I did expect to have my LR3 Upgrade shipped so soon but couple days ago I got info from Amazon that it will be sent earlier than at the beginning of July. I got it today and installed it without making any special preparations. I have been doing upgrades on this machine since version 1 and so far no problems. This time installation was quite fast and it asked if I want to upgrade my current catalog. I confirmed and it did it quickly. I tired all my archival catalogs and no problems were detected. I quickly launched it to see how much difference I could see at first glance. It’s almost no visible signs that I am using new version besides big logo it top left corner. It seems to be faster. Maybe because it optimized my catalogs to make them smaller. It is also truly 64-bit. Preview generation also seems to be faster. I read that raw processing engine has been given a complete overhaul so I tried it on few images and sometimes it is immediately visible and sometimes I cannot tell a difference. I cannot see any setting to turn it on permanently but I assume it will import using new 2010 process. Lens calibration recognized two of my lens and visually it seems to have bigger impact on image than just switching a process. I need to play with it more especially when I got images where distortions or chromatic aberrations are more visible. I cannot tell much about noise reduction until I try some high ISO images. Next I wish to see how it handles videos
I guess many people, including me, did not know that free media player, VLC, can be used to create screencasts of your desktop. It may require some experimentation to come up with the right settings but you do not have to buy any special software to do it. You need download and install VLC.
1. From Media menu select Convert/Save
2. Open Media dialog will be presented and you have to switch to Capture Device tab.
3. Select Capture Mode: Desktop
4. Set desired frame rate. I used 25 fps.
5. Press Convert/Save button and you will see Convert dialog. Source will be preselected to screen://
6. Browse to select destination file
7. In Settings you need to choose profile. I got best results with “Video – MPEG-4 + AAC (MP4)”
8. Hit settings icon to edit profile.
9. My preferred settings are:
- Encapsulation MP4/MOV
- Video codec H-264, 25fps
- Audio codec unchecked since I am not going to record any audio
10. Press Start to begin recording then stop when you finished.
As an every day commuter I am really happy to see this happening. The bike directions take a lot of factors into consideration:
designated bike lanes, tries to avoid areas with lots of hill climbs and drops, busy roads and intersections. In giving estimates on trip times, Google uses an average person at an average Body Mass Index level, peddling up and down the terrain. Let’s take a look at my usual morning route. I checked it with GPS logger and it is 9 miles which takes me about 35 minutes. According to Google Maps it is 11.6 mi and takes 1 hour. This feature is still in beta so I hope they will make some improvements
Ant Movie Catalog is a free (really free, i.e. the source code is available) program made to manage your collection of movies on DVD, CD (VideoCD, DivX, …) and tapes.
If you use GNU/Linux rather than Windows, you can try to use WinE to get this program running; some people notified me that this was working. You can also check Moviefly, which is a complete rewrite of Ant Movie Catalog made with Python.
Moviefly stores information on video media files, including title, actors, genre, descriptions, comments, rating, director, producer, picture, languages, subtitles, video- and audio format, video- and audio bitrates, resolution, framerate, file size and media type. Technical information can be automatically extracted, descriptive information on a title may be downloaded from the internet.
