Sunday, September 17, 2006

Welcome Blu-Ray!!

First it was those floppies(those big ones 5 1/2 inches) and then their size reduced to 3.14 inches and capacity increased to 1.4mb.Next the revolution of CD/DVD changed the way of mass storage.They have been in the market for atleast 10 years with un decreasing popularity.But though the capacity of a dvd is 4.9 GigaBytes it is not enough for transfering even more huge volumes of data,so it is time to move onto the next GENERATION of Mass storage.Say a Big welcome to Blu-ray ,the newest technology on the block.
Blu-ray, also known as Blu-ray Disc (BD), is the name of a next-generation optical disc format jointly developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), a group of the world's leading consumer electronics, personal computer and media manufacturers (including Apple, Dell, Hitachi, HP, JVC, LG, Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Samsung, Sharp, Sony, TDK and Thomson). The format was developed to enable recording, rewriting and playback of high-definition video (HD), as well as storing large amounts of data. The format offers more than five times the storage capacity of traditional DVDs and can hold up to 25GB on a single-layer disc and 50GB on a dual-layer disc. This extra capacity combined with the use of advanced video and audio codecs will offer consumers an unprecedented HD experience.

While current optical disc technologies such as DVD, DVD±R, DVD±RW, and DVD-RAM rely on a red laser to read and write data, the new format uses a blue-violet laser instead, hence the name Blu-ray. Despite the different type of lasers used, Blu-ray products can easily be made backwards compatible with CDs and DVDs through the use of a BD/DVD/CD compatible optical pickup unit. The benefit of using a blue-violet laser (405nm) is that it has a shorter wavelength than a red laser (650nm), which makes it possible to focus the laser spot with even greater precision. This allows data to be packed more tightly and stored in less space, so it's possible to fit more data on the disc even though it's the same size as a CD/DVD. This together with the change of numerical aperture to 0.85 is what enables Blu-ray Discs to hold 25GB/50GB.

Blu-ray is currently supported by more than 170 of the world's leading consumer electronics, personal computer, recording media, video game and music companies. The format also has broad support from the major movie studios as a successor to today's DVD format. Seven of the eight major movie studios have already announced titles for Blu-ray, including Warner, Paramount, Fox, Disney, Sony, MGM and Lionsgate. The initial line-up is expected to consist of over 100 titles and include recent hits as well as classics such as Batman Begins, Desperado, Fantastic Four, Fifth Element, Hero, Ice Age, Kill Bill, Lethal Weapon, Mission Impossible, Ocean's Twelve, Pirates of the Caribbean, Reservoir Dogs, Robocop, and The Matrix. Many studios have also announced that they will begin releasing new feature films on Blu-ray Disc day-and-date with DVD, as well as a continuous slate of catalog titles every month.

Oh my god upto 80GB of storage equal to about 18 DVD's...the world is going NUTS!!!!!!
DUNNO WHATS NEXT????

Taggies:

Labels:

Sunday, September 03, 2006

How to make a screencap of a movie!!

Well a few days ago i was searching the internet for few english movies,and found some good ones.Along with the movies i saw some nice sample of the movie(preview)and some excellent quality Screenshots.They were really cool and i searched on how to make one.After a search of two days i found a easy and and a handy way on making screenshots.Here we go....

TUTORIAL:

Initially you need two things before you can proceed...
1. ImageGrabberII - A brilliant program,helps us to capture screenshots.You can
get it HERE.

2.A free image host - I use imageshack.us..but you can use flickr or any image hosting sites.

Creating ScreenShots:

To get started Open up the ImageGrabber and open up the movie from the file menu.The movie will start playing,now press the button thats look like a monitor and you will get a window as shown...

imagegrabbernoscreenshots5mw.jpg



Enter the number of screens shots you would like to take of the scene. A good number for a scene is probably about 10-15 and you can have a play around with this and the number of columns explained in the settings below to see what you like.

When you click OK it will go through the movie taking the screen shots and add them to the timeline across the bottom.

You can add individual selected screenshots by using the scrollbar to move to the picture you want and clicking the button next to the you used for screenshots to add the current image at the end of the timeline.

Once you have all the pics you want you can arrange the screenshots in the timeline.


* Right click a screenshot to delete it, delete all or change the text label.

* Left click a screenshot to drag it to where you want in the timeline.

ImageGrabber settings

Once you have all the screens you want, on the File menu click Save File and you will see the following default settings dialog box ...

imagegrabberdefaultsettings2lx.jpg


Layout: Good idea to make the dimensions of each screen (Tile) a fraction of the original to avoid distortion.

Style: Details of the drop shadow around your screens and the background color for your image.

Info: You can include the time each sample was taken in the vid.

JPEG: You can adjust the quality down to reduce the file size say for a full movie with many screens.

Details: You can include the basic movie statistics in the image.

There are plenty of possible configurations, try playing around with different settings until you find a layout you like.


Click the save button and using the Default settings will produce an image with a layout similar to this ...

lotr9li.jpg



Once you have your image you may want to resize it or modify it in some way, a nice free and easy to use image viewing/editing tool is irfanview -you can get it here.(This step is optional).


Now you have your screenshots, the next step is hosting your cool new image.

2. Hosting screenshots

The are a few free image hosting web sites around and most of them operate the same way. As i said you can use imageshack.us or flickror any one of the free image hosting sites.

Thats the tutorial, hope you found it useful.More intrestiting facts coming up on the next post!!

Taggies:
ss_blog_claim=23c66b64da5471a2b2f9019eaa57c82d