Took advantage of the glorious weather today (72 degrees) to walk from the train station at 44th St & Washington to the Cofco Chinese Center.
8 minutes 50 seconds at a determined yet leisurely pace.
Perfectly acceptable in late February.
In July = heat death.
Watched games 4 and 5 of the Chappel-Hadley Cup between New Zealand and Australia. The series was a draw (dammit) and Australia retained the cup.
Went to try Pollo Campero – well, can’t really see what drives the South Americans wild about it, but it wasn’t bad.
Filled some gaps in the driveway.
Nice weather.
It’ time to review iMovie ’09, the only other piece (apart from iPhoto) that has much interest for me in iLife.
In the interest of full disclosure, I made the move to the Macintosh just so that I could use Final Cut Pro. I learned to edit video on an ancient linear U-matic editor. I learned to edit non-linearly on Adobe Premiere and then stepped up to Final Cut Pro. ([1] Final Cut Pro is a huge improvement over Premiere [2] Windows sucks (or at least sucked at the time) as the basis for an editor.)
I’m no pro. not by a long shot, but I have developed the mindset that goes along with the traditional style of video editing.
iMovie ’09 is not at all like that… or, I should say it’s a different paradigm.
iMovie ’09 is the “fixing” of iMovie ’08, the complete new version that introduced the current scrubbing workflow but completely eliminated all the good stuff. For me iMovie ’08 was unusable. ’09 has fixed most of the problems and, once I got my head wrapped around it, works fairly well.
Today, I took some crap footage from my 2005 trip to Taiwan and began to edit it entirely in iMovie ’09. I started by capturing all three Mini-DV tapes from the trip. iMovie had no problem with the import, and it has a very nice feature in that not only does it read the time code and split the videos out into individual clips, but it also organizes them into daily events alà iPhoto. This makes locating and organizing video clips from a large capture much easier.
iMovie shines at rough cut edits, which some editors love, but I typically don’t use. I prefer to make each edit as close to the final edit as possible and this caused me some initial grief in iMovie. What it does best is to allow you to select and grab rough sections of your raw footage and toss it onto the timeline.
That’s great when you’re working at making a sequential piece from disparate clips, like this perhaps: First I toss in a shot of the park, then I grab a picture of my daughter running, then a long shot of a slide, then my daughter climbing a slide, then her sliding down. Makes perfect sense but you’d be surprised at how often you have those clips, but they aren’t in that order, so you’re looking at visual representations of the clips and you scrub a small section as you see them and put them one after the other in the timeline – then you watch and it is painful. The long shot is too long, she takes too long climbing the slide, there’s too much running and she’s facing the opposite direction when she’d climbing the slide.
Here’s where the precision editor kicks in. In the older version, all the editing had to be done with imprecise broad mouse strokes, with the new version, editing can be done with more precise, fine mouse strokes. Zero in on the transition between two clips and move the edit to the precise frame you want, click and the change is made. That’s a huge improvement over ’08, but they go further.
Now you have overlays, which can simulate an A-B roll (Final Cut Pro doesn’t use A-B rolls, either, so I’ve gotten used to the overlay system, but it still foxes some people I know.), green screen, Picture in Picture, narration (with automatic ducking) and separate audio control.
Plugin support for special effects and transitions is missing, so you’re stuck with the provided ones, and there’s still no keyframing mechanism. Keyframing is probably most often used in home movies to rubberband the audio track, although the concept can be applied to application of special effects and other post-production effects. I really miss that, but at least the narration (and other) tracks can be designated to cause other tracks to hide behind them.
Clearly the engineers at Apple figured out that people shoot lots of “event” footage – trips, birthday parties, weddings, etc. and this package is really geared towards trying to polish the typical turds that people with camcorders usually record.
They also figured out that, if you look at YouTube, and subtract all the completely pirated and illegal postings of music videos, there’s a massive number of homemade music videos (usually set to pirated and illegally obtained music.) iMovie’s new edit to the beat feature is phenomenally simple. Simply lay down an audio track, play it back, tapping out the beat with your finger, then start dropping video footage into your project. It’s automatically cut on the beat. Even random footage laid down to the beat of music looks great.
