NOTE: This process changed since this was posted. See the update at the bottom. When working with PAL just use DV PAL settings in place of NTSC

Tom Porett, from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, writes:

I enjoy your newsletter greatly – thanks very much.

 

I have a question about converting a 16:9 format to 4:3 in letterbox format (with bars). If there is an issue of the newsletter that has that info I’d appreciate it.

 

I am uploading work to Google video and they require 4:3 format only.

Larry replies: Yup, it can be done. In fact, I had a client this morning that needed to convert a DVCPro-50 16:9 sequence into a DV 4:3 video. Here’s how to do it.

1) Open the sequence you want to convert into the Timeline.

2) Choose File > Export > Quicktime movie.

3) In the Save As dialog, change Current Settings to “DV NTSC 48K” — if you are working with PAL video, you would select “DV PAL 48K”. Then, make sure that Make movie self-contained. is CHECKED.

4) The movie will export — and will take a while to do so, depending upon the length of the sequence you are exporting. Use this to rediscover the outdoors and sunshine. Look out a window, or something.

5) When the export is complete, change your Easy Setup to “DV NTSC” (or “DV PAL” depending upon where in the world you live).

6) Create a new project and import your newly exported QuickTime movie. Then, edit it to the Timeline.

Ta-DAH! Your 16:9 image format is retained, but Final Cut has now added black letter-boxing at the top and bottom of the image. You are now ready to output as a standard DV file.

The best part about this process is that no additional rendering is necessary; your file is ready to output as soon as you get it edited into a new sequence.

Fast and easy.

UPDATE – Jan. 2008

As Oren Hercz pointed out:

I just wanted to mention a minor problem I discovered with your “converting a 16:9 sequence to 4:3 video” article. I was following your instructions, using FCP 5.1.2, but when I exported my anamorphic sequence as “DV NTSC 48k” and then imported it into a NTSC DV timeline, I got a stretched image inside black bars (yuck!) I discovered that I had to export using “DV NTSC 48k anamorphic” setting to make it work. I don’t know if this is a change in FCP since you wrote that article, but I thought you might want to know.

Larry replies: You are correct. Apple has now made anamorphic video a specific menu choice in the application. If you are working with 16:9, then please select “anamorphic.”

• Emulsion paint for walls and ceilings (vinyl matt and silk)
• Kitchen and bathroom paint
• Paint for interior and exterior wood and metal (gloss, satinwood and eggshell)
• Undercoats and primers
• Masonry paint for exterior brickwork
• Varnishes and woodstains
• Floor and tile paint

Reclaimed paint is available in a wide range of colours and sizes – from 750ml to 10 litres. A range of ‘as new’ paint donated from commercial sources is also available.

Reclaimed paint is available from the following locations for a suggested donation of £1 per litre:

FRP The Paint Place

Unit 7 The Sidings (Off Hainault Road)
Leytonstone
London E11 1HD
020 8539 9076 (please leave a message)

Open: Monday, Wednesday and Thursday 10am to 4pm
Closed: Tuesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday

In addition to our normal weekday opening hours FRP The Paint Place will be holding another fantastic free selected paint giveaway on the last Saturday of the summer months:

Saturday 27th April – 10am and 1pm
Saturday 25th May – 10am and 1pm
Saturday 29th June – 10am and 1pm

FRP ReUse Centre

2c Bakers Avenue
Walthamstow
London E17 9AW
020 8539 3856

Open: Monday to Thursday 10 am to 4 pm.
Closed: Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

FRP also supply reclaimed paint to the following organisations where it is available to buy:

Bright Sparks Re-use Centre (Tufnell Park)

153 Fortess Road
Tufnell Park
London NW5 1AD

Open: Tuesday to Saturday 12:30pm to 5:30pm, Thursday 12:30pm to 7pm
Closed: Sunday and Monday

Enfield Re-use Centre

Units E4-6 Harbet Road (near Costco)
Stonehill Business Park
Edmonton
London N18 3QP
020 7324 4627

Open: Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 5pm
Closed: Sunday and Monday

Homestore (Referral Only – registration required)

Units 2 Maryland Industrial Estate
26 Maryland Road
Stratford
London E15 1JW
020 8519 6264 (weekdays)

Open: Weekdays – if you are on low income or benefits, call to register as a Homestore customer
Closed: Weekends

