If (video.type = home) then video.watchAvg = 0.43

Here at Digiplex Industries, our Video Office in the Department of Technological Advancement has a special program to help eradicate the taping of home videos. The Center for Statistics shows that 82% of all black video tapes bought are used for the recording of "home videos". The CfS estemates that 92.1% of those "home videos" include menial home or school events, 95.6% involve children, and 3.94% are watched again within 3 years of recording. Because of these figures, we have started a program called DIHE (Destruction of Irritating Home vidEos)...

Okay, so the statistics are made up, but I will bet that the figures are not too far off. I saw my parents for years record our Chritsmases and Easters and I never saw the tape again (except on those occasions where I accidently recorded over a couple because they appeared blank when I looked at them on the DV camcorder and they had no labels, as was oft to happen in our house.) Occasionally, the tapes from way back are fun to watch - such as the one from when I was one year old and could not for the love of me blow out that candle on the cake because I was smiling and blowing at the same time, resulting in my blow being diffused around my teeth. (I can blow out twenty or so candles now with one fell swoop, thank you.)

I, myself, have fallen pray to the figures above. When my family went to Yellowstone, then Disney World, I was dubbed the camera man on both trips. Because of that fatal mistake on the part of my parents, six tapes were used on both trips. And for nothing, I might add.

I was determined to make sure that the video I was making was not just another home video. I went around and videotaped all that I thought was worthy to be show in a video highlight of Our Disney World Trip. The movie would be called "Mickey!" and the 1 - 2 hour long highlight would show the jist of our trip. Granted, I took along six tapes to do the job.

But, because I planned that, I forgot to plan for the unexpected. While in MGM studios, my dad was approched to do a side show that involved a "Dating Show". Well, by then it was our next to last day. I had gotten beautiful shots of Disney's various attractions, wild animals, and beautiful lands. And, unfourtunatly, all those shots took up all may tapes - up to the very last minute of my sixth tape. The result was I could not record the entire show... in fact, I could not record the majority of the show.

The project was never started because I missed that shot. I had forgotten the unexpected and that is why I hate home videos. A similar event happened in Yellowstone (where the project was called "Yellowrock"), though that trip was FOR the unexpected. Neither project was started and neither will be. I will burn those Home Videos before I do anything with them editing wise. Its just not worth the grief.

video.editQuality = high || die

Here at Digiplex Industries, our Video Office, part of the Department of Technological Advancement, has all the best equipment and best video editing software. Our movie sets are state-of-the-art and our camera rigs are sturdy. However, in the course of making video, we have found that the problem with videos is not the equipment and not the software, it is the human factor. We are sure to hire the best video people. If you wish to be hired in our Video Office, get together your best demo video and apply on our website...

Not only am I good at programming and video game playing :) , but I also have a knack for editing videos. I work at a photography studio making wedding videos, so I should know a thing or two.

Now one of my pet peeves involves badly made videos. Another one of my pet peeves is a badly made video that gets sold to the masses and actually gets sold once or twice. Last year, both of those pet peeves got invoked at the same time. A group at my school made a special video for our graduating seniors and they showed it over the television system early in the morning before any classes. As I watched it, I had to keep myself from puking all over my surrounding class mates; I had to be one of the worst videos I have ever seen. The "Senior Video" was merely a slide show, hastily put together in the span of two weeks. The slideshow consisted of pictures from rather recent events, instead of events from throughout the school year, strung together by a random selection of special effects transitions, such as blocks flying around and pictures flipping away and things flying around. The songs they selected were chosen from various favorites of theirs that had a theme of leaving. Even though they didn't match some students' tastes, the songs wouldn't be that bad. But they made them bad by adding lyrics occasionally to the video. These lyrics, apparently highlighting certain lines in the song, flew in to the picture, sat there for a single second, then flipped around back out, allowing the next line in the song to fly back in...

This year, I plan on making the video. I will make sure to follow the Video-Rules-of-Thumb for making the video. Here are a few rules that you should remember should you ever edit a video:

1. Use computer-generated titles only when necessary
Spelling out lyrics in a song is not a necessary unless your doing a sing-along. When titles are necessary, first try and use a title in the natural setting of the video, such as a sign. If the videographer took a shot of the entry sign of a ballpark, use it instead of creating a title saying the same thing. If no such shot if available, then make the title, making sure you do not obscure anything important in the shot.

2. Keep Titles Inside the TV Safe Area!!!
This is a big one, hence the bolding. When you watch a normal TV (not a new plasma TV), you are actually not seeing the entire shot. The outside edges of the shot do not show on TV. The TV safe area is the inside 80% of a shot; this is where you are guaranteed to see the content of the shot. There's a large chance that the viewer will not see anything on the outer edge of the shot. I have seen professionals that do not know about TV safe areas. Most editing programs I've seen have a feature to turn on boxes to show you TV safe areas. Use those.

