[GreenKeys] MAC stuff -- guru advice needed -- off-topic, but tty-related

[Don Robert House]

Amen Gil,

My older son Rich (of Jeopardy fame) tells me that Logic Express is  
what you need to supercharge Garage Band and more.  My son William is  
a professional videographer and is very familiar with the ins and outs  
of Mac software for audio and video.  You might chat with him about  
your needs.  I will ask him to call you if you give me your phone  
number off list.  Will uses FinalCut Express rather than Pro.  Will  
also uses iDVD quite a bit.  Relating audio MP files to print on  
Teletype machines is an area that Jim "Riceguy" Swanberg has  
experience with.

I have a portable display setup here with a PowerBook B3 PISMO running  
OS 10.4.11 with iTunes.  I can connect it anywhere that has WiFi and  
select itty Teletype News from Sequim, WA USA..  then pipe the audio  
jack to the ST-5000 and run a model 28 RO.  I had hoped to put on a  
display at the McHenry County Historical Society but they were only  
interested in MORSE, at least for the time being.

I also tried the local amateur radio club, but they are not interested  
in things mechanical, only yakking over repeaters.

Don
MacUser since 1984
MacCollector since 1994


On 14 May 2008, at 2:43 PM, gil smith wrote:

Hi folks:

First, some rambling:

Yes, I too went back to mac this year, after a fifteen year hiatus;   
got a nice macbook pro.  I'll need to keep some XP machines for some  
engineering and accounting apps, but I hope to never see Vista.  I was  
a big Mac fan back in the early days (still have an SE). Then I  
started a business, and all of my customers were using windows.  At  
that time, I reluctantly moved platforms, since "The Customer is  
Always Right"  -- you've seen the signs in offices everywhere.  Of  
course we all know the sign should really read "The Customer is  
Usually an A**hole, with Unrealistic Expectations."   Post one of  
those signs, and you'll smile every day.  I still kick myself for ever  
caving in to windows, and wasting untold hundreds of hours on stupid  
problems.  But I digress.

I love the mac -- all of my photo/music/print/web/media stuff is  
moving over.  I got the full Adobe Creative Suite since I do a lot of  
Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat.

Pictures:  We have several Canon cameras -- Canon's photo import  
utility for the mac is just as clumsy as the win version, but it is  
the only utility I have found that lets me prefix the filename with a  
date (eg: 20080514_ttypics_0001.jpg).  I love this, since an alpha  
sort puts everything in chronological order, AND, Walgreens prints the  
filename on the back of the pic, so it is much easier when we sit down  
once or twice a year to put pics in an album.

I don't use iPhoto, since I have used Photoshop since version 1.0 on  
the Mac II (the first color Mac), circa 1990-ish.  Had been stuck at  
version 4 on windows, until now.  I also don't like the idea that  
iPhoto combines everything into one big proprietary file.  I want all  
my photos individual, chronologically-named, and in jpg format.  I'll  
take care of copies that get edited.

Music:  Can't beat iTunes and iPod for music serving.  I moved 30 GB  
of MP3s over from Winblows, with minimal hassle.  I'd like to delete  
iTunes' pre-defined genres, but that's no biggie, since I just add  
mine.  The only real problem I ran into was that a lot of the MP3s had  
the Artist and Title concatenated together in the Title field.  A bit  
of googling led me to an Applescript that fixed that.  It's pretty  
nice to find a quick solution to what would have been a tedious manual  
fix.  I'll have to learn Applescript someday.

