Tao’s Blog

Quite lazy these days, just finished organizing the kid’s photos. There are two batches, one of June 17, one of July 1. Check the following link:

Son’s photos of June and July

I am learning video editing. There are many video formats, and I think I’d better to familiarize myself with those commonly used formats.

First, let me describe my work flow. Usually, I use my Sony Digital Camcorder to capture the video on MiniDV tapes. It’s in raw DV format. Then, I transfer it through Firewire cable to my desktop PC for editing with Adobe Premiere Elements. I am not sure what internal format the Premiere Elements uses, but it does not matter to me. All that matters is that finally, I can export my edited footage into any commonly used format, such as avi, QuickTime, etc.

After I get my exported movie, I can uploaded to YouTube.com. The format used at YouTube.com is Flash Video, or FLV format, can be easily displayed on web sites. When the footage is uploaded to YouTube.com, it is converted to FLV format, so anyone can watch the video on their browser easily. According to YouTube.com’s suggestion, the best format is 320x240 MPEG4 video (xvid or divx), with MP3 audio track.

Other than my Sony camcorder, I also use my Motorola SLVR L7 cell phone to capture some spur of the moment low resolution video footage. Those footages are short, and is encoded in 3gp format. 3gp means 3rd Generation Phone video format, it’s a kind of low-res MPEG 4 encoding, using H.263 for video encoding, and AAC or AMR for audio encoding.

Since the phone can use AAC for audio encoding, it should be able to play those AAC tracks I used on my iPod. I tested it, it does play AAC tracks of my iPod.

I use Miksoft’s Mobile 3GP converter to convert the 3gp video files to avi. I haven’t tried to edit those footage inside Adobe Premiere Elements, but I think Premiere Elements should be able to process the converted avi files.

For more information about using the 3gp format, see Gromkov’s Software Guide.

Sometimes I also use my Creative Labs webcam, but it is trivial to capture the video footage in avi format.

A note about using my Motorola SLVR L7 mobile phone: it is much faster to take out the microSD card, and use the card reader to load the files to computers. You can also use Bluetooth or direct USB cable connection, but they are quite slow, comparing to the card reader transfer. It is also true for transferring files to PDAs, card reader is always the fastest way to transfer large chunk of data.

I have been using Google Docs & Spreadsheets for a couple of months. It’s a wonderful service, and it is free.

Although I have Microsoft Office 2003 installed on my Windows PCs, and Office 2004 on my Macs, I still think the Google Docs & Spreadsheets indispensable. The main reason is the synchronization of the documents on different computers.

I use multiple computers at work and at home. If I don’t have a central depository for my documents, my documents would be scattered across all over more than five computers, that would be a major disaster. An alternative is to use a USB thumb drive, but it would be tedious to plug and unplug the thumb drive every time I finish with a set of document on a computer.

Having broadband internet connections on all the computers, an online depository would be a nice alternative to the USB thumb drive solution. Before I start to use Google Docs & Spreadsheets, I use Yahoo’s Briefcase. It’s a nice online file storage, but I cannot edit the documents directly with Briefcase, it stores files only, but it stores all kinds of files, as long as the file size is below 5 MB, and total space is below 30 MB for free accounts.

On the contrary, Google Docs & Spreadsheets only stores word processor documents and spreadsheets, no other file types. One can edit those documents, but you cannot load arbitrary files. Sometimes I have very fancy Excel spreadsheets with all sorts of VB scripts and charts, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets has difficulties to open it, and I have to use Yahoo Briefcase to store such fancy files. For ordinary documents and spreadsheets, Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a wonderful tool.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets also has limits for free accounts. For documents, each document can have up to 500 K, with up to 2 MB embedded images. For spreadsheets, each spreadsheet can have up to 10,000 rows, or 256 columns, or 100,000 cells, or 40 sheets, whichever is reached first.

As with the desktop counterparts, Google Docs & Spreadsheets also use a lot of keyboard shortcuts, here is a simple list:

Google Docs & Spreadsheets Keyboard Shortcuts

Sometimes the internet connection can be sluggish from time to time, in this case, I usually download the needed documents or spreadsheets to the local machine for editing, and after I am done with the editing, I upload the documents again.

An interesting phenomenon is been reported by Cringely of PBS. In his article The Google Connection, he experienced an interesting phenomenon while using Google Docs & Spreadsheets in Hongkong: suddenly all the user interface became Chinese, and he was totally lost, although he knew that a simple preference can switch it back to English, but the problem is, how can you find the preference if all the user interface elements are in Chinese, and you know nothing of the language?

It reminds me of my experience in Korea. Last year, I stayed in Inchon International Airport for a couple of hours waiting for my flight to China. The Internet Café in the airport was not expensive, so I logged on Google Gmail to send some emails. Surprise, the Windows XP are all in Korean interface, and I was totally lost. Fortunately, the Internet Explorer icon remained the same, and I clicked it, and typed mail.google.com in the address bar. Here came the Korean Gmail interface!

Fortunately for me, it is not difficult to figure out the username and password input box, and I usually use keyboard shortcut to navigate the Gmail interface, for example, c key to compose, x key to select the message, y to archive, # to delete, g followed by a c to go to contact, g followed by an i to go to inbox.

With this kind of blind navigation, I managed to send some email to China, in Chinese! It turned out that the Korean Internet Café, for some reason, installed the Chinese input methods. From the Windows language bar, it is easy to switch to the Simplified Chinese input method.

Now I just remembered that inside Gmail, the link right after your email address is Settings, regardless of the language. If you don’t understand the language, just click this link, and the next page, you will see a pull-down menu, listing all the supported languages in their native form. Then, all you need is to figure which is the OK button. That usually is the right one, the left button usually is Cancel.

In Google Docs & Spreadsheets, the second link right to your email address is Settings, right after the red link, which is “New Feature”. The next page will allow you to change the language interface. This time, the left button is “Save Changes”, and the right one, “Cancel”.

Since all modern OSes supports Unicode encoding, your documents can be a mixture of different languages, such as Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Japanese, English, and Russian, if you want to put that many languages inside a single document.