Petit Miracles ***Coming Soon***

West 12 Shopping Centre
Shepherds Bush
London W12 8PP

Open: Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 5pm
Closed: Sunday and Monday

Splash Pilion (Appointment Required)

Unit 8 Clarendon Buildings
25 Horsell Road
Islington
London N5 1XL
020 7700 2498

Open: Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm – contact Howard on 020 7700 2498 to arrange an appointment
Closed: Saturday and Sunday

http://edplastics.co.uk/

Creating your successful artist website is not about simply displaying art. It’s about engaging your site visitors through a compelling story about you as an artist that includes your artistic vision and your ability to create unique works. Your story should be interwoven throughout the structure of the website in such a way that visitors’ navigation through your site should reveal different aspects of your larger narrative.

The resulting relationship from visitors’ encounter with your site’s narrative is what has the potential to create audiences and potentially generate opportunities and sales for you.

The significance and potential of your website will allow it to function as the anchor of your artistic online identity. It is a place where you can maintain full control of your personal narrative (artistic journey, history and vision). It should be the most official and complete version of your artistic identity available on the web.

CONSTRUCTING A NARRATIVE:
Just like the blank pages of a book or white walls of a gallery, your website should be a simple and stark background that highlights your unique vision and ability. The goal is to use the website design and content to present a clear narrative that weaves your story together in a way that it is accessible to a broad general audience.

The most basic, common, and effective narrative structure for your website is as follows:

Homepage - The homepage is a brief introduction to the intent and content of your website. It is here that visitors first encounter you and your work. It is also the place where the look and feel of the website should be established. This includes elements such as font, color scheme, layout, and logo (if one exist) that should be found on every page.

A standard artist homepage typically involves the strong pairing of one image that epitomizes your work or vision as an artist with sparse text that conveys basic information about you and the your site’s contents (ex. Lisa Smith. Graphic Designer. Futurist. Feminist.).

Selected Works – Works included on the website should expand upon the story introduced on the homepage.

You should not feature your entire body of work online, since it will make the site look cluttered and unfocused. Instead, make a selection that will give a viewer an idea of your style(s), theme(s), message, and breadth of work, while still conveying a sense of cohesiveness.

If you work in more than one medium (such as photography, performance, and painting), feature a few selected works from each. However, this should only be done if you have a reasonable amount of work in each medium, or if the selected works are in some way related to the works done in your primary medium.

Regardless of what medium is featured, all media should be sized and compressed in a manner that will allow it to quickly load on the website. Site visitors may lose interest, if they are subjected to a long wait before they can see or hear featured work. The specifications for the appropriate media file size will depend on the capabilities of whatever platform the website has been built upon. Therefore, it is up to you (or your website developer) to test the load time of the site’s media on several different web browsers (i.e. Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer), before launching the final version of the site.

Artist Statement – The statement should demonstrate how the sparse description on the homepage blooms into a full-blown story about your vision and creative process. It may include information about your influences, inspiration and creative intent.

This is the area of the website that most clearly provides visitors with context for your work. It should be free of esoteric language and discipline-specific analysis, to ensure that it can be understood by a broad audience.

Biography/CV – Your biography and CV should connect your statement to your broader personal and artistic journey. This section should include mention of your training (apprenticeships and professional development fellowships), past experience working in the arts (teaching, conference presenter, commissions), awards, grants, and exhibitions.

Store/Representation (optional) – Knowledge of the entities that elect to represent and sell your work gives visitors a sense of your established (and potential) value in the art market. It also allows them to become part of your story, by enabling them to purchase the works.

If your art is being sold through a gallery or agent, it is worth listing their contact information, so potential buyers know where to turn to make their purchase(s).

Depending on your needs and resources, an online store may be an efficient way for you to sell art independently. Creating links through a service such as PayPal is an easy and low-cost way to integrate a purchase option into a website that will allow a buyer to use their PayPal account or credit/debit card to purchase art.

Press – This section serves as an archive of press coverage received by you, and thus presents a history of you as an artist in the public eye.

Over time, as the archive builds, you should weed out articles that have very little specific coverage about you (such as a review about a group show). You should also become more discerning about the news outlets represented.

