It’s a little like time and space travel, (a Billy Pilgrim experience), as I bounce between watching Katrina on the tube five years ago in my mind, filming last spring in New Orleans on my computer, and the Peter Jennings broadcasts in real time on the tube.
Here’s Nick in a clip that sums up the duality at work.
And it’s all been further confused because we left New Orleans last spring full of hope at the redemption that seemed to be occurring, only to have the oil spill knock everyone down again.
I’ll be finishing up the first cut of this film and the one on Frans Lanting on my own time as our funding from the Library of Congress has run its course. We will have something good to look at by the end of September. Thanks to ASMP and the Library for making this possible, and Bryce Lankard for setting up these great interviews.
Recently, I answered a question about how to use AVCHD files from a consumer video camera on a Mac. It can be really frustrating since these files are not native to the Mac. If you have the Leopard or Snow Leopard operating system and you use iMovie or Final Cut or Adobe Premier Pro, you can read the files natively.
But what about playing them with Quicktime, or cataloging with Expression Media? In these cases, you need to do some kind of conversion of the files. There are two basic ways to do it – transcode or rewrap.
When you transcode, you take the bundle of JPEGs that make up the movie and you actually remake them. This is a destructive process that degrades the image as the individual frame images are remade. (That’s an oversimplification, but you get the point).
In general, whenever you transcode, you want to keep the original as well as the converted files. Not only is transcoding destructive, but there is the possibility of some kind of transcoding error, where frames might get dropped, or some other glitch introduced to the sequence. This means you’ll be really increasing the storage needs, since you’ll need to save (and backup) both the original and the transcoded versions.
When you rewrap, you are basically taking all the JPEGs inside the movie file and putting a new wrapper around them (kind of like what a DNG does with raw file data). Since the individual images for each frame are not remade, there is no loss of visual quality. This also greatly reduces the possibility of any kind of dropped frames, etc.
Clipwrap ($50) can turn those pesky AVCHD files into quicktime-native files quickly and easily. If it reports a successful wrap, you’re pretty safe in tossing the original files. (Of course, to be safest, you’d want to watch the entire clip before tossing the original.)
Thanks to Richard Harrington who first talked me through this issue when I was dealing with my own camera.
Phase One has launched a survey of existing Expression Media and iView users. If you’d like to have some input on the future of the product, take a moment to fill out the short survey.
Writing the filename into the IPTC title field is a really useful practice. It preserves the name in a place that’s accessible, and likely to survive any kind of renaming I typically use it for one of three reasons.
I like to write the name in the title field of all my images after they get their permanent name in the ingestion process. That way, if a client renames the file and asks for the original, I have a breadcrumb trail back tp the original. All I need to do is look in the metadata of the renamed file.
Another reason to do this is that you are using a service of some kind that needs the files renamed. Pictage is a popular wedding print service that requires files to be renamed or upload.
And finally (and the real reason I made the script), you might want to rename files if your file renaming convention changes. When I started in digital, I used several different naming conventions before I settled on the one I use and promote now (Krogh_YYMMDD_####.ext). I’ve been working on the deep archive for a project, and decided it was time to rename the older files. But I wanted to keep the old name, in case someone might refer to the file this way.
I wanted to do this work in Expression Media 2, since that’s the program that manages my legacy archive. There is an existing script for iView, and I’ve made one available free for Bridge here.
This movie shows how the script works. If you are interested, it sells for $9.99. Available here.
It would probably be more accurate to say “how copyright enforcement by multi-national entertainment companies can threaten democracy.” No, I’m not going all “copyleft” on you. This movie picks up on a thread from several weeks ago when I recommended watching RIP, A Remix Manifesto.
Current US copyright laws have arguably gone over the edge, as both RIP and this movie point out. In the process the individual creator is getting squeezed. Part of the general public sees rights holders as unreasonable and greedy operators, trying to lock up the most recent version of our cultural heritage behind a pay wall forever (even as the current culture borrows liberally from intellectual property of the recent past.)
Many media conglomerates, meanwhile, see the residual value attached to the work of creators, and are doing their best to acquire all rights without regard to fair compensation to the creator. If the work has a hundred-year economic life, then they have even more reason to wrest total ownership of the work from other parties.
