Well, I was recently elected webmaster for the Young Liberals of Central Virginia, taking the place of retiring senior Ruffin Evans. In other words, I was the only one at CHS that knew what a content management system was. I suppose I’ll be spending some time over the summer sprucing up the homepage… You’re a brilliant programmer, Ruffin, but the site needs some serious Photoshopping. Also, I’m really not the biggest fan of Joomla. I have a feeling I might be installing WordPress on the server sometime soon.

Anyway, that was my shameless plug for Brian Bills‘ organization. But I might find my association with Brian detrimental in the future - he’s hated by a lot of conservatives, and I don’t like being hated…

Not to be outdone by Adobe, Apple just announced their upcoming release of Final Cut Studio 2 - a massive update to their line of video and audio post production software. And despite being an avid mac-hater, I’ve actually been really impressed with what I’ve seen so far. Among their updated/new features are Sountrack Pro 2, Motion 3 (for work with 3D environments), and Color (original name, I know…) for color grading and correction.

I’m not as familiar with Mac software (considering you have to, you know, own a Mac to use it, and I’m not exactly rich) , but one thing I’m impressed with is the integration of all the tools. From what I’ve seen on Apple.com, it looks like you can reference video project frames while editing in Soundtrack, and they’ve added motion-tracking features to most of the programs, including Color. That’s one issue I take with Adobe - motion tracking is only available in After Effects.

It would also appear that integrating projects from multiple programs is much simpler now. Let’s be honest here - Adobe Bridge (meant to “bridge” elements from different programs) is a complete joke. I don’t want to spend five minutes waiting for it to load, and I have a 3Ghz dual core machine. Also, Compressor 3 supposedly encodes video between all sorts of formats easily. I’ll believe it when I see it.

And although I may have only touched Final Cut Pro a few times in my life (and on crappy 5-year-old iMacs, at that), some of these new features have got me wishing I had a Mac (shocking, I know). You see, with FCP6, video samples with different settings and frame rates can be used in the same timeline without transcoding. And people, transcoding is a dirty, dirty word to me. I just cleaned up dozens of gigabytes on my hard drive from getting rid of obnoxious transcoding files I’d used only once.

But regardless of how cool it looks and the advanced features that I would kill to get my hands on, there’s really no use oggling over it. ‘Cause unless someone wants to give me the $8,000 I’d need for a Mac that could actually run Final Cut Studio 2, I’m out of luck.

And can someone tell me why Apple used a semi-British guy for all the voiceovers on their promo videos?

It appears that I just lost a month of my summer. A few months ago, I applied to the Virginia Governor’s School for Theatre Arts, and I just got the acceptance letter today. So, I’ll be in Richmond from July 1-28, most likely performing random acting exercises with 49 other theatre geeks from around the state. The one setback - the program is the same time as Otakon, the second largest convention of Japanese culture in the western hemisphere. Though, as much as I’ll miss walking around Baltimore in the July heat with 25 thousand anime fans (i.e. some of the scariest people you’ll meet), I think I’ll enjoy Governor’s School all the same.

Of course, they don’t allow computers or even cell phones in the program… Grr. Maybe I’ll have to start blogging by highly covert cell phone emails…

It’s that time of the year again. That’s right - Eurovision is only a month away! The European version of American Idol that’s been going on for more than 50 years is one of my favorite things each year. Dozens of countries hold competitions to select a band that will represent their nation in the international competition each May - and some of the selections are… interesting, to say the least. I’ll be posting a few over the coming weeks which I found to be particularly quirky/excellent/downright creepy. Up first, the competitors from Israel:

Teapacks - “Push the Button”

There’s been a lot of talk recently over the Blogger’s Code of Conduct, but I’ve noticed one rule that never made it onto that list: Basic Blogger Ethics. I just read a post on Playfuls.com about CBS shows becoming available on the Joost file sharing network. Or rather, I read a shameless advertisement disguised as a press release disguised as an innocent web posting. True, Playfuls isn’t exactly a blog, but this represents the bias that so many blogs are susceptible to through their advertising obligations.

Let’s be honest - few bloggers love something so wholeheartedly that they have nothing critical to say in a post, especially when it involves a corporate announcement of some sort. Just be careful about what you read on a blog with ads. Be outright terrified when you see Dell ads on a PC hardware review site.