A lot has been said about the new automatic image stabilization feature, which analyzes more of that turd footage and makes it look steady. I’m not so enamored of this feature. In a camcorder, digital image stabilization (as opposed to the good stuff: optical stabilization) has been around for years. It’s a cheat. What it does is capture a larger area (or shrinks your available image area) and then essentially moves the image around based on an algorithm that tries to identify objects that ought to be “fixed”.
iMovie is doing the same thing, only it has no choice except to shrink your original footage to give itself room to work with. In other words, it’s applying digital zoom to your recorded images. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again – turn off digital zoom on your camcorders. It makes the pictures look like crap (not just turds). Depending on how unstable your footage is, iMovie has to zoom in enough to compensate. Jerky footage rapidly looses image quality. That said, it does work nicely for slightly unstable footage, although it does make the occasional digital foobar with the image for no apparent reason. Best suggestion, buy a tripod or learn some tricks to stabilize your camera when shooting.
The other digital effects work well. The filters, the speed controls, the titles and transitions all worked smoothly.
It’s not without bugs, though. One bug in particular is nasty. Sometimes when making edits to clips that are already in the timeline, they don’t seem to take, and then the audio starts acting weird, and you can’t undo the changes. After fighting with this for some time, I discovered that if you close iMovie and restart it, the problem goes away and your change is probably still there – but not always.
All-in-all, it should be simple and easy to use for most home users, and once the bug fix is out it should be less frustrating.
Wednesday was day 1 of 18 without pay.
Luckily, I had some side computer work that netted me about 1 day’s pay.
Got a haircut. Got some business calling cards. Treated myself to an ice cream cone.
Didn’t play Wii at all during the day. Somehow I thought that’s all I’d be doing on these days.
Configured a jboss development environment in Eclipse on my wife’s computer.
While I was out of the office, they had a “reduction in force” of about 20% of our staff.
In terms of manpower we have now moved past “cutting to the quick” and have amputated up to the knuckles.
The shoe finally fell tonight.
We’ve known for weeks approximately what was going to happen, but we’ve been in a holding pattern to see what form it would take.
The State of Arizona, like all the states is experiencing a drastic turn-down in tax revenue. Like many governments, Arizona spends its tax money before it receives it. In fact, for all the hype you hear from politicians claiming we ought to “live within our means” – none of them seem to be willing to spend money after it has been collected. The budgeting process is a complex system based entirely on tax forecasts, which as anyone with half a semester of economics can tell you is (eventually) a recipe for disaster.
Arizona; however, is facing the largest percentage shortfall of any state, and they’ve known a storm was blowing for months. We’ve been on a hiring freeze for the better part of a year. They stopped collecting our garbage save for twice a week, the turn up and/or down the thermostats and they disconnected half the light bulbs in our building. As we’ve scampered to save every penny we can, they’ve swept it away to try to float the ship. We’ve been siphoned down past the level of safe blood-letting.
The budget crisis has been in limbo for months because the Republican controlled state legislature didn’t want to negotiate with the (outgoing) Democratic Governor. Knowing that she was going to work for President Obama and that the next-in-line for Governor was a rank-and-file Republican, they waited. Every day they waited, the deficit gets harder to overcome.
The legislature is overwhelmingly ideologically in goose-step opposition to raising taxes for any reason and so, at last, a brutal budget has been hashed out (mostly behind closed doors, of course) and they’ve slashed across the board without regard to individual agencies’ existing funds, requirements, mandates, whatever. “Just give us 10%” of your annual budget back.”
That might not sound so bad except, 10% of the annual means effectively over 20% for the remainder of the year, and, since many of an agency’s expenses are paid in advance, or are contractually obligated by law, for a small agency like ours, it’s closer to 35%. And since they’d already taken anything we’d saved and eliminated any purchases we might have had budgeted, there’s precious little left except personnel costs.
Today we got the word, for starters, all staff will be on unpaid leave for 18 days in the next 18 weeks. Effectively a 20% pay cut for the next 5 months. With the job market being what it is, that’s a whole lot better than being unemployed, but it isn’t a picnic.
The Administration Department laid off all the building maintenance workers for our building last week. Today, we didn’t have toilet paper in our bathrooms. Do they still print Sears & Roebuck catalogs?
