Monthly Archives: September 2006

Sound memories

Technique

Sounds add greatly to memories.

The very first column in these pages spoke about the nostalgia of family albums. I could not but help being reminded of it the today when a singularly unusual thing happened.

I was rummaging about in the desk drawer looking for something when my old Sony microcassette dictaphone surfaced from the dark recesses. Seeing it brought memories flooding back. Not of all the times I had used it in business to dictate cover-your-rear memoranda in the world of corporate politics. No, that is mercifully forever behind me now. Rather, I recalled that the last time I had put this great, if now very dated, analog tape recorder to use was some three years ago when our son was but one year old. He used to hang out in his crib and merrily squeal to himself as he discovered his vocal chords. So I had switched it on ‘record’ and placed it in his room under the crib, so he could chat away undisturbed.

Coming back half an hour later, sure enough, there were several minutes of squealing and general joie de vivre on the tape. I put it back in the desk drawer and pretty much forgot about it until it surfaced again today. Now with my new awareness of the value added by sound to my photographic efforts, it immediately occurred to me that the tape had to be somehow recovered and placed on the family web site, next to the snaps of our son. This proved trickier than you would think.

You see, the tired old tape, used who knows how many times, decided to come off the end spool when I rewound it. Now these cassettes are not rebuildable, being heat sealed, unlike in days of yore when they were actually screwed together. And the idea of somehow transplanting the precious tape to another microcassette was a prospect I dared not contemplate. Why not buy a regular tape cassette and splice in the tape from the microcassette? And she was right – the tape sizes are identical and I had always used the 1 7/8 inches/second tape speed on the Sony for best quality. That’s the same speed regular cassettes run at.

Off to the local Target store where, to my dismay, I was hosed down for no fewer than ten cassette tapes, individual ones no longer being sold. Still, at $7, the damage was bearable, particularly given the importance of my mission. Back home, I pulled out enough tape to make room for the spliced section coming from the microcassette, managed to get hold of the tape pigtail in the latter, and glued in the whole tape with superglue, winding it in laboriously with a pencil through the hub….analog to digital was never so difficult.

The next step was to track down a tape cassette player – our tape cassettes exited stage left years ago. Then it occurred to me that I had an old boom box in a guest room and before you could say ‘yipee’ I had the tape playing on the boom box with my Edirol digital recorder placed nearby.

Into Audacity with the MP3 file, a few moments later a noise sample was made and the noise filtered out (Audacity is great!) and our happy son made his way to the family web site for all to enjoy. They’re just squeals to you, so I will not repeat them here, but for us it’s a wonderful enhancement to our memories of Winston when he was but one year old.

So when you take pictures of your kids, why not record the sounds they make too?

A related lesson is to digitize all your old media – records, tapes, pictures, because before long it will be impossible to get the playback devices these need. Plus, backing-up of digital is very easy.

The photo gallery of the future

Photography

Flat screens continue to get cheaper.

If you are in a high sales tax state the chances are fair that you have purchased expensive electronic or photographic goods out of state by mail order. The sales taxes saved, not to mention the satisfaction of knowing that you are starving the beast that is government, outweigh shipping costs.

So it’s not lost on me that the wonderful B&H AV catalog is not only from an out of state vendor to this Californian, but also contains some 35 pages dedicated to televisions. Or, as I prefer to think of them, picture frames.

The traditional gallery model, adopted in my home theater requires the viewer to walk around and gaze at each wall hung picture in turn. He can, of course, enjoy an interactive experience by clicking on the hotspots in the electronic panorama version. That’s pretty neat. But it’s still nice to look at a Really Large Print mounted on the wall.

So why not just scrap all those frames and mattes and hangers and replace all of them with but one large screen flat panel television monitor? We look at pictures on computer screens all day and the definition is just fine. And while it’s true that a gallery with multiple hanging pictures can entertain more than one viewer at a time, in the home you are usually dealing with one viewer only, so that’s not an issue.

