MacWorld – Day One

John, Chick, and I met down stairs this morning at 7:15 to head over to the MacWorld check in area. We were essentially at the beginning of the line. Here is what it looked like as we were leaving the check in area.

The class I was taking today which is continuing on tomorrow is covering all the aspects of video compression. I am learning quite a bit. The person teaching the class says that he is a “compressionist”. All the does for a living is compress video for big companies. He worked for Abercrombie & Fitch for the last 5 years compressing their video for their website, and for the in store TV’s that play the videos while you shop. I’m not sure, but I think he now works for a company that just compresses video for major companies around the country. Pretty crazy that is all he does. He was talking about how much easier compression is when using a High Definition camera. He has basically sold me on needing one of them. 🙂

We learned about all the major compression software’s like Sorenson Squeeze, Cleaner, Compressor 2, and a couple others. I learned that pre-compression work is very important to make your video look a lot better. Adjusting the color, saturation, sharpening, and a few other things can really make your video look much better. I am looking forward to playing around with these new ideas when I get back. I also learned that you could use all the computers on your network as a “cluster” to divide up the compression task and make work go a lot faster. If I can find some computers to get this working on I think it can really save some time.

After the conference we stopped off at a couple stores including the San Francisco Apple Store. Its a pretty cool store full of 30 inch monitors and every Mac software and hardware you can think of.

After that we headed back to the hotel and grabbed some dinner. I had a very tasty steak, after which we went out for a walk around town. It is nice to be in an area where you really don’t need a jacket when you are outside.

That’s all I have for now. I should get some sleep before the day starts tomorrow.