I’m not saying that some almost-miraculous circumstances might not pop up, but unless they day, it seems very unlikely that we’ll be going to England this year, despite missing taking Michelle to see the Museum of Natural History that she so dearly wants to see and missing an almost once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the World Twenty20 Cup final.
Perhaps airfare will plummet to under a $500 a person, and we can squeak out 4 days, just enough time to got to the museum, see the game, have some good fish & chips and kebobs and come back?
Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.
Oh what I wouldn’t give for a way to go back in time and see all the colossal and bizarre life that has existed on this planet! (That and an M1 Tank.)
I’ve been playing around with iPhoto ’09 for the last few days and, on the whole, I’m impressed. Unlike some claims I’ve heard, it does not cause my (1st generation) MacBook’s fans to spin up or even seem to bog down the computer.
Faces is an interesting technology and it makes a pretty good shot at figuring people out, although, it seems to have trouble telling my wife and my mother-in-law apart, and in one case, it thought I had a second face on my knee. (We aliens do, but they’re invisible to the camera.)
My photo library is huge. Oh, maybe not huge by a professional photographer’s standpoint, but huge from the standpoint of available disk space on my MacBook. I’ve had to break my albums apart in single years’ albums, and my 2007 album is over 42gb. 2008 is smaller, but still over 30. Earlier years, taken with smaller-resolution cameras or scans weigh in around 10gb each.
I had to convert each and every one of them into iPhoto ’09 format, and the face scanning process (which looks at each photo and identifies potential faces) took several hours on some of the albums. If Faces misses a face, you can add it manually, which is great for the occasional miss. It sucks though when Faces seems to fail miserably, as it did with my 2004 album. Only one in 10 photos is tagged for Faces – and there’s no way built-in way to re-initiate the scan to try again. You can; however, go into the photo package and delete the faces.db files. That causes it to rescan – with equally bad results. Before I invest a lot of time tagging faces, I’m going to wait for a bug fix to come out.
More interesting (and useful) to me is Places. iPhoto has got this right – at least that’s my impression so far. I do geotag some of my photos. I use a nifty piece of software called HouDahGeo to map the track log of my GPS to the date/time stamp of my photos. It sets and saves the GPS coordinates right into the EXIF data. That’s great when I’m out with my GPS and the GPS is turned on – not so good when I don’t have my GPS with me. My iPhone stores geotagged coordinates, but the GPS functionality in an iPhone 2G is pretty slack.
What do you do when you don’t have GPS data for a photo, but you want to add it? Well, it’s a tedious process and not worth the effort. iPhoto has gone and fixed that. Pick a photo, or group of photos, hit the info button and start typing in the name of the place. Ofttimes it will find it, but the mix it knows about is eclectic. Why does it know where Heritage Square (a ratty old park in Phoenix) is, but doesn’t seem to know where Los Angeles International Airport is? No problem, you can add frequently used places to your list and then adding them to photos is a snap. Further, the places you add can have a range of precision, for example, if I wanted to tag my house, I could expand the zone to just the house, but if I wanted to make a place for a park, or a city, I could expand the zone accordingly. I’m not entirely sure what effect that has on the coordinates just yet, but the idea sounds good.
Here’s when it gets creepy weird. For the first time, to my knowledge, someone has made a program that makes geotagging old photos easy. In fact, I’ve geotagged all the photos I’ve got of my childhood. Of course, I don’t live in those houses anymore, and if I upload to flickr… what would the people living there think if they go to “their” house and see it populated with dozens of strange photos?
This will only accelerate. Soon it will be YouTube videos too. Already I’m seeing lots of meaningless personal videos on Google Earth (if you have the YouTube channel turned on.) The usefulness of geotagging visual information will rapidly decline. For example, what if a company decides to make a commercial for their product – let’s say it is food powder – what’s to stop them from geotagging the video at the location of Eiffel Tower? People going to Google Earth to see videos about the Eiffel Tower will be presented with foot powder ads.
It will all end in tears.
But for now, it’s pretty cool in iPhoto.
A lot has been said about “Trial of a Time Lord”, some of it by me, but that’s neither here nor there. This Colin Baker series comes from another era. It was era of disappointment in many ways – of enormous potential squandered. A time when optimism was slowly eroded away to despair.
