Digital ICE

Digital ICE is a technology which works specifically with transparent and semi-transparent materials like photographic film. It fairly reliably reduces or eliminates dust, scratches, and dirt that would be otherwise visible in a scanned image, without loss of quality of the underlying image. It uses a combination of hardware and software, so it's generally integrated into a slide or transparency scanner, much like the one we use here in the lab. It's not something you can simply download for your existing scanner. Also, because of the way it works, it does not have an effect on scans of opaque objects like photographic prints.

Here's a real-life example:


This is a crop from a scan of a slide taken in the 1960s. On the left, you can see all of the dirt, mold, dust, etc. that has accumulated on the surface of the film. This would be nearly impossible--or ridiculously time-consuming at the very least--to clean up in Photoshop. But the right-hand image shows you that turning on Digital ICE cleans up the dirt almost magically.

There are a couple of small drawbacks to Digital ICE. The first is that it slows down the scanning process. The second is that you will notice a slight decrease in sharpness, but nothing that can't be easily rectified in Photoshop with unsharp mask.

You can turn Digital ICE on in Nikon Scan before you start scanning slides. Ask the lab consultant on duty if you need help.

Happy 25th Anniversary to the Macintosh!

Poster Printing at the Biomedical Library!

Very exciting news! The printer is open to Penn faculty, students, staff, UPHS staff, and affiliates. The poster printing service is intended for professional posters only, with priority given to scientific posters. Staff is available to print your poster, but will not provide design, formatting, or editing services.

Printing posters at Biomed is very similar to printing them here (same pricing, software, equipment, etc.), with a couple notable exceptions:

• Printing is by appointment only, which means you no longer need to wake up before dawn just to make sure you're one of the first 7 who need posters that day!
  
• You can pay with a credit card or with a budget number in addition to PennCash and departmental copy cards!

And of course, it's much more conveniently located for those of you already over at the Medical, Vet, and Dental Schools, or one of the hospitals.

To make an appointment, contact the Biomedical Library Reference Desk by email (libref@mail.med.upenn.edu) or call (215-898-5818) or drop by between 11am and 6pm weekdays Use the online form at http://www.library.upenn.edu/forms/biomed/posterprinting.html.

See the full announcement at http://www.library.upenn.edu/computing/Health_Sciences/biomed_poster/poster_about.html, where you can also find a link to their FAQ.

CALL FOR FILM SUBMISSIONS!

What: Greater Philadelphia Student Film Festival (GPSFF)

Submission Deadlines: Regular submission ends February 1, 2009. This is about two weeks after school begins. There is no submission fee for regular submission.

Late submission is from February 2nd - February 13, 2009 at 5pm. There is a $10 submission fee.

All submissions must be dropped off or mailed to Cinema Studies Program - 209A Fisher-Bennett Hall - 3340 Walnut Street - Philadelphia, PA 19104.

Anything under 15 minutes that has been made since February 15, 2008 is eligible. All submittants must be registered at a four year college or university in the Philadelphia metropolitan region.

Please make sure to visit www.gpsff.com/submit in order to fill out a submission form and see other relevant submission information.

Why?: This is a chance to get your work seen in front of over 500+ students from around the Philadelphia region in addition to judges who work in the film industry. We also partner with Openfilm.com to distribute your film online and host the film for viewing on our website. Winners receive a trophy engaged with their name.

Film Categories: Drama, Comedy, Documentary, Animation, and Experimental.

Format: Submissions should be Quicktime Movie Files burned onto a data DVD. Please do not encode the DVD.

GPSFF Connect: This service allows you to find crew, composers, actors, and editors for your films. It also has opportunities if you simply want to get involved in film projects. A great way to find work on film productions across the city. www.gpsff.com/connect

GPSFF Watch: Watch the winners and finalists from our past three festivals! www.gpsff.com/watch

Backward Compatibility

Hi guys. Now that Adobe's CS4 software is out, we're starting to see people show up with files created on the newer versions that don't open up properly in the CS3 version that we have here in the lab. Especially InDesign.

To the best of my knowledge, most of the labs on campus (including the Libraries, the School of Design, and the School of Arts and Sciences) are not upgrading to CS4 until at least this summer. In the meantime, if you create files in any of the CS4 software on your own computer, and you plan to work on it in a campus computer lab, you might want to save a copy in the older file format as well to avoid any problems.

Inaugural Events Viewing

The Library is opening the Class of 1955 Conference Room (2nd floor West, just outside of Lippincott Library) for anyone who would like to view the Presidential inauguration. The room will open for viewing at 10am on Tuesday, January 20.

