"I have finally decided to take the plunge. Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop:"

To be honest there is only one conclusion to be made; Microsoft has really outdone themselves in delivering a brand new operating system that really excels in all the areas where Vista was sub-optimal. From my testing, discussions with friends and colleagues, and a review of the material out there on the web there seems to be no doubt whatsoever that that upgrade to XP is well worth the money. Microsoft can really pat themselves on the back for a job well done, delivering an operating system which is much faster and far more reliable than its predecessor. Anyone who thinks there are problems in the Microsoft Windows team need only point to this fantastic release and scoff loudly.

Well done Microsoft!

Geez--so Vista is Windows ME: The Next Generation?

Err, actually, in a way--it is!

(Via David Frum.)

Bill Hunt reviews the DVD version of Blade Runner: The Final Cut and likes what he sees. He also explores the extensive bonus material and earlier versions of the movie itself, available in the special five-DVD set due out next week.

In principle at least, it certainly sounds like a great way to end one the long-running Civil War between North & South.

(Via a Governor LePetomaine-quoting Glenn Reynolds.)

While the Internet has certainly made distribution of music and video much simpler, CDs and DVDs aren’t going away anytime soon, which is a good thing for all sorts of reasons in my book. (Books--another legacy media that's not likely to away anytime soon!) And I have some times on protecting and repairing those discs online at Videomaker as well.

Libertas's "Dirty Harry" writes that the format war between competing high definition DVD formats has slowed the acceptance of the successor to the DVD, which is now in its tenth year of existence. And the film studios are shooting themselves in the foot, since the money isn't in the player, but the back catalog.

A format war merely slows--or stops--Hollywood's efforts to resell its back catalog yet again, which is where the real long term money is, anway. When I go high-def DVD, I'll be on my fourth or fith copies of some movies, having gone from VHS to 12-inch laser disc (remember those?!), to DVD. And along the way, having bought pan & scan and letterboxed LDs, and original issue and remastered DVDs of some of the titles I was more obsessive about.

Meanwhile, I just downloaded my first MP3-only only album off Amazon.com. It's a complete win-win for both consumer and Amazon: there's no physical product to be inventoried, packaged and shipped, and it downloads so quickly over broadband that it's near-instantaneous consumer gratification. The individual tunes are MP3s so there's complete portability amongst the PC and iPod-style player. It's been licensed by the record company, so there are no Napster legal issues. And the MP3s are rendered in 256 kbps format, which is, I believe the second highest quality format available via MP3. (Per XM's request, we do PJM Political as a 320 kbps MP3, which is the highest quality MP3 format.)

There's little doubt that as broadband speeds increase--and they will--video will be soon be added to the download mix, and not just teeny YouTube clips. Eventually DVD collections such as these will be a download away. I don't think bricks and morter stores will fade away anytime soon, but the Long Tail is becoming increasingly easier for savvy online retailers to implement.

Oh, what album did I buy? This.

No, really! Fooling around with Roland's new VG-99 guitar modeling system and its built-in recreation of their classic original GR-300 guitar synthesizer got me in the mood to hear 1984's version of "The Future of Guitar." (Would that that future came true, as compared to what passes for pop music on the radio today.) And speaking of the VG-99, if you're a guitar aficionado, you may enjoy my review of Roland's latest guitar modeling system, which I knocked out for Blogcritics over the weekend.

Not since the early days of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and New Shimmer have two-two!-great tastes come together in a full metal redorkulation overload.

Two quick technology updates:

Found via Steve Green, I hadn't planned to buy an Apple iPhone, but I'm starting to change my mind...

And while I often have sushi while sitting in front of my PC's twin LCD monitors, apparently the in-thing amongst the really hip members of the digerati is preparing the sushi right on them. That sounds good to me, but aren't they worried that the wasabi will melt the plastic?

Allahpundit explores the boffo box office--which a different kind of PC industry, politically correct Hollywood, would kill for--of Microsoft's Halo 3, which ties in with an apt comment Glenn Reynolds made a while back:

It occurs to me that the media sectors that are doing badly -- movies, music, newspapers, TV women's shows -- seem to be the most highly politicized, while the sectors that are doing well, like games, aren't. I'd be interested to see more analysis on that subject.

Meanwhile, James Lileks has online video of the haves and have-nots of the videogame world as Halo 3's launch approached.

Ahh, but what sort of space would be worthy to qualify as the perfect rec room in which to play such an awesomely awesome game? There can be only choice:

This.

Want to get into digital video? Over at Blogcritics, I review three books that make a fine introduction to medium cool.

The latest in Libertas' series of "Put Up Or Shut Up", an excellent guide to indy film/digital video making, is online, and deals with audio. There are loads of great tips, including this comment right at the start:

Sound matters more than picture. If the picture’s fuzzy, out of focus, or gone completely, it’s better than bad sound. Bad sound immediately takes you out of the film.

And speaking of location sound, I've been having lots of fun with this product, Samson's Zoom H4 portable digital recorder. I'm not sure if I'd recommend it for the types of projects Libertas has been describing, but for location work for short video podcasts, it seems to do a pretty darn good job. The base of the recorder has a pair of XLR-inputs for use with professional mics. And for certain applications, it's small enough to hold on camera as a handheld mic itself, especially with the black foam cover over the two small condenser microphones located at the top of the unit. It records audio onto a Smart Card, which can simply be popped into the computer to import into your audio or video editing program afterwards.