Let’s pause for a moment and consider the economics. My home theater displays fifteen pictures, each 13″ x 19″ framed and matted 22″ x 28″. Each picture costs maybe $10 to print, taking into account paper, ink and depreciation on the printer. The mounting board and matt add another $25, the frame and glass $35. So that’s $70 a framed print or $1,050 for the fifteen hanging on the walls. And those are DIY prices. Don’t even think of going to the framing store. Suddenly, I don’t feel so good….

The diagonal of a 13″ x 19″ print is 23″; the diagonal of the framed print, with matt, is 36″. The closest TV screen to this size I can find at B&H is 37″ and most run around $1,000 to $1,600 delivered, and that’s for an HDTV model. I can deliver the picture to this screen at no additional expense using my Sony AV unit in the home theater. This device, in addition to playing DVDs, plays CDs with JPGs just fine. Indeed, I can compile JPGs or TIFFs into a QuickTime movie slide show and route the output to a screen of my choice using my iBook laptop computer and a $19 adapter cable from Apple.

Plus I can watch regular TV on this screen and display as many slideshows as I want, as opposed to the static picures on the wall which are incredibly labor intensive to assemble. Indeed, I am comfortable in speculating that I could install one large flat panel television in less time, much less, than it takes to process, print, mount, matt and frame a conventional print. And that print will have a fraction of the dynamic range of the transilluminated ‘slide’ projected by the television. Further, adding music or virtual reality movies with sound effects is very simple, as I have illustrated in these pages.

So what’s wrong with this picture? With limited wall space and nowhere to store hard copy prints, why not scrap them all together and replace the lot with a slim flat panel TV screen? The prints will only get more expensive to make while the TVs will only get cheaper. And you no longer need acres of wall space to show your work.

Here’s the price history of one chosen at random from another web vendor:

I would guess there’s little to choose between brands quality wise, as most screens are made in just two or three factories in the far east. Sony and Samsung, strange bedfellows indeed, make their screens in a jointly owned factory, for example, so there’s no need to go ‘label shopping’ in the mistaken belief that a famous name means better quality.

Update May, 2011: Click here to see how I delivered on the above.

Quicktime movie enhancements

Software

A bit of coding makes for a better experience.

Apple buries it on their web site, but there’s a lot you can do to enhance the Quicktime experience by adding a few parameters to the HTML code which runs the Quicktime movie. Apple calls this ’embedding tag attributes’ – which sounds pretty offputting.

Click below and, once you are done, click the back arrow to return here.

Click for demo

I have used six Quicktime parameters to enhance the viewing experience. The code looks as follows – I have numbered the lines to refer to them; in practice, no numbers would be used:

Line 1 – This tells your web page where the movie file resides.

Line 2 – The size you want the movie on the screen. 600:338 is 16:9 widescreen.

Line 3 – This sets the background color – red being appropriate to this subject. You can also use standard hex numbers – if there’s a color on your screen you want to match, run Apple’s DigitalColorMeter utility to determine the number and insert the siz aplhanumerics between the quotes.

Line 4 – This is an important one. Once the viewer has finished watching, a single click anywhere on the movie will direct him to this page on your web site – in this example I am redirecting the viewer back to this blog page. Note that the ability to pan with the cursor in all directions and to zoom in and out with the keyboard Shift and Control keys remains unaffected.

Line 5 – This prevents the viewer from downloading your movie and saving it.

Line 6 – All Macs come with Quicktime, so no plugin download is required to watch Quicktime moves if you use a Mac. If you are one of the unenlightened many still using that lock-up device known as Windows, and if you do not have Quicktime on your PC, this line will automatically direct you to the download page of Quicktime for Windows on Apple’s web site.

Line 7 – This scales the movie to preserve its original aspect ratio rather than forcing it to fill your frame.

