Troubles with wi-fi networks?

At home I had been noticing more and more difficulties using my laptop wirelessly. It would connect to the Internet via the wireless router but often failed to load a page etc. It was driving me mad. Depending on the time of day the connection was better, quicker and more reliable than at other times. I assumed that the router was at fault. My service provider (Tiscali) has been OK. However last week I finally figured it out. The problem was that my router uses the same wi-fi channel as several neighbours. When I changed the channel my router used, the problem disappeared.

In order to perform this useful feat you need to know what channels your neighbours are using. You need to know your router's login and password and about 10 minutes of time.

Since I use a Mac I used coconut wifi - a free application that gives you the info you need to select a channel. Pick one thats a couple of channels away from a neighbour's. Open the router settings (accessed via your browser) select a suitable channel.

Job done. Thanks to Macuser for that great tip.

Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express

Recently I have been helping students make short films.  Their first steps into filmmaking, and a steep learning curve.  We try, as much as possible, to remove some of the technical complexities.  Allowing the students to concentrate on the storytelling.  The last two weekends have seen 14 shorts in production.  They were all filmed over 2 days (a weekend). Now we're start the post production.  But first the logging and capturing.

One of the decisions we had taken fro the students was to shoot in HDV rather than our usual default, anamorphic DV.  We could see the advantage of the greater resolution - we might need to tweak some of the shots.  We'd project in 'high def' (HD) and drop the films down to standard def (SD) for the DVDs.  The data rate is, after all the same as SD, but with greater image size.  Great!  OK, we know that there's a slight lag from the time you press record to when the camera records.  But thats a small price to pay.  We thought.

If only things were as simple as they looked!  Some of the tapes we issued were pre-stripped. (We were keen to avoid timecode breaks - a perennial problem with novices).  Sadly these were stripped in SD DV.  We subsequently had worse timecode breaks than normal as the decks we were using for capture kept requesting we change format!  We worked around this problem, but there were more.

Some students, tempted by the keen pricing and educational discount, owned FCP Express and were keen to use their own machine to do their edit.  Usually we get the teams to create the master folder with a master FCP project and all the rushes.  Students can then copy this onto external drives or laptops to do their own individual edits.  It normally works fine.  On monday one keen and diligent student, having finished logging and capturing on one of the Uni's Macs, wanted help to transfer it to her own Macbook.  I was pleased to help her and we transferred the data using target disc mode.  We then opened the FCP Pro 6.0 project in FCP Express 4.0.  Problem - all the clips had audio but failed to display the video.  We investigated and discovered that there was a codec issue with FCP Express.  I suggested purchasing QuickTime Pro.  That'll sort it out.  Nope - at a cost of $30 (approx).  The next option was to delete the media and re capture from the master tapes.  That seemed a pity.  Why had this happened?

Its not clever but it would appear that FCP Express encodes HDV (Mpg 2) into Apple Intermediate codec.  FCP Pro allows you to natively edit HDV format.  To solve the problem therefore in FCP Pro we used media manager to 're-compress' the footage into the Apple format (the file size increased only slightly).  This, hopefully would work in FCP Express.  What a pain.  Next time we might set FCP Pro to capture all the films in Apple Intermediate Codec. But I suspect that there's another gotcha lurking in there somewhere!

Why take Black and White images?

Its easy to take colour pictures but black and white images are still very popular. They are often seen as more 'arty' than colour ones. The Magnum in Motion images are often in black and white. Photographer Harold Davis explains here why there is a case for still using black and white in the digital age. See his Flickr monochrome set here.

Here are a couple of ways of doing this in Photoshop. Importantly they allow you to manipulate the tonal values rather than just removing the colour uniformly from the image.

Posting 1 and some more techniques posting 2.

I have a further technique that has worked well for me but I might experiment with some of those too.

enjoy, Mike J

Composition and framing in photography

Over the past 4 weeks we have been refreshing camera skills before the start of semester 2 and starting to shoot and edit video.  We discussed framing and camera controls in a crash course single session.  There was alot to take in for those new to the subject.  today I found an interesting 'site' covering the basics of composition.  The author has a very useful photography website thats well worth a look.  The photos are technically really nice but very stylised.  While I'm on about photography here are some other sites worth checking out:

photoshop tutorials

lightwriting - virtual graffiti 

Magmun in motion - great photo essays 

photographing scenes with snow  

enjoy,

Mike J