New HD video camera… almost

During the process of writing a chapter about iMovie ’08, I decide to upgrade my video camera to something “tapeless” with high definition capability. I want good quality, but don't want to spend thousands of dollars. To be more exact, I want a great camera that's substantially less than one thousand dollars.

I couldn't decide which would be best, the Sony HDR-SR5 or the Canon HG10. Both record to a 40 GB Hard Disk Drive. That means no fast forwarding and rewinding of tape to locate scenes. When you connect the camera to the computer, the clips that are on the camera's hard drive appear in the iMovie Import window (below). Click a clip to preview it. To import one or more clips, click the checkbox under the clip, then click the "Import Checked" button. Pretty nice. Of course you also have the disadvantage of not automatically having an archive on tape of all your footage (tape is very cheap compared to buying extra hard disks for storage). Then again, I've got hundreds of hours of tapes whose video I'll never get around to looking at again, because I'm too busy shooting new video.

The iMovie ’08 import window (above). The bottom pane shows the clips that are on the Hard Disk in the camera. Select a clip to see a preview in the top pane. Checkmark the boxes under the clips you want to import.

I decide to go with the Sony HDR-SR5 and order it online from ButterflyPhoto.com (they're great). The Sony gets here the next day. I love it. Good quality. Oops. I didn't notice that this model doesn't have a view finder, just an LCD screen. The screen is advertised to be bright enough to use in bright sunlight, but that must be referring to 20 year-old eyes. I can barely see the image on the LCD screen, and it's gray and overcast outside. Dang, gotta call ButterflyPhoto and see if I can send it back.

Fortunately, the ButterflyPhoto people are very nice and understanding, and suggest that I exchange it for the Canon HG10. Perfect. I almost ordered that one anyway. Hopefully it'll be here by Monday.

Leaving San Francisco

Pals (and artists) Jeremy Sutton and Peggy Gyulai picked us up at the Moscone Convention Center, then drove drove us to the Lobby at Battery & California where Peggy's one-person show, Tone Interludes, is hanging. She gave us a personally guide tour of the exhibit. Beautiful work.

Then Jeremy drove us to their art studios in the Mission District. Fabulous studio spaces and beautiful work inside. Jeremy gave me one of his latest Painter Creativity DVDs. Fabulously designed and produced.

The DVD title is "How to Paint from Photographs Using Corel Painter X, Createive Techniques with Jeremy Sutton." As I mentioned in an earlier posting, Jeremy is one of the top Corel Painter experts in the world, and an inspirational, charismatic teacher. And, he's agreed to visit Santa Fe in early October, 2008, to make a presentation to the Santa Fe Mac User Group, and, better yet, to hold a 3 or 4 day workshop about using Painter (the fabulous "Natural Media" painting software that simulates real world brushes, oils, watercolors, chalks, pencils, etc). Details will be posted on the Santa Fe Mac User Group web site as they become available.


Robin and Jeremy in Jeremy's studio. Not shown is the other half of his studio, including a space for at least six students and their laptops (for the digital painting classes he teaches).


Peggy's studio is next door to Jeremy's. Great spaces in the Mission District.

We didn't get to meet track star Michael Johnson (world's fastest human) as I indicated in an earlier posting. I guess I had that information wrong. Although, now that I think about it, I did feel a breeze while I was there, so I guess that could have been him (he's famous for being fast, you know).

After a nice lunch and coffee at the Coffee Bar (shown below) located on the ground floor of their studios building, they gave us a ride to SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), which was just a half block from our hotel. Jeremy is a member of SFMOMA, so he ran inside, got a couple of free tickets for us, and said goodbye. We enjoyed the museum for 30 or 45 minutes then grabbed our bags at the hotel and snagged a cab for the airport.

Farewell Macworld

We took one last stroll around the exhibit floor. The show was winding down. The Quark booth had a few people attending one last demo presentation.


For many years Quark had a pretty arrogant attitude about their dominance of market share in desktop publishing, and they (the founder or president or some top guy) even publicly expressed disdain for the smaller Mac user market, and usually didn't bother to show up at Macworld. So now it's payback time, especially with Adobe InDesign treating Mac Users with respect. Ha! (Oops, sorry, that slipped out).