If you go to the panorama page on my web site and click on any of the thumbnails to watch a movie, you will see these enhancements at work, in full sreen mode.

The full range of Quicktime parameters can be found on Apple’s web site here.

More lies from CBS

Hall of Shame

Protect your property by all means, but lie about it?

Hot on the heels of my piece on digital tampering by the news media comes the not-so startling revelation that the people at CBS are at it again.

This time, the purpose of their lies is innocent if no less damnable, namely protecting the image of their $15mm a year teleprompter reader, one Katie Couric.

A picture being worth a thousand words or 15 lbs of fat, I will let the following photograph do my talking for me. Guess which one CBS used in promoting Ms. Couric?

In the same way that they tried suing gun makers for murders committed with their weapons, doubtless that scum bag class known as tort lawyers will be suing Adobe/Photoshop any day now for making it possible to trim off all that fat. The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable, as Wilde once said of fox hunting.

Always carry …. a sound recorder?

QTVR, Sound

A new twist on an old saying.

Which of us has not heard “Always carry a camera”? The exhortation is rarely informed, of course. Any Englishman will tell you that it never rains when you carry an umbrella, and for most, the same applies to cameras. You never see good pictures if you just happen to have one along for the ride. Good pictures are made, not found.

However, just to put a new twist on it, how about “Always carry a sound recorder”?

This past weekend I was with our four year old at a local park and, as is the case with kids, Winston made straight for the play area. This, you must understand, is fenced. Not to keep anyone out but rather to keep all those threats to society, little children, in. And no, this was not in the Bronx or Brixton. The reality, I suspect, is that one of the city councilmen just happened to have a relative in the fencing business and …. well, you know how the rest of it goes.

Well, Winnie was struggling with the latch to the gate so I gave him a hand, only to be met with the most appalling squeaking as the gate opened. Payola for the gate oiling program must have been missed this year, I suppose. But the emotion I felt most was one of excitement. This was a fantastic sound effect! So I whipped out the Edirol sound recorder (from its newly acquired 99 cent canvas case found at Target – Roland being too cheap to supply one) and had at it with the gate, much to Win’s amusement. We whanged the gate back and forth a few times and had a jolly old time doing it, I must say. Creepy! Adults like funky sounds too!

I had already added wind howl sounds to the Piedras Blancas motel QTVR picture but this project just called out for a creaky gate sound to complete the feeling of desolation. It was a moment’s work in Audacity to superimpose the squeaky gate on the wind howl and then to parcel the whole thing up in CubicConnector.

Here’s how the sound tracks look in Audacity – the wind howl is at the top. Subequently I copied and pasted the squeaky gate to match the length of the wind howl then told CubicConnector to loop the whole thing:

Now I’m not about to lug the Canon 5D/KingPano head/Linhof tripod with me wherever I go, in the search of new panoramas. But the Edirol may just make the trip.

* * * * *

A few words about this old motel. It has been on Highway One, close to Hearst Castle for as long as I remember. Back when I first saw it on my inaugural drive up the most beautiful road in California – that would have been 1979 or so – it was replete with gas pumps and was a hive of activity. A half decent restaurant and those same jolly white and electric blue colors. Then over the years it began to fail. Nothing wrong with the location, just lousy management and marketing. Finally, last year, the State of California bought it for an obscene amount of taxpayers’ money and promised to convert it to an educational institution, whatever that means. After all, this is the state that made America’s best public schooling system into the worst in a short twenty years, so it’s not as if they can claim to know anything about the subject.

A year later what you see is what is in my picture. A couple of old paint buckets sit outside the deserted main entrance. Weeds grow everywhere. The gas pumps are long gone and a couple of abandoned cars soil the parking lot. It’s an incredibly sad scene. Desuetude and detritus in this otherwise pristine area, with a brown State of California sign ‘Closed for Restoration’ tacked by the doorway. That’s a sign that needs to be posted on the Capitol in Sacramento.