 Europride
began at 10pm on Friday evening with a small parade
along Canal Street in Manchester's Gay Village. You
can watch my exclusive online video of the opening (1
min 25 secs):
Streaming video: (512k
DSL/broadband users only. Windows Media) click
here to view.
Slower connections: download
the video and view when fully transferred. Right-click
on one of the following links and save to your PC: MPG1
(suitable for most users) or for best quality XVid
with MP3 audio.
VIDEO INFO LINKS (external
websites)
XVid
Movies: read about the free high quality XVid codec
and download it.
Media
Player Classic: tired of bloated video players?
I can recommend this free one.
 I
finally got myself a new camcorder. Yup it's a Canon
of course (a joke for regular readers!) and pretty cool.
Nope it's not MiniDV, it's Hi8. A Canon G30Hi. I wanted something in the short-term
that was cheap and would play all my old Hi8 and 8mm tapes. I know Sony do a Digital
8 camcorder that plays Hi8 but they're expensive and I'm not a fan of Sony (I
like Canon and Panasonic). I've had too many problems with Sony in the past and
I find with them it's generally a case of too high a price for too few features.
Maybe that's why they are doing so badly right now?
I got this baby for an incredible price -- just £200 ($300). It's true,
MiniDV has more vertical lines of resolution but, when it comes to quality, the
format isn't the whole story. There is the lens and manual features to consider.
This has a couple of nice facilities that are important
to me. I can lock the focus and the exposure. If you
want professional looking shots, these are two things
you need... Also useful if you're transferring home
movie film to tape and doing effects such as bluescreen.
Which I am...
The colour balance is excellent and I never saw such
great pictures in low light! As you'll see from the
Europride video above... It does a good job even under
orange street lighting at night, filtering out much
of the colour cast.
There's a lot of crap talked about analogue and digital. The fact is, once
you've input your Hi8 video into a PC, it's 'digital' and you can then edit and
copy it all you like with no loss of quality. Learn how to filter and process
your video effectively (I use VirtualDub)
and even 20 year old VHS can look pretty amazing. It's not what you've got, it's
what you do with it...
My movies are going to end up on my websites or on
Super Video CD (SVCD) for viewing on TV. Did you know
you can get an hour of good quality video on an ordinary
CD and it'll play in many DVD players? See DVDRhelp.com
for everything you need to know on this subject and
to check out their listings to see what your model of
DVD player is capable of.
Here in the UK, Asda is doing a fantastic little DVD player for £45 -- the
Pacific 1002W. It has a 'retro' early '80s look to it and plays just about everything:
VCD, SVCD, MP3, JPG images, even MPEGs on a multisession CD that hasn't been closed.
Would you believe you get a three-year guarantee too? Many people are now regretting
having paid £150 or more for big-name players that don't do half as much!
For the technically-minded, I'm currently encoding my stuff in half-D1 format
MPEG 2 (also known as D2). That way I can easily copy them over to DVD in the
future when I get a DVD burner. Visit KVCD.net
to get the templates (60 mins on a CD) for the MPEG encoder TMPGEnc.
Meanwhile, if you want a good replacement for the
bloated media players that are offerered by Microsoft,
Apple and Real, try the free Media
Player Classic. It plays everything, including .mov
and RealMedia if you get yourself the codecs (which
are probably ermmm slightly illegal and in no way condoned
by me and my website ahem!).
Click here to visit the Badpuppy website
GETTING IN TOUCH
See the contact
page for full details of how you can reach me by e-mail or chat.
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