It's also useful in the studio as well--I've been using it as a digital backup recorder for the Pajamas' Blog Week In Review audio podcasts, just in case.

Some bleeding edge high-tech home music stuff over at Blogcritics, where I have a lengthy review of two harmonizer plug-ins for PC-based recording. The first is Audio Damage's Discord4, which recreates the classic Eventide H910 Harmonizer (remember Bowie's "Fame...fame...fame...fame...fame swirling up and down in pitch? That was the Eventide Harmonizer). The second is TC-Helicon's sophisticated Harmony4, which is specifically designed for vocals and create up to four independent lines of harmony from a single vocal.

In his latest column, James Pinkerton explores "The Importance of DIY Movies":

As a movie critic for TCS Daily, I sometimes feel like a bicyclist at a Harley-Davidson convention: My presence is tolerated, people are friendly enough, but I'm not exactly necessary. I know that most TCSers want to get their brain-motors running, reading-wise, on heavy-metal issues of technology and society. And any techster today knows that movies are just a small part of the show -- a legacy medium, shrinking relative to the endlessly proliferating content to be found online.

This is something I spotted back in March, when I wrote:

Hollywood is rapidly becoming just another niche entertainment product. And as it rewards films that are aimed at coastal niche audiences, and critically shuns the movies that reached the widest viewers, it has only itself to blame.

At this point, I’m sure I risk coming across like my parents, wondering why so few people are making entertainment these days that interests me. But then, as Mark Steyn recently noted, Tinseltown's sounding even more antediluvian at the moment, trapped mining controversies that are no long controversial; both ignoring today's issues, and half its potential domestic audience.

On the other hand, my parents' generation had to rely almost exclusively on Hollywood for their entertainment: only the stars themselves could afford their own in-home recording studio--and video production at home was strictly science fiction.

But yesterday's science fiction has a way of becoming reality. And these days, reality is often much more enjoyable than Hollywood.

For Pinkerton, the manifestation of this new reality in action is "the trend toward do-it-yourself -- or at least do-it-without-Hollywood -- moviemaking and distributing.":

One such samizdat film is a documentary, "Border War," produced by David Bossie, president of Citizens United, a DC-based activist group. Bossie, a veteran conservative activist, told me that about five years ago he decided to "do something different" to promote his beliefs. And so he traveled out to Hollywood, got turned on to documentaries, and started making them -- nobody told him he couldn't.

Libertas has written on numerous occasions that documentaries are indeed often the best place for a budding filmmaker to start. Just ask seminal DIYer Stanley Kubrick, who was shooting cheapie newsreels for RKO 17 years before MGM handed him $10.5 million to shoot 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Back in 1968, believe it or not youngsters, $10.5 mil was serious money in Hollywood, funding an entire big-budget Cinerama movie, from cast to catering. Now it's half of one movie's B+ level star's salary.)

But I digress. Back to Pinkerton's look at David Bossie:

The best known of his documentaries so far is "Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain... Begins to Die," a response, of course, to Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911." And while Bossie didn't win any Oscars, he did make a splash, even turning a profit for his group.

As for "Border War," it's going to appeal to conservative immigration hawks a lot more than libertarian immigration doves. So be it. Those with other points of view should be making their own movies, and it's never been easier.

Bossie's insight is the realization that today movie-making talent is widely distributed. All those high schools and colleges and garages are cranking out kids who know their way around a videocam -- and also know how to upload to Youtube. Moreover, not all these talented kids are liberals and left-wingers, not by a long shot; an up-and-coming cineaste doesn't need to pass through the ideological strainer of NYU or UCLA anymore. And it's rich beds of talent nationwide that make "alt.conservative" movies possible.

Only a few days before the niche-solidifying Oscars, I interviewed conservative documentarian Evan Coyne Maloney. His filmmaking advice is well-worth re-reading. And as Kubrick himself once said:

The best education in film is to make one. I would advise any neophyte director to try to make a film by himself. A three-minute short will teach him a lot. I know that all the things I did at the beginning were, in microcosm, the things I'm doing now as a director and producer. There are a lot of noncreative aspects to filmmaking which have to be overcome, and you will experience them all when you make even the simplest film: business, organization, taxes, etc., etc. It is rare to be able to have an uncluttered, artistic environment when you make a film, and being able to accept this is essential.

The point to stress is that anyone seriously interested in making a film should find as much money as he can as quickly as he can and go out and do it. And this is no longer as difficult as it once was. When I began making movies as an independent in the early 1950s I received a fair amount of publicity because I was something of a freak in an industry dominated by a handful of huge studios. Everyone was amazed that it could be done at all. But anyone can make a movie who has a little knowledge of cameras and tape recorders, a lot of ambition and -- hopefully -- talent. It's gotten down to the pencil and paper level. We're really on the threshold of a revolutionary new era in film.

That was from 37 years ago. And if anything, "the pencil and paper level" is infinitely--infinitely--easier today than it was in 1969.

In the latest Blog Week In Review, Austin Bay and Glenn Reynolds discuss Rupert Murdoch's recent acquisition of MySpace for $580 million. Is Murdoch shifting his attention primarily to the Web? Variety writes that he's seriously considering dumping his holdings in DirecTV:

In a splattering blow to the satellite biz, Rupert Murdoch supposedly dubbed DirecTV a "turd bird" and is considering selling News Corp.'s controlling stake to Liberty Media.

FCC chairman Kevin Martin on Thursday shot down another possible outcome for the satcaster. He indicated regulators still would be reluctant to greenlight a merger between DirecTV and smaller rival EchoStar.