I remember those times well, or at least passably well, I was Vice-President of the local Doctor Who fan club, TARDIS. (The Arizona Regional Doctor Who Interest Society – don’t blame me for the tortured acronym, that was from before my time.) TARDIS was at the time the largest Doctor Who club in Arizona with a typical meeting attendance of about 30.
Peter Davison episodes of DW had been shown on the local PBS station, but to watch the Colin Baker episodes was an exercise in international intrigue. In those days, you could typically expect years before DW would be syndicated and arrive in the Phoenix market. In those days, the conflicting video and videotape standards between the US and the UK were formidable. Tapes had to be made when the episodes aired in the UK and mailed to someone in the US. They, in turn, needed to have a British TV and VHS deck, plus a second US standard VHS recorder and a video camera – which they would aim at the screen and record the playback on the UK VCR. The result was of low quality, and as they would get copied and mailed around the US, the quality deteriorated. The holy grail was to either be in the first tier of copies or, better yet, to actually be the recipient of the original tape.
How long it took from original airing until we sat around at our bi-weekly meetings on Saturday nights was highly variable, and much anticipated.
Trial of a Time Lord though was something special, not only was the Doctor back after an 18 month “rest” but we all thought, “This will be something special – something that will bring the show back to its glory days.” We had, perhaps naively, hoped it would reverse the decline that had begun at the end of Tom Baker’s era.
Here’s another reason it was special – it was the first, and only, time that I personally listened to Doctor Who live – as it actually aired in Britain. It was over the phone.
I suppose I should explain how that came about. Around that time I was a FidoNet BBS operator, and through those connection, I met a nice chap named Frank Thornley. (Frank, if you’re still out there, here’s a shout out!) Frank was visiting the United States with the aim towards establishing a business arrangement between his Compulink BBS and the US’ BIX service. He and his wife Sylvia, who I didn’t meet for several years, were contemplating setting up some sort of office in the US. Honestly, I don’t know what they’re exact plans were, but I do know that they ultimately didn’t cut a deal with BIX and, in the end, established their own online service called CIX (The Compulink Information eXchange) which was, I gather, quite successful.
I was unemployed and had plenty of time on my hands, so I was helping Frank get acclimated to Phoenix. I happened to be at his apartment at the very time that the first episode of Trial of a Time Lord was on, and he was talking to his wife on the phone. They turned on Doctor Who for me and let me listen for a few minutes on the phone. Well, that was a big thrill in those days. They were terribly nice people. I haven’t heard from them in years, ever since they were talking about buying a yacht and traveling the world. What I remember of that phone call was, “Hmmm, the phone makes the theme music sound very different!”
Anyway, a few weeks to a month after it aired in the UK, I had seen Trial of a Time Lord, and had some opinions on the matter. Since then, several months ago, I watched the first two episodes of it again, and then didn’t finish. Now, in the last two weeks I have watched it in it’s entirety, and the complete contents of the “bonus features” on the DVDs. Now, it’s time to re-evaluate the Trial.
Synopsis
The Doctor is on trial for his life. Snatched, alone, out of time and space he is brought before an “independent” inquiry by the Time Lords of Gallifrey. The charge: meddling.
Bringing the case against the Doctor is the bloodthirsty Valeyard, a Time Lord who seems desperate to have the Doctor executed for his alleged crimes.
In the case for the prosecution, the Valeyard uses evidence from the Matrix – the Gallifreyan computer that contains the sum total of all knowledge. He demonstrates two tales from the Doctor’s history, the second, culminating with the death of his companion Peri.
In rebuttal, the Doctor presents a case from his own future showing that, “he gets better.”
The Master arrives, inside the Matrix, proving that the evidence has been tampered with by the Valeyard in an effort to kill the Doctor. The Valeyard is revealed to be a future incarnation of the Doctor himself, who has gone evil. In the end, the three renegade Time Lords battle it out inside the Matrix where nothing (least of all the script) makes sense. In the end, both the Doctor and the Valeyard escape, the High Council is deposed and Gallifrey is in anarchy after yet another one of the Doctor’s visits.
