the next few weeks."

I didn't realise that converting are a pre-designed (and pre-hinted) font would require point version releases. When working on projects like this In the past I just went from original paper based design to finished. My employers prefered it this way. No release candidates or anything.

Ben Terrett - "Scaling the default font so that the change when the font loads is less jarring"

Less jarring than web page loading? Sorry Ben but I don't even begin to understand what this "issue" actually is. You changed the font in your stylesheet and then reloaded your web page to find out that…. WOW it looked different? What exactly was your team expecting?

Ben Terrett - "Sending a slightly different version of the font which should render better for Internet Explorer users"

Again html 101. Next time Google "embedding web-fonts into your website for beginners".

"Lots of work still to do – this stuff isn’t simple."

I am sorry to say to have to say this Ben, But it really is that f*@#king simple.

Ben Terrett - "For the first time we’re hosting it ourselves rather than using another service like Typekit or Monotype’s web fonts."

As your team is kind of talentless why not just use Typekit (or any other good online Type vendor)?

From the Typekit website: "Our fonts work everywhere - Typekit works in all modern browsers and operating systems."

That would be a major government problem solved for a measly $8 per month subscription fee wouldn't it?

Were Lavasoft's buyers once on its hit list?

LowRez
Holmes

Very good investigation. Thanks for the heads up.