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Category: technology

August 1, 2012

GPS Jane

My Garmin Nuvi took my family on a ride getting to our vacation. Then, my iPhone Maps app actually got us there.

The first time my wife and I drove with GPS navigational support was six years ago, while driving in a car rental out in San Francisco.

I should first mention that my wife is the official navigator in the family.
She loves maps and has only gotten lost once (in the woods) in all the time I’ve known her.
It’s probably not going too far to say that I’m moderately to severely geographically challenged. I could get lost driving down a straight highway.

I could blame this unfortunate fact that I grew up in New York City and never drove a car until after college. Good excuse? Well it’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Driving around Fog City, I felt like I was in the car of the future. A portable navigation device using GPS (Global Positioning System) technology to take you anywhere you wanted to go. No more worrying how to get there.
I was sold, before I even got into the car.

My wife wasn’t so sure.
I was so charmed I set the device’s voice control to dictate its directions in a smooth female Australian accent.

And then I gave it a name.
Jane.

[My wife joked about “the other woman.”]

The Other Woman
We ended up not following Jane’s directions much that day due to human/computer incompatibility. My wife had her map, and unless she saw the logic of the Aussie hussie, my wife called out an alternate course.

And though we collectively agreed there was little value to this circus show circuit freak, I purchased one within three months. (the Nuvi 760)

The name stuck, and eventually, the two north stars in my life came to some sort of understanding, and Jane became a welcome passenger on most of our big road trips.

Today, even though portable GPS navigation tech is a common consumer tech tool, and of course available in many car models and through our iPhones, we still use our aging Jane quite a lot. The fact that she talks still keeps her ahead of much of the still silent competition, unless you want to buy a costly GPS app for your iPhone.  (That said, I understand Android’s native free navigation capability is pretty awesome.)

And as of May, Garmin has sold over 100 million of its GPS products. So I’m not alone in my devotion to this magic tool that stretches my navigational capability.

Deep down, though, my two navigators still don’t get along.

And much like a bad movie where the “other woman” threatens the lives of a happy couple, I have finally begun to see the errors of my ways with Jane. But is it too late?

The Blind Leading the Blind?
First off, I’ve clearly become overly reliant on Jane.
I take Jane with me down the street to get a quart of milk.
New restaurant in the next town? Too far to risk getting there by myself.
I need my Jane!

And now that Jane has comfortably cemented herself to my life, something strange has begun to happen.
She’s getting lazy.

Her directions are sometimes, well… wrong.
And over time, the problem has gotten worse.
Her directions eventually get me where I want to go, but not always through a shortest route approach.

Yes, I know that road maps need to get updated from time to time, and you’ve also got to refresh your portable GPS unit’s memory with software updates.

About a year ago, I got an email from Garmin offering lifetime software updates for Jane. I took the deal, thinking I would never need to look for another portable navigator ever again.

Cue the ominous movie music…

Jane Takes a Vacation during our Vacation
Last weekend, the Lester family got into the car to kick off our little beach vacation on the North Fork of Long Island.

As usual, Jane was front and center as we headed out.
I type ‘Harbor Road’ into her keypad, but before I can complete my data input, she automatically suggests ‘ Harbour’ without allowing me another option.  She then happily locks in the address but also changes the two-digit house number to a non-related three-digit number.

It’s like the vacation address just doesn’t exist.
Am I in a Twilight Zone episode?
If only…

So I pull out my iPhone and repeat the same exercise to see how the Maps app handles the task.

Problem? What problem?
My iPhone quickly locks into our correct route.
There it is. Harbor Road, on the water.
Not Harbour Road, several blocks inland with an entirely different address.

My wife is driving.
So I have the flexibility to run both devices simultaneously.
A little competition, if you will. (Getting into the spirit of the Olympics.)

Let the Games Begin!
The two wonder machines run neck and neck until the last mile. I knew it would come down to the wire.
Then Jane says calmly, “Turn right.”

But iPhone Maps clearly points, Left!!

This is the moment of truth.
It was time to change the status quo.
I call out, “Take a left…Now!!”

Jane proclaims her disapproval at my disobedience.
I firmly repeat my navigational act of anarchy.

My wife complies, and as our car begins its left turn, Jane admits defeat.
I look at her readout and it says, “Recalibrating…”

And in that moment, Jane lost her grip on me.
She eventually regains her composure and finally displays the original address I had wanted all along, as well as our now-correct bearing.

Too late, Jane.

She decides to acknowledge her error in the last minute of our journey?!
I don’t think so. This is the last straw.