Green IT Website

The University's Green Computing site has been updated and expanded. Check it out for tips on saving money and energy, extending the life of your electronic equipment, safely disposing of e-waste, and more.

http://www.upenn.edu/computing/greenit/

New Poster Printer Prices

Starting today, we will be charging $0.02 per square inch inch for poster printing. So if your poster is 24 inches by 36 inches, the charge would be $0.02 x 24x 36 = $17.28.

Additionally, we are now required to charge 7% tax for posters which are not school-related. Most posters printed in the lab are exempt from this tax. Examples of tax-exempt posters are posters for class assignments, for academic conferences, for student groups, for official dorm or college house activities, or for sports teams/events.

Posters for which we charge tax include posters for a birthday party, posters to hang on your dorm room wall, or presents for friends/family. To calculate tax, use the pricing structure listed above and multiply the poster price by 1.07. For example, an 18"x24" poster would be 1.07 x .02 x 18 x 24 = $9.24

All this in more in our Poster Printer FAQ!

My Bike wins 4th in National Contest

Congratulations to Vince Levy, whose video, "My Bike," just won 4th place in the national Total Recut contest. The same video won 2nd prize in our own Video Mashup contest last year. Vince created "My Bike," a music video for a song written by friends, during his first semester of film production courses here at Penn, and it was only the 2nd video he'd ever made.

Check out Vince's entry at http://www.totalrecut.com/contest-winners.php#fourth

And see the other entries and winners from our own mashup contests at http://wic.library.upenn.edu/mashup/

iTunes to go DRM free!

Gizmodo reports from Mac World that the iTunes store is moving to a totally DRM-free sales model. This is great news for everyone who's ever wanted to download a song from iTunes to include in their home-made student video, but hasn't been able to because of the copyright protection built into most of the songs. There will also be a new 3-tiered pricing system, with songs now going for $.69, $.99, or $1.29. Sounds like the complete switchover happens during the first part of 2009. Yay!

This is not your Father's YouTube.

Everyone's familiar with the "Where the Hell is Matt?" videos, where Matt Harding travels around the world dancing his funny little jig and gets viewers that number in the millions for some reason.

Well Matt's latest video is available on YouTube in Hi Def. Yes, Hi Def. It's about time, am I right? HD is no longer for Vimeo users only. See Matt's latest installment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKdbWwruY and be sure to click on the "Watch in HD" link below the lower right-hand corner of the video. Who knew YouTube could look this good?

Cheap portable hard drive!

Ok, this was just too crazy not to post. Buy.com has a 320GB portable hard drive for $79, with free shipping. Here's the link. I plan to buy 1 of them for myself, too. Go! Buy them! They make good presents--for yourself or others.

Thanksgiving Hours

Happy early Thanksgiving. We're closing at 6pm this Wednsday, and we'll be closed this Thursday and Friday so we can go home and fill up on food. But we'll be back Saturday 12-5, and Sunday we'll resume our regularly scheduled hours. You can also always check our hours online.

A little chilly

They're going to be working on the air handlers in this part of the building this weekend (starting today at 3pm), so I'm told it might get a little cold down this way tonight and tomorrow. There's nothing we can do about the temperature, so if you get chilly, you might want to grab a laptop from Rosengarten and work in a warmer part of the building until the heat comes back on.

iWeb Demo Today

Today from noon - 1pm, we will be holding a free workshop on how to use Apple's iWeb software, which is available in the Digital Media Lab, and comes free with every Macintosh computer.

iWeb makes it easy to create a website that’s stunningly beautiful — and totally you. Start with an Apple-designed theme, then customize it with your own text, photos, movies, and podcasts until it’s exactly what you want. And switch themes with a click anytime.

Apple's own Mike Wolk will be teaching the workshop in the Seminar Room in the Weigle Information Commons. See you there!

Tin Eye

Tin Eye is an image-based search engine. The way it works is you submit an image (via upload or by entering a URL) and TinEye returns other versions of that same image that it finds on the web. I've used successfully this in 3 ways.

1) I've used it to find higher resolution versions of an image I only have a thumbnail of. This is especially helpful when you're making a poster or a print of some sort and you need something with a higher image quality.

2) I've used it to find full versions of images when all I have is a cropped version. For example, I want a picture of a $100 bill, but all I have is a crop of George Washington's face.

3) I have an single image that I know is from a set of similar photos. If TinEye can find a page with the image I already have, often it will be a page that also shows the other photos from the same set.

Give it a try. It's still in beta, and it does require you to register for free before you can use it, but it currently indexes over a billion (that's Billion with a 'B') images. So check it out at http://www.tineye.com

A Poster Printing Fable

Joan woke up this morning and decided to come to the Vitale Digital Media Lab in Van Pelt Library to print a poster for her Urban Studies presentation. She got to the lab at 9:15am, just a few minutes after it opened. But when she arrived, Joan discovered that the poster printer queue was already full for the day! In fact, the lab consultant on duty told her that people had been waiting in line outside Van Pelt at 8:20am--ten minutes before the building even opened--so that they could be assured one of the day's 7 lucky poster printing slots, and even THEN, the lab consultant had to turn away 3 people who'd been waiting since before the lab was open. So Joan went home unhappy, wondering how she'd ever get her poster printed in time without having to spend $120 at Kinkos or Campus Copy.