News Corp. owns 38% of DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite provider. But Murdoch's been down on the business lately. Cablers are successfully rolling out a triple play of video, Internet and telephone -- service that satcasters can't easily match.

DirecTV stock fell 3.23% Thursday to close at $19.19 after a Morgan Stanley analyst downgraded the shares.

A person close to the conglom said a DirecTV sale is being discussed as one of several possible ways to unwind Liberty's large stake in News Corp.

CNBC reported that Murdoch had made the "turd bird" remark.

The current architecture of satellite TV does make it vulnerable to end-runs by both digital cable TV (which offers video-on-demand, something currently difficult, if not impossible with satellite architecture), and especially, the phone companies' IPTV format, which, if all of its proponents' forecasts pan out, could be a remarkable advance in television technology.

DirecTV better do everything it can to hold onto its NFL Sunday Ticket monopoly. It could very well be the only thing keeping millions of viewers attached to the format, if new technologies continue to pass it by.

Over at TCS, Glenn Reynolds has harsh words for Amazon's new online video service:

So, in summary, to be allowed the privilege of purchasing a video that I can't burn to DVD and can't watch on my iPod, I have to allow a program to hijack my start-up and force me to login to uninstall it? No way. Sorry, Amazon.

[CNET reviewer Tom Merritt's] advice to Amazon: "Try again."

Talk about Not Ready For Primetime Players.

Update: Jeff Jarvis has equally harsh words for "The National Broadband (ugh) Company", NBC's foray into, well, broadband:

* “If we really want to compete with big aggregators like Yahoo and Google, we need our video in as many places as possible,” Mr. Falco said.

No, if you wanted it as many places as possible you would follow the YouTube model and let us distribute it for you. But you don’t trust us. Odd not to trust the people who make you money.

* And my favorite: “When ‘Saturday Night Live’ had a great clip of Lazy Sunday, YouTube made a lot of money off it,” Randy Falco, the president of the NBC Universal television group, said at a news conference yesterday. “In the future, when we have a Lazy Sunday clip, NBBC will make a lot of money on it.”
No, fool, you made a lot of money from YouTube because your long-dead stinker of a show, SNL, got new audience because your public — the ones you don’t trust — put the video up and got it seen … until you foolishly made them cease and desist.

The Times says lots of companies are trying out NBC’s service because it’s nonexclusive (including About.com, where I consult, but where I was not involved in this). It’s a what-the-heck. But I’d sure as hell have a strategy for YouTube, Revver, Veoh, et al. If NBC had any brains, it would, too.

Just think of it as the Supertrain of the Internet.

While this could be a decent service for the right person, I'm happy to stick with my Slingbox when I want to view TV on my computer. But it certainly sounds like AT&T is trying to maximize its investment in IPTV.

I probably haven't posted much home recording stuff lately, but I have a review of Korg's Digital Legacy Collection, which contains software versions of Korg's M1, the best selling digital synthesizer in history, and its successor, the Wavestation over at Blogcritics. You can click through to hear samples of the M1 in action.

For those musicians in the audience--or those laypersons interested in home recording in general, I thought I’d explain how I put the Pajamas Podcast theme song together.

The first step was booting up Cakewalk Sonar, my primary recording program. I then began to fire up various software synth applets and started experimenting.

A couple of months ago, Cakewalk introduced their Rapture software synthesizer, which contained a variety of sequencer patterns. These are pre-programmed riffs designed to unfold as the musician holds the key or keys down. Play one note and get ten--or a hundred. That certainly appeals to me!

Apparently, one of the programmers at Cakewalk is a big Blade Runner fan, as both Rapture and Project 5 Rev 2 have contained patches strongly reminiscent of the sound Vangelis invented for that seminal movie. In the case of Rapture, there was a sequence patch inspired by the Vangelis’ sequencer on the film’s end titles. I knew I wanted to start with that as the “music concrete” to build the theme around, so the first step was experimenting to find a tempo that the patch sounded best at (about 110 beats per minute).

The next was to find a drum pattern that sounded nice against the sequencer. I have a collection of various drum loops, mostly from Sony’s Acid Loops series. One of their more offbeat (heh) drum collections is called “Zero Gravity Beats”, and a pattern from that disc matched up nicely with the Blade Runner sequencer.

I knew the theme wasn’t going to be much longer than 30 second at most, so I laid down 30 seconds of the Blade Runner sequencer in A--which meant programming one long A note, and the sequencer would automatically chug up and down in its pattern, always returning to that note.

I then decided to craft a simple chord sequence in that key, and found another sequencer pattern in Rapture that sounds great as a sustained chord. It would hold the chord for almost a bar, and then play a sequence of notes as it trailed it off. So I played a series of simple acending chords in the key of A: A major, B major, C#minor, D major, E major, returning to A.

With two layers of synths burbling away, I figured some electric guitar would sound great for contrast, so I dusted off my Gibson 1959 Les Paul reissue, and fired up Line6’s aging but still very functional GuitarPort, which allows me to plug in an electric guitar’s standard quarter-inch guitar cable via its floor pedal into the computer’s USB port.

I chose GuitarPort’s “Brit Hi-Gain” patch, which convincingly models a late 1960s Marshall stack--the perfect amp for a fluid, lightly distorted Les Paul lead sound.

I then improvised a few melody ideas on the Les Paul and eventually, started recording them. The final lead line is the best of two takes spliced seamlessly together.

