Gene Siskel has gone off to the great cinema in the sky, and Roger Ebert was nowhere to be found, so Jimmie Bise of the Sundries Shack and I cut a podcast last night discussing each of our top five movies, and why. Tune in here to listen!
And they need to pick up the December issue of Videomaker magazine, which contains an article I wrote titled, “How A Camcorder Sees Light” — or read it online, here.
Duane Lester of All American Blogger and Radio For Conservatives recently interviewed me about the history of Ed Driscoll.com, a topic I know just a little bit about. It’s an hour-long podcast; tune in here if you’d like to listen.
(Incidentally, greetings from 30,000 feet, as this and the last few blog posts were delivered via American Airlines’ onboard Wi-Fi system.)
Video gearheads will certainly enjoy this HD video at, appropriately enough, Videomaker magazine on the history of blue and green screen in the movies, going back to Linwood Dunn’s pioneering efforts at RKO in the 1930s.
And speaking of Dunn, he gets namechecked in my newest article at Blogcritics on selecting the appropriate transitions when editing your next online video (which references some of the transitions I experimented with in the intro to the most recent edition of Silicon Graffiti). It makes, I hope, a nice follow-up to my own article this month at Videomaker on “The Art of the Title Sequence.”
Related: Well, tangentially at least. At Deep Glamour, Virginia Postrel explores another side of Hollywood make-believe: “Grace Kelly: ‘Natural Glamour’ Rising from the Sea.”
If you were out this weekend enjoying the Fourth of July, you may have missed these posts:
And a video interview with Austin Bay featuring “A Quick & Dirty Guide To Iran:”
For those into DIY video, and video podcasting, I have a troika of video-oriented product reviews at Blogcritics:
Check ‘em out — it certainly makes a nice change pace from all of our recent Hef blogging!
Update: Skye at Midnight Blue gets techie with it as well, comparing the Creative Lab Vado HD camcorder and the Pure Digital Flip Mino HD, two tiny affordable cameras great for quick and dirty vlogging, in a new post appropriately titled “Flip Vs Vado”, complete with screen captures and YouTube clips.
As James Lileks wrote a few years ago when he broke down the subtext and leitmotifs of the score for Star Trek’s “Doomsday Machine” episode, “I think this will be the stupidest, most geeked-out thing I’ve ever written. I think I need an intervention: dude, it was one cheesy episode of one cheesy show. Give it up.”
Similarly, having doped out how to do a decent transporter effect for the end of last week’s edition of Silicon Graffiti, I figured I’d write up a how-to article, which is over at Blogcritics. If you’ve ever wondered how do beam yourself into or out of your own video…well, now’s your chance.
K’plah!
Stop by the newly spiffed-up Blogcritics, and check this veteran Blogcritic out (who’s been there since the start!) as you scroll through the archives…
Join host Steve Green of VodkaPundit.com for a snapshot of Washington–and beyond. Segments this week include:
“Is Twitter the next best marketing and networking tool, or merely another way for that annoying guy at work to brag about his mundane life?”
Rachel Motte writes that “It’s really up to you.”
(and if you’re new to Twitter, let’s just say that Rachel has excellent taste in introductory videos.)
“Or: Why The Internet Invented The Phrase ‘Epic Fail’”, Red State quips, as they observe Keith Olbermann, and NBC, going through the looking glass:
Not only is Olbermann’s total lack of research and complete absence of journalistic curiosity exposed by this story, his familiarity with the internet is decidedly at question. “I‘m not on Twitter. I tried to sign up last summer and abandoned the project.” Tried to sign up? Project?! Remember the frenzy about McCain being technology illiterate? Just asking.
You know, it’s not for nothing that journolist trashed Olbermann, but I’m starting to think he wouldn’t have understood the list in the first place. Any day now we might see Olbermann’s Worst Person be: “… the gentleman from Nigeria. You, sir, have failed to return my emails. Indeed, not only have you and the Prime Minister you so recently worked for refused to deposit my 100,000 euros, you have withdrawn a great deal of my own money!”
The incompetence that led to Keith Olbermann naming Twitter the “Worst Person in the World” is staggering. He smeared the popular service and a fellow liberal Democrat enemy of Fox News, because he got an email he didn’t understand, about a technology he didn’t understand, and neither he nor his staff did a click of research.
Hey, they could have started here if they needed a quick and easy guide to Twitter:
Somehow I wound up on Right Wing News’ “The Top 10 Conservative Video Bloggers” list. And I’m in some pretty good company with both the other nine video bloggers and the honorary mentions (including Michelle Malkin, who’s “Vent” video blogs in 2006 and 2007 inspired my own efforts). Check out the complete list here, and my own videos by clicking here.