It is arguable that the extension of copyright has therefore hurt the economic interests of many creators.
At the recent NDIIPP partners meeting, we heard the phrase “fix the copyright problem”. I don’t have high hopes that a fix would be working in the interest of the independent creator.
In any case, for your viewing pleasure. The intro to Cory starts at 9 minutes in. There’s a question about how this relates to photography at 52 minutes. (I’m going to turn comments back on, and hope the spam does not return):
Here’s another item I picked up at the NDIPP partners meeting – a report by some pretty heavy organizations about the economics of digital preservation.
The organizations included: U.S. National Science Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the U.S. Library of Congress, the U.K. Joint Information Systems Committee, the Electronic Records Archives Program of the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Council on Library and Information Resources.
I spent several days last week at the NDIIP partners meeting. This is the Library of Congress program that supplied much of the dpBestflow funding. The groups is really an exceptional one, including people from academia, cultural heritage institutions, trade groups and some companies, Here are a few of the items I bookmarked from the program.
THATcamp – The Humanities And Technology unconference (like O’Reilly’s FOO Camp). This is a yearly event where humanists and technologists work together. They happen all around the world.
Andrew Turner (whom I met at the Foo Camp 2008) spoke about the future of geospatial data integration with digital collections. He’s now CTO of Fortius One.
Cathy Marshall from Microsoft did a hilarious and enlightening talk about personal archiving.
Pergamum is an energy-efficient file storage protocol that uses disks rather than tape. The disks spend most of their time at rest, and spin up periodically to self-test.
Andrew Maltz spoke about The Digital Dilemma, an ongoing project from AMPAS (the Oscars people) that looks at the issues of archiving motion picture data. They have some great research to be published soon, under their NDIIPP award.
David Ferriero, Archivist of the US, gave a great presentation. He’s both smart and funny. Here’s his blog.
I also got to reconnect with Howard Besser from NYU film school. I met him while I was at the archiving conference in Den Haag. Howard’s an unbelievably productive guy, working in motion image preservation.
The IPTC released the new Extended Schema two years ago. Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3 support the schema natively, but users of CS3 and CS4 can’t read the new fields. Last week, new panels were released that add this capability to these older versions of Photoshop.
New from John Beardsworth, a plug-in that lets you copy the metadata from one file to another one of the same name (From a JPEG to a NEF for instance). John’s hard at work on Lightroom Plug-ins, which is good for people who want to use the program and need extensions to the file or metadata handling capabilities.
From his blog:
My latest plug-in Syncomatic is uploaded and available. Syncomatic is not a plug-in everyone will need but is designed for circumstances where you need to copy the metadata between two groups of files and can use the filenames to match up pairs of images. So imagine you have lots of raw files with metadata, and TIFs of JPEGs whose metadata should match the raw files from which they were created. Syncomatic simply runs through the two groups of pictures and makes the metadata of 1234.jpg the same as 1234.raw, makes 6789.jpg match 6789.raw…..
Editor’s Note: This post was created more than a year ago, and was lost to a blog hack. Thanks to John Beardsworth for helping to sort out the hack, as well as a more recent one that we’ve been battling for the last month of so. The recent July 4th holiday has prompted me to bring it back out.
Every now and then, I get to work on a project that I’m really proud of – something that is really important. I consider the virtual Vietnam Veterans Memorial to be one of the best. I was commissioned by Footnote.com to make a digital representation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. They wanted to provide a way for everyone to experience the power of the wall, regardless of their ability to travel to Washington. And they wanted to let visitors leave behind comments and photos, in the same way visitors do at the real wall.
When you click on the name of any person on the wall, you get some information about that person, age, hometown, rank, cause of death. You also get the opportunity to upload comments or photos to the record of that person. In this way the wall becomes more than just a list of 58,000 names – it becomes a record of 58,000 individuals. The tragedy of war, and the depth of the sacrifice of the individual soldier is made all the more real when you see the comments of family, friends, and comrades left behind.
Tips on navigating the site and more on the project after the jump.