Contact/Email List/Social Network – This is one of the most important aspects of the website, since it is the portal through which site visitors can interact with you directly. This section should contain one (or more) ways for visitors to be in conversation with you.

Email – Providing an email address is the most direct line of communication that you can make available between yourself and your site visitors.

Contact Form – A contact form offers optimal privacy for you, since it doesn’t require that you provide an email address. Visitors simply enter their email address and a message in the designated fields of the form. Once they have submitted it, it is sent to your email address and you have the option to respond directly.

Email List – Embedding an email list sign-up option allows visitors to submit their email addresses to you, via an eMarketing service, such as iContact, MailChimp andConstant Contact. This list can then receive mass messages from you about upcoming exhibitions, broadcasted interviews, fundraising campaigns, and other related matters.

Social Network Links – While your website is the foundation of an your online presence, social media networks* on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provide a means through which you can post commentary and minor announcements, as well as correspond with your audience and fellow artists.

Most social network sites offer easy to embed code that will allow a direct link from an artist’s website to their social media account.

*You should note that current policies held by some popular social networking companies call into question the ownership of posted material. Some sites include in their user agreement a clause that allows the site to use images or materials posted on their service for marketing purposes. Therefore, you should be wary when posting images, audio or video of your work.

PUBLISHING THE STORY:
Once you have generated all of the content needed to populate your website, the next step is to upload it onto the internet. To do this, a crucial decision about the construction and maintenance of the website needs to be decided.

Hired Assistance vs. Do it Yourself (DIY)
Depending on your computer and internet literacy, you may grapple with the decision to hire an experienced web designer versus constructing a website on your own. The decision is informed by many pros and cons.

The pros of hiring a web designer include:
- Working with a designer allows for the construction of a completely customized website

- Working with a designer allows you to be hands-off with matters surrounding acquiring a domain name and hosting service, updating security features, conducting routine data backup, and of course web coding.

The cons of hiring a web designer include:
- Depending on what you want from a website, the initial fee for a designer can run from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

- In addition to the initial development and launch of a site, you will need to pay a designer to add new content to the website as well as run security updates, data backups, and other website maintenance.

The pros of the DIY approach include:
- If you have a strong command of coding, then you can have full control over the look, feel and operation of your website.

- If you have little to no coding expertise, there are a plethora of art-specific pre-fabricated sites (e.g. WordPress.com, Weebly, Wix that you can easily customize to develop a professional looking website. These sites often take care of security and back-up issues, leaving you to focus on the website’s content and aesthetic.

The cons of the DIY approach include:
- You are responsible for the continual maintenance and content update of your website, in addition to continuing your practice. – Even if you elect to use a prefabricated template service, you may find the need to pay an annual fee to add advance features on the website (e.g. video hosting, customized domain name, additional space).

- While prefabricated templates do allow for minor modifications, you must know some level of code to achieve a significant degree of customization.

- Should the company providing the prefabricated site fold, you may be is faced with the responsibility of transferring your data to another readymade service or considering converting to a custom-built solution.

If you elect to use the DIY approach to website design, a list of services that offer prefabricated sites specifically designed or well-suited for an artist website can be found here.

BEYOND PUBLISHING — MAKING AN ARTIST SITE VISIBLE
The internet is a vast library of resources. Therefore, once a publishing approach has been implemented and your website is live, it will need an ongoing marketing campaign to drive visitors towards it.

Methods for driving an audience towards your website:

Email List – In addition to informing audiences about important announcements regarding your career, email lists can be used to encourage people to revisit your website. Whenever new content is added to your site, an announcement should be sent out to the list. The announcement should be truncated and linked to the full announcement that is posted on the website. This will encourage people to visit the website to read the full story.

Know that in addition to collecting email addresses through your website, you can manually enter email addresses into your list. These can be acquired by receiving business cards from interested parties and having a paper sign-up sheet available at events where you are presenting your work. Make sure to avoid adding email addresses to your email list if you have not received consent from the address holder. Email recipients can report the unauthorized inclusion of their email in someone’s list to eMarketing services, which can lead to having your account deactivated.

Social Network – Social media allows you to do more than just interact with your audience. The ease in which you can connect with other members of the social media community also allows you access to another avenue through which you can expand your audience. With these expanding networks, you can drive more traffic to your site by including a link to your website in the social media profile. You can also post comments or announcements (with direct link to a specific page of your site), on your account feed.

