College Football...in 3D?

As the college football season rolls into full swing this week, the one item that I am choosing to address is the live 3D showing of the USC versus OSU game on September 12th. The game will be the first time that ESPN has tried to air a live game in a 3D format. The reason for this airing will be to gauge the effectiveness, cost and availability of the format to users and ESPN as a whole. The game will be filmed simultaneously in 3D, with seven separate 3D cameras, as well as in standard 2D. The game will be aired in locations in Columbus, Ohio, Hurst, Texas and Hartford, Connecticut. If plausible, this emerging technology could have a massive effect on the standard viewing of sports, but at what cost to the viewers? The use of this technology will require way more man power and resources in order to be aired in a viewable fashion and that cost will have to be covered by some entity. The other question that comes into play is whether sports viewers want to watch sports programming in such a way. Through the use of focus groups and other audience feedback tactics, I feel that ESPN will be able to answer these questions and more. The future of television will no longer be of quality importance but rather how the viewing audience experiences the programming as whole.

DV Tape or P2 Cards, The Future of Video

This week's subject will revolve around the journalism students that are looking at going into video production. The use of High Definition, HD, video in today's society has reached a point that allows producers to choose what type of format to use to store their video media. The conflict that I am discussing today involves the use of DV tape versus P2 storage cards. Digital Video, DV, tapes have been a standard digital format since the late 1990s and has been used within consumer and professional based camcorders. When transferring footage into editing software from a DV tape the transfer rate constitute a 1 to 1 ratio. This means that if a videographer has 35 minutes of tape to edit it will take the same amount of time to transfer the video into a non-linear editing source. The benefit of this format is price and availability to users. Standard defeinition tapes range anywhere from $2 a tape and the HD format start at prices of $20. The average record time of the HD tapes are about 60 minutes. SD on the other hand have the capability of longer runtimes considering the amount of information stored. P2 storage cards are used in professional grade HD camcorders and records the video as a MFX format. This format contains free running timecode and is stored as a computer data format called metadata. The P2 cards use solid state technology and therefore use less running parts within their media source. On average, P2 cards come in 8, 16, 32 and 64GB cards and can range in prices from $400 to over $2000. The average runtime on this format will depend on the camcorder being used. For instance, with a Panasonic DVCProHD the average runtime with a 64GB P2 card is about 128 minutes. The format is reusable and does not degrade like standard tape formats. In the long run, I feel that professional technology will move towards P2 cards in order to cut down editing times and overall easy of use. In contrast, the consumer-based camcorders that have the same transferable abilities will remain tape based until compression reaches a point of less degradation to be used for editing.

CourseSmart and eTextbooks

The one option that weighs heavily on every college student's mind is the purchasing of textbooks. Well as freedom to information increases and new innovations are made students are giving more options than the standard on campus, off campus bookstores and websites such as Amazon that charge exorbitant prices for books that can be returned at the end of the semester for a fraction of what you paid. The solution to this can be seen in the concept of CourseSmart, which offers its users books for a severe discount. Though users do not receive physical textbooks, they are able to access the book and all of it's contents for a period of about 6 months. One example that I was able to witness was a textbook of mine that was about $76 on Amazon brand new versus $39 on CourseSmart. The draw back to this site can be seen in the infancy of its creation. The website is a mere two and a half years old and only has collections from about fourteen publishers. Though this is a slight disadvantage, I do see this site becoming helpful in the classes that a user will not require the textbook after the class is over.

Gh.o.st Cloud Computing Software

Considering this is my first post I thought I would write about a product that I found to be extremely interesting and possibly useful. The concept of cloud computing is the concept that the internet (or the cloud) contains all of your information in one centralized source. G.ho.st provides a service that allows users to create a virtual computer or desktop within any internet browser. As a user, I am constantly on my desktop PC, Blackberry and Asus netbook. The use of these three products are used on a constant basis and are normally used for similar interests. The promising features of this website is the benefit of having 15gb of storage capacity for free that allows you to store any type of files that you wish along with the ability to attach several different widgets and addons. When I first created my account, I was able to set up my desktop on my PC with no problems. Other than a slow upload rate, it was everything that the website described it to be. The following day I tried the site on a shared PC on the UGA Campus and the desktop was the same as when I left it previously. I accessed the site from my phone on their mobile site, G.ho.st/m. The site was able to pull up all of my information with no problems and it worked extremely well. When I tried to access the site from my netbook the java applet that they have running for the virtual desktop to run was distorted and unable to be used or changed. This could be from the display requirements from the applet. Overall the operation and concept of the site are great ideas and very useful. Though the the site needs to work out a few bugs I feel that a free service that runs on service advertisement would be an excelent way to make college easier.