During the whole 14-part trial, we get to see three new stories which, although officially untitled, are known as “The Mysterious Planet”, “Mindwarp” and “Terror of the Vervoids.”
Analysis
First, the background. I’m not a fan of producer John Nathan-Turner’s era. As far as I can tell he made nary a good decision. New theme music during Tom Baker’s final year – poor. New style at same time – usually jarring and unconvincing. The question marks – trite! Peter Davison’s Doctor – weak and ineffective. Colin Baker’s Doctor – obnoxious and loud. Colin Baker’s costume – yuck. Sylvester McCoy – stuffs ferrets down his pants. McCoy’s theme music – too dance music. The companions – horrible. In fact, the only things that I recall liking about his decisions were: Colin Baker’s casting (sadly, the scripts failed him), The Trial of a Time Lord theme version by Dominic Glynn and Peri’s first appearance in a bikini.
And so it came that when I first saw Trial of a Time Lord, I thought it was a depressing failure. The show continued in the vein it had been. Their 18 month hiatus had taught them nothing.
Now I wonder.
Having watched the bonus material, I have a much better feel for the reasoning – and where to put the blame – for the failure.
The story simply cannot be treated as a whole as it is a disjointed mess. The trial sequences foul up the other stories continually, so let’s start with them.
Eric Saward, script editor for the series, claims to have written them. That’s not a claim I’d boast about. Never has there been a more poorly conceived trial sequence in the history of television.
Consider: The Doctor is accused of meddling. He was previously convicted of it and sentences to exile on Earth. Since then the Time Lords have kept track of him and on occasion used him. Let’s be blunt: the Doctor always meddles. If all they needed to do was prove that, he’d be convicted. He is guilty of that “crime.” Of course, he’d argue it shouldn’t be a crime, but that’s a different case. Given that, the Valeyard could choose any of the Doctor’s adventures and convict him without chicanery.
Instead, he starts with the adventure of the planet Ravalox, which, the Doctor discovers is actually the planet Earth, renamed, nearly destroyed and hidden. Who could do that? We later learn it was the High Council themselves. The destroyed the planet to protect Time Lord secrets and then tried to cover it up. The Doctor stumbles into the situation and that’s what ultimately precipitates the High Council’s attempt to have the Doctor tried and destroyed.
During the court sequences, the discovery that Ravalox is the Earth is revealed, and some characters have their words “bleeped out” because they contain top secret information. (Later revealed that they were talking about the Matrix.) Why oh why would the Valeyard choose that particular story to try to convict the Doctor?! Surely he raised more questions in the court than he answered when any other adventure would have done! Answer: It reveals plot points to the audience, but it makes no sense in the context of the trial. That’s bad scripting. If Saward were working with a script editor, that never would have passed, but he wasn’t. No one was watching the watcher.
Mindwarp fairs a bit better as evidence. Unfortunately, we’ll never know how much of the story really happened. The Doctor’s brain is scrambled by an alien mind probe and he begins acting like a villain… or does he? The Doctor can’t remember and the Valeyard is tampering with the Matrix to make the Doctor look worse. In the end, Peri’s brain is killed by the bad guys and then her body is destroyed – on the orders of the High Council. Later we’re cheated out of even that ending when we’re told Peri is alive and living as a warrior queen. At least this one makes sense in the context of the trial, both showing the Doctor is the worst possible light and bringing us up to the point where he is brought on trial.
Finally, the Doctor get’s to put his case. He, paradoxically, decides to use his adventures in the future to demonstrate that he gets better. This falls apart logically and legally. He gets better? So what? He still committed the crime he was accused of. How can this be his future if he gets convicted executed before it happens? (Let’s not try to understand Time Lord time lines… the Valeyard really fouls this one up.) The only defense the Doctor could have is to prove he didn’t commit the crimes or, perhaps more cleverly, he might have proved somehow that meddling shouldn’t be a crime.
Finally, after the Vervoid segment, the Valeyard calls for the charge to be changed to genocide – the Doctor wiped out the entire Vervoid race. Did he? I thought these were events that hadn’t happened yet! How can he be guilty of a crime he hasn’t committed yet? And of course, if he’s found guilty and executed, he cannot commit the crime, so there’s no reason to convict him.