Business Cards, Postcards and Emails – Any means of communication that you distribute should include mention of your website. General business cards and postcards that are advertising a specific event or show should have your website listed clearly on them. The signature of your email (the area right below your name at the end of an email) should also include a link to the site.

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) – SEO are strategies that can be used to elevate the presence of a website in search engine queries.

- Increased traffic means increased popularity.
The more people you can encourage to visit your site, the higher a search engine will position your site in a search result list.

- Search engines recognize words and associate them with websites
Whenever possible, your site should contain as many commonly used and discipline-specific descriptive words as possible. Everything from the file names of images, videos and audio files, to the website’s narrative should contain words and phrasing that people are likely to enter into a search engine. This will help increase the likelihood that the website will appear, when those words are entered into a search.

See Website Resources, by Lisa Szolovits , for a quick guide to popular website-building services and resources.

Toccarra Thomas is NYFA’s Program Associate, NYFA Source.

Article Published March 6, 2013

CLP, Holborn London http://www.londonclp.co.uk/holborn.htm

Footprinters, Leeds http://www.footprinters.co.uk/

(& Dashes)

We all need to use them but hardly any of us know how to type them. Here is a brief guide of how to type smart quotes and accented characters (and dashes) on a Mac. If you have the latest OS you probably discovered that you can also find accented characters by holding down a letter to reveal its spicier cousins (I discovered this myself many times when attempting to type “heeeeeyyyyy” in an iChat window.). If you’re on a Windows computer or some nerdy space machine, I’d recommend googling “keyboard commands for accented characters”. If you use a non-English keyboard, you probably already know how to find all the accented characters you need. Made by Jessica Hische for your enjoyment and enlightenment.

These are dumb quotes: ’ “

Don’t use dumb quotes for quotations or apostrophes—the nerds will revolt. Do use them as shorthand for feet / inches.

These are smart quotes: “ ” ‘ ’

They are also known by the cuter term “curly quotes”.

This is how you type smart quotes:

• Left double quote:

  option + [

  “

• Right double quote:

  option + shift + [

  ”

• Left single quote:

  option + ]

  ‘

• Right single quote:

  option + shift + ]

  ’

This is how you type accented characters:

• Any letter with ˆ above it:

  option + i then release and type the letter you want accented

  âêîôû ÂÊÎÔÛ

• Any letter with ´ above it:

  option + e then release and type the letter you want accented

  áéíóú ÁÉÍÓÚ

• Any letter with ` above it:

  option + ` then release and type the letter you want accented

  àèìòù ÀÈÌÒÙ

• Any letter with ¨ above it:

  option + u then release and type the letter you want accented

  äëïöüÿ ÄËÏÖÜŸ

• Any letter with ˜ above it:

  option + n then release and type the letter you want accented

  ñãõ ÑÃÕ

• To type an å:

  option + a for lowercase

  shift + option + a for uppercase

  å Å

• To type a ç:

  option + c for lowercase

  shift + option + c for uppercase

  ç Ç

This is how you type (and when you use) different sorts of dashes:

Here is a really long wikipedia article of how to use various dashes and below is my own shorthand version adapted from that information. There are more kinds of dashes than those mentioned here but these are the ones you’re most likely to use and confuse.

• A hyphen: -

  You know how to make this.

  Used to break single words into parts (like when lines of type break within a word) or to join separate words into single words.

  I love me some hand-lettering.

• An en dash: –

  option + -

  Used in dates to replace “to” or “and”. It can also be used to illustrate the relationship between two different words.

  I was in jail from 1976–1978.

  Mother–daughter beauty pageants make me uncomfortable.

  I have a love–hate relationship with stretchy denim.

• An em dash: —

  option + shift + -

  For a break of thought similar to but stronger than a thought contained within parentheses. An em dash can also be used where a period (or full-stop) seems too strong but a comma seems too weak. At times it can have a similar vibe to a colon. Some non-Americans use en dashes in place of em dashes and add a space before and after them.

  I once had to use the bus station bathroom—horrifying.

  I tried a durian fruit once—tasted like hamburger pudding.

http://quotesandaccents.com/

http://www.bluecinetech.co.uk/products.php?cat=87

http://nylllon.com/

Could be useful for collaborative coding.