I then edited the drum loops, pasting in various drum rolls and cymbal crashes to the give the aural impression of a drummer reacting in sympathy with the lead guitarist.

Sometimes ideas that are clichés are useful because they just can’t be beat, so I launched Zero-G’s Nostalgia software synthesizer and found its recreation of the infamous Fairlight “Orchestra 5” patch. I say “infamous” because it seemed that every recording MTV ran in the mid-1980s had one or twenty orchestra hits from this patch. Frankie Goes To Hollywood seemed to have based their career on it.

But that was twenty years ago, and orchestra hits seemed like a useful way to kick off and end the song, so I dropped in a few hits: one at the start, and a couple at the end.

Then I added a simple Fender bass part using another software synthesizer. I chose a very conventional bass sound to contrast with all of the non-conventional synth sounds in the frequencies above it.

Since it was the lead instrument and would feature prominently in the mix, I wanted to give the Les Paul a slightly more fluid, modern sound, so I fired up Izotope’s Spectron processing applet, and ran the guitar their “Sweet & Sour” patch, which processed the guitar with a light combination of delay, filtering and smearing, that’s a tad more exotic than the typical chorus or flanger patch.

Izotope’s effects typically sound great, but are very processor-intensive. So a track with one of their treatments on it usually won’t play in time with the rest of instruments. To offset this, I first cloned the original Les Paul track and then muted its original version. Next I processed the cloned track with Spectron. I used the original track as a guide to visually slide the new version backwards in time so that it lined up with the old track.

The song was beginning to take shape, but it didn’t seem quite done yet.

the chord sequencer part served as a nice counterpoint to the start of the lead guitar part. But as the piece progressed, I decided to introduce a second guitar part to add a little additional excitement. So I took off the Les Paul and plugged my Fender 1952 Telecaster reissue into the same GuitarPort patch and played some simple licks, in a higher register than the Les Paul’s lines. It was also on the Tele that I played the bent, heavily vibrato-ed A note that i mixed in under the first orchestra hit.

After listening to the track as it stood, I wanted some interesting noise or effect to subtly begin the tune before the first orchestra hit went “boom!”. I rifled through my collection of Acid Loops from Bill Laswell’s collections, and found a nifty tape rewinding effect--it was part of a collection of DJs scratching records and creating other hip-hop/techno licks. The symbolism of the podcast starting with a tape rewinding seemed irresistible, and even if nobody “got” the effect, it at least added some subliminal ambient weirdness to create some subtle initial tension, resolved when the actual instruments enter.

Finally, I mixed everything down to a stereo .Wav file adding some subtle reverb on most of the instruments to bind them together, and processed the entire track with Izotope’s Ozone mastering applet, to give it all a nice professional sheen.

If that sounds like a lot of work, well, a lot of it is based on tried and true techniques I’ve either learned or developed over several years. The whole thing from start to finish took an evening--a very pleasant evening indeed, as I find music recording to be an extremely rewarding hobby.

Hope you liked the finished result--please tune in each week to the podcast it was created for!

Eugene Polley is a 90 year old man--who just happened to invent one the greatest devices in the history of mankind: the television remote control. Raise your Philips Pronto up in honor to him, next time you're in your den or home theater!

(Via Nick Schulz, my editor at TCS Daily, on his Transistion Game sports blog.)

Les Paul was once asked if anybody taught him his incredible knowledge of electronics at it relates to music. And he instantly replied, "Just the library. I'm a real book man. If it's in a book, I can get it." And over the years, I've found that to be great advice. Over the past twenty years, I've read dozens and dozens of music books, and a few of these have permanently remained on my shelf.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, budding guitarists such as Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton had little to go on but their ears and trial and error--rock and roll was a new form of music, with little or no written instruction. Today however, it's a different ballgame. For guidance, there's a host of magazines, instructional tapes, CDs, DVDs, and books available.

Read More »

I interviewed documentary video maker/blogger Evan Coyne Maloney for my recent TCS Daily piece about the future of video on the Web. Unfortunately, because of the article's structure, I could only use a couple of paragraphs of Evan's detailed responses in the article, so I asked him if he'd mind if I reprinted the rest here. For anyone interested in DIY video--whether it's for the Web, DVD, or their own personal archives, there's a wealth of information here. As I once mentioned on my main blog, his suggestion about camera choices is an invaluable tip in and of itself to any budding documentarian.

Ed: What sort of hardware do you use to record video?

Evan: When I shot my first web video, I didn't own a digital video camera. I wanted something professional-looking enough that my interview subjects would take me seriously. I rented a Sony PD-150. It's a highly-regarded professional/consumer ("pro-sumer") DV camera that has been used for low-end broadcast production, and it's large enough that I didn't look like some jerk goofing around with a handi-cam. (Instead, I looked like some jerk goofing around with a PD-150.)

I used the PD-150 once more for another shoot, and I was very happy with the results each time. However, when it was time to buy my own camera, I opted for the Panasonic DVX-100. It gets phenomenal picture quality and has a feature that the Sony lacks: a 24P shooting mode, which many contend gives a more "filmic" look to the motion. Also, as an editor, I find that progressive scan video gives me more flexibility than interlaced video.

You can generally get these types of cameras for under $3000 now. And if you have the money, there are a number of high-definition HDV cameras getting attention these days. You can find them for under $5000, and will allow you to distribute high-def DVDs when those become commonplace.

Ed: Do you use different gear for material that will be released to DVD as opposed to simply uploaded to your blog?

