Apr 7

(I've just made the leap to Adobe Premiere from Final Cut, because I HATE the new FCPX and no, I'm NOT afraid of a new paradigm.  Adobe's keyboard shortcuts alone are reason enough to be glad I switched.  I mean - tilde (~) expands the panel you're hovering over to fill the whole screen?!  And then tilde again puts everything right back!  Sign me up.)

SO I had this problem which I solved in Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and i thought I'd mention it here.

I imported a few camera cards full of AVCAM / AVCHD footage from my HMC-150 and edited for a few days.

Then I clicked on one imported clip and found that the audio was wrong.  Glitches, skips, out of sync, weird things happening - all nice sounding, but not in the right places.

I checked the original MTS files on my HD using VLC player.  Sound was fine, everything was in sync.

I tried dragging the files into the Premiere project window, to see if it was a media import problem.  Same thing happened when I did that - the identical glitches, which were the same every time I played the file.

So I started guessing that Premiere had imported it wrong, and had recorded some wrong metadata.  That turned out to be the case.

I went to the "PRIVATE" folder where I'd copied my SD card to HDD.  Premiere distressingly fills this folder up with metadata files associated with each clip, which violates the law of "DO NOT MESS WITH YOUR SD CARD DIRECTORIES."  But it seems to cause no harm because it only ADDS files, it doesn't alter or delete any.

For each imported clip in .mts format, Premiere adds a file with the same name with .xmp as the extension in the same folder.  Feeling bold, I quit Premiere then deleted all these the .xmp files for that card - though i didn't empty my trash yet.  I re-opened Premiere and double-clicked that file.  It was dead silent, as clips often are when first imported to Premiere.  It does some meta-data-ing... and then the sound was all back in proper order, problem solved.

The XMP files had been re-produced in that folder, although this time, apparently, without glitches.

-Flick

Feb 18

Terry MilewskiTerry Milewski

Politics

Online surveillance bill opens door for Big Brother - Politics - CBC News.

"Essentially, [this law] says that government agents may enter an ISP when they wish, without a warrant, and demand to see absolutely everything — including all data anywhere on the network — and to copy it all. If that seems hard to believe, let's walk through it."

Feb 15

Fast-moving news today about the new internet surveillance law, bill C-30.

Vic Toews, Canadian Public Safety Minister, has pulled the GW Bush card in the war against privacy: "You either stand with us, or you stand with the child pornographers."

He denies saying this, but here's the video:

In response, the anonymous Twitter user Vikileaks30 has launched a campaign of revealing private details of Toews' own divorce case.

I won't repeat any of those tweets here, since I can't vouch for their truth.

Today, House of Commons staff handed out the "wrong" version of the new law allowing warrantless surveillance of internet traffic.  The error revealed the guts of Conservative communications strategy: accuse defenders of privacy of supporting child predators.

"The short title is listed as "Lawful Access Act." An hour later, House of Commons staff withdraw it and replace it with the identical bill, save a new short title. It's now the "Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act.""

It's a strategy that backfired on then-opposition-leader, now Prime Minister, Harper when he accused PM Paul Martin of defending child molesters in the 2004 election.  Now that Harper has a majority government, it might be more useful for battering down the scattered opposition.

Open Media.ca has a petition against the new law, bill C-30. The law grants unprecedented powers to police, and forces ISP's to pay for surveillance technology.

Feb 15

Stop Online Spying | OpenMedia.caStop Online Spying | OpenMedia.ca.

Please circulate and sign this petition.

The government is about to push through a set of electronic surveillance laws that will invade your privacy and cost you money. The plan is to force every phone and Internet provider to allow "authorities" to collect the private information of any Canadian, at any time, without a warrant.

