Just read that the inequality of income and wealth in the US is at a pre French revolution level. I wonder if that will continue or grow. Where is the tipping point? Is media the “church” of the masses. As long as people listen to the media for information they are happy with the reporting and take it as factual information. What would spark a revolution? Police killing unarmed young people? The whole notion of wealth seems to go back to Reagan’s trickle-down myth. I read the cup doesn’t overflow but rather the rich just get bigger cups. What is the demarkation line? 1 million in wealth? 10 million? I’d like to know. I wonder how you got on the list of people lined up for the guillotine in the french revolution? There must have been a criteria. Maybe not. Perhaps it was political and wealth identified. I will look on wikipedia.
Category Archives: Media
Made the leap to Adobe CC
Well, I decided to install Creative Cloud version of Adobe applications at home sooner than I anticipated. The price was right. As professional staff at the University of Iowa I am eligible for an educational discount. The cost was just shy of being free. I didn’t install everything possible and retained my CS4 versions that are not subscription based. The apps I picked were Dreamweaver CC, Photoshop CC, Flash CC, Audition CC, Muse CC and After Effects CC.
The deciding factor was the price. Second was a perceived need to stay current in the industry. Everything installed just fine.
I explored Muse CC first. It is easy to create webpages with the program. It is setup to publish to Adobe’s hosting service. I saw that I could create paypal payments with the program. That is a first. It has a few easy to add interactive menus. I think it is a work in progress so it will be interesting to see what happens to it in the future. Next, I am going to determine if it is really possible to create a shopping cart website with the program.
It is fairly expensive to run a shopping cart web site that takes credit cards, prices start at $20/month at Dreamhost. At that price point you get a service that allows you to build a site online that takes credit card information and tracks your inventory on a simple level. $20 per month compared to just a few years ago is quite inexpensive. There are more expenses for security, and credit card transactions. But it is in the ball park of allowing just about anyone to setup a business online. As an artist I would like someone else to do the fulfillment portion of the deal so I could just focus on making Art. But that is unlikely.
Well, back to CC. The next program I looked at was Photoshop CC. I went to look at the filters and I found one for adjusting focus. I think they call it tilt-focus. It is very nice.
Then I looked at Audition CC. It is very similar to Soundbooth that I currently have on tap. It is alittle easier to edit sound files with it. And I see a boat load of filters in it. Very nice.
I looked at After Effects CC for a few minutes. I’ll have to read up on it. I installed it to learn more about it.
Then Dreamweaver CC, not much change.
So there are a few additions to the apps in CC. I really could not afford to not install it. At work they are thinking about upgrading us to CC though we are reluctant because we use non-Adobe tools like Camtasia. I would really like Audition CC at work. That is one area we are lacking, a good audio editor. We have CS6 currently. We like Adobe Premiere Elements 11 as it does the work we need to do without being overly complex. It does chroma key with plenty of controls. The output options are written in English rather than Premiere’s lists of broadcast quality presets. Most of the time we want output that is a file, an mp4 ready for Camtasia and captioning.
Beginnings (2014)
Beginnings, Propellerhead’s Reason, 2014
Level 3 Chart
I think I learned how to use the Diagrammix. This is a chart of what I do at the University of Iowa. Best if you click on it to see it enlarged.
Flow Chart
I worked on this chart tonight. I don’t know if I have the energy to go to level 3. You have to click on the chart to see it in full scale.
Listening to the House
Today, I listened to the US Congress House debate the clean CR. Just as I tuned in, after a few minutes, the House stopped abruptly with little notice. I wondered what was the cause so I looked at a news site and the news was there was shooting on the Mall in Washington DC. I witnessed history. They ended because they thought they were in danger and wanted to hide. Some person rammed a barricade to the White House, resisted arrest, panicked and started a chase through Washington DC. The press reports clearly said there was an “exchange” of gun fire. It turns out there was “no exchange” of gunfire it was just the police shooting and killing the woman, the driver in a black sedan who had rammed the white house barricade and fled.
Anyway, this event or series of events was portrayed in the media as a “shooting” and there were preventive lockdowns on the Hill.
* Don’t believe the early reports about any event in the news.