Evan: If you're shooting on any reasonable-quality DV camera, you should be able to use the same gear for the online and DVD versions of a given work. The real issue, though, is often audio. These days cameras are advanced enough that it is very easy to get a decent picture, but you really have to know a lot about your shooting location, how windy it gets, how much background noise there will be, what types of mics to use for different situations, etc., in order to get decent audio. And in most cases, if you get bad audio, you're screwed. Your footage won't be usable.

Many people assume that the on-camera mics are sufficient, but they tend to work well only in a very limited set of circumstances. If you're only looking to distribute low-resolution videos online, then people will generally be forgiving with substandard audio. But on a TV, especially one hooked up to a decent set of speakers, bad audio
will ruin the experience for the viewer. So, if you're looking to make DVDs of your video production, and you plan on having an audience that extends beyond friends and family, I would recommend investing in a decent set of mics. I would recommend a pair of lavalier mics, a handheld omnidirectional mic (like the Shure SM58--good for recording voiceovers) and a shotgun mic with an attachment that can make it a "short shutgun" or a "long shotgun". A pair of wireless attachments is also useful in cases where a wire between the mic and camera would be unwieldy. (I've had good luck with the mid-range Sennheisers.) But don't ever rely on wireless exclusively...they are sometimes beset by radio interference and static, so it's always good to have a backup channel of audio from a non-wireless source.

Lastly, to get the best audio, look for cameras with XLR audio inputs. These are much less susceptible to electrical line noise and radio interference, and all professional mics use XLR connectors.

Ed: Any thoughts on where video is going on the Web in general and/or the Blogosphere specifically?

Evan: What we're seeing with online video is just the beginning. Three factors point to a future explosion in the availability of online video.

First, simple economics. Ten years ago, the expense associated with putting together even the most rudimentary online video would have put it out of reach for most people. Even if you had your own camera, you probably didn't have video editing software or a computer capable of running it. If you did have access to an editing suite, then you probably didn't have sufficient bandwidth to make the resulting video available online. And even with unlimited bandwidth, the people on the other end--the potential viewers--probably didn't have enough bandwidth to watch what you made. Today, however, none of those are limiting factors. You can buy a usable consumer-level DV camera for around $500. You can buy a "pro-sumer" DV camera for under $3000. You can even shoot in high-definition HDV for under $5000.

Second, near-ubiquitous bandwidth availability. Although high-speed broadband has been available in most corporations for a few years, broadband is just beginning to penetrate the home market in large numbers. This means that we're really at the very beginning stages of mass viewing of online videos. We haven't hit the inflection point yet, but I suspect we'll see, within a few years, the same massive growth with online video that we saw with the web in the mid-1990s. Eventually, maybe 10 years from now, we'll have full-screen, full-motion on-demand high-definition video available directly to the home. That's the ideal video delivery platform, and if we're still a decade away, it means there's plenty of room to grow in this market.

Third, there will be an ever-increasing number of devices available for watching video. Whereas online video now requires you to sit in front of a computer, in a year, people will be watching it on video iPods, cell phones, Sony PSPs, etc. When high-speed wireless data networks become deployed nationwide, online video will eventually
mean wireless video-on-demand streamed from the Internet. It will no longer be necessary to sit in front of a computer to watch video. If you take mass transit, you can watch video on your morning commute. You can watch video while waiting in the doctor's office or standing on line at the post office.

Of course, all this means a massive democratization in the production and consumption of online video. More people can afford to put out their own unique messages via video, and more people can watch videos in more settings. Traditional broadcast and cable networks will find themselves facing smaller audiences as people spend their time with other outlets. Shrinking audiences mean shrinking ad revenue, so it will become more difficult for big media to spend as much money producing content. Traditional outlets will be lowering their production values at the same time that individuals or small groups are increasing theirs.

In the future, anyone can be the mass media.

For quite a while now, Adobe's Premiere Elements DVD-authoring program has managed to combine a variety of attractive features at an extremely affordable price--it streets for about a C-note. All of which makes the program suitable for a wide range of applications and users. It's certainly easy enough for beginners to plug in a camcorder and transfer and edit their first DVDs, but it's powerful enough to create some surprisingly professional looking finished discs.

However, as I wrote in PC World last year, there were several areas where the program lacked horsepower, especially when compared with more full-featured programs (not the least of which is Premiere Elements' own big-brother, Adobe Premiere).

Several of these areas have been rectified with version 2.0, which we'll address in a moment. But first, an overview of the basic concepts of the program and the minimum horsepower a computer needs to run it.

Minimum Requirements

With a program like Premiere Elements, it helps to have a fairly speedy computer and a fair amount of RAM. Adobe recommends running the program on a Windows XP PC with an Intel Pentium 4, M, D, or Extreme Edition or AMD Opteron or Athlon 64 and 256 MB of RAM; anything beyond those minimums would be all the better. I used a machine with 2.5 gigahertz Pentium 4 and a gig of RAM, and the program ran very smoothly.

A FireWire card and a FireWire-equipped digital video recorder are both fairly essential elements for getting the most out of Premiere Elements; the program is tailor-made for them. (If your PC lacks a FireWire card--as mine did until earlier this year--installing such a card is a breeze; for most computers, only a screwdriver is necessary.) Having both of those components will make importing video a surprisingly seamless task.

Essentially, the DV camcorder and Premiere Elements merge into one component. Pressing fast-forward, play or rewind on Premiere Elements' GUI sends those commands to the DV camcorder, which responds accordingly. And another button on the GUI will capture the camcorder footage and import into the PC and into Premiere Elements. (And of course, if your camcorder has A/V inputs, a conventional VCR can be connected to it, and then via the FireWire cable, video can also be input into Premiere Elements).

