theMediaman.com

Well, in spite of my ranting time and again about Blu-ray, it did win the format war against HD-DVD. And in spite of my misgivings about the format I am overwhelmed that my very first mass-produced DVD was a next-generation video format.

Tonight I picked up a copy of Young People Fucking on Blu-ray. This was the first project I had a hand in authoring after starting at Juice. I didn’t do it alone. Saying I did would be slightly more egocentric than I commonly resort to. However, much of the troubleshooting and debugging (and repetitive coding) was performed on my part.

$29.95 and I have my very first Blu-ray disc on my shelf. I don’t even have a Blu-ray player yet.

It’s a strange feeling to see something I worked on out in the open. Eight years at Livewire and the most exposure my work would get was being projected on a wall behind Frank Stronach’s front page photo in The Globe And Mail. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m unhappy with the extensive work I’ve done over the years, but I find myself standing in awe as my very first month at Juice produced more exposure than any single project (or even the accumulation of all projects) that I have worked on over the last eight years of my professional life.

It’s a very strange feeling indeed.

I think it’s…

…pride?

Wow. My brain hurts.

But all that spare time spent learning about DVD capabilites, learning MPEG-2 compression technology, reading Blu-ray engineering whitepapers, and researching specs has paid off.  The crash-course I had today in preparing a DVD would NOT have been productive had I only ever experienced DVD authoring through Encore.

Tomorrow I get to author Blu-ray!

Still, around 3 o’clock I was getting pretty sleepy. It might have been the load of information, or the lunch I had from Burrito Boys…

Oh yeah, and every Wednesday, Juice Productions buys everyone lunch and we just sit around and shoot the shit for half an hour.  Sweet.  It’s a very large group of people who like movies, but I had to hold back on displaying my full wealth of nerdy trivia knowledge in order to keep from sounding like, well, a movie trivia nerd.

Still, I was able to identify Seth Rogen as the actor they were describing, and I also gave a brief outline of a Canadian film based off the same story as “21“… I might have gone overboard with that particular innane piece of trivia.

Tomorrow I get to author Blu-ray!

Dressed in khakis and one of my short-sleeve button-up shirts, I was woefully overdressed.  The only person as dressed up (and only just as “dressed up”) was one of the two partners. The other one - yep, shorts and a t-shirt. Tomorrow I think I’ll wear jeans.  However, I still haven’t gotten my gut down to a point where I feel comfortable in a t-shirt.

All the way to work I was feeling like it was the first day of school.  Simone had to reassure me that the other kids weren’t going to make fun of me.

I’m not kidding. Ask her.

The view is stunning, as it faces the downtown core from Adelaide and Peter with an unobstructed view.  I have to take a photo and post it.  This is definitely my new “favourite view” of Toronto following the obfuscation of my former favourite by all the new condos.

The trip home took 40 minutes. A far cry from the old time of 75-90 minutes. In fact, it takes an hour and a half just to walk the distance from work to my apartment.

Now I need sleep. My brain started slowing down today, and I need to keep my speed up. I have a little over a week before I leave for my honeymoon so I need to soak up as much valuable info as I can.

And tomorrow I get to author Blu-ray!

Wow. Busy week.

Monday after work I met with some fellows at Juice Productions downtown. By Wednesday afternoon I had resigned from Livewire.

My last day will be the day after Labour Day. I will be leaving on my eighth anniversary of starting at Livewire. To put that in perspective, I spent nine years going from Kindergarten to grade 8 in public school.  I’ve almost spent as much time with Livewire as I have at Steele St. Public School.

It’s a real shift for me.  For the last four or five years I’ve been trying to push my way into more video and DVD work. For the last nine I’ve been trying to find  a job in the downtown core. Years of job searching managed to culminate in a single, whirlwind week.

I’ll probably go into more detail in a later post (and better composed), but for now I’ll say that I’m going to help the office move towards more Blu-ray production. I’ll be able to utilize my animation/programming background, and extensive experience with DVD production (al beit for corporate video productions…  zzz…)

It looks like a young and growing company, but they already have an extraordinary number of titles under their belt. It’ll feel good to be doing work that’s seen by thousands instead of hundreds or dozens.

I wonder what it will feel like the first time I see my work on the shelf at Blockbuster or Future Shop.

The location is supurb. Adelaide and Peter, between Spadina and John St.  A block east is the Fox and Fiddle, my favourite pub - best price/quality combination of any pub downtown. Just north of that is the Paramount Scotiabank Theatre, and just south is a Tim Hortons… a REAL Tim Hortons. No more four-timbit-selections for me anymore.

A five minute walk takes me all the way up Spadina’s rich Chinese district, or to the SkyDome Rogers Centre for a Jays game.  Three blocks will put me in front of Simone’s workplace.

I’m seriously waiting for the other shoe to drop. This job is exactly what I’ve been wanting and training myself for, it’s a perfect location and it is timed perfectly as I start my new life with Simone.

Even the cat’s feeling better.  Life is good.

A bad pun I had to create a posting for just to use it.

The company Syl’s working for, Dynacon, is putting a Micro-satellite into orbit with help from the CSA. Very cool. I’ve never worked for a company Slashdot-worthy.

I kind of pictured a “Micro-satellite” as something that looks like the Hubble Space Telescope but about the size of my thumbnail… like a scale model or something that got caught in a shrink ray.

Instead, ‘NEOSSat will be the size of a large suitcase‘. Com’on! This thing tracks killer asteroids! Get more imaginative! At least put some bumper stickers on it.

Either way, it’s pretty cool whenever something you’ve worked on gets applied to the real world space.

Edit July 2, 2008: Updated to correct nomenclature and past/future tense.

Shortly after the breakdown of talks between the Sony camp and the Toshiba camp to release a unified HD disc format, avoiding a costly format war, I registered the domain name, “HDvsBlu.com”.

I intended to make it a central hub analysing the war and how it affects the most important side, the consumers - a group rarely represented in such discussions. However, for one reason or another, I never finished development.

Tomorrow, the domain renewal is up. After a few years of spending a ten-spot renewing it, I’m going to let it expire. The war is over, and Sony is rewarding itself for the win by jacking up the price of players.

I think I’m sticking with DVDs for the time being. Unfortunately, it looks like some material I want might never be released.  A favourite mini-series of mine was the “Biography of the Millennium: 100 People - 1000 Years”. I remember being particularly proud of myself at guessing the number one and two spots as going to Johannes Gutenburg and Isaac Newton respectively.

Regularly, I would check the Internet to see if they had released it on DVD. I remember seeing it on VHS a while ago, and it can still be found on that antiquated format. However, even if the next-gen format may not make it into my home entertainment system anytime soon, I can’t imagine VHS staying much longer.

I contacted A&E to see if they were planning to redistribute it anytime soon. To be frank, I was a bit surprised at the speed of the reponse. About one hour after sending an email, this is what I got.

Unfortunately, this program is no longer available for sale. Most likely due to a rights expiration issue with certain key elements within the program.

Stupid copyright law. Basically what is being said is that, short of going to work for A&E and getting access to their library of episodes, I’m never going to get to see that mini