Late today the media said it had information that the woman had mental health problems. At this point I treat that as disinformation. At least the media said that they didn’t have any information on the motivation of the woman ramming the barricade and fleeing the scene. Media reported the woman was from Connecticut. The irony is that the government has shut down and there are 800,000 furloughed federal employees. One media account this evening even interviewed a couple walking on the Mall that were furloughed federal employes coming to talk to their representative about the government shutdown. Another irony was that the capital police are working without pay. Another irony, which escapees me, is that Congress continues to get paid.
Washington was on edge after the Navy Yard shooting a few days back so I think many drew the conclusion that this was another shooting. It was not. Apparently, there was an infant in the car with the woman that somehow escaped injury. Apparently,one policeman was injured in the high speed chase when his police car ran into a barricade.
I might also say that the House debate was highly partisan. Each side blaming each other for the government shutdown. Since the House is controlled by Republicans they enjoyed a one sided debate where the Democrats were stifled by a procedural rule. It was quite the spectacle. Total dysfunction.
UPDATE: The media is now saying the woman was suffering from depression. “Relatives have said that she may have suffered postpartum depression.”-a quote from the news. And there was a report that the woman had a head injury about 1 year ago.
UPDATE: Some are questioning the use of deadly force on an unarmed woman and the need to escalate to a high speed chase. Others said that the police did the best they could given that it could have been a more dangerous threat.
UPDATE: At this point I still don’t know the details of the life of the woman. I feel sorry for her. It was so desperate. There is so little in the news as followup. Just the sensationalism of the day.
Who would want to be the police? Always having to deal with the public, always on guard and in crisis. And as Jo says, the police are shooting to kill these days.
My media bias
This is a wordle of my software expertise. Err. What software I use as a pro. So wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could identify their bias? I am partial to Apple and Adobe. Most professional media developers I would imagine are partial to these companies as they make great creative tools. The words “pro” and “studio” factor as well. I run two studios, I use professional tools like Dreamweaver, and Photoshop. Next is bias toward Microsoft and software in general. Microsoft makes tools that run the enterprise. Every other faculty person has a PowerPoint show by the dozen. I’ve used PowerPoint for so long and so often that nothing surprises me in terms of supporting that tool.
Apple is big because I use Apple at home. I know Apple well enough to consult with people and small business that run on that platform.
There is a third tier of bias and that is Camtasia. I like it. I know everything it can and can’t do. It is one of my top 5 applications. I think it is a prosumer tool. Not quite professional but not for beginners. It is easy to edit in it. It does great screen capture. I’ve lived through version 5 (it would crash now and then and you would loose everything) to the current version that rarely crashes though it will choke on large files.
So I am bias toward Apple, Adobe, Pro software, and software for the studio. I am biased toward Microsoft PowerPoint. I could argue this is a bias that is shared throughout the media development industry. But look between the big words and you find dozens of little players. I like them just as well. Each specializes and does something well. Maybe in 10 years they will be the big words in a wordle on expertise.
You might ask why I am bias for Apple. Well, they are the 800 pound gorilla in the room now. Apple doesn’t want to own the enterprise through the desktop. The desktop is dying. I have a desktop because I need storage for media assets and speed to process them. But the day is coming when the media decisions will be made on a tablet. Today a tablet is a powerful computer and something that moves with you.
I am never bored. I have the Internet 24/7. Waiting for the doctor, pull out the iphone. Waiting for someone at the supermarket, pull out the iphone. Check a score or a price…you get the drift. I have over 200 apps on my iphone. And these are just the valuable apps that I have found. I can do slow motion photography…you name it. I just heard that the iphone will be able to be used for medical self-diagnosis. This includes, monitoring blood pressure, glucose levels and more.
UPDATE: I guess it would be inaccurate to say all media developers share a bias for Apple and Adobe. Many of the Final Cut Pro 7 users didn’t migrate to FCPX. I read they moved to Avid or Premiere. Not sure if that is true. I know that FCP was a standard that studios followed, but not by choice. These are two different shops. The broadcast shop or the web media shop. Broadcast shops have very high standards. I am part of a web media shop. Tools include Camtasia, Premiere, Premiere Elements. At home I use iMovie, FCP7. At either place I don’t work with broadcast quality material, RAID and high end cameras. At work we use prosumer cameras, webcams, and screen capture. At home I use an AVHD camera and iMovie and publish on DVD or YouTube. Web media requires software that compresses the hell out of the movie without loss. H.264 is the standard.