Month: February 2009

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So I’m working a project at work that requires me to show website material on top of the people on camera.  Well, after several failures with screencap programs (the text was far too small), I decided just to shoot the screen with my camera.

The problem came when I needed to put it in to the timeline.  The shots came with a bunch of lines on them.  This is, of course, the thin-film transitor layer that forms the pixels on the monitor.  Our eyes don’t usually see it (except on poorly manufactured monitors), but the camera picks right up on it.  This is a problem.  While this may not be the ideal solution, I have came up with a workaround if you run into the problem if you’re using Adobe Premiere.

Simply go to your Effects panel and choose the “Fast Blur” effect from Video Effects -> Blur and Sharpen.  Apply it to your monitor shot, and slightly notch up the blur.  You should only need to set it at 1.00 or 2.00.  Any more and the text starts to visibly become blurred.  It doesn’t remove the lines, but at the low numbers, it will blur the picture just enough to smooth them out to make them not as noticable.

A better solution may be try and reshoot the picture and adjust the settings on your camera.  When asking at Creative Cow for a better way to fix this problem, user William suggested adjusting the shutter speed.  This didn’t work for me, but my camera is not always…ideal…for everything.  Maybe some of the higher end camera would benefit from this.

So, for now, the slight blur seems to work.  I can see why this wouldn’t be wanted, though, especially if you’re going to output in HD, as the blur will be more visible.  However, I’m currently outputting at SD, so the blur isn’t as much of an issue.

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This article was cross-posted from Poligazette.  And before you ask, yes, I had a lot of fun writing it.

CBS News reports that radical eco-activist Marie Mason has been sentenced to 22 years on charges of arson, setting off an explosive fire in 1999 at Michigan State University’s Agricultural Hall.  Here’s the details:

At MSU, Mason and Ambrose targeted a campus office that held records on research related to moth-resistant potatoes for poor parts of Africa. Computers, file cabinets and desks were doused with a flammable liquid. Vapors contributed to an explosion, and the fire got out of control.

The explosion burned Mason’s hair and prevented her from finishing the message, “No GMO,” on a wall, a reference to genetically modified organisms.

“Pure luck” prevented the couple from being killed, Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagen Frank said. “Did that deter Ms. Mason? Not one bit. She celebrated it. Her community celebrated it.”

Someone innocent could have been killed, and Mason almost was.  Her husband, who turned informant for the FBI, was given nine years.

Of course, the actions are pretty disturbing.  But almost or as much as disturbing is where the apparent facts lead one reading the story.  Mason will serve time in a domestic prison.  Perhaps a high security prison.  And that’s unconscionable.  Because lets not forget: Mason is a terrorist.  And well, as we’ve been told, we can’t have terrorists held on U.S. soil.

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This article was cross-posted from Poligazette.

In the past, I’ve written about ‘militant atheists,” or those type of atheists who spend their time ridiculing and disrespecting believers for their beliefs.  But, I’ve also taken pains to point out that not all atheists are this way.  Not all of them going around laughing at Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc. for belief in a deity.  Some are content to “live and let live.”  Freddie DeBoer, an atheist of the non-militant flavor, ponders the motives behind his more vocal comrades:

I’m left with three possibilities when I consider the atheism of disrespect. Either people like Richard Dawkins, PZ Meyers, Bill Maher, and assorted don’t know that the way they are confronting these issues is disrespectful, in which case they are tone deaf to a frankly absurd degree; or they think that, tactically, the way to get the kind of change they say they want is to ridicule people into believing as they do, in which case they have a dramatically underdeveloped understanding of human psychology and sociology; or they are more interested in producing ridicule than in producing change.

Freddie goes on to say that he really would like to wish that the third choice wasn’t reality.  But, I doubt number one is, since people like Dawkins are far too smart to be unaware of what they’re doing.

(H/T Andrew Sullivan)

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This article was originally posted on Poligazette.

Watching CSI: Miami on Monday, I was intrigued by a question: Do state mandated safety regulations trump free market choice in the medical field?  Or should consumers be allowed to choose to undergo a medical procedure that might cost less than what you could get at a hospital, even though it might not meet all the standard safety requirements?  For those of you wondering what in the world I’m talking about, I’ll see you after the jump, so CSI junkies don’t try and murder me.  For those of you on the RSS feeds, you have been warned: spoilers abound.

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