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It's the Easter Holidays and I'm happy. I think, so far, I've spent a lot of it doing productive things.

I just don't have the time to update it.

I tend to have a select number of sites that I visit a few times a day that tend to give me all the information that I feel I need (most of them based around technology). Some are very similar and offer some very interesting points of views, some I just enjoy reading.

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So Here are my top five Blogs that I read (in no particular order):

Engadget 

 Engadget is great as it culminates the most important tech news stories all in to one place. Even those from their sister sites such as TUAW (See Below). They have a crack team of bloggers who have a genuine interest in what they are writing about. I often find there posts to be very in depth and there live coverage of events great (such as Apple Events). I highly recommend the blog, but I highly doubt that you have not at least heard of it.

Extra Life 

Extra Life is the best blog/web comic I have ever seen. I have mentioned them before, but I thought that I'd go in to more depth. The comics take on issues from gaming, to the search for Dean Cain (Go read the last few comics if you don't get what I'm going on about ) The blog is also fantastic because of a lot of the content and links are user submitted and very funny. Scott Johnson the mastermind behind Extra Life is one of the most talented web comic artists I have come across (and there have been many) SO I highly recommend it and hope that it continues for a very long time. Scott also does some very cool free avatars which I have used on many occasions.

Major Nelson 

 I first found out about Major Nelson's (MN) blog when I was looking at buying an Xbox 360. Since then then I check  out MN for the latest market place news and arcade games and also his fantastic podcast/blogcast there we get to here some great interviews. MN works at Microsoft games devision ad is the community manager (?) which helps as we get to here from the people working within the Games Devision and see some very cool stuff. And if you very wondering Major Nelson is Larry's gamertag.

Webmacster87

Doug who runs Webmacster is great. He manages to write some very opinionated stuff (thats by no means a bad thing) and seems to have the ability to do what no other man can do and shake off Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion field and look at the facts of most Apple products. He is currently doing a mass of reviews of various apps for the mac that are very detailed and I suggest you check them out.

Glenn Wolsey

I linked the other day to Glenn when I did my first weekly wallpaper, and he is a prime example of a blog creating their own content (which I find d a great challenge) I liked his series on starting a blog and mac setups and the interviews with their owners. Glenn also does a very good video show on YouTube called (very appropriately) The Glenn Wolsey Show. He also has a mac pro (also called by some - The Four Core Whore ) which allows him to do some great work with photos in Aperture and he runs a Desktop Friday feature, and one of his desktops I'm using right now So check out Glenn's blog.

More importantly, what blogs do you read?

I just went around our graden and took a few random pictures (mainly of flowers). No special filters or IO levels (what are they anyway).
 
The first picture is from when my dad got back with a friend from Sandhurst at about 2AM/

Audio: Share the song that will get you dancing...every time! 
Submitted by foxsydee.

YMCA!

Ymca

Ymca

artist

Here a few video slide shows that Mr Leigh made using the photos from the trip, we also took plenty of video but I expect that it will take a long time to be edited.

The HV20 arrived at lunch - I'll probaly write a review ina week or so once we have had a bit of time toplay around with it.

At school we are currently getting into video and audio production. Currently we produce about 3 shows fairly regularly for example our current project that we are really into is The Aaron Show. We have produced about four episodes but only released one on the website, however we are currently looking at increasing our production value with some new equipment.

First of all, the camera:

We are currently using a JVC HDD camcorder which is really nice but it does not have a mic input which is a big disadvantage and as it is a hard drive based camera it compresses the video to mpeg 2 so we do not get the highest quality video that you might get with DV tapes - is this correct?

Another problem that we are having is interlacing. When we record the video and edit it there is no sign of any really bad interlacing. We have tried dozens of codec’s in different qualities such as quicktime, mpeg and wmv all of these produce really bad interlacing. So we have more or less narrowed it down to the software that we are currently using Adobe Premiere Elements. As when we watch the footage it is fine before putting it into premiere.

