Technology: October 2004 Archives
Now that I have burned my first DVD with material we recorded last summer, I want to show it to our friends and family. But I notice a great difference between the people here and in Holland. All our family and friends here have a DVD player. Videotape is dead; DVD is the current device to use. It is almost impossible to rent e recent movie on tape. However, none of the Dutch people I have recently spoken have a DVD player! This includes my parents and my sister, probably the persons that are the most interested in our recordings. This weekend I will have to spend some time to copy the DVD contents to tape, so I will be able to show them our adventures in Thailand when we visit them in November.
I am wondering whether Spain really is more technically advanced than the Netherlands ---who would have expected that?---, whether my friends and family here are more gadget freaks than the people we know in the north of Europe, or whether I simply did not speak to the right people in the Netherlands. Do you have a DVD player?
After all problems I encountered last week, I laid my little video project to rest for a while. Until yesterday; when I felt the itch of an unfinished project. In the mean time I found on the internet how to get around the rendering problem: I simply created another project that contained the problematic scene plus some footage before and after, rendered it to an AVI file, and included this file in my project. A few hours of rendering later I had my DVD!
Happily I inserted the precious disk into our DVD player to admire the result. But... all sound editing ---sound levels and background music--- I had done in the project had disappeared and in some scenes the sound was out of sync. Once again I was very dissapointed! :-(
I got back on the internet, and search the Pinnacle support forums. There was a huge thread about this problem, which lead me to the FAQ. I have to update my software to version 9.0.8 to fix this problem. On the download page I found a huge patch ---46 Mb--- to update to version 9.1.2. What bothered me most is that this fix is from June, while I purchased the software in September. They simply sold me a defect product, while they had already solved these problems!
I am downloading the patch now, and this afternoon I will buy a DVD+RW disk to try to burn my project again.
Just a few weeks after Microsoft acquired LookOut to provide advanced search for Outlook, Google released Google Desktop Search. LookOut is mainly focused on OutLook, but also does a little bit with other files, while Google focuses on Office files and also does Outlook.
At the moment I have both tools installed, to see which one I prefer. Of course I expect Google to expand their application very soon, while an upgrade from Microsoft might take a while.
The PalmOne Zire 31 comes with a SD slot and a default ---small--- card of 16 Mb. It's basic use is to put MP3 songs on it, to be played with the RealOne player. Putting files on the SD card is very easy; you only have to drag the file to the QuickInstall icon, and the next time you synchronize it will put the file on the card.
However, you can only access the file from the Palm, there is no way to copy it back to a PC. I would like such a function, to keep some important documents with me, which I can access from any PC.
Therefore I was really happy when I found Card Export II. This little application emulates a USB mass storage device on the Palm, so you can access it as a flash drive. But after installing it, I received an error message when connecting to my PC: Cannot open USB port 0307. I e-mailed the Softick support department, and two days later they presented a new version, which also works on the PalmOne Zire 31. Great!
The past few weeks I have been working myself into a completely new world: video editing. It all started with the camera we received this spring. Of course we took it with us on holidays, and back home we wondered what to do with the tapes. They contained some nice material, but also a lot of 'crap' produced when trying out the functions of the camera. I wanted to edit the video, and copy the result to a DVD for easy play back.
So I installed the tools that came with the camera on my PC, and connected it to an USB port, only to find out that the software is useless and that USB only supports low quality video. After looking around on the internet a little bit I ordered Pinnacle Studio DV, a software suits that comes with a FireWire (IEEE-1394) PCI-card.
After installing the card, I set to work: I copied the tapes to my hard disk, and selected the scenes to be included. I made some dark scenes a little bit lighter, and adjusted the audio levels. After adding some smooth transitions and background music my video was ready for DVD. I set my PC to render for a few hours, and the next morning I had... an error message! I figured that it must be a full disk, so I cleaned up the disk and set it to render again. The next morning, I found the same error at the exactly same scene; a photo I included in the video.
After a little bit looking around, I found a log file, giving me a more detailed error message: Max Video Bitrate:8494000 for disc output. Mmmm. bit rate, that must have something to do with data throughput. Since the problem appeared in a photo, I decided to increase the JPG compression of the file and give it another try. Half a day later I found the same rendering error again. I was getting frustrated, and started to search on the internet, without results. Then I looked in the configuration of Pinnacle Studio, and saw that you could configure the bit rate for DVDs. It was set at automatically, which gave me 60 minutes of video per DVD. Since the error message mentioned a bit rate a little bit above 8Mb, I fixed the bit rate to 8Mb, and let my PC work again... with the same result as before. Now, I lowered it to 7Mb, and pushed the Create button again. In a few hours I will know whether that has solved the problem, but I have a bad feeling about it...
[Update 2004.10.06]: I was right, the error is still there. I did a short test with a project containing only the photos involved, and it rendered correctly. It's time to see how good the support department of Pinnacle is.
