Home Page

 


EARLIER FEATURES

 


FEATURES CONTENTS

 


LATER FEATURES

 

Features Contents


9th August 2002

KEN ABOUT - SILENT RUNNING

Ken Ross

email.gif (183 bytes)
petlibrary@bigfoot.com


 

FROM VENUS WITH LOVE

If you browsed amongst the hi-fi magazines in the late 70s, in the days when Walkmen were fantasy, an item may have caught your eye. Cassette tapes are prone to background noise due to the tape speed past the playback head. 8 tracks have better background noise figures due to being twice as fast.

( http://www.8trackheaven.com will tell you more about other people who still use them).

With this in mind  a clever chap created a cassette machine that ran at twice the normal cassette speed. So was launched a jumbo sized tape deck with everything scaled up by a factor of 2 - including the cassettes themselves.

It passed into history very rapidly, a victim of non compatibility ..........

THE WINGED AVENGER

A copy of Roxio Toast 5.0.1 Titanium came my way recently. Lurking on my HD is Toast 4.1.2, in both 'Lite' & 'Deluxe' versions, and 5.0.1 in itself offers no great advantage over these, unless you've got a DVD-R drive. However, on the point of stowing away in the 'just-in-case-archive',  I found the Video CD option is useable in this version on my PPC. Video CDs can be used in quite a few DVD players, (but always test to make sure before parting with your hard earned).VCDs are an earlier form of video disk, before DVD emerged as the format leader with its larger capacity. VCDs have the same capacity as audio CDs, ( 74  & 80 minutes ). The video track is limited to 320*240, (drawback - the television picture maybe a bit pixely at times ), at 25 f.p.s. (That's PAL standard for colonial readers ).

There is another variety labelled S(uper)VCD that reduces the capacity by half, but it's still the same picture size / resolution despite other 'enhanced' features.

After installing Toast 5.0.1, QuickTime exporting of VCD tracks in MPEG format is enabled. However it seems to be very picky about what sort of MPEG files it likes to use on VCD, as QT exported files are the only ones I've been able to use. A note to fellow Zip drive users - put the Zip driver extension into the disabled folder, as Toast 5.0.1 in VCD mode for some reason dislikes living with it.

The saving of VCD tracks may be better suited to a G3 beastie, as on my PPC it takes around 1 hr to convert 20MB of QTM to VCD track - that's about 2 minutes of video! So the final result is converted overnight, with all peripherals shut down in case you ask.

ESCAPE IN TIME

Toast 5.0.1  will create VCDs that play without menu options, so its a case of fast forward & rewind for the controls on the DVD. QuickTime Movie editing and creation is simple enough as there's quite a few of them around - it's largely a matter of what you get on with best.  There are a couple of (shareware) VCD player programs for the Mac but MoviePlayer will do the job just as well.

For people who've installed QT version 3.0 and don't want to pay out for getting the Pro version - that enables saving and basic editing etc - just get hold of MoviePlayer 2.5 and those features are back with you again.
In the options menu when saving, there's fit / crop / fit & crop for the final MPEG track result, depending on what you think looks best.

My  end testing of VCDs was done in the AV dept of John Lewis's on a couple of afternoons  - donations of DVD players & used fivers are being accepted at the usual address!

THE BIRD WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

Simple animations can be created in (freeware ) Chipmunk Basic by saving the individual frames with a function call, then turned into QTMs with Smoothie (shareware).  Static titling can be created direct from QuickEditor (shareware), or scrolling titles from Desktop Trilogy (shareware). This can also create stills by first creating a, (e.g. silent), soundtrack only movie however long is needed before pasting the still in as a background picture, then doing the MPEG biz.

THE SEE-THROUGH MAN

If you've got flat rate internet access, (or broadband!), then pay a visit to http://www.moviearchive.org. Here there are 1254 titles available of short films from mostly the USA in the 40s & 50s. The versions that are easier to work with are the MPEG-4 (.avi) movies, which  require the DivX codec from http://www.DivX.com for converting to standard QTMs. The soundtrack conversion extension says it's for OS9 but it works fine in OS8.6. Rig for overnight running and paste the movie URLs into iGetter. Then, you too can delight in being shown 'How to Use the Dial Phone', from 1927 produced by  American Telephone and Telegraph Co. (AT&T )

THE TIGER AWAKES

Micromart is at present running a series by the 8 bit world's very  own Shaun Bebbington - so why not let the editors  at Micromart that he's doing a good job?.
 


 

 

 

 


TOP