Meanwhile, the Adobe booth was still at standing-room-only capacity. But, to be fair, Adobe wasn't showing InDesign, Quark's competitor. They were showing the amazing Photoshop Elements 6. If you don't want to buy the very expensive Photoshop, Elements 6 does almost everything Photoshop does, except convert files to CMYK color space (necessary only if you're preparing files that are to be printed commercially by big, expensive color printers, or published in a magazine that's printed by commercial printers).


This panorama created from 3 separate shots opened in Photoshop CS3, but you can do the same thing with Photoshop Elements 6.

Party at The Franciscan Crab Restaurant

Thursday night and we just got back from a great seafood buffet dinner and party at Fisherman's Wharf, sponsored by the Apple Consultants Network, which included Crucial, DriveSavers, Peachpit Press, VMWare, and others.

Outstanding Corel Painter expert, artist, and instructor (and long-time pal) Jeremy Sutton and his sweetheart Peggy showed up. He offered a tour of his San Francisco studio tomorrow, and a visit to Peggy's current exhibit of oil paintings. We'll also get to meet track star Michael Johnson, world's fastest human. Jeremy is doing a portrait for him.

Years ago, Jeremy came to Santa Fe to give a Painter presentation to the Santa Fe Mac User Group. Minutes before the presentation started, the computer died and Jeremy thrilled the audience with a swing dance and break dancing demonstration (yeah, he's an expert dancer too). It was a favorite meeting that most members still talk about.



Jeremy Sutton and Peggy



The party also featured magician Ash K, The Pretty Good.

Another bedtime story for designers

Did you ever wonder where Peachpit Press got its name. Robin has been associated with them for nearly twenty years, and she has the scoop on that.

When Robin was first introduced to the young fledgling publishing company, owned at the time by Ted Nace, they had published three books, one of them being Ted's own book about Ventura Publisher (they laid out the Ventura book on a plank placed over the bathtub). At the time, Ted and his college roommates were living and working in a peach colored house in Berkeley that was such a dump it was considered a "pit." Thus the name "Peachpit."

So now you know.

A Story for Designers

Sitting in the DriveSavers Hospitality Suite, I mentioned to Scott Gaidano, President and founder, that I like his logo, a white nautical life preserver against a red background. He says "Yeah, we were sitting around in a hot tub trying to come up with a name for a company, and there was a life preserver hanging on the side of the tub. We wanted to run a small, two-color ad in MacWeek, and the only choice they offered for a second color was red."

Recently a marketing company wanted to throw out the logo and start over on the image. Scott says "No the logo stays, but you go if you bring it up again. 300 of the Fortune 500 companies already know that logo."



Robin chats with Scott Gaidano in the DriveSavers Hospitality booth.

Blogger Lounge Hell

I decided to give the Microsoft Blogger Lounge another chance. It's been two days since I was there and unable to connect, using their Wi-Fi.

I can tell right away some changes have been made. The Lounge has just one other blogger in it. Instead of just walking in, a door guard asks if you're here to blog. If so, sign in with your name and blog address. I do that and login. They've changed the wireless network (because it was non-working). Now there's no security setting required, and no password required. Oh yeah, now there's a thirty minute time limit for a visit.

Sweet Swan of Avon! The connection works, but it's possibly the slowest connection I've ever experienced (other than the wireless connection in our hotel, The Westin). I go to Speedtest.net to see just how slow it is. Loading that page just about uses up my 30 minutes, but no one kicks me out.

As you can see, the download speed in the Blogger Lounge is a blazing 242 kbps, (that's just a speed burst -- the average speed ended up as 174 kbps). That's not even modem speed from 10 years ago. And I'm now the only person in the Lounge! The red zone in the large gauge is the broadband speed area.

As a blogger, I'm really more interested in the upload speed. A Thousand Curses! The upload meter (the "Up" arrow on the left) never gets above a speed burst of 1 kbps.

I predict this lounge will be empty for the remainder of the show.