I know. Jane and I are bonded together for life. Right?
Lifetime updates with no additional cost.
Doesn’t matter.
It’s time to make a change.

Jane, it’s over.

Let’s Just Remember the Good Times
My change of heart has nothing to do with the recent but separate tech announcements by Google Maps and Apple promoting even greater upcoming capabilities for smartphones. And even more irrelevance for dedicated GPS devices.

Wired has already declared, “The portable GPS device is dead.”

Nope. I’m not just reading the writing on the wall about Jane.
This time, it’s personal.

Where’s the Nearest Flower Shop?
Now I’ve got to woo back the one and only true navigator in my life.

So I decide to write my wife a little note to express the error of my ways and my true regret.

Dear Wife,

I’m sorry I ever doubted your navigational superiority.
Artificial intelligence can never match your keen sense of direction, and your innate capability to drive around a traffic jam, leaving all others in your dust.

I was wrong to ever trust Jane, when you are truly my one and only navigator.

Can you ever forgive me?

Love,

Your Geek

So I close the envelope and look around for my wife.
It’s suddenly way too quiet.
Oh no… She’s gone!

Don’t worry.
She just went shopping with a friend at a local farm stand on the side of the road, five miles away.
I should go find her.

But I don’t really know where she went.
Ummmmm…

Excuse me. I’ve got to go and find Jane.

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July 15, 2012

Singing the Blu-ray Blues

Are you still on the Blu-ray Disk bandwagon, or have you moved on? I’ve got five reasons to stick around.

Not so long ago, I was the proud owner of a new Samsung Blu-ray Disk player. I immediately repurchased a few of my favorite sc-fi blockbusters and marveled at the magnificent imagery of this HD-enabling device.

My home entertainment center was worthy, again.
(Is that a tear welling up in the corner of my eye?)
I looked ahead to the gleaming age of HD video with Blu-ray Disks for my 42” Panasonic Plasma TV.

Fast forward to the present.

The Distant Honeymoon
What the frak happened?!
HD video is so yesterday. Now, it’s 3D that’s the bomb.

Yes, Blu-ray Disk sales are still strong.
In fact, 2011 was a banner year with sales up 20%. But digital delivery rose 51% over the same period.

Don’t look now, Blu-ray, but your days on top may be numbered.
Is it just a matter of time until HD streaming technologies take the lead?

So where does this leave you and me?
Again with confusion.
Time to abandon Blu-ray? I hardly knew you.

All I know is my movie collection is a train wreck.

The Costs of Beauty
Blu-ray tech shows off a stunning picture. So I’ve pledged to never go back and buy a standard DVD ever again. That would be sacrilege!

But the premium pricing of Blu-ray Disks never came down that much from their original sticker shock levels. Plunking down $20-$30 to watch a movie in today’s enlightened media landscape is somewhat extravagant. No?

Here’s the current pricing for few new Blu-ray disk titles at Best Buy-
Wrath of the Titans- $19.99
Mirror Mirror- $29.99
The Artist- $24.99
Safe House- $24.99

Where’s the value proposition? (more on this later)

And can I mention how annoying it is to wait for a Blu-ray Disk to load?
(It takes like, FOREVER!)

So, needless to say, my Blu-ray Disk collection has not flourished.

Smarty Pants Strategy Implodes
Of course, I’ve been ordering all my Netflix red envelope movies to arrive wearing Blu-ray stripes.

That strategy quickly became a problem a couple years back when my home theater started growing cobwebs. Remember, I am a proud parent of a toddler.
And that prompted most of my media consumption to go mobile when
I became a mobile media warrior on Metro North.
So now what?

Well I thought I would be very clever. So I jumped down the rabbit hole.
(way down)
I bought myself Panasonic’s prototype portable 9” Blu-ray player and almost broke the bank. (Don’t tell my wife.)

You might ask who in their right mind would spend big money on a tiny screen for watching HD video with a platform that moved at the speed of glue?

I think there were three of us.
(But I got a great deal on Amazon.)

You must understand I had no other choice, right?
I had over-technoligized myself into a corner.
How was I otherwise going to watch my precious movies?
(And remember, as a new parent, going to the flicks the old fashioned way was a distant memory.)

I really got the Blu-ray Blues.

Dead Disk Walking?
Look, the facts don’t lie.
Let me add to the weight and throw a few more rocks onto the future of Blu-ray tech.

  • Apple never put the darn drives into their computers.
  • I’ve already got HD streaming via Apple TV and Roku.
  • Standard DVDs really aren’t that bad. (Please don’t stone me.)