A new feature of PE 2.0 makes the program compatible with camcorders and PC's supporting the USB 2.0 standard. Otherwise, it's possible to import video via a video-USB interface such as Pinnacle Systems' Dazzle 150, or a comparable device.

PE's Great GUI

Once data is imported, Premiere Elements' graphical user interface is extremely intuitive, and makes editing, then inserting special effects a snap.

Premiere Elements stores all of a project's video in its media window. These elements can then be dragged and dropped into the program's timeline, where they can be edited and modified.

By clicking on "File" then "Interpret Footage", it's possible to set the aspect ratio of any clip stored in Premiere Elements. This is useful both to ensure that all of a project's footage is in the same aspect ratio (whether it's 4X3, 16X9 or 2:1, all of which are supported by PE), or to customize your DVD for a specific play-back format.

This is highly useful, especially for projects with a disparate variety of sources. Premiere Elements works with video in a wide range of formats, which include DV, AVI, MOV, MPEG/MPE/MPG and WMV.

The program also allows for a reasonable amount of straightforward audio editing. It won't make you give up Cakewalk's Sonar, or Steinberg's Cubase, but for many applications, it can get the job done. Premiere Elements accepts a variety of Windows-supported audio formats including WAV, AVI, MP3, and WMA. So it's possible to have a background song from an MP3, sound effects in WAV, and the dialogue in the default Windows Media format from the video it was recorded with--or in any other combination. (PE 2.0 will import Dolby Digital AC-3 files, but exports them as stereo. Adobe still appears to want keep surround sound the province of its full-blown version of Premiere.)

The Timeline: Premiere Elements' Nerve Center

Whether working with video, still photos, or some combination of the two, photos and video are edited and conformed via Premiere Element's timeline window, which is where the bulk of the work in the program is carried out.

The timeline has a time stretch tool, making it easy to adjust the duration of a shot, either by dragging it forward and slowing it down, or by right clicking on the shot and typing in a percentage number for its speed. 100 percent is normal speed, a smaller number speeds it up (by reducing the frame count), a number greater than 100 percent slows it down, and a negative number reverses the shot's motion.

Premiere Elements also works with BMPs, GIFs (including animated GIFs), JPEGs, TIFFs, PSDs, and other still photo formats, which allows the program to create a slideshow on DVD, for those producing, for example, a wedding production that combines professional videography with still photos shot by the attendees. To create a slideshow, simply insert still photos (such as gifs or jpegs) into the media window, and then click it's "MORE" command, which brings up a dropdown window. Click on "Create Slideshow". A dialogue box will allow you to adjust the duration the images display.

Menu Templates Now Allow For Motion Video

If all of this makes the program sound like a very user-friendly program for someone new to video editing you're absolutely correct. But the new menu templates included with the program make it even more useful to professionals who wish to use it as an element (pardon the pun) of their trade.

While PE 1.0 had a variety of extremely serviceable menu templates they were silent and static; their lack of audio and motion video was an obvious defect, which version 2.0 corrects. It includes several menus with either or both, in addition to the previous static templates.

What's the bottom-line on PE 2.0? With its street price of $100 or less, Adobe's Premiere Elements Version 2.0 packs a surprising amount of bang for the buck, even when compared to its full-featured $700 big brother, Premiere Pro.

Having written my share of "Here's what life will be like ten/twenty/thirty years now" articles (including this one, which I think I originally wrote in 1999 or 2000), I always enjoy looking back at other attempts to predict the future.

In 1987, the now defunct Omni magazine polled its readers as to what life will be like 20 years from then. In other words: today. All in all, they did a pretty reasonable job on their profile of the future.

(Via The Corner.)

While I was busy installing a new A/V receiver, I figured I'd also install what's frequently called "a media bridge", to allow me to play all of the Windows Media files on my computer in glorious 7.1 surround sound, rather than the small speakers of my PC. I had actually purchased a D-Link DSM-320 and a few days later, it was still sitting in the box, ready to be installed when I picked up the issue of PC Magazine devoted to video on the Web, that I had previously mentioned here.

They gave the D-Link unit so-so reviews, but raved about BuffaloTech's LinkTheater High Definition Wireless Media Player, giving the issue's editor's choice award. OK, I can take a hint: the D-Link unit went back to Best Buy, and since they didn't have the BuffaloTech player, I drove down the road to Micro Center and bought it.

Boy, that was fun: it took forever to get the unit to talk to my computer, but I expected this segment of the process to be finicky. Once I did get them talking, that part worked great: the BuffaloTech unit and the A/V receiver sounded dynamite together, and my Windows Media audio files never sounded better.

But the BuffaloTech unit also comes with a progressive scan DVD player, and I thought--well, I'll kill two birds with one stone: I'll make this my primary DVD player, one that I can also play Windows Media through.

So I popped in a DVD to test it out. It wouldn't play. Would. Not. Play. Wouldn't detect the disc; it just ground to a halt.

So I got on the phone to BuffaloTech HQ in Austin, Texas. While they advertise 24 hour tech support, at 1:00 AM on a Sunday morning, there's either one guy manning the phone's who's very busy (probably dealing with other LinkTheater purchasers), or he's off visiting the local Burger King, or he's asleep.

