23 Jan 10 System Upgrayedd!
Waaay back
My first experience building and customizing computers was over a decade ago when I worked a short stint in a small computer shop. I still have my first custom P4 desktop, complete with 3.5″ floppy drive. It’s been upgraded to its maximum potential over the years but has been made obsolete by my more recent systems, kind of like an old pair of jeans that you keep patching up but wouldn’t wear to church on Sunday.
Not so way back
My most recent build was a home server I put together last June. The MSI nettop case is tiny, but hardware installation and setup was as simple as it gets. The strangest thing about the assembly is its internal CompactFlash slot, which requires removing the motherboard completely from the case to access. With its modest hardware, it uses a fraction of the power of my other systems and gets the job done as a server.
More recently
While the needs of a home server are pretty minimal, a multimedia system can be quite hungry for power. My Dell XPS Gen2 laptop has been a good multimedia workhorse for the past few years. This system has handled most of the digital imaging and video processing tasks I could throw at it. Games also played seamlessly, my preference being action/adventure RPG’s.
The “Mass Effect” Effect
Unlike most gaming consoles, PC games often require new hardware to experience the most out of their design. At the same time, games can be configured to run on (slightly) older hardware, usually at the expense of graphics quality. Mass Effect was no different. It was originally an Xbox 360 release, but it eventually made its way to the PC in mid 2008. I soon found that with the game’s lowest settings, my XPS laptop would overheat and crash after a half an hour. I even experimented with tweaking the graphics drivers to see if anything could be improved. Underclocking resulted in slightly more stability but much choppier gameplay. Overclocking actually did eke out better graphics performance but resulted in way higher temperatures and more frequent crashes. Needless to say, I didn’t get very far into the game.
Upgrayedd!
Gaming was just an added benefit to me, so I saw this “failure” as just one of many benchmark scores to measure system performance. Hitting the limit on a recent video editing project gave me a better excuse to take the upgrade plunge. My initial plan was to build a new system from scratch. It would have been great to recycle old parts. Unfortunately, I had almost nothing I could utilize towards a new system. Even my old desktop’s hard drives are all IDE (PATA), while most newer drives are SATA. I might have been able to use its mid-tower case, but that would leave me with too many obsolete parts at the cost of one older but working computer.
I priced out new parts over the past few months and came up with basic build requirements hovering around $900 minimum for something sufficiently future-proof. Then, I saw it: an end-of-year deal on new XPS desktops. The Dell XPS 9000 met or exceeded my needs for even less money than my custom build. I decided to go with the default RAM and graphics card to get the best possible deal, since individual component mark ups seem to cancel out any savings. I could have been more frugal with an XPS 8000, but the 9000 had too many added benefits: a larger case and beefier power supply, 8 GB more RAM (24 total), 1 extra internal HD (3 total), more slots/types of PCI cards and various extra ports. I’m still keeping an eye out for deals on individual part upgrades as I settle into the new system, but for now, speed is definitely not a problem.
15 Jan 10 Case Study: Swai Jiao Seminar Video (Background)
I thought I’d begin this blog with some background information about a video project I’ve just (re)started, eventually creating a more in depth case study with subsequent postings.
My Video Experience
I don’t claim to be a video expert, but I have studied video production and motion graphics during my multimedia education and degree in digital media. I also tackle a couple video projects per month at my day job, ranging from simple conversions, DVD production and more complex compositing. In other words, I have a good foundation but I am always learning and improving as I go forward.
Project Background
This project originally began a few months ago. My Swai Jiao school documented a 2-day seminar at the end of August, 2009, with the goal of possibly creating training videos of the private sessions. We have footage from multiple cameras shooting simultaneously, which is great for providing a range of angles. Multiple sources also means there is a range of video containers, with different naming conventions, clip lengths, dimensions, codecs and framerates. Collecting all of the videos alone was a challenge, taking a few weeks in all.
Conversion and Import = Fail
My main multimedia system was a Dell XPS Gen2 desktop-replacement laptop built nearly 5 years ago. The XPS has been good to me over the past few years, whether working on various multimedia projects or occasional gaming. I started out converting the hodgepodge collection of videos into something Adobe Premiere CS 1.5 could stomach, using a combination of VirtualDub and FFmpeg. This stage took place over another few weeks as I would let videos convert overnight when I had time. When I finally started importing the converted videos into Premiere, my system was showing it’s age. I soon found importing hundreds of videos was not possible, as it would completely freeze my system. Even limiting the project bins to just a few videos, the CPU and RAM would be pegged out just with the import alone. Trying to synchronize more than two videos together was a pain, since it was too choppy to tell what was going on.
As one possible option, I could have created a duplicate set of compressed/low-quality videos to work with, then attempted to swap in the high-quality versions to render the end result. I’m just not sure my system would let me accomplish that last part.
Project, Part Duex
That brings us back to now. Next case study post, I’ll detail my restart of the project with new hardware and software!
Tags: Case Study, Design
09 Jan 10 Site Reboot
It’s about time that I recreated this site. UnusualMedia.com started as a portfolio and contact site for my multimedia design business at the end of 2004. After going from freelance to a full-time corporate gig, the site slowly and painfully died off, starved of any new content to feed on. I had the intention to post new stuff as time flew by, but I lacked the motivation since I wasn’t looking for new gigs. This site soon became a neglected conceptualization that was going nowhere quickly. NO LONGER!
For the new year, my resolution is to start posting some content on this site. The goal here is relatively modest, to post something once per week. These ramblings might remain floating out in intertube limbo with only myself to view them, but that’s besides the point. (Am I serious about this? Yes! Will I actually continue doing it? Maybe!)
I’ve actively studied multimedia design since the 90’s and have worked professionally in the field since 2000, so I’m going to try to keep the content related to that.
Tags: Goals