3. Fancier is not always better
Say your friend just found the most awsomest transition he's ever seen in the world, man. He shows you his newest video which has the "awsomest transition" between every shot. This is bad... very bad. Though the transition may be cool the first time, it becomes rather dull and somewhat annoying after, say, the 35th time. Slap him. If you need to use any transition at all (cuts work well sometimes) you should use a dissolve. Dissolving from one shot to the next is the easiest and least intrusive transition there is. It never gets old and it can easily pull your viewers into the next shot. A cool transition is nice every once in a while, but not constantly. Also keep in mind that transitions with titles should always be kept simple. When putting lyrics onto the screen for sing-alongs, don’t transition, just cut.

4. Moving pictures are better than still ones
Video is different from pictures in the simple fact that videos move. When putting a video slideshow together, use a cool technique called the Ken Burns effect. Burns was a genius; he said that moving pictures are cooler than still ones and then made his pictures in his history documentaries "move"! By taking your picture and panning and zooming during the shot, you have just added excitement to your picture. If you watch any history documentary, they always pan that shot of the civil war. That's Ken Burns at work.

So if you follow these rules of thumb, you should be able to create a pretty good video for you, your family, and your class as well.

Of course, I'll be suprised if someone actually cares...

If (Not Me.efficientProgrammer) then me.goodProgrammer = false

Here at Digi-Plex Industries, our systems are state of the art. However, no matter how fast their processors may be nor how much memory they may have, they are constantly running several thousand programs at once. Therefore, if one of our programmers is dubbed inefficient, we fire them immediately…

Okay so most companies are not that harsh, and this method (reminiscent of Despair, Inc.’s method of fixing their morale problem) won’t fix much. However, even though companies usually don’t fire their employees for inefficient coding, they won’t hire you again if your code weighs down their system after they hired you independently to make their scheduling system. So to keep your code from bringing their system to a standstill, here’s some tips on how to keep your code efficient.

1. Limit the If statements
If you have several dozen “if” statements and if you have them all one after the other and if they all test the same thing and if they all must be satisfied and if… well, you get it. “If statements” are tests on a certain variable or group of variables. For every if statement in the code, the program must go over and check to see if the variable tests correctly. If there are a string of if statements, then the code takes longer to execute. To correct this problem, try these steps:

1. Find an algorithm to do what you want. Look at the title of this post. It could be made more efficient by instead typing:

me.goodProgrammer = me.efficientProgrammer

2. If there is no algorithm, then see if you can put them into an “if… else if” chain.

If key.isDown(“Up”) then
    Me.Move(0,5);
Else if key.isDown(“Down”) then
    Me.Move(0,-5);
End if

2. Remove unnecessary Print statements
If there is anything that is printing every frame, every second, or every loop, remove it – immediately. These print statements, which should be used for debugging and debugging alone, slow down the computer drastically as it prints and updates the screen. If you need something to give a status report, do it only every so often, such as every minute or 15 seconds, but not constantly

3. Give it a break every so often in a loop
In the better programming languages, such as Visual Basic, it has a function that hands processing power off to the system for a moment before ceasing it again for its process. In Visual Basic, this function is called DoEvents. The function allows other processes to run besides itself and prevents the computer from thinking that your program has become unresponsive even though all its doing is parsing a 23MB text file letter by letter (by the way, don’t do that). DoEvents also allows the Windows GUI (Graphics User Interface, aka, the windows on the screen) to update the program’s window. So if your progress bar was not updating and you don’t know why, try inserting DoEvents in there.

4. Do Not Work from the Disk!
Do NOT Work From the Disk! File I/O is the slowest thing on a computer system. The last thing you want to do is save every variable that you change to the disk as you do the process. That was what memory was invented for; if possible, pull the file into memory and work on it there. Now some things, such as gigantic databases, are not possible to pull into memory and therefore, you have to work on it from the disk. In these situations, you need a different method. I will outline that different method when I learn about it, but for now, read number 5.

5. When searching a database, binary is your friend.
If you need to search for something in the gigantic database mentioned above, Do Not For Loop Your Way Through It. Use what is called a binary search: First, find the midpoint in the data. Second, is the data you want before or after that midpoint? Third, cut the data you are looking through in half and do the First, Second, and Third steps again with that data. This method is much faster; I would vouch to say a good 15-20 times faster.

There are more tips to come; I write them down as I think of them. But these first five will get you off to a pretty good start. Start applying them to all your code and you will have a much faster program before you know it.

I just hope I’m not blabbing on into space for no reason…

Print "Hello World!"

Welcome to Digi-Plex Central, home of the Digi-Plex Industries message board. We in Digi-Plex Industries are the forefront of technology, the creme-de-la-creme of gaming, and the top in all that we do. To say we are optimistic about the future would be an understatement...

Okay, so I'm getting ahead of myself. The "W" in "We" is upside-down, there is only Me. This is my first post of my first blog and therefore my first "Hello World" in the blogging community. I have done the statement Print "Hello World" in several programs, including Basic, Visual Basic 6, VB.Net, Flash's Action-Script, Macromedia's (or is it Adobe's?) Director, PHP, Javascript, and Clickteam's Multimedia Fusion, among other programming languages and applications, but this is the first I've used the blogging community. In non-verbose language, "Bear with me, I'm new..."

So, with this blog, I plan on commenting on, giving tutorials about, and having "classes", per say, about programming, games, and computers.

That is, if I stay with the Idea for more than three minutes...