a new world of media

ah, looks like i'm finally taking a step forward in the video/photography/media sector of my life. ever since i was a child (ok, well, 11th or 12th grade) i was an avid fan of making movies. lets see. the earliest movie i can remember now is my class project's rendition of Lord of the Flies in which we portrayed Simon and his campaign in a "presidential election". we had some advanced special effects too...when simon turns into a dove, we used stop photography and flour powder.

when my skills and toolset moved from VHS TAPE and its endless record/play cutting tedium to digital media, i discovered adobe premiere. and ever since, i've been struggling with the fact that i got adobe premiere for free, and will never be able to make videos look as good for as little memory as the big dvd studios do.

until now. muhahahah!

this endlessly useful article, Everything you wanted to know about video codecs, gives me the scoop on a new codec, x264. Actually, other than this bit of information, everything else i actually learned about in 6.341. wow, this class website hasn't changed. only now i recall seeing "H.264" on our study sheet, as a detail that i didn't bother to learn. who'da thought that might be the new codec of choice?

well i havent actually done anything with this knowledge yet. i will be downloading some encoders and decoders and whatnot. thank god for opensource...only now i understand its meaning and importance. so maybe soon i can process nicer videos...or at least compress my raw videos in a way that keeps as much of the original quality as possible, without forcing me to buy more external hard drives.

on other media news...i received my new camera that was purchased off of woot. it's basically my birthday present from my parents, i guess, that i managed to catch on last week's woot-off. at only $99, it's surprisingly better than my old klunky kodak, which has probably officially died. and the underwater case that comes with it is waterproof to 10 feet...enough for me to go take surfing pictures from the board. i'm really glad that now i have a digital camera again, and that it is more compact/portable, cheaper, and probably comparable in quality than my old one. so stay tuned...for some amazing surf shots! next up...underwater video camera for surf videos, compressed with the x264 codec?