24 & More

I have been having heart palpitations all week in anticipation of the premiere of 24: Day Five. Oh man, it's finally here. And a Bears playoff game on the same day, right before 24! How could it get any better? Sure, the Bears are losing right now (23-21) but there's still 12 minutes to play.

In other news - and this should come as no surprise - Google rocks my world. I've been exploring the Google Video program lately. I'm not real interested in actually purchasing videos but I do like the other functions of Google video, such as the ability to download most free videos in one of three formats: GVI (Google's proprietary format, playable in the new Google Video Player), iPod Video, and Sony PSP (which are both MPEG-2 compliant formats, I believe, although I have neither an iPod or PSP so I'm not positive). You can also embed the standard streaming flash interface into any website and play any free video on Google Video. See cup stacking immediately below.


Speaking of cup stacking, who knew that was a sport? Note that the adult standing with all the children does not look that impressed. Must be how my mom usually felt.

So anyway, in the spirit of Google Video, look for two videos coming from me very soon with possibly more to follow. The first is a photo slideshow video of Abbie, our cat. It was completely produced by Google's own Picasa (ironic?) with no post-production by me so hopefully it transfers to the site okay. It is uploaded and awaiting verification by Google, which is supposed to take a few days on average. The second video is the infamous "Drunk Tape" that was recorded on May 17, 2003. It was recorded originally on my sister's Hi8 camcorder, then digitized into my new (at the time) Dell when I briefly has a video capture card that got sent back because it wasn't the one I really wanted. Well, it worked well enough to digitize the video. Using Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, I combined the four parts from my original video capture session, added a title and credits, and did some sound and video transitions, and there you have it: a finished product. Adobe was giving me problems exporting in an MPEG4 format (like XVID or DIVX) so I exported it in the MPEG2-DVD format which yielded an M2V video file, which I'd never actually seen before. Luckily QuickTime 7 Pro had no problem decoding the M2V. I did some last minute editing in QuickTime when I realized that even though the M2V video file was encoded in stereo, the original analog recording and subsequent video capture files were mono. So I ended up with a 2-channel video with only one channel with sound. So, I disabled channel 2 and after a bit of tweaking, found out that QuickTime will put one channel on ALL speakers if I set it to "center." Once the sound was optimized, it was time to export. QuickTime allowed me to do a complete MPEG4 video with H.264 video and AAC sound. The resulting file was about 1/4 the size of the original MPEG2. Isn't compression awesome?

The Bears game is almost over and 24 will be on soon. They are still losing. I've got my fingers crossed.