Wednesday 16 June 2010

THE PRISONER (2009)

I just got to hand it to the makers of The Prisoner ('...a re-imagining of the 60s TV cult classic...'). Compelling / compulsive viewing. Astonishingly to be found on ITV1 in the slot after Britain's Got Talent while potential audience were smoking pot watching BBC4 / Dave / David Lynch DVDs / Youtube.

Totally rocking soundtrack by the bloke who did Bee Movie, some perfect uses of trippy Beach Boys trax and quite the best new version of 'My Funny Valentine' I ever did hear.

Also very amusing spoof website.

Despite all the moaning minnies on the web it's been 6 hours of my time well-spent.

Friday 12 March 2010

Digital Sound module streaming compression examples

These clips are for my class on streaming and podcasting on Monday.

Here's a test upload of a collection of film clips with a written commentary relating to my research.

The first one is a 26.4 Mb .wmv file, 768 x 576 pixels, 3:17 long, audio: 1860kbps, 16bit sample size, 2 channel stereo, sample rate 48 kHz, video: data rate 958kbps, sample size 24 bit.

** I've removed this clip as it was purely a teaching example which broke lots of copyright regulations.

Here's a more compressed example of the same video. This one is 2.85Mb .wmv file, 348 x 288 pixels, 3:17 long, audio: 126kbps, 16bit sample size, 1 channel mono, sample rate 22kHz, video: data rate 100 kbps, sample size 24 bit.

It only took 2 minutes to encode from the original .mswmm file and only a couple of minutes to upload and process. The first version took around half an hour for encoding and 20 minutes or so to upload and process. The first one is ten times the size of the second.

** I've removed this clip as it was purely a teaching example which broke lots of copyright regulations.

You can see the difference but does it really matter? Discuss.