QTX Sound

QR12PA / QR15PA
QTX Sound User Manual
178.843 / 178.846

Features:
 Mains, external or internal D.C. power supply
 Internal 12V rechargeable battery
 2 x VHF handheld wireless microphones included
 2 x microphone inputs (6.3mm jack)
 Master 2 band EQ and Echo effect for microphones
 Internal USB/SD digital audio media player
 Wireless remote control for media player
 Integral trolley with telescopic handle
 Integral 35mm pole mount
 AUX line input

Interparcel have major accounts with the world’s largest and most trusted courier companies. Thanks to our massive buying power we have secured huge discounts off their normal selling rates. This allows us to offer you some of the lowest parcel delivery prices in the country!
	We’re the UK’s largest online parcel broker
	Excellent Customer Service
	Largest range of courier services
	Telephone, Email & Live Chat Support

They will even ship crates up to an insured value of £1000.

Recommended companies:
Packable, wood approved for international shipment, fast turnaround, many options.

The Sculpture workshop in the Berlin district of “Wedding” with an overall size of 3600 square metres and 12 metres height provides excellent conditions for artistic projects in metal, wood, stone, plaster/casting, plastics and ceramics. A 3D laser scanning system is also available.

The available space sections are designed to be able to carry out a variety of projects, including large-scale and complex designs, facilitating a work environment to the highest professional standards.

The workshop supervisors are there to offer advice on the technical realisation of projects, providing information on specific materials and are willing to help with developing solutions for unconventional ideas.

Ranging from the traditional printing methods, such as book printing, etching and lithography to screen-printing and offset print, the services on offer are regularly adapted to incorporate the latest technical developments. Additionally, the studio runs workshops for papermaking and bookbinding.

A whole range of printing methods may be realised: from traditional printing editions to crossover techniques and experimental projects.

• News from the workshop
• Screen printing
• Etching/ Engraving
• Lithography
• Letterprint
• Bookbinding studio
• Paper Making
• Computer
• Fotografie
• Accommodation in Berlin?

Druckwerkstatt im Kulturwerk des bbk berlin GmbH

Mariannenplatz 2
10997 Berlin

Mathias Mrowka (Leitung)
Doris Heidelmeyer (Büro)

tel 030 614015-70
fax 030 614015-74

druckwerkstatt@bbk-kulturwerk.de

Monday: 1 pm – 9 pm
Tuesday -Friday: 9 am – 5 pm

   Supported by the Berlin Senate Cultural Affairs Department

Gresswell

K2 Screen - high end screen printing for artists, Central London

See what LibreOffice can do for you »

http://www.mastersketchup.com/

thanks Phil.

This tutorial shows you how to enter data in an online spreadsheet to generate a set of placemarks in Google Earth and Maps. Google’s web-based, collaborative editing allows you and your team members to simultaneously enter data and instantly publish updates. Using this tool you could: showcase your organisation’s projects, programme sites or partners; map your offices, volunteers or resources; or visualise your data on local, regional or global scales.

Some of the new and improved features in Spreadsheet Mapper version 3 include:

• Create 1000 placemarks – add more if needed.
• Six simplified balloon design templates – add more if needed
• Simplified publication process
• Additional customisation options

Spreadsheet Mapper 3 uses Google Apps Scripts to help generate the KML placemarks and to provide useful tools. If you want to use the older Spreadsheet Mapper 2, which only uses spreadsheet formulas, but limits the number of placemarks and balloon templates, you can still access it here: Spreadsheet Mapper 2.0 tutorial

Tutorial Contents:

• Before you begin
• Let’s get started
• Enter your own information
• Publish and view your changes
• Need more or less rows?
• Sharing your placemarks
• What’s Next?
• Discussion, Feedback & Questions

Before You Begin

Spreadsheet Mapper is a powerful tool for mapping point locations. It starts with enough spreadsheet rows for 1,000 placemark points and provides a tool for adding additional rows. Adding more than a few thousand rows/points will slow down the spreadsheet mapper and produce a very large KML file, in which case you may want to look at other tools such as Google Fusion Tables.

http://www.google.co.uk/earth/outreach/tutorials/spreadsheet3.html

What:

• Use your Gmail Contact Groups as subscribable mailing lists so that anybody can add / remove themselves from it
• Get a subscription box for your website – customizable with your own style sheet (see right)
• Get a custom URL for your mailing list (e.g. http://www.GMailingList.com/<you choose>)

Why:

• So that you don’t need to manually update your contacts in your Gmail Contact Groups

How to:

News and announcements may be found on the blog. One can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook

These paper and fabric speakers are made by running 5-9V amplified sound signal through a very conductive coil in close proximity to a magnet. Unlike most speakers that have the wire coil wrapped cylindrically and placed around the magnet, here the coil is in the plane and directly adhered to the membrane that moves the air creating sound.

