Railroads
The October 3, 2005 issue of The New Yorker has an article titled “Coal Train – I” by the renowned writer and essayist John McPhee. It is the first of two parts. Interesting reading for railroad buffs, geologists and geographers, conservationists and environmentalists, and admirers of fine reporting. I’m looking forward to Part II.
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Housekeeping
My workspace is getting messier by the day. Not to mention my bedside table, my garage, my bookshelves, and my record-keeping. Would that we had more hours in a day to attend to such mundane matters as housekeeping. I really don’t know where the time goes. Have set up my iMac to announce the time in a cybernetic voice every hour on the hour, and the frequency with which this weird voice comes on is beginning to be annoying.
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Videomaking
There’s a lot to be said for technology, some good and some not so good.
I have been an amateur moviemaker for most of my adult life. Started back in the Sixties using 8mm hand-wound movie cameras – Canon, Sankyo, Bell & Howell. Then Super 8mm came along and in the Seventies I got electric-powered cameras like the Minolta, Nikon, and Nizo. All of these produced some fine family and vacation films that I still have, though I would only run them through a projector in order to copy them to videotape, and subsequently to DVD. Reason being that the old films are brittle and the emulsion easily scratched, and when the projector is old and feeble as they all mostly are, terrible things can happen to the film
Came the Eighties and the appearance of electronic imaging. So I went out and bought the first 8mm video ‘camcorder’ made by Sony. They called it a Handycam (still do, as a matter of fact) and the quality of the image was much better than the first generation large VHS camcorders. It had something called a ‘flying erase head’ which eliminated the annoying glitches that occurred with the older plain vanilla VHS tapes each time you started and stopped the camcorder. I have a collection of 8mm tapes from that period that are still good enough to watch today (when I have the time).
Next came an improved format called Hi-8, which offered better resolution, on the same size tape. So I bought a newer Sony camcorder to keep up with the times. And then another, and then another. I trusted Sony’s products (and to a certain degree I still do today). When things went wrong with the camcorder, I would take it in to the Sony Service Station a short drive away, and for a not unreasonable fee (if it was no longer under warranty) and following an absence of a week at most, the unit would be fixed and we’d be off and running once again.
We now come to Digital Video. The cameras are tinier, the electronics more sophisticated, the tapes (called MiniDV) no larger than a matchbox, the buttons, screens, menus, and all the bells and whistles so cleverly and ergonomically arranged as to become almost a natural extension of one’s hand when in use. The picture quality in terms of lines per inch (which is the accepted measure of video resolution) is far superior to what I had before. Now I have a collection of MiniDV tapes enough to fill several shoe boxes.
The big advantage with digital video, of course, is that it is digital, meaning that it can integrate easily with your home computer when the proper connection is made. So you take your camcorder, hook it up to your computer, open the video editing software of your choice (new computers running Windows XP or Mac OS X already have such software, though there are third party companies that offer them as well), and there you are, a few clicks of your mouse, and your movie can be viewed, captured on your hard drive, manipulated, cleaned up, cut and trimmed, livened up with titles, transitions, and special effects, and finally, turned into a DVD (provided your computer has a DVD burner and the necessary software).
But things keep changing. There are now new formats and camcorders that make the job of transferring to a computer much less complicated. Though I have not yet used them, they are out there – miniDVD camcorders, using a smaller version of the familiar DVD that fits into the central well of your computer’s DVD tray, and camcorders with memory storage either built-in or on replaceable memory media. Do they hold promise for videomakers? Perhaps. But it seems the professionals are not yet convinced, as they still use the miniDV tapes.
As for Sony, their higher-end consumer level products are well-made and still quite expensive. But in this user’s opinion, their customer service has slid noticeably from the high levels of the past.