So after about a half-hour or so, I bailed and called again during the day. Other than hearing the exact same on-hold music as the night before (much as I love Dave Brubeck's classic Time Out album (the one with "Take Five"), knowing you'll be hearing it endlessly while on-hold somewhat ruins the experience), that part worked great: quickly got somebody who was knowledgeable, friendly, and suggested I upgrade the firmware and see if that would get the DVD player working. And it did. Yay!

So I spent each night for the next week happily watching DVDs. Except...at least once, each disc would fast-forward several frames. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner and Black Rain each seemed particularly affected, speeding up several times during the movie. But no disc seemed completely immune: Capt. Kirk would skip a word here and there. Dr. Zhivago would lurch forward once or twice during the movie wildly while gesturing. Audio would occasionally speed-up, then resume normal speed.

Last night I picked up a new copy of Lost In Translation at Borders. Virgin, pristine, right out of the shrink-wrap. And about halfway through, it did the same thing. And nobody messes with Bill Murray in town! (To paraphrase one of the good Dr. Venkman's great riffs in Ghostbusters.

This afternoon, I was on the phone to Austin again. They told me there was nothing they could suggest, other than take the unit back and get a refund. So I did, thinking it was a bum drive, and I get another unit. Micro Center was out of stock, but I looked on Amazon to see if they sold the unit.

They did. But one of their customer reviews had this to say:

Some weird glitches. About 8 minutes into "Liar Liar" Jim Carrey started walking twice as fast and speaking really quickly in a high-pitch. I tried watching several times and the same thing happened at the same point in the movie every time.

And that happened to me as well: each weird speed-up would repeat exactly. (In retrospect, I noticed several of the other glitches this fellow was referring to, but they weren't as severe as the intermittent speed-up/dropped frames thing.)

Does that mean that every unit has this problem, or that PC Magazine hyped a faulty product? In both cases, probably not--the tech support person said that he hadn't heard of any similar cases, and the magazine review obviously didn't mention anything about it. But that was more than enough for me to move to multimedia plan B.

Which is? I'll tell you in a few days. This could be interesting.

Update: Faster than a speeding bullet! The same night a week and a half ago that I couldn't get the DVD play to work, I first emailed a request for tech support to BuffaloTech before eventually calling. The response to that email arrived in Outlook today (2/9/06). Speedy, guys!

The San Francisco Chronicle has a profile of Dave Barry, who tells the newspaper that "Newspapers are dead":

Several years ago, Barry created the blog www.davebarry.com. It features typical "Barryisms," odd news stories sent in by ubiquitous "alert readers," columns, and a recurring feature called "A Fine Name for a Rock Band." (Most recent submission: Loincloth Outrage.)

"About five years ago, I went to the Herald and I told them, 'I've got this blog and maybe you'd like to run it,' '' Barry said. "And they said, 'It's a what?' But then they had a committee meeting or something and now they want everybody to have a blog. They want the security guard to have a blog."

Barry's blog has taken off like gangbusters, and like podcasts, blogs are the Next Big Thing in journalism. More and more newspapers are offering blogs covering everything from the local sports scene to the business world. (See The Chronicle's "culture blog" and others at sfgate.com.)

So it's clear that although there may be doubts about the future of the newspaper industry, there are directions in which it can expand and thrive. The future is digital.

It has to be said, however, that Barry is not optimistic. A little more than a year ago, he announced that he was taking a sabbatical from his column, and has now decided to make the break permanent. The reason, he stresses, was not that he had a lack of faith in the industry, but that he was ready to move on. Still, he has grave doubts about the future of newspapers.

"It has to start with the kids," he said. "My son is 25. He's been around newspaper people all of his life. He doesn't get the paper. That's the first problem. The second problem is: We can no longer compel people to pay attention. We used to be able to say, there's this really important story in Poland. You should read this. Now people say, I just look up what I'm interested in on the Internet."

Meanwhile, Arnold Kling asks, "Is Blogging a Fad?"

He doesn't think so, and I don't either--but with one caveat: individual self-publishing on the Internet is not a fad--but it's possible its form could change radically in the coming years. I picked up the February 7th issue of PC Magazine to read on a flight to L.A. last week--and wide swatches of the issue are devoted to its cover story: video on the Web. It's entirely possible that within a few years, Blogs could be supplemented by much more dynamic multimedia formats. But in a way, that just proves Kling's argument. There will still be millions of blogs, just as television didn't eliminate movies, and didn't eliminate radio--and the 'Net hasn't eliminated any of those mediums either. (Pace Dave Barry, it's a fairly safe prediction that any metropolitan area with a large number of commuters will have dead tree newspapers of some sort for decades to come--but they probably won't have the same level of prominence they once took for granted.)

Note: I wrote this review a couple of years ago for Blogcritics. While consumer electronics technology advances so rapidly these days, much of the book holds up well, particularly for those seeking a primer on building their first home theater.--Ed

Having written one of the best, easiest to read books on home automation with Smart Homes For Dummies (written in 1999, but revised earlier this year), Danny Briere and Pat Hurley have an obvious sequel in this year's Home Theater For Dummies.

As I wrote in my review of the revised version of Smart Homes:

Perhaps one reason for their emphasis of home telecommunication networks, is that unlike many home automation experts who come at home automation through their mastery of home-based technologies, it was in the telecommunication industry that Danny and Pat have made their careers, prior to writing Smart Homes For Dummies. Briere is CEO of TeleChoice, Inc., which he started in 1985. "Today, just about every major telecom player in the world is our client," he says. And Pat Hurley is a consultant and DSL analyst for Telechoice.

