You’re looking at 120 dollars worth of Blu Ray discs. Man, these things are expensive. Two spindles of 25 cost 240 bucks and then they delivered them to the wrong address. But that’s par for this project – it’s fought me every step of the way. I suspect that’s a very good sign.

Look at this:

The disc is held by a double sided foam square, which is holding the sleeve closed. The sleeve is card held by the photo media guides. I printed off about 20 or so before I got the look I wanted. I had only used a mock up until tonight, the theory seems to be working. Throwing the compact around, it seems to be holding. Until I mail it, I won’t know for sure. There’s balloons and metal confetti inside!

Now here’s the numbering system!

52 playing cards which mark 52 original Showbags! You can’t see the design on the back of the card but it’s … rather unique. You’ll know you have an original copy once you see it. If we go past 52 copies then I’ll make something similar.

OK so here’s some bad news.

The first batch will be Australian/European PAL. I am sorry but tests show that there is still a big difference between PAL and NTSC playback even on HD systems. I cannot be sure that USA televisions will work with the videos as they are. But I will make sure that some of the first 52 WILL BE NTSC format. As soon as possible these will be available.

If you intend to run the disc on a computer drive, then you can use the PAL version anywhere. Computers don’t care. Televisions do. If you are in the USA and choose the PAL version I will double check that you understand. The American NTSC version will run at 24 frames per second. This means that the HD video will be 4 percent SLOWER than real time, with the sound pitch corrected. Running the HD video slower is cleaner than converting to 29.97 fps. The standard definition clips will be at 29.97. I am trying the main video at 59.97fps.

I will soon mail have mailed off a free copy to a lucky person. When I do that the Post Office will be able to tell me how much this is going to cost. IT IS HEAVY, and although I swear that I will sell it for damn near cost, the postage will likely be is expensive. So as soon as I have the postage I will make these available for order. PAL is now shipping.

Right now I am drinking champagne sent to me by Government House, well deserved, and frankly making up for a rather horrible week or so.

Tonight is garbage night. MY NIGHT.

All the standard image formats die – JPEG, BMP, PSD – forget it. Photoshop starts to use ‘Large Document Format’ or PSB – not understood by other tools. After Effects and Nuke just cry and give up. Most smaller software turns into radioactive dust. TIFF will hold the fort so long as the file is less than 4Gb in size. Yet another reason to congratulate SONY – their Vegas software will load a TIFF that size and even animate it – impressive! But in this case we couldn’t use Vegas because we need a certain motion path.

I generated the mosaic first at quarter size – ‘only’ 22.5K across. After Effects can handle up to 30K. Then I generate the full size image and pass it to command line software called ImageMagick which opens the file line by line and so can deal with the enormous memory strain. This is familiar from the days when Amiga computers would use similar buffering to work on print images in 4Mb of RAM (Art Department Pro was the name I seem to recall).

This can slice the image into 9 tiles of which we only need the middle. The trick is to track out from this middle section until it’s about to leave gaps at the edge of the screen. Then switch over to the lower resolution version which is by this stage indistinguishable.

Slightly tedious work-flow but doable. Has to be done 12 times, so it had better be.

Possible alternative route is to load a TIFF into Photoshop and then write an action to slice the image into percentages. By the time I got through reading the ImageMagick manual I felt that I’d paid my dues and I’ll stick to that script.

It’s interesting to think of how larger images might get with the demand for higher resolution, multiple screens and 3D. The Science Fiction staple ‘holodeck’ would probably require images of this kind. Although probably something made out of vectors, given current work.

THE END of THE BLU RAY IS NIGH

The Blu Ray of ShowbagHD is definitely ready to be sent out for people to try – the plan is to buy in bulk at about 5 dollars a disc and then charge about $12 (the same as a CD) which should cover the roughly $6 postage. I don’t expect to make any profit on this – I’d rather lots of people have it and there’s also a fair bit of sampled visuals on there which seem a bit bad to charge for.

I’ve learned enough from this to start on the album that was once going to be called Co Kla Coma 96 – at least until Kevin Elliot decided to send a cease and desist letter over the CKC name. All of that seems to be worked out now and for the moment it’s going to be a Blu Ray called EXCALIBUR (and no I don’t know why – it’s something from Scientology that Lou Ball came up with. Although it also has to do with Mr Ed, the talking horse which Lou reckons is a ‘psychic point of resonance’. These people have mental problems.)

