The Old Interlaced Man

Something disturbed me horribly at work today. A fairly empty shop this morning aside from a two nice customers and one... idiot.

Ignorance I can tolerate, but when someone believes information they acquired from "the guys down the pub" so blindly that when reality stares them in the face they righteously trot away like a religious fanatic being shooed from a front garden, that is stupidity, which I cannot tolerate. I quote:

"Good morning Sir, how might I help you?"

"I'm looking for a really good camcorder, where is that camcorder shop on Byres road?"

"It's actually just down on Great Western road, all the way to the end of Byres and turn right. Would you be interested in any Panasonic camcorders? How about the SD700?"

"I don't want any of this 1080p rubbish. I want 1080i."

"Why's that Sir?"

"Allow me to enlighten you. The 'i' stands for interlaced, and the 'p' for progressive. You can make a progressive picture from an interlaced one but you can't get an interlaced picture from a progressive one."

He begins to open the door to leave


"But Sir! This camera shoots 50p!"

He's gone


If this were a film (rather than real life) I would then state "FML" before continuing in my mopping of the floor.


So yeah. The SD700 shoots 1920x1080 @ 50 progressive frames a second. Hence you could lose every second frame to get 1080p25 (standard progressive). Or use even lines of first frame, odd of second and interlace those fields to get 1080i50 (standard interlaced).

But he obviously knows best since he's old.

That pissed me off, glad to get it off my shoulders... or back even... chest? insert expression here

Greenscreen test videos

I was trying to compare professional software with open source stuff. Since I'm a very basic programmer it's not that fair. But the pro software makes life so much easier. Takes longer to render though.

OpenCV attempt - here
This seg faults after 10 seconds... I don't know why. So it's shorter.

Pro Software (trail version) attempt - here
Comments would be appreciated - on the greenscreening that is. I tried to correct for the whitebalance shift 5 seconds in. Stupid handycam.

28K Epic Win

Cheers to Omnimorphic for the graphic

This RED digital cinema dream camera nightmare format is something which could be the next IMAX fills-your-whole-peripheral-vision-and-make-you-violently-ill winathon format.

You've gotta love this company.

Now for some cool numbers:

A still image in 28k RGB format would be 261,352,000 pixels, or ~261 Mega-pixels.
So @12bits per channel that's 9,408,672,000 bits per frame, or ~1.2 Giga-bytes per frame.

Hence @24p the data rate would be 225,808,128,000 bits per second, or ~28.2 Gigabytes per second.
Which means that on a Tera-byte (1000 Giga-byte) hard drive you could fit just under 35 seconds of raw 28k footage. With the same space, you could store 9.3 hours of raw PAL.

Even if mpeg2 encoding was used to the same degree as is used for DVDs, you could only fit ~3 mins on to it. Instead of 247 hours of PAL.

This is the true Red Epic. This thing is going to be incredible.

I can't wait.

Epic Food

Post gym fill-me-up just filled-me-up.

Ingredients:

• Spicy smoked sausage (1)
• Beans (1 can)
• Chicken nuggets (12)
• Teriyaki marinade (scoop)
• Grated cheese (three)
• love (a whole lotta)