Video for Everyone

You may give or receive a camera that records video during the upcoming holiday season. In addition to video cameras, many digital cameras, even the SLRs, include the ability to record video. What comes out of that camera may bore your friends or amuse them. It's up to you. Raw video, the stuff that comes out of the camera, is usually boring even if you're an Academy Award Winning director. Editing is everything and you have lots of choices: Adobe Premiere ($800), Adobe Premiere Elements ($125), and Magix Movie Edit Pro ($70 to $130) are some of the choices.

Let's take a look at Magix Movie Edit Pro. If you're a producer of professional videos who needs time code and other high-end features, this is not the application you're looking for but if you're creating videos for use on your (or your relatives') television, this could be exactly what you want.

Click for a larger view.Magix provides an amazing demo with the application. It uses only 14 tracks so it's well within the capabilities of the basic $70 application.

You'll find the demo on Vimeo or ...

What This Country Needs Is a Really Good 5¢ Cigar

US Vice President Thomas R. Marshall is reported to have said this to a Senate clerk. Marshall was vice president from 1913 to 1921 during Woodrow Wilson's presidency. What that has to do with the price of salami in Harlem is this: Just about everyone has a camera of some sort that captures video but not everyone is willing to spend $1000 to buy a video-editing application or spend the time needed to learn how to use it.

Enter Magix Movie Edit Pro. The basic application's 32-track limitation (if you can call 32 tracks a "limitation") is unimportant because most people will never need 32 tracks. So that means the $70 application may be sufficient.

I grabbed a still camera that can capture motion video and pointed it at the cats.

Click for a larger view.As with most video editing applications, you have a choice of scenes or the timeline. The Scenes view is a good choice when you're dropping "film" clips into the project. It's "video", of course, not "film" these days.

Click for a larger view.Once you have the various scenes in order, it's a good idea to switch to the Timeline view so that you can trim both ends of the video as needed, move scenes, and add transition effects.

Movie Edit Pro comes with a huge array of transition effects but an important point to keep in mind is that cuts are almost always the right choice. Fades indicate a break in the timeline and the "fancy" effects should be reserved for times when they are appropriate. In other words, don't use a tumble transition unless you know why a tumble transition is appropriate. (In most cases it won't be appropriate.)

Click for a larger view.I uploaded the basic cut-only edit to Vimeo and you can watch it on Vimeo. Or ...


What's remarkable about this is not the lousy video or the boring subject but the fact that it took me less than 10 minutes to cut these pieces of video together. I started out with several clips of Percy (the orange cat) and several of Chloe (the multi-color cat). All the Chloe segments were together and so were those with Percy. I wanted to alternate between the two so I trimmed off the parts I didn't want and shuffled them around.

The transitions are all just simple cuts because there was no good reason to use any of the more distinctive transitions. The fancy transitions are useful when you need them so I re-edited the file and added transitions that make no sense for this video.

Once again, you can view in on Vimeo or watch it here ...

Click for a larger view.There's also an option to export the video for use on a DVD or portable device.

I've described only the basics of what this application is capable of doing. Be sure to watch the first video in this program and watch for effects such as image adjustment, picture in picture, titling, transitions, sound effects (Foley), and music track.

5 CatsYes, "Video" and "Easy" Can Be in the Same Sentence, along with "Inexpensive"

Video editing isn't something that most people consider to be easy or inexpensive but Movie Edit Pro makes it clear that these capabilities can coexist quite nicely in a single application.
For more information, visit the Magix Movie Edit Pro website.

FTC: Facebook is Unfair & Deceptive

Facebook has accepted accusations by the Federal Trade Commission and will now respect the privacy wishes of its users. In addition to that, Facebook has agreed to allow the FTC to conduct regular privacy audits for the next 20 years.

The case began in 2009 when Facebook, without warning its users, made public information that users had stored on Facebook but had indicated that it was not to be shared publicly. Other problems came to light during the investigation, including the ability of Facebook advertisers to obtain personally identifiable information about users. That meant that advertisers had access to information about 800 million people worldwide.

The FTC also charged that even deleting an account wouldn't protect users from having their information shared because Facebook retained photos and videos from those deleted accounts.

Facebook faced a total of 8 complaints by the FTC. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the actions were mistakes. The FTC did not claim that the violations were intentional and levied no fines against Facebook. However, if Facebook violates the terms of the settlement, it could be fined $16 thousand dollars per day for each violation.

The settlement means that Facebook must obtain "affirmative express consent" before it can change the way information is shared.

Facebook has annoyed users many times in the past few years by unilaterally changing the operating characteristics of the service and often the complaints have dealt with privacy issues.

Although the head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Marc Rotenberg, said that the FTC order was a good first step, he noted that a federal law to protect consumer privacy is still needed.

The timing of this latest trouble for Facebook could hardly have come at a worse time. The company is preparing for an initial public stock offering and if investors are skeptical about a company's ability to make money, the stock price will be lower than it might otherwise be.

It's generally expected that the IPO will generate about $100 billion.

Short Circuits

Why Isn't Everything This Easy?

I use a reading lamp on a shelf above the bed. It's probably about 50 years old and the push-button switch in the base finally wore out. On = 3 pushes. Off = 1 push. So I decided to replace it.

I took the base off and removed the switch. Because it's an old lamp, access was easy: Remove 2 screws and allow the base to drop off. Unscrew 2 wire nuts holding the wires together. Grab a pair of pliers to loosen the knurled nut holding the switch in place. Total time: about 60 seconds.

When I moved to Worthington, I thought the Worthington Hardware store was fabulous; it always had anything I needed. Worthington Hardware is an old place with wooden floors that creak. Over the years, the mega-stores arrived. The ones that take half an hour to drive to, 10 minutes to walk in from the parking lot, an hour to find what you're looking for. The little hardware store has become smaller and the employees are younger but they still know where things are and they're still friendly. And the store still smells like a hardware store. That's where I went for the replacement switch. Total time (portal to portal) was about 20 minutes and that includes the time I spent not finding it the first time I walked through the electrical area.

Back home, I unpacked the switch, installed it, hooked up the wires, and plugged in the lamp. Another 2 minutes.

I don't know if this switch is good for another 50 years but this is probably not something that should concern me. But I do know this: Every technology problem should be this easy to solve.

Oh ... the light bulb that's in the lamp is an LED device that puts out 351 lumens at 80% color accuracy. That's the equivalent of about a 40-Watt standard (incandescent) light bulb but instead of using 40 Watts, the LED bulb uses only 8 watts.

So my antique lamp has one of the world's most modern light bulbs in it.

67.222.41.89

TechByter Worldwide now has its own IP address, 67.222.41.89. If you have a website and it's not being served from a computer you control physically, it probably has a shared IP address. Most hosting services have one IP address for all of their clients or all clients that share a particular server. Normally this is OK but there are reasons to consider having your own address.

If you plan to sell anything via your website, you'll want an SSL certificate and that requires a static IP address that's assigned just to you. I'm not planning to sell anything here but there are other reasons to spend the $30 per year or so that a static IP address will cost you.

A static IP address makes it possible to run server-based programs that require a dedicated IP address, you can run scripts that are not permitted on shared-IP systems, and your host may be willing to open ports that cannot safely be opened in a shared-IP environment.

Spam is a concern that having your own IP address will not alleviate. Many people think that obtaining a dedicated IP address means that your e-mail will be sent from that address. In most cases, this is not so. If you use your hosting service to send e-mail, you will still share the sending IP address with all other clients whose accounts are hosted on that machine. This is one reason why it still may be better to receive mail through the Web hosting service and to send mail via your Internet service provider.

There was no single overarching reason for me to make the switch but overall the advantages of a dedicated IP address, I concluded, are worth the $30 fee.

Google Maps Comes In From the Cold

Google, how do I get from the kitchen to my bedroom? Things haven't gone that far but Google Maps has started offering layouts of airports and malls. Originally Google offered just maps, then directions on how to get from A to B. Next came views at street level and agreements with many transit systems to provide times and routes for using mass transit. Now this.

Google explains it this way:

There is, however, a catch. Two, actually:

Google would really like you to buy an Android device!

(Slightly) New Look for 2012

The redesigned 2012 TechByter Worldwide will appear on 1 January 2012. Usually there are no programs the weeks of Christmas and New Year but this year it's a bit different. I'll still be off Christmas week but back in the saddle on New Year's Day. This year's biggest changes are in the background as HTML5 powers the pages.

The change isn't retroactive because changing nearly 1000 archived pages would be a huge job and I think it's not a bad idea to retain those old pages as reminders of what we once had to do to create pages that worked with multiple browsers.

Over the years the site has become narrower and then wider. In the old days, I didn't know enough to limit the width but that was OK because most people were using screens that were just 640 pixels wide. Eventually I dropped down to a width of 600 pixels, then increased to around 800, and in January the width will be an even 1000 pixels. Most people have monitors that are at least 1024 pixels wide and many have far wider monitors.

I'll outline all of the changes in the January program.