So why not just chuck Blu-ray and move to a higher plane with all streaming?
Well, it turns out there is actually something to the Blu-ray value prop.

Five Reasons to Stick with Blu-ray Disks

-The Downloadable Copy
One big reason I will buy a Blu-ray Disk is if it comes with the digital version.
If you shop smart, you’ll often find a version packaged with a digital copy you can pop right on your mobile phone. Nice.

-The Extras Come with Extra Extras
I know this has marketing ooze all over it, but it works.
They simply pack the Blu-ray Disk extras with more goodness. For example, I wouldn’t know the correct Star Trek movie (2009) plot without having gone through all the deleted scenes. Fascinating. (I had to enlighten a friend who had only bought the standard DVD version.)

-DVD Player, Say Hello to VHS Player in the Attic
It’s over, baby. Thanks for the memories. You can hang around a while longer, but please leave the keys on the way out.

-3D
I’ve said I would never wear those silly glasses at home, if I don’t lose them first. Time will tell…

-I Prefer Owning Atoms instead of Bytes
I’m still stuck on the idea of having a physical object to put on my shelf.
I know. It’s an analog vestige I’ll grow out of some day.

Fold or Hold?
So where does all this leave us in the HD game?
Though this feels like another tech poker tournament, the reality is Blu-Ray Disks aren’t joining their HD DVD cousins and Betamax ancestors any time soon.

Cheer up.
While you’ve got your Blu-ray Blues, at least you’ll be viewing them in the full color spectrum of awesome high definition.

Joy?

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July 8, 2012

I Sold My Soul to the Digital Devil

Is Final Cut Pro X sharp enough to erase that evil deal you made to shoot movies on your camera?

If a stranger with a wicked sun burn walked up to you and said you never needed to use your camcorder ever again to record your home movies, you’d take the deal, right?

We all did this a few years back.

The last tape-based camcorder I ever bought was a Sony Mini DV unit back in 2002.

I edited the content by sucking it onto my iMac via FireWire. My editing software was iMovie and then later, Final Cut Pro.
Everything worked just fine, and I was rather chuffed with my little home media studio of the early 21st century.

Then one day, digital cameras started showing up with little red movie record buttons, and everyone suddenly realized you didn’t need tape-based camcorders anymore. Heck, you didn’t even need a camcorder. Cameras could do double duty.

Sure, the video quality wasn’t as good. There were file size limits that restricted how long you could record. And to edit your digital movie files, you had to buy external hard drives to handle the massive movie clip sizes. And the file size problem really exploded when HD recording came into fashion.

You theoretically could save the files forever. But you also had to worry about your hard drives going belly up with all your precious family memories.
(This has occurred to you, hasn’t it?)

But storage, backup, and file corruption concerns aside, I have to admit it’s pretty cool to plug your camera’s little SD card into your computer and watch your movie files quickly transfer over.

So yes, it was a time saver.
Yes, it was easier.
Yes, I liked it way better.
(really)

…BUT
(You knew that was coming.)

There is one problem that nobody ever talked about-

TRANSCODING.
No, not transwarp.
TRANSCODING!

The Deal with the Digital Devil
You must have wondered somewhere along the way how a tiny four gig SD card in a camera could record so much video. Well, it’s called file compression, and that’s your camera’s secret voodoo.

There are a few types of movie recording codecs that perform this tricky task to squeeze your movies small enough to allow them fit onto your camera’s memory card. A few of the more common codecs are H.264, Motion JPEG, and AVCHD.

These highly compressed movie formats create video files that look great when you play them back on your camera or your computer, but you couldn’t edit with them. (That’s buried on page 17 of the contract.)

So what good were these movie files if you couldn’t do anything other than look at them?

The fix here was to reprocess or “transcode” the files into a different video codec that your editing software could actually handle. This meant creating a larger and less compressed duplicate of each movie file that would play nice with your editing software.

Got that?
Just nod your head, and let’s move on.

The Devil is in the Details
As a new daddy, I went about my business editing little movies of my son’s early days by first transcoding every frickin video clip I wanted to edit with.

You can imagine the organization that kind of workflow required.
-Duplicate files.
-External hard drives filling up at triple speed.
-Archiving hell.

I’ll just say my desk at home, let alone my computer’s desktop, does not quite live up to the clean and simple aesthetic of our almost all-digital world.

But you do what you gotta do.
Right?

Was I the only father out there who had a deal with Mephistopheles to make home movies? Nobody else seemed to be talking about it.
(Maybe it’s in the contract. I really never got around to reading mine.)