The moral of this story is The Early Bird Prints the Poster. We open at 9am on weekdays and 12noon on Saturday and Sunday.

Disclaimer: The preceding story is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Ok, that was a dumb fable, but no joke; they really were lined up outside at 8:20AM. Get here EARLY.

CS4 Trial Downloads Available

Exciting news! Adobe has finally made the free 30-day trial versions of their CS4 software (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) available on their website for you to download onto your laptop or home computer. If you don't already have one, you'll need to register for a free Adobe account, but that's a small price to pay for a fully functioning copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended!

You can download the trial versions at http://www.adobe.com/downloads/

Indesign CS3 has arrived!

InDesign CS3 is finally up and running on the machines in the Digital Media Lab! Our licenses arrived today, and we got it installed this afternoon. Sorry again for the delay, but we're glad it's finally available for everyone who needs it.

Embedding Video

So you want to put a video on your website...

YouTube
Well, the easiest way is to upload it to YouTube and then embed it that video onto your website. The benefits of this are:

1) It's free!

2) You aren't paying for any of the bandwidth. So even if a million people visit your website and watch your video, YouTube is paying for the bandwidth instead of you.

3) YouTube gives you the HTML code you need to paste into your webpage, so you don't even have to know how to write HTML to embed your video successfully.

4)You're likely to get more viewers because other people will stumble across your video on YouTube, whereas if you just store the video on your own web server, you have to do all the advertising yourself to make sure people find it.

The problem with services like YouTube is that you don't get much control over the quality or compression of your video. You're also bound by their artificial time and size limits (for example, YouTube limits you to 10-minute videos. If you have a longer one, you need to break it into 10-minute chunks).

If you're using iMovie 08, there's a built-in upload-to-YouTube option. Otherwise, YouTube offers advice on its website at http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/

Vimeo
Vimeo ( http://www.vimeo.com ) is still fairly new, and not as familiar, but it offers some distinct advantages over YouTube. Along with the benefits listed above, Vimeo has:

1) Better quality video (including support for HD video!) Check out one person's Vimeo/YouTube comparison at http://greyscalegorilla.com/blog/2008/04/02/vimeo-vs-youtube-quality/

2) No specific length limitation (although there is still a 500MB per week upload limit)

3) A for-fee service with even more features (see http://www.vimeo.com/plus )

Vimeo offers advice on how best to compress your video for upload at http://www.vimeo.com/help/compression and has a short video on how to upload at http://www.vimeo.com/339189

DIY
For maximum control over your video, you'll want to store the video on your own web server. If you're a student group, you probably already have a web space you can use. Otherwise, you can usually purchase a domain name, storage space, and bandwidth quite cheaply from a web hosting service (just Google it or ask for a recommendation from a computer-saavy friend.) The following advice applies only to people who have access to a web server and the ability to edit or upload webpages to it. If you aren't sure whether you have this access, check with the local service provider (LSP) for your home school, department, or organization.

We recommend using the FLV (Flash Video) file format (which is what YouTube uses) for your video, which gives a good balance between file size and video quality, and ensures it'll be playable on almost everybody's computer, since just about everyone has Flash installed on their machine.

In the lab, you can do this from within iMovie or Quicktime Pro. Open existing video file in Quicktime Pro or open your iMovie project on one of the machines in the lab and export as FLV it at Medium Quality using the "Expert Settings" option, since it will give you a smaller file size, which is friendlier to your viewers, who won't have to wait as long to watch your video and won't have to worry about having a fast enough connection to the internet.

(Note: If you're doing this on your own Mac, you may need to install the free Perian plugin ( http://perian.org ) which enables QuickTime Pro support for FLV along with some additional audio/video file formats.)

Watch the video to make sure it's a high enough quality. If not, export it again, this time with "high" quality.

Next, you'll need a FLV player for your website. Fortunately, there's an excellent player created by Jeroen Wijering, who generously makes it available free of charge for non-commercial use. You can download from his site at http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player You can then upload the player along with your FLV video to your own website.

Jeroen has also provided a setup wizard ( http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?page=wizard ) which gives you the HTML code you'll need to paste into your webpage. And he has a list at http://code.jeroenwijering.com/trac/wiki/FlashVars which explains all of the variables you can set to customize the viewer to your needs.

If you need help at any step along the way, just stop into the lab and ask for help!