Well, at least for your audio pleasure. Over the weekend, I did an interview with Joel Beckett of OutloudOpinion, which produces a number of podcasts for Pajamas Media, where we discussed the poor state of the GOP’s back bench, and the even poorer state of the legacy media. Ordinarily, I’m happy to play Carl Reiner to Steve Green’s Mel Brooks-ian patter on PJM Political, but I’m was happy to bloviate with Joel for about 15 minutes or so. Click here to play the MP3 of our conversation.
Afterward, for a gustatory treat, my I recommend communing with The One?
In the mail today was the April “dead tree” edition of Videomaker magazine, which contains three of my articles:
If you’re looking for tips to produce better sounding videos or audio-only podcasts, you might very well find some useful tips in the first two articles. Check out the above articles online, but look for the entire issue at your Borders or Barnes & Noble.
In the meantime, here’s an important tip for those, who like myself, work extensively with chromakey and virtual sets. Whether you work with green screen or blue screen–make sure you’re not wearing either of those colors:
Steven F. Hayward writes, “Barack Obama Should Study Ronald Reagan’s First Days in Office”:
President Barack Obama’s honeymoon period seems to have ended quickly. That’s because Mr. Obama doesn’t grasp the essentials of presidential leadership. Rather than making a compelling case for his economic policies, he has resorted to curt rebuffs, such as telling House Republican whip Eric Cantor, “I won.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the same thing the same day: “We won the election; we wrote the [stimulus] bill.” This is the trope of a party that has lost its ability to make an argument.
Mr. Obama and his team would be well advised to put aside the imperious FDR model and study Ronald Reagan’s first 200 days in office. The contrast is instructive.
Upon entering office in 1981, Reagan’s team produced a 50-page, detailed blueprint for their first six months in office. The passage of their economic policy was the central objective. This report, called the Initial Actions Project (IAP), has received little attention from historians or journalists (with the notable exception of Lou Cannon). It would be highly useful for Mr. Obama to review it.
Read on for some details from the aforementioned IAP, and be on the lookout for the second volume of Hayward’s The Age of Reagan series, The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989 currently scheduled for release in August, according to Amazon. Here’s my review of Volume I, from the very early days of Blogcritics, back in 2002–which seems more like a millennia ago, than seven years.
(Via Ann Althouse.)
Update: Related thoughts from Roger Kimball.
You have may have noticed a slight change in the look of the blog, and its URL…
Last year, Roger L. Simon asked Glenn Reynolds, Steve Green and myself if we’d move our blogs inside the Pajamas portal. As it’s the 800-pound Insta-gorilla of the Baconsphere Blogosphere, it was understandable that Glenn’s blog went in first, and then Steve followed in December, and yesterday, Pajamas’s primary blog technician put the finishing touches on my installation.
Having been working on material for Pajamas since before the official launch in November of 2005, and having been producing first their “Blog Week In Review” podcasts (hosted by the great Austin Bay) and then their weekly PJM Political show on Sirius-XM’s POTUS channel, moving into the Pajamas portal certainly made sense. And I had wanted to update my blog for some time; the Movable Type platform it ran on was beginning to creak and moan under the strain of 14,000 or so blog posts accumulated since March of 2002, whereas it was obvious from writing the posts for the radio show each week that Wordpress updates at a much faster pace.
You’ll notice also that comments are enabled as well, so this is your chance to provide feedback—ranging from wild hagiographic cheer to impossibilities of an anatomical sort. (And/or drop us a line on Twitter) And all the stuff from the old blog—including the Silicon Graffiti videos—will be appearing here as well.
And while the EdDriscoll.com URL still works fine (and in fact relocates to this site), as the vice president is wont to say, gird your loins and update your bookmarks–or even vice versa if indeed that’s the way you yourself personally roll.
(Bumped to top.)
In the latest update to Videomaker magazine’s Website, I have a piece titled “Basic Training: Recording Good Audio for Video.” If you produce video for the Web, or even if you produce audio-only podcasts, hopefully there’s a tip or two that your productions might benefit from.
If not, your admission price to the Website cheerfully refunded!
I was on the Breitbart.tv B-Cast earlier today discussing the future of online video, as well as the current difficulty in making Internet advertising revenues work. Tune in here to watch.
The lead item has nothing to do with the future of multimedia, but it’s quite a moo-ving story in its own right…
Dr. Melissa Clouthier takes the pulse of the MSM, with some assistance from Charlie Martin of Pajamas Media’s “Edgelings” tech blog, and a little video help from your humble narrator himself.
And speaking of a troubled MSM, Newsbusters reports that the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has declared Chapter 11. Its best-known journalist in the new world of the Blogosphere and Satellite Radio directs us to this piece in the Minnesota Post for some additional details of the Strib’s bankruptcy and what may be to come. (But not before including a sublime screen capture from A Night To Remember, taken at the apex between iceberg and eternity.)
Related: “Your MSM Moment of Zen.”