This bizarre legislation will create Internet surveillance that is:

  • Warrantless: A range of "authorities" will have the ability to access the private information of law-abiding Canadians and our families using wired Internet and mobile devices, without justification.
  • Invasive: The laws leave our personal and financial information less secure and more susceptible to cybercrime.
  • Costly: Internet services providers may be forced to install millions of dollars worth of spying technology and the cost will be passed down to YOU.
Jan 29

So without much more than a crashed Macbook to slow us down, Something Collective's first presentation of "Signal Out" went off great.   Liz Solo and the Black Bag Media Collective presented Flick Harrison's films in St John's, Newfoundland while we showed Liz's music-video and machinima work here at our studio at Moberly Cultural Centre.

After the screenings, we did live Skype chats so the audience could Q & A.  I spoke a lot about Final Cut Pro vs Adobe software and the future of independent video editing. Liz, for her part, talked about Second Life and the combination of joy and horror she feels in that phantasmagoric shopping mall.

Liz got to bed VERY late - the time difference is 4.5 hours - and a good time was had by all, at both ends of this giant country.

 

Jul 2

Final Cut Pro X means Apple has abandoned professional artists

by Flick Harrison

Guy Debord said that the main function of our society is now the production of spectacle. The spectacle alienates us from life and each other. Facebook, for instance, transforms our relationships into images of those relationships, mediated by Facebook's own hidden desires.

Fifteen years of engagement with the Final-Cut-Pro-using professional class is, at best, a good self-funding, street-cred foundation for the new consumer version of FCP, called FCP-X.  It could be compared to the free itunes app of yesteryear which slowly led us to the Itunes Store and thence to the app store, iphone and ipad.

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May 6

Imagine if, ten years ago, you could drive around collecting free, working televisions until you filled several carloads, then finally had to abandon dozens more because you had no room.

That's where we're at today, as the dominant technology of our living room becomes obsolete practically overnight. HDTV is sending those heavy, awkward boxes out to the curb, to be replaced with newer, more expensive, and quicker-to-obsolescence machines.

I'm designing media for a new theatre show - Macbeth: nach Shakespeare by Heiner Muller. I'm building a throne of televisions that will show piles of corpses whenever the King sits on it... I thought it might be easy to gather free TV's through craigslist, but I never imagined how quickly the cathode-ray sets were being discarded.

This class-warfare Macbeth takes the moral clarity out of the story: Instead of Macbeth murdering a wonderful King out of pure bloody ambition, we start the play with Macbeth committing murders for the King's benefit. Peasants strung up for not paying rent, rebellious lords skinned alive for disloyalty. So when Macbeth decides to murder up instead of murdering down, the moral leap isn't that big: what's one more dead body on the pile?

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Feb 4

penguin open office

That's a figure of speech, of course, because Open Office is the FREE alternative to Microsoft Office.  I've been toying with it in Ubuntu on my XO laptop, and then installed it on my Mac G5 once I realized that X11 (the interface for Linux apps) came pre-installed on OSX 10.5.  I like that O.O. opens .doc and excel files, so I've been trying to migrate all my office tasks onto Open Office.

But two factors that I discovered today sold me ultimately on it, despite some conversion troubles.*

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Oct 24
Xubuntu on OLPC
icon1 flick harrison | icon2 linux, xo laptop | icon4 10 24th, 2008| icon3No Comments »

I finally went whole-hog and installed Xubuntu on my OLPC / XO laptop. I am too worn-out by the process to actually post screencaps or photos so I posted someone else's!

Instructions that I followed are right HERE. I used the XO itself as the Linux box to create the SD card / format / partition it etc. I used my Mac G5 to download the torrent of the Hardy tarball and put it on a Fat32 USB drive.

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Aug 28

So, for those of you using the XO Laptop (the One Laptop Per Child Project), this might help you update cleanly.

I wanted to upgrade to build 711, the latest stable release, but I didn't want all the kiddie / programming activities that come with the activity packs. I had some problems installing activities one at a time, and finally made Web 86 work after installing Firefox and Browse, both of which failed to start and seemed to prevent me from installing Web at first.

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