Also see: etched fabric speaker, carved and engraved wood speakers, plated seashell speakers:

http://hlt.media.mit.edu/?p=1372

What can you do with the Raspberry Pi, a £25 computer the size of a credit card? All sorts of things! If you’re learning how to program, or looking to build new electronic projects, this hands-on guide will show you just how valuable this flexible little platform can be.

This book takes you step-by-step through many fun and educational possibilities. Take advantage of several preloaded programming languages. Use the Raspberry Pi with Arduino. Create Internet-connected projects. Play with multimedia. With Raspberry Pi, you can do all of this and more.

• Get acquainted with hardware features on the Pi’s board
• Learn enough Linux to move around the operating system
• Pick up the basics of Python and Scratch—and start programming
• Draw graphics, play sounds, and handle mouse events with the Pygame framework
• Use the Pi’s input and output pins to do some hardware hacking
• Discover how Arduino and the Raspberry Pi complement each other
• Integrate USB webcams and other peripherals into your projects
• Create your own Pi-based web server with Python

About the Author

see it working Imran Perretta uses Stacey

HTML5 Doctor

http://tapeline.info

Looking to learn the basics of using the Arduino starter board? Well be sure to watch this informative video hosted by Massimo Banzi, one of the Co-Founders of Arduino.

The video explains how to build a basic circuit with the Arduino board, and how to use each of the basic components such as LEDs, switches, and resistors. So if you are new to engineering, or have only recently purchased the Arduino started kit, this video is a must-watch!

View this video and others at RS online: http://ow.ly/e3WVr

Buy the starter kit and related Arduino products: http://ow.ly/e3WVr

134 x 197mm (Standard)
216 x 138mm (Demy)
210 x 148mm (A5)
234 x 156mm (Royal)
249 x 177mm (Pinched Crown Quarto)
246 x 189mm (Crown Quarto)
276 x 219mm (Demy Quarto)
297 x 210mm (A4)

it is often cheaper to use one of these.

Pressbooks

http://grabcad.com/library

Maybe you got a new TV for Christmas. Or maybe you just got one recently. Maybe you are thinking of buying one. Whichever is the case, take heed: your TV will try very, very hard to make whatever movies you watch on it look not just bad, but aggressively, satanically, puppy-drowningly bad.

TVs are designed to do one thing above all: sell. To do so, they must fight for attention on brightly-lit showroom floors. Manufacturers accomplish this in much the same way that transvestite hookers in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district do—by showing you everything they’ve got, turned up to eleven. You want brightness? We’ll scald your retinas. You want sharpness? We’ll draw a black outline around everything for you. Like bright colors? We’ll find them even in Casablanca. Oh, and since you associate “yellowing” with age and decay, we’ll also make the image as blue as a retiree’s bouffant on Miami beach.

Here’s how Inception is supposed to look:

Here’s how Inception looks at your local Best Buy:

It’s understandable how this comes to be. After looking at the Best Buy version, the correct version looks positively sad. This is why we don’t taste Pino Noirs after drinking a Doctor Pepper, and why you can’t compare TVs in a store. At Best Buy, you’re not comparing TVs, you’re comparing settings. It’s not just that TVs in stores are too bright, too colorful, and too blue—they are clawing over one another to display the brightest, bluest, and most saturated image on a wall of 300 competitors.

At home, you don’t have 300 other TVs to compare yours against, so you won’t suffer from your natural inclination to gravitate toward the most candy-coated images. At home, you’ll be delighted with Inception looking exactly as intended. But you won’t be seeing that.