Work on my own Blu Ray is going a lot slower than expected. The tools are less blunt than a year back but you’re still going to have some tough times figuring out just why your precious video looks like cat vomit. Case in point, most of my old assemblies have been done using Sony software, so trying DVD Architect seemed the go. But once you declare a disc to be a certain format in DVDA e.g. 720p50, seems there’s no way to create tracks which are some other size and shape, which is bad news for all my old standard definition videos.

On the other hand if you use Adobe Encore, you can mix up sizes, but MPEG streams made by Vegas will be imported looking like the afore mentioned feline regurgitation. If I had used Première, fine, but I hadn’t, so it’s been a round trip from Vegas to Adobe Media Encoder to Encore. You will be asked many inscrutable questions as you run each – answer wrongly grasshopper and you will be back at the start.

Because I am an old fool who grew up in a period where hard drives were very small and very expensive – I have a tendency to delete temporary files once they’re encoded. Of course you only notice the bad coding 22 minutes into the programme after you just trashed that 100Gb assemble.

Anyway this is what’s on the PS3 after three days

As you can see the idea is to pack as much crap onto one disc as I can fit. Great big fonts for reading across a room. That innocent little OP4 link was a decision made about 3 hours ago that I am already regretting.

The sub menu for the farewell gig. Menus in Encore are made in Photoshop, with a little bit of editing available inside the software. Buttons are formed via some arcane naming of layers which I haven’t quite mastered yet. The buttons are mostly the wrong shape so far and fonts are another puzzle, but keep in mind the ’safe area’ around the edges of the screen – no room to move.

Here’s the main menu for OP which somehow has to organise 65 sub-menus. While I already have a web version of this on sevcom, a BD player like the PS3 won’t see raw WAVs in a folder structure, nor stream them from a web site. They are going to have to be made soundtracks for menus, one for each track, so that the user can navigate. This is going to be really tedious to set up. I did it once before for the Animated Family Doctor and it’s a pest.

I’m targeting the PS3. I think the majority of the audience has these, or one of the cheaper players that have come out in the last few months, with much less audience on BD-ROM drives. We’ve got a variety at work I can try.

A hard decision has been to go with 25 frames a second. Almost everything I have is 25fps, and slowing this to 24fps for the Americans is something I can try once I have a handle on the basics. Thing is, I reckon everyone who owns a BD player is using it with monitor that can handle 25 (actually 50) and seeing the videos in slow motion is not needed. Some beta discs will go out first to try this out, if I’m wrong I’m wrong. We’ll see.

Why Bother?

If I listened to Steve Jobs I’d not bother with the disc and just stream the video online, but listening to Steve Jobs is an invitation to mainstream conformity. 25Gb of material is a lot to store in one container and equals many people’s entire monthly download budget. It’s expensive, but it gets a bit better over the months, and I’ll look  into cheaper AVCHD disc versions as well. But I’m tired of seeing my good work look like complete shit on YouTube. Running the sevcom shop is a losing proposition, still, even if 10 people have this BD at least that’s 10 people that can see the videos looking like they are supposed to look, and hopefully they will pirate it well. In a world where everything seems to be a race to the bottom, we have to keep doing stupidly overwrought things to show that we’re not all businessmen.

Built the performance rig – Roland keys to laptop running Live 8.1. Sound from MBox2 to the new Yamaha stage mixer. Launchpad controller for switching inputs, live scenes and volume mixing (this is turning out good, easy to see the buttons). Sony PS3 for the video out, although the production want component video sends and the cable I bought doesn’t work. New cable or replace with backup BD player. Testing the rig on a daily basis, one major collapse so far due to a plug in. Stewart will be coming up from Tasmania soon with keys and Logic, be good to practice together at last.

Quite a lot of the performing is happening on macros built in Reaktor with occasional jamming on Live using the probability launching feature. Hardest bit is tapping the keys to get good sync. Have to get latency down.

All the videos are complete and on both BD and the hard drive of the PS3. Some strange problem with dull sound quality when compiling the video … I’ve remastered and replaced the video sound from a different editor but have to investigate once we’re out of the panic zone. (Could it be 44.1 to 48KHz or am I doing something wrong with the compression or what).

Deep into preparing the speech for Saturday … I’ve got way too many images now and have to try figure out how to build a coherent overview out of all the conflicting ideas: like what is the difference between Lady Gaga with a lightning bolt on her face and Kraftwerk using El Lissitzsky on their album cover? Why would you call a glitch label Mille Plateaux? Why did they wear purple wigs in UFO? How can I connect Daft Punk with Space Patrol?