I can only conclude that copious amounts of drugs were involved in the creative process and it shows.
Let’s look at the individual stories. I’m not going to say a lot about them. The Mysterious Planet, written by Robert Holmes isn’t bad. It’s not his best work, but it shows his characteristic trademarks. The Doctor and Peri are finally getting along. I can remember that from back when it first aired. That was a breath of fresh air. It’s a pity that, from the interviews in the bonus material, it was revealed that they were supposed to still be snarking at each other, only Colin and Nicola played across their lines and made them affectionate instead of acrimonious. Watching the episode with that knowledge and it becomes obvious – what they say and how they’re saying it are totally out of sync. Amazing what acting can do to the written word.
Mindwarp by Phillip Martin suffers terribly from not knowing if it is real or not. As it stands it’s an unpleasant tale which serves as a sequel to the equally unpleasant Martin tale, Vengeance on Varos. Brian Blessed always puts in a 200% performance, and his stint as King Yrcanos is no exception.
The Doctor’s evidentiary tale is Terror of the Vervoids, by Pip and Jane Baker. This story is a plain old fashioned murder on an ocean liner mystery set in space, with killer vegetables thrown into the soup. (I couldn’t resist.) I thought this was a good solid effort by Jane and her husband, Pip. It won’t be remembered as one of the greatest episodes of Who, but it may have been Colin Baker’s most traditional story. Pity they didn’t start him that way and work from there.
Finally, there’s the Ultimate Foe, which serves as the conclusion of the Trial, as the Doctor and the Valeyard battle it out in the Matrix. This was a two part story that was supposed to be written by Robert Holmes, who, in conjunction with Saward, had plotted the conclusion out. (This also explains why Holmes’ Mysterious Planet setup the info about the High Council’s crimes.) Sadly, Holmes turned in the script for part 1 and promptly fell ill and died. Saward, who was completely in the loop about where the story was going, stepped up and finished episode 2 in accordance with Holme’s outline.
John Nathan-Turner didn’t like the ending, which apparently ended with the Doctor and the Valeyard trapped forever in some sort of void. JNT wanted a happy ending. He and Saward had a falling out and Saward quit, taking his script with him. JNT was forced to turn the task of completing the story over the Pip and Jane Baker, but they were not allowed to know any of the contents of the second part of the story. They were given the completed first script and told to write a second part based upon it.
We should not forget that Holmes originally wrote The Deadly Assassin, the first Gallifrey-based story and the introduction of the Matrix and it’s ability to form fantasy worlds manifested by the minds of the people trapped within. This time the Matrix is a dark, foreboding Victorian back-alley of a world but all too suddenly it becomes Pip and Jane Baker’s tortured, illogical fantasy mess. I suppose, given that they were told nothing about the original plot, they did a fair job of tying up the pieces – I suppose. I wouldn’t want that assignment, but I guess it pays the bills.
All’s well in the end, of course, and the Doctor leaves with Mel, a companion he hasn’t even met yet. That would be bad enough if I didn’t know what was going to happen next in Time and the Rani.
No panning of Trial of a Time Lord would be complete without mentioning the rubbish cliffhangers, apparently at JNT’s insistence: Colin makes dramatic face and holds it, camera zooms in, cue end music. Episode after episode until you begin to laugh about it. If it weren’t for Dragonfire in Sylvester McCoy’s time, they would surely be the worst cliffhangers ever.
Conclusion
I mentioned hope for the future. Back then everyone except, apparently, the production crew knew what was wrong with Doctor Who. Too much shouting, too much in-fighting, shitty stories. After the 18 month hiatus we just knew they’d had time to figure it out, and perhaps they did. Taken individually, both Mysterious Planet and Terror of the Vervoids showed a distinct improvement over previous series. Mindwarp was an unpleasant holdover to the bad old days. Despite that, it would have been passable if it hadn’t been tinkered with to make damning evidence. But all that was destroyed by framing the episode inside the trial, which ruined everything.
Even though it had been mangled, there were signs of improvement for the future. There was still hope for the Sixth Doctor, and for the entire series.
As we all know, then they fired Colin Baker, and things were about to get a lot worse.