Fortunately, you probably won’t be seeing the hyper-colorful showroom “torch mode” version either. Most reputable manufacturers are seekingEnergy Star approval on their flatscreens these days, and part of that certification means that the sets cannot come off the truck in “demo mode,” also known as torch mode. You may be presented with a choice when you first power up the set: demo mode or something like “home” mode. Pick “home” mode and your default settings will be somewhat tamer than the “hey, look at me” showroom floor configuration.

And that, right there, is as far as 95% of TV owners will ever go toward “calibrating” their TVs. More than ever, this is a tragedy.

Most TVs have some preset modes deigned for different uses. There’s often a “Cinema” or “Movie” picture mode. Use it. It’s the best, easiest shortcut to setting up your new TV to be as inoffensive as possible. These modes will be quite subdued compared to the amped-up default settings, so chances are, when you first switch them on, you’ll experience a bit of that “wow, that sure is yellow” sensation that you get when you look back to the correct Inception frame after staring at the torch-mode one for a minute. Don’t worry, this will pass almost immediately.

Even with this done however, your TV is, in all likelihood, still actively trying to destroy cinema, right in your home. Chances are your new TV is an LCD panel, and chances are it features “120Hz!” or even “240Hz!!!”

First, let’s talk about LCD technology versus plasma. Most TVs these days are LCD. Some manufacturers have completely phased out plasma. Why? Because while plasmas look better than LCDs in your home, they don’t win the brighter-bluer battle on the showroom floor.

Pause for a moment to reflect on this tragedy—this battle of who can make the most egregiously wrong image has actually caused a superior technology to fall out of favor with manufacturers. Plasmas lost by making movies look they way they’re supposed to.

How exactly is plasma superior? For the time being anyway, plasma TVs can render much darker black levels than even the best LCDs. This is the single most important factor affecting image quality in the home, where you are likely to watch movies with at least some of the lights off. It’s also something you just plain cannot judge in a brightly-lit store.

New paragraph for effect: If you are TV shopping, just about the worst thing you can do is go look at TVs in a store.

Plasma sets also tend to have superior viewing angles. This means that they look good from a broader array of seating positions. LCDs tend to have a “sweet spot”—they can look fine for whomever is seated right in front of them, but the image quality degrades rapidly as you move off-axis—and that’s both side-to-side and up-and-down.

But my personal favorite thing about plasma TVs is that they usually don’t have a feature common in LCD sets: motion smoothing.

This “feature,” which goes by different names, is associated with sets that tout “120Hz” or “240Hz.” Those are refresh rates, and LCD sets need to tout fast refresh rates, because in the early days of LCDs, they suffered from poor, smeary motion rendering. Those days are gone, and a modern LCD is perfectly capable of displaying 60 clean images per second, which is perfect for NTSC video.

Now I’m going to do that internet-unfriendly thing I try to do every so often, which is make a nuanced point. A 120Hz or 240Hz refresh rate is not inherently a bad thing. In fact, they can be good. Both are multiples of 24, where 60 is not. A 60Hz TV, such as a CRT, must display 24p material using an alternating cadence known as 3:2 pulldown. Every other frame is shown for slightly longer or shorter than the previous (2/60ths of a second, then 3/60ths, then 2, then 3, and so on). We don’t tend to notice this, but it is hardly the same as seeing each frame for precicely 1/24th of a second.

120Hz and 240Hz TVs have the potential to show you each 24p frame for exactly 1/24th of a second, perfectly replicating The Way Movies Look, and that’s great. The problem is, it’s hard to make them do that, because of awful motion-smoothing settings that are On by default.

Manufacturers somehow decided that The Way Movies Look is bad, and that they should “fix” this using technology. The same technology that is used in software like Twixtor and Kronos to change frame rates of video. Why show a mere 24 frames per second when we can magically build, orinterpolate, new in-between frames and show 120 or even 240 frames per second?

The results, while varied, are certainly “smoother” than 24p. And the engineers rejoiced. “We’ve fixed that horrible ‘film look!’”

You’ve seen this. It’s in every store. A big, bright, blue LCD set blastingAvatar. The image is so smooth and “live” looking, you catch yourself trying to figure out if it’s the game or the movie. Or it’s some classic film, playing big and bright and smooth and causing you to wonder if you’re somehow seeing the EPK “behind the scenes” video instead of the actual movie.