This background has helped them to come up with a number of ideas that are "outside of the box" of the traditional home automation industry.

It also grew out of a practical need to expand their own knowledge base. In the mid-1990s, Briere began to renovate his then recently purchased house in Maine, to convert it into what he calls a "'vacation home for the next sixty years' type of place". Briere often spends a month at a time both working out of there, and spending time with his family. (His primary residence is near the University of Connecticut, where Briere's wife is an assistant research professor.)

When Briere began to ask his contractor about what would be needed for a sophisticated home office in his vacation home, Briere says, "he didn't know anything. And we started talking to all sorts of people, and we went to various stereo stores, and other people, and couldn't really find anybody who knew anything."

That same outside-the box thinking drives Home Theater For Dummies.

Home Theater Versus Media Room

Part of the problem is that in the 1990s, home theater became a term that's so nebulous to be almost meaningless. In the late 1980s, when Audio/Video Interiors magazine debuted, home theater meant just that-a recreation of a movie theater in your home. The term was created when people such as Theo Kalimarakis began to convert their basements into recreations of the classic movie theaters of the 1930s. (Kalimarakis, one of the first, got so good at it, that he went from working at a magazine, to making his living designing and installing ultra-high-end theaters in others' homes.)

What the vast majority of home owners desired however, were media rooms, multi-purpose rooms with some sort of large TV, a laser disc (later DVD) player, a VCR, some set-top boxes, and a surround sound system. Whereas the home theater is purpose-built and pretty much dedicated to watching movies, in a media room, music can also be listened to, regular TV shows can be viewed, and even video games can be played.

For whatever reason, the public glommed onto the term "home theater", so that just about any electronic component larger than a 13-inch black and white TV is slapped with a label that reads "home theater ready!"

So at this stage of the game, home theater is ubiquitous, and us old-timers are left fighting a rear-guard linguistic battle. I guess I can't blame the authors or their publishers. To paraphrase the line from Jaws, it's psychological: you write a book called Media Rooms For Dummies, and people go "huh?!". You call it Home Theater For Dummies, and you'll sell some copies.

The Home Theater PC

One very interesting concept in HTFD is the home theater PC. (I've written a few articles about these myself, incidentally). There are all sorts of reasons why a PC in the media room makes perfect sense. (Of course, they're also arriving there in pieces: component size MP3 players and PVRs like ReplayTV and TiVO are essientially simple computers dedicated to singe functions.) But in the past, getting a PC's display to look good on a fuzzy NTSC screen has been difficult. Fortunately, the growing number of HDTVs, DTVs, computer-grade projection systems, plasma screens, et al, in media rooms have made this easier to accomplish, as Briere and Hurley explain in their book.

The media room PC reflects one of the goals of HTFD: have a home theater that's capable of anything, that can be used to surf the net, play videogames, listen to music (whether it's CD, MP3, SACD, DVD-A, etc.), and with a little help from the advice in Smart Homes For Dummies, be accessible by TVs and speakers in other rooms in the house.

If you're new to the idea of media rooms, err home theater, and like the idea, Home Theater For Dummies is a great place to start. If your media room is starting to look a little long in the tooth (no PVR, no MP3 player, a first-generation DVD player, etc.), and you'd like to bring it into the 21st century, Briere and Hurley's book is equally recommended.

Don Surber writes:

Western Union Telegrams. Stop.

Why? The company stopped telegraphing on Friday. No one noticed until Wednesday.

Wow, and I thought VHS was passé.

(Via Pajamas Media.)

Look for loads of cool Warners Brothers DVDs in 2006, according to the Digital Bits, including several titles sure to please dedicated Kubrickologists like myself:

Look for 4 new Stanley Kubrick SEs including 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980) and the original unrated version Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Each will include new documentaries and never-before-seen footage blessed by the Kubrick Estate (although don't look for deleted scenes - Stanley himself never wanted them released).

But the most wanted Warners title may not be out until 2007:

And finally, here's a bit of news that's going to get a lot of you excited (and I made a point to specifically ask about this title, believe me)... Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) is currently on track for release as a multi-disc special edition in time for its 25th anniversary in 2007. The release is far from certain (as usual, there's a lot more that I can't post about this title yet - think of the old saying, "Loose lips sink ships"), but Warner says that work is proceeding, most of the key players are involved and things are "looking good" for release next year. We'll see.

It can't come soon enough: I watched my DVD copy of Blade Runner this weekend, and as one of the first discs released in that format in 1997, it's truly showing its age, especially since remastering has come so far since then.

Incidentally, something else I noticed while revisiting Blade Runner. while the production design still holds up, I was really surprised, how poorly its expository scenes were edited, in virtually every scene where there's background info that moves the story along. Notice that so much of it was delivered in long shots, where the actors' mouths ca barely be seen (such as when Sebastian takes Pris up to his apartment, and when Harrison Ford's Deckard character leans on the Egyptian in a fez to find Zora's location). Or, in during the scene in which Bryant tells Deckard the number of "skin jobs" on the streets, notice that so much of this information is spoken during cutaways to Deckard.

Clearly, this was a case of trying to salvage the film in the editing room, perhaps after initial preview audiences were confused by the film's action. (Hence the original addition of narration, as well.) Critics, used to regularly seeing films with this sort of editorial tune-up work are likely to spot it immediately and instinctively think "uh-oh, this one's a turkey", which may be why so many panned the film initially.

That's what Charlie Richards of BeyondtheNews.com writ