Building the listening kiosk for the exhibition. Every damn track has to have a page with an embedded Java player on it otherwise the monkeys can break it.

PUBLICITY How many more images can I get of 1981? Christ how I was I supposed to know to have a frigging photographer covering everything that happened 30 years ago… got two publicists from the festival working on it … the Sydney Morning Herald are doing the Post Punk thing in the Spectrum mag this coming weekend. Daily Telegraph is doing the gig. FBi radio this Thursday are doing Sevs history live to air 9pm. I guess JJJ will take John Cale which makes sense. Hell, John Cale might have trouble when Al Green is in town.

I have to catch up with Roger Bolton soon, back from London from working with Inside Us All and has a VJ night in mind in March for Rainforest Rescue – be a good excuse for me to get wrapped in Quartz Composer and databases for the thesis. As soon as the festival is over the retro stuff stops cold dead – I have to get busy with what happens NEXT. I suspect it won’t be me saying no, it’ll be some other shiny history bauble that catches the sun…

Can’t sleep. Clowns will eat me.

HAPPY 3oTH BIRTHDAY SEVERED HEADS
World’s longest running shaggy dog joke.

Modular and the Festival of Sydney present:
SEVERED HEADS & THE REELS
STEVE ‘MAL’ MALLINDER & MARK MURPHY

BECKS FESTIVAL BAR JANUARY 14TH

More information and some picture they found in a cupboard that had been sitting there for nearly 25 years at the Sydney Festival site!

Brought to you by BEER.

Ask yourself if the paperless office has come about except in the dreary imagination of our forebears. A furphy, a nonsense! Paper has been the heart of officiousness since the Egyptians. One has it on paper or not at all. Yet we live in an age of cybernetic marvel, where the twitting of twitspace is paramount. Would that we could have our paper and yet twit! And lo it is that very thing that I speak of!

What would you say then to a pen that writes on paper – and yet writes on the computer as well? You would say – oh this would be a fine thing! But do not believe such can be! But I am here to tell you that such a thing exists!

Today I was entertained by the marketing persons of the Oxford paper company – from their name you can immediately tell they hail from France. I was one of a merry band of selected bloggers fed a breakfast of petite croissants and strong coffee,  invited to see for myself the advantage of The PaperShow kit over uncouth tablets:

Can you photocopy or print onto a tablet? I think not.
Nor can you pin it to a wall once inscribed.
Can you fold a tablet into an aeroplane? Do not pester me with such idiocy.

One takes the PaperShow pen and writes or sketches on the paper as has been done since time immemorial – one’s strokes are sent as if by magic (but actually by bluetooth) to a nearby computer and shown to all and sundry. The paper then remains in your possession as a trustworthy record of the proceedings.

True, there are whiteboards of some similar powers, but in a comparison I found it much easier to hold the paper on my lap than the board, especially with coffee being poured. No, this is paper; you have written upon it, rolled and smoked it, devastated large tracts of forest to get it. Accept no substitute.

This blog is proud to have been bribed into this heartfelt outpouring of acclaim. This blog was delighted to be photographed pulling stupid faces while operating the PaperShow kit for use in any future advertising material. This blog is proud to have a free PaperShow device and matching coffee mug sitting right here, on this blog’s desk and will accept gifts and bribes from any company that would also like a stream of meaningless piffle written on the Internet (would like a netbook next, ta.)

— cut —

OK? Here’s the shit. Looks like Hamelin (who trade as Oxford) also have a product called Easybook which is a notebook with the same camera pen. Write stuff in the book, transfer it to your computer. Has some kind of storage and OCR going on, which I’d like to see in this kit too. Probably for technophobes forced to digitise their scribbles: old architects and film makers. Not enough of them buying?

Looks like Oxford have adapted the pen to work as a kind of personal electronic whiteboard (failed to take off? or expanded?). Their payoff would be in the paper – it’s specially marked with some kind of pattern that feeds the pen, and so you have to buy it from them. Until someone in China figures it out.

Works just like a Wacom except it leaves an awful feeling about wasting paper – it’s no worse than just paper but the potential to avoid felling trees is always in the back of your mind. Actually paper feels better than a tablet, you can walk around scribbling on the paper pad as far as the bluetooth signal goes.

I could use this to lecture about drawing storyboards, once they get a mac version. Meanwhile I’ll use the mug. As for why bloggers got given this thing … well it’s the in thing innit? Bloggers for cash?