The Phoenix of Final Cut Pro
A year ago, Apple shocked the digital editing world and killed off its wildly successful Final Cut Pro editing platform. Almost a decade earlier, Final Cut had brought professional non-linear editing to the masses for a fraction of the cost of competing systems.

Then Apple pulled the plug by reinventing Final Cut Pro all over again. The problem is the new version, Final Cut Pro X, is an entirely new program, “built from the ground up.”
It’s not compatible with the old version, Final Cut Pro 7.
(There is no version 8 or 9.)
So you can’t move your old or ongoing editing projects to this new editing platform. Sorry.

I got stuck in the eye of this hurricane, and for the past year I’ve been struggling to decide when to make the transition.

First off, Final Cut Pro X only works on Lion, Apple’s current operating system (and soon to be released Mountain Lion). So I first had to make the Lion upgrade.

Then, there was sooooo much bad press about how inferior this new version of FCP was. Angry editors called it iMovie on steroids. There was a consensus in the professional and semi-professional editing communities that they felt abandoned by this more limited editing platform.

So I wasn’t too eager to jump into the mess.
I’ve got plenty of my own digital messes to clean up!
(plus a few analog ones too)

But Apple kept banging their drum about how much better FCP X really was. They said you simply had to invest a little time to learn the new interface.

But there was one particular FCP X feature that caught my eye.
Apple said you didn’t need to transcode your files anymore.
You could throw just about any video codec at FCP X, and it could work with it.

Bold words.
But still I held off.

Fast forward to our current timeline, and Apple, never standing still, has been busy improving FCP X through multiple software updates.
And there’s a rumor out there that the old FCP 7 platform will cease working with the Mountain Lion OS, coming out later this month.

So I figured it was finally time.

Final Cut Pro X to the Rescue
Last week, I went to Apple’s App Store, which always has a friendly icon waiting eagerly on my iMac’s dock.

I clicked on it and downloaded Apple’s most controversial product since the iPhone 4 ‘Antenna-gate.’ (Remember all that hoopla with the antenna reception problem?)

The time had come to face my digital gauntlet.
I watched my finger make its move to launch Final Cut Pro X.

FCP X quickly sprung to life.
Would the continuity of the Lester family record on video be ensured for eons to come?
(or at least the next couple of years?)
Drum roll please…

Well, of course it worked.
But as I’ve said, the devil is always in the details.

While this is not a product review, let me confirm that FCP X is better and faster in a whole host of ways. It’s also still missing some functionality that was standard with the older version. One example is it takes three steps to blend a transition between two audio tracks instead of the old way, which took one.

I’ll live.

The Big Answer
And what about TRANSCODING?
Remember, Barrett’s holy grail?
Have we forgotten about that already?!

Can Final Cut Pro X edit my native H.264 .MOV files fresh from my Canon SX230 (standard-issue toddler cam) or Canon Elph 300 (in-a-pinch pocket cam)?

Perhaps the question should be,
“Does FCP X WANT to edit with my camera’s native H.264 movie files?”

I don’t think it really does, but it grudgingly will when told to.

FCP X quickly gave me a few opportunities to transcode my imported movies.
Pro Res 422 (a beefy codec) is now FCP X’s default transcoding option.
It was almost like, “Would you like fries with that?”

Clearly Apple’s declaration that ENDS THE ERA OF TRANSCODING has been somewhat exaggerated.

Look, I understand that better ingredients create a tastier pie.
And the same holds true in the digital world. Non-optimized movie files will make FCP X and your Mac work harder. And maybe not all Macs (especially older ones) are up for the task.

But my 2010 iMac is a 2.93 GHz Intel Core i7 with 4 gigs of RAM,
(I’m not bragging) and should be ready for the challenge. Yes?

So I refused all requests to transcode and hit the proverbial red button.
Cue another drum roll…

EUREKA!! It worked!
(And there was much rejoicing in Barrett’s brain.)

Let me proclaim this again loud and clear throughout the land!

I DO NOT NEED TO TRANSCODE MY H.264 .MOV FILES TO EDIT IN FINAL CUT PRO X!

I am free!!

Wait, did I just cut another deal with Beelzebub?
Hmmm. I don’t think so.

So today’s story has a happy ending.
Technology has made my life a little easier.
(Savoring the moment…)

Digital Zen restored.
I am At Home with Tech.

Now please excuse me while I get to work editing my five-month backlog of family videos. I think I’ll be needing to move at transwarp speed to catch up!

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