I did my first slide show on the Mac for my cub scouts, and it was a  
lot of fun.  Photoshopped 240 pics, dragged them into iDVD, strung 20- 
minutes of  tunes together in GarageBand, dropped the mix into iDVD,  
added the rotating picture thing as the DVD title menu -- it was  
pretty easy.  Did run into a couple of problems:  I had it set to end  
perfectly on the last song (set show to length of audio, and iDVD  
calculates the slide-change interval for you).  Unfortunately, I  
swapped out a song in the mix, and when I updated the audio track it  
was 20 secs shorter;  then, near the end of the slide show, it wrapped  
around to the first song again.   Accck.  It was 2 in the morning so I  
didn't change it, since it took about an hour to render the first disc  
(but only a few minutes for copies).  Suppose I needed to reselect the  
"set to length of audio track" option.  The slide show also seemed to  
drop audio for a second or two here and there, and the video flickered  
up and down on a scan line periodically.  Any Mac gurus out there who  
have run into this before?  Maybe I need to select a higher-quality  
render mode.  Hmm.  Still, can't complain;  it turned out pretty  
nice.  Burned a disc for everybody in the den.

After all that preamble, I come to the tty-related question which is  
the focus of this email.  I am trying to re-create Ransom Slayton's  
slide show tour of the Teletype Museum.  I have a DVD of it -- the  
audio is good, but the pictures are very dark (copied from some old  
video tape).  Then I got high-quality scans of the original slides  
from the IEEE History Center (yes Jim, I still need to get these to  
you;  been trying to get this show done to send as well).

I want to take the audio from the DVD, combine it with the good  
pictures, and make a pristine version of the slide show.  Sounds  
simple enough, but here is what I have run into:

iDVD burns DVDs, and allows you to create slide shows, but the slides  
must change at a fixed time interval -- this does not help since the  
Slayton show has variable change intervals.

iMovie says it allows variable slide change intervals, and arbitrary  
transitions (Slayton used both instant and dissolves), but iMovie only  
outputs to Quicktime video -- can you render a high-quality Quicktime  
mov and then put it on DVD somehow?  It would be kinda nice to use  
iMovie then, since a lower-quality QT version could run off of the web.

Just getting the info off of the DVD is not trivial.  Yes, you could  
play it elsewhere, run the audio into the Mac line-in, and digitize  
it, but I found a utility that extracts the audio track from a DVD, so  
that is not necessary.  But I also wanted to see the original video  
with the audio, so I could plot the slide-change times.

No mac application would acknowledge existence of the original  
DVD .vob files (frickin' lawyers).  Then I found another utility  
(forget the name right now) that converts the original DVD .vob files  
into .mp4 files.  I was able open an mp4 file in GarageBand and see  
the video track and preview along with the audio track, determine the  
slide-change interval with great precision, and even place named  
markers at those locations.  A couple more problems though:  the  
utility that converted the vob to mp4 left truncated files, and did  
not convert the entire vob.  Also, the Slayton DVD has three vob files  
(to convert to three mp4 files), but GarageBand only allows one movie  
track -- since it is really designed for multi-track audio, and the  
movie track is an extra feature to allow syncing your audio mix to  
video, I can't really fault GarageBand for this.  So I would need to  
concatenate the vob or mp4 files first, and also fix the truncated mp4  
problem, before importing the video/audio into GB -- at this point I  
could scroll through the whole thing, add markers at each slide- 
change, name the makers appropriately (eg:  Wheatstone perforator),  
and export a quicktime mov file (including markers, I presume).  I  
thought this GB-created mov file would be able to be opened in iMovie,  
but iMovie "only opens certain mov files."  Crap.  This is getting  
much more complicated that I expected.

I was focusing on GarageBand, since it seems to be the only app that  
lets me see the video as I listen to the audio, and place named  
markers where I need the slide changes (and I can likely solve the  
truncated and concatenated vob/mp4 file problems before starting).   
But this does me no good if I can't get it into iMovie, where I can  
use the named markers, strip off the original video, and create the  
slide show from the picture files.

So I am a bit stuck at the moment, and in need of some advice.  I also  
have FinalCut -- this looks to be one super-duper video editing  
program, but looks like it is pro-oriented, and is a bit  
intimidating.  However, I will learn it if it will get the job done.

Doesn't seem like this should be as complicated.

Help!

thanks,

gil






Vaux Electronics, Inc.
480-354-5556
(fax: 480-354-5558)
www.vauxelectronics.com


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