2:3:3:2 *giggle* (victory lap)

Temporally correct; don’t shift. Next-closest spatially correct; shift.

Black Rattle – heavy metal for toddlers. (or is it Baby Rock, Toddler Metal, Diaper Rock…) Too funny.
(1.5mb MP3, mirrored from Greg Behrendt’s site with ID3 tags added.)

Boyd Ostoff posted an illustrated comparison of adaptive de-interlacers showing Joe’s De-Interlacer side-by-side with DVFilm Maker. Both de-interlacers yielded excellent results on his test footage. Unfortunately, rendering times were only cited from FCP 3, De-Interlacer renders more than twice as fast in FCP 4.

Here’s my reply to Boyd’s original post on DVInfo.net:

Boyd Ostroff: “So I ran a controlled test with a 30 second clip. It took Joe’s de-interlacer 378 seconds to render the clip, while DVFilm Maker only took 128 seconds, a three-fold speed difference. As noted above, both programs used their default settings (Joe’s de-interlacer was set to “fast interpolate”… can only guess how long it would take at “normal” speed ;-)”

Thank you for posting that Boyd. I’m curious what your numbers would be for Joe’s De-Interlacer with FCP 4.02. In my own highly unscientific testing, I’ve found De-Interlacer is more than twice as fast in FCP 4 as it was in FCP3. (and I was happy about the speed in 3!)

I just did a 10 second test at default settings (NTSC DV):

• FCP 3: 217 seconds
• FCP 4: 104 seconds

Multiplying that difference against your numbers, I’d expect FCP 4 to render De-Interlacer in about 181 seconds. That puts DVFilm Maker at only about 1.4x faster, much better than 3x faster. At any rate, the time savings of working inside FCP and not having to import/export and possible reconnect all your media should also be considered.

The ‘Normal De-Interlacing’ method uses a very precise field-preservation algorithm but I’ve been moving away from that since the difference is basically non-existant.

Any FXScript effect is going to be at the mercy of FCP’s rendering engine regarding speed. The benefit is that you don’t have to manage clips in and out of FCP, the disadvantge is speed and not having access to the unlimited tools available in Carbon or Objective C. Thankfully FCP is only getting better and faster.

Lunar Eclipse

At some point in the past week or two I seem to have burned out on blogs. Maybe it had something to do with the brilliant NetNewsWire, which, while helping me read more efficiently, also helps see how many sites I regularly visit (about 75 different sites averaging 350+ new postings a day) and how often those sites overlap or otherwise have nothing much to say. I wish NNW was more of an aggregator and less of a collector. I’d love to be able to quickly see when different sites linked to the same places.

Maybe it’s just because I’m busy, but I can’t bear to visit some of my old regulars. Seeing the same set of memes go around in circles like so much pseudo-intellectual spam, suffering through an increasing barrage of “Blogosphere trumps old media”, slogging through battles of political punditry and anti-punditry, pounding my head while a few otherwise interesting people worry desperately about the pointless act of choosing an ideological label, or any number of other new weblog cliches [like this one (a twofer)] has started to get depressing.

So I barely read anything last week, and from what I could glean by hopping around today, I don’t seem to have missed much. I need new souces.

Model airplane crosses Atlantic. It gets even better, The Spirit of Butts Farm was designed by Maynard Hill, a 77 year old retired engineer who is legally blind and partially deaf (photo is not Mr Hill.). The plane sent its location data via satellite to an AOL email address, weighed less than 11 pounds, and flew more than 1800 miles from Canada to Ireland in 38 hours using less than 1 gallon of fuel.

This story is from August, but is one that I find totally inspiring.