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Like a zillion other photographers I stood out in the winter night air and aimed my cameras skyward for the total lunar eclipse. I’m sure there’s a handful of folks who did their shooting with a nice equatorial mount and are Photoshopping their HDR captures as I type this. Me, I just pointed the camera and winged some exposures. (Not that I would be in the latter camp if I had the equipment….)
We’ve had Apple TV “Take Two” installed for about a week now.
Generally speaking it is a great upgrade. It took a few minutes for me to figure out that they have dynamically merged locally synched content with the shared iTunes library (so if you have iTunes running the movies or whatever are dynamically merged into the menus). This is really quite slick.
The ability to directly access movies, tv shows, and especially podcasts is also pretty good. I haven’t rented a movie yet, but we’ll definitely give that a try one of these days.
The ability to access .Mac galleries is wicked cool. I haven’t tried Flickr yet, but I can see how that would be a great feature.
However, I’ve noticed a few changes that aren’t positive, and lately I’ve run into some downright issues.
Apparently some of those nice dynamic features come at a cost (which is almost certainly a software bug rather than a real cost). The UI is extremely “jittery”: freezing up at various points. I checked the Apple user forums and I am not alone. One hypothesis is that dynamic iTunes merging may be the source of the problem and they seem to be correct.
So, for now, we don’t have access to our movie library on the home server — annoying but we use Apple TV mostly for watching podcasts and our music (both sets are synched).
During the summer of 2007 I covered the Water Wise Workshops sponsored by the Organization for the Assabet River with both photography and video recording. [Here's an earlier article on the workshops.]
Over the past several weeks I’ve taken this material and produced a video that OAR will use to promote the workshops to potential sponsors. You can take a look at the Water Wise Workshops video on OAR’s website.
The video was produced using a variety of tools. I used Apple’s Keynote to create the graphical base (the text, still images, and transitions) and had it generate the Quicktime video. I then layered the video tracks on top of the Keynote base. There was definitely some weird interaction between different frame rates and Final Cut Express (not sure if it’s a bug in FCE).
Delivery was done with VisualHub to compress the final program for the web (also AppleTV and iPods). I generated some DVDs with iDVD.
Today is the day where the phrase “if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute” comes to life:
8a – Snow on trees, heavy clouds, “freezing fog”
8:30 – Hazy sunshine, slight breeze
9a – Sunny
10a – Partly sunny
12:30 – Turns dark, windy.
1pm – Thunderstorm, snow squall, near white-out conditions
1:30 – Sunshine
3pm – Blue skies, windy
3:30p – Sky turns dark again
4pm – Snow squall, gusty winds
4:30 – Sun peeks through
4:40 – Clouds
5pm – Sunset,
6pm – Thunder, windy, snowing
6:30 – strong winds (20-40 mph)
When the sun peeked out in the afternoon I tried running downtown to take a picture of the clock tower lit up against the storm clouds. The sun, literally, disappeared while I was driving up the parking garage — a span of 3 minutes. Augh!