To upgrade or not to upgrade...
The release of Leopard is minutes away. Not that I'm keeping a countdown, but I went by the Apple site and saw the homepage countdown. Most OS upgrades are mostly fluff in my book, and yet certain features make my life so much easier. A little thing like not having to copy all the files over to a blank DVD or CD - only having to create an alias that references the source files - that one has saved days off my life in the past year.
Is the upgrade worth it to you? Most likely I won't upgrade all of our computers until we buy a new one and then we'll need some feature and so we'll have to make the switch. I figure, let other people be the guinea pigs. I'm sure you're the same way, but I can't afford downtime with some bug. Perhaps that robs me of the joy of being an early adopter. I'll be more adventurous with my hobbies rather than my livelihood.
What are your thoughts?
Jacob
Friday, October 26, 2007
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Future of Media
LOCATION:
Macaroni Grill, Provo
IN ATTENDANCE:
Micah Anderson, Carter Durham, Garrett Batty, Zach Batty, Michael Eager, Jacob Hoehne, Mike Johnson, Cammon Randle, Dave Crenshaw
TOPIC:
Archiving media - new media trends
COMMISERATE:
Cammon mentioned a podcasting conference he spent good money on hoping to learn something, only to discover he had more to teach them.
CELEBRATE:
I'm on week two of my iPhone and I think it's a keeper. The portable media player has been great for showing people what we can do. It has some features I wish it had, but overall, I really like it.
Where is the media industry going from here? Cammon said he's heard of people who think Net content will overtake Network content. While your "average Joe" does have more access to media creation and publishing via the Internet, YouTube style video isn't likely to make the likes of NBC and ABC extinct. Zach shared a quote in regards to that sentiment, that with the advent of the Power Bar no one thought it was the end to meals as we know it. What is more likely to die out, according to Zach, is the Network TV schedule in five years or so. Beyond TiVo, will we have a 2 TB drive connected to a monitor that plays our stuff - ESPN only without having to pay for Bravo - feature films in a digital form, YouTube etc.? The less the media is fixed in a tangible form, the harder it will be to keep it from being ripped off. We stand as both consumers and creators of media and have to keep a foot in both camps.
How do these changes bode for content creators like ourselves? It's interesting to look at the desktop publishing "revolution" in the 90's. Now, anyone could do layout and print without having to go to a typesetter and a designer and all of that. Did that mean the end to graphic designers? Not at all. It lowered the barriers to entry in the industry, and a flood of would-be designers, but the true talent still rose to the top.
It does seem that the trend is only towards more media saturation, for better or for worse. Moving images - be it flash or video (and that line is quickly disappearing) - is becoming the communication medium of choice.
We did touch briefly on media storage and archiving. Right now, we're shooting mainly Panasonic P2, which means there is no built in archive like tape. We've been backing up our 8 GB cards to Dual Layer DVD's, which per gig is actually pricer than hard drives. However, we recently got a 16 GB card which doesn't fit on any DVD we can burn at the moment. We have looked at a LaCie Blu-Ray burner which will do 25 GB on a side and 50 on dual layer (but I'm unaware of any blank media that is dual-layer at the moment). Another strong contender is a LTO-3 drive. It's like a DLT drive of yester-year for DVD replication, but one tape will hold 400 GB. The DLT drives are painfully slow, but the LTO's are actually fast enough to read/write from like a hard drive (65 mbps through put). No clunky SCSI connection either - it mounts via gigabit Ethernet. Sticker shock: $5,00 - 8,000.
What are your thoughts? What other topics did we discuss that you'd like to weigh in on?
Regards,
: : Jacob : :
Macaroni Grill, Provo
IN ATTENDANCE:
Micah Anderson, Carter Durham, Garrett Batty, Zach Batty, Michael Eager, Jacob Hoehne, Mike Johnson, Cammon Randle, Dave Crenshaw
TOPIC:
Archiving media - new media trends
COMMISERATE:
Cammon mentioned a podcasting conference he spent good money on hoping to learn something, only to discover he had more to teach them.
CELEBRATE:
I'm on week two of my iPhone and I think it's a keeper. The portable media player has been great for showing people what we can do. It has some features I wish it had, but overall, I really like it.
Where is the media industry going from here? Cammon said he's heard of people who think Net content will overtake Network content. While your "average Joe" does have more access to media creation and publishing via the Internet, YouTube style video isn't likely to make the likes of NBC and ABC extinct. Zach shared a quote in regards to that sentiment, that with the advent of the Power Bar no one thought it was the end to meals as we know it. What is more likely to die out, according to Zach, is the Network TV schedule in five years or so. Beyond TiVo, will we have a 2 TB drive connected to a monitor that plays our stuff - ESPN only without having to pay for Bravo - feature films in a digital form, YouTube etc.? The less the media is fixed in a tangible form, the harder it will be to keep it from being ripped off. We stand as both consumers and creators of media and have to keep a foot in both camps.
How do these changes bode for content creators like ourselves? It's interesting to look at the desktop publishing "revolution" in the 90's. Now, anyone could do layout and print without having to go to a typesetter and a designer and all of that. Did that mean the end to graphic designers? Not at all. It lowered the barriers to entry in the industry, and a flood of would-be designers, but the true talent still rose to the top.
It does seem that the trend is only towards more media saturation, for better or for worse. Moving images - be it flash or video (and that line is quickly disappearing) - is becoming the communication medium of choice.
We did touch briefly on media storage and archiving. Right now, we're shooting mainly Panasonic P2, which means there is no built in archive like tape. We've been backing up our 8 GB cards to Dual Layer DVD's, which per gig is actually pricer than hard drives. However, we recently got a 16 GB card which doesn't fit on any DVD we can burn at the moment. We have looked at a LaCie Blu-Ray burner which will do 25 GB on a side and 50 on dual layer (but I'm unaware of any blank media that is dual-layer at the moment). Another strong contender is a LTO-3 drive. It's like a DLT drive of yester-year for DVD replication, but one tape will hold 400 GB. The DLT drives are painfully slow, but the LTO's are actually fast enough to read/write from like a hard drive (65 mbps through put). No clunky SCSI connection either - it mounts via gigabit Ethernet. Sticker shock: $5,00 - 8,000.
What are your thoughts? What other topics did we discuss that you'd like to weigh in on?
Regards,
: : Jacob : :
New CoNNECT blog
Creative Professionals:
Our previous blog was through .Mac, which worked well, but was limited in how we could all contribute. Your feedback is welcome regarding how to make the site a more beneficial extension of our gathering.
The hope is to extend the benefits of our monthly luncheons online as a place to connect and share - from technical questions, news bites, customer complaints, and the like.
Regards,
Jacob
Our previous blog was through .Mac, which worked well, but was limited in how we could all contribute. Your feedback is welcome regarding how to make the site a more beneficial extension of our gathering.
The hope is to extend the benefits of our monthly luncheons online as a place to connect and share - from technical questions, news bites, customer complaints, and the like.
Regards,
Jacob
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