Filmmakers were not content to make movies with video cameras until those cameras could shoot 24p, because video, with its many-frames-per-second, looks like reality, like the evening news, like a live broadcast or a daytime soap opera; whereas 24p film, by showing us less, looks somehowlarger than life, like a dream, like a story being told rather than an event being documented. This seemingly technical issue turns out to have an enoumous emotional effect on the viewer.

These days, any TV you are likely to buy, will, by default, have technology enabled that completely changes the emotional quality of the movies you watch. This is a cinematic disaster.

But again, let me try to restate my nuanced point: The fact that these TVs refresh at 120Hz or 240Hz is not the problem. It’s the motion smoothing technology, often enabled by default, that destroys the way movies look and renders them as soap operas. And you can turn this off.

In a Samsung set, the bedeviling setting is branded as “Auto Motion Plus,” and you can set it to “Off” in the Picture Options menue under Picture.

LG calls it TruMotion, and its found in the Picture menu. Set it to Off.

Sharp calls it simply Motion Enhancement, and you turn it Off at Picture Settings > Advanced. Sharp has a mode called “Film Mode” that is good—it recognizes 24p material and displays it correctly.

Similarly, Toshiba sets have a “24fps Cinema Mode” that displays film material at a true 24 unadulterated frames per second.

Panasonic, despite making the mest plasmas available, joins the sad trend with their LCD sets in the form of “Motion Picture Pro 4,” found under Picture > Advanced.

Sony (not pictured) calls theirs Motionflow, and it’s in various places on various sets, but easy to find. Turn it, say it with me now, Off.

read more…

Want to know how to use an electronic component? This first book of a three-volume set includes key information on electronics parts for your projects—complete with photographs, schematics, and diagrams. You’ll learn what each one does, how it works, why it’s useful, and what variants exist. No matter how much you know about electronics, you’ll find fascinating details you’ve never come across before.

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Perfect for teachers, hobbyists, engineers, and students of all ages, this reference puts reliable, fact-checked information right at your fingertips—whether you’re refreshing your memory or exploring a component for the first time. Beginners will quickly grasp important concepts, and more experienced users will find the specific details their projects require.

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• Comprehensive:Volume 1 covers power, electromagnetism, and discrete semi-conductors; Volume 2 includes integrated circuits, and light and sound sources; Volume 3 covers a range of sensing devices.

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The London Bookshop Map

Using Popcorn Maker’s simple drag and drop interface, you can add live content to any video — photos, maps, links, social media feeds and more. All right from your browser. The result is a new way to tell stories on the web, with videos that are rich with context, full of links, and unique each time you watch them.

“Until now, video on the web has been stuck inside a little black box,” says Mozilla’s Director of Popcorn, Brett Gaylor. “Popcorn Maker changes that, making video work like the rest of the web: hackable, linkable, remixable, and connected to the world around it.”

http://popcorn.webmadecontent.org/videos/popcornmakerteaser2.mp4

Basic skin retouching using frequency separation and dodging & burning. I use this process on every photo that I do, and I usually spend about 4-5 minutes on headshots like this (and less time on full body shots when there is obviously less detail in the face). This is not intended to be a high-end retouching tutorial, but techniques that can help people who want to do natural-looking retouching while maintaining most of the natural skin texture!

Frequency separation is a technique that allows you to give skin a smooth-yet-sharp look.

Here’s an explanation by retoucher Ben Secret for his tutorial “Retouch images with frequency separation“:

[Frequency separation is] a technique that enables you to selectively process not only different areas of an image, but also different detail levels. Frequency separation involves creating a high detail (high spatial frequency) layer and a low detail layer from a source image [...] Using this technique enables you to smooth and rework rough and fine details independently, and opens up some very high-quality and non-destructive methods with which to sharpen your images.

Julia Kuzmenko McKim has a great text-based tutorial as well, titled, “Skin Retouching – Frequency Separation Technique.” Her page also includes a number of before-and-after examples that you can switch between by dragging a slider.

You can find the finished version of the photo in Kiesling’s video here.

original pdf

backup pdf

Online book, free: http://natureofcode.com/book/

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More: http://blog.makezine.com/arduino/

With Screen Stitch ($49), you can choose from 36 different split screen effects right from the convenience of your generators browser in Final Cut Pro X. Vertical split, horizontal split, diagonal…two clips, three clips or more, change background color, scale images…