Billy Fire LLC

One of my children bought an Asus EEE 900A. Its a very attractive little machine. 9 inch screen that is surprisingly easy to view, a small but ergonomic keyboard, and, because this device uses solid state storage, it is silent and has excellent battery life.

The downside, the disk drive is only 4 Gb.

Before we bought it 4 Gb seemed small, but after all, it wasn’t that long ago that I paid about $500 for a 120Mb drive for my IBM desktop, and 4Gb still holds a lot of word processing documents. Or so we thought…

When the Asus arrived it included … Continue Reading

DIY Steadicam, Glidecam http://tinyurl.com/krmmwe via http://www.diigo.com/~whittam

Ikonoskop is an innovative manufacturer of movie cameras based in my favorite city, Stockholm, Sweden. A few years ago they created a super 16mm film camera called the A-cam SP-16. The camera was designed to be inexpensive and light. It was able to achieve this by using 100ft spools of 16 mm film (rather than 200 ft or 400ft used by other professional 16mm cameras such as Arriflex or Aaton). They also used a non-reflex view finder arrangement. This means that there will be some parallax error when using longer lenses, … Continue Reading

I just bought the full version of Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition and I can confirm that, just like trial version mentioned previously, it seems to be able to use the AVCHD files from my Canon HG10 camcorder.

I purchased it from Amazon, opting for the CDs and box version, rather than the download, and it was considerably cheaper than going though Sony.

I decided to go for the CDs because on many occasions I have had computer troubles and have lost software that I had downloaded from the Web. For example, I had an excellent little ico editor which was useful … Continue Reading

A client of mine has started a series of podcasts. Thus far I have recorded the podcasts using the Samson C01U USB Studio Condenser Microphone discussed in a previous blog posting. We had always planned that my client would ultimately be able to create his own podcasts and he asked me to get him a suitable microphone. Having read a few reviews I decided that the Blue Snowball microphone would be the best option.

… Continue Reading

I recently took another look at the current state of play for AVCHD video editors. Things are definitely improving. I downloaded a trial of Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition and I have been VERY pleasantly surprised.

Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition is from the Sony stable of editing software and falls between their entry level Vegas Movie Studio and Sony Vegas. All of which are available for trial downloads. The Studio Platinum Edition trial lasts for 30 days.

The description on the Sony Web site says: “you can import … Continue Reading

I mentioned previously that my Canon HG10 replaced a ZR, whose firewire port had ceased to function. I realized a few weeks ago that the ZR replaced another Canon, but not a video camera, a Super 8 film camera, the Canon 318M.

I’ve had this camera in my cupboard for over 25 years and I hadn’t though much about it. I was recently surprised to see that some wedding videographers were actually offering Super 8 footage as part of their wedding packages. The idea being that film has a special quality which is difficult to achieve with video. I also imagine … Continue Reading

One the huge benefits of a hard drive video camera is the ability to find and playback any clip within a matter of seconds. On the Canon HG10, when you change the mode to play, up to six clips are displayed on the screen. You can easily navigate between the clips using the control to the left of the screena and play the clip by pressing the middle button (see the image below). It sure beats rewinding tape, stopping, playing, rewinding etc.

We recently introduced a virtual PBX into our business. The system from 800PBX.com provides us with a toll free number, together with a local fax number. I have initially opted for their lowest cost option ($14.99) per month, this means that since a fax number is included, it is almost cheaper than what I used to pay eFax just for their fax service. $14.99 doesn’t get you that many minutes, but it is a good place to start and you can always upgrade later.

In choosing 800PBX I looked at several competitors. … Continue Reading

I have been investigating several microphone and recorder options (some probably a little unorthodox) in order to help my clients as they enter the world of podcasting as well as actually recording podcast for some of them. My basic criteria are as high a sound quality as possible, without spending a lot of money. I would also ideally like something that is portable and self contained, more about this later.

So far I have investigated:

• A Beyer M58 microphone (which is the sort of microphone that TV interviews use on outside broadcasts) connected via a Presonus TubePre preamplifier, which provides in input … Continue Reading