However we think that it might be viable to get a new camera with a mic input and higher quality video and we have narrowed it down to about 3 cameras -

1. Canon HV20 (my preference) It does 1080i and 24p plus it records to DV tapes. I know that Merlin Mann, Leo Laporte and Alex Lindsay like it. The only downside that I know of is that it doesn't have very good low light performance. We would be able to get hold of this for about £680 from amazon.co.uk
2. Sony HDR-HC7 It is over £100 more expensive and it also does 1080i but not in 24p. It also does DV tapes, the main improvement over to HV20 is the low light performance, but I'm not sure if the money is worth the performance.
3. Sanyo Xacti HD2 This is a hard one, it is very cheap from amazon.co.uk at £325 and it does 720p, it has a mic input . The major downside which for most probably isn't, is the fact that it records to SD cards and then obviously through that Mpeg2 which is heavily compressed HD. Also that it takes up a lot of room meaning that with a 4GB card which can be pretty expensive give you about 40minutes of HD video. Another thing for me is something that I can't find anywhere is whether it works with a tripod as due to the design I'm not sure whether is does have one. I'm sure that this camera would be great for "in the field" stuff but most of our work is studio based and if we do go outside we would still definitely need a tripod.

What do you think? - any other suggestions for cameras?

Next is hardware which will affect the software.

Mac or PC? We recently took a trip to a place in Cheltenham about how they produce video they use Final Cut Pro and a host of Macs. But do we really need one and is the Apple software superior over say Adobe’s video suite – but I’ll cover the rest in the software bit.

So lets cover the actual machine itself:

We have a fair budget of about £2300 for the Computer itself.

A big decision is whether we should get a Mac Pro or an iMac. This is hard because we want the computer to be able to everything seamlessly and be able to last a long time (say at least 4 years) This makes us lean towards the Mac Pro as it is very expandable unlike the iMac. There is much more space for hard drives which we would naturally need for video. Plus we could also upgrade the ram easily. But one big downside to the Mac Pro is naturally is the price and would it be overkill to get one especially as we would also have to get a monitor or two. But this is the price that we have come up with:

2.66 GHz

2GB ram (1GB from Crucial)

1x 250 GB HDD

1x 500GB HDD (not from Apple)

ATI Radeon X1900 XT (big question on this in a bit)

Dell 22” monitor

Logitech VX Revolution

This adds up to about £2292

Now here are a couple of questions about the Mac Pro:

1. How long do you expect it to last- as long as we thing it will (4 years +)
2. Do we really need the ATI card or should we stick with the NVIDIA card this is one major thing as we are not sure as to whether it will give us the performance we need in the future if we decided to migrate to even more demanding software.

So next in the iMac. It is far cheaper and seems reasonably powerful but our major problem with it is the expandability. I am aware that they might be updating it on Monday so I shall not go into specs but would a reasonably tricked out one last us a while?

Next is software. We are looking at Final Cut Express which is £200 and comes with some really cool features. Does anyone have any experience with it and are there any issues with it.

Thanks for reading this, there are a lot of questions but it really comes down to whether we should pay extra for a better machine and camera which will last us longer and be more expandable (in the case of the Mac Pro) or is it over kill.

Thanks in advance – remember to check out THE AARON SHOW – episode 2 up next week

we have booked and finalizing our summer holiday to the US today and I'm really excited.

T48-19

First we'll be flying up to San Francisco for four days in which we'll be staying at the Fairmont Hotel. And we'll be going to Alcatraz, Golden Gate Bridge and of course.... The Apple Store.

Then we'll be flying up to Denver to go to Latigo Ranch for a week.

Then we're going to go to go back to Denver for a few days where we'll go watch a baseball match and see the cirque de soleil (how do you spell that?) We'll be there when the 7th Harry Potter book is released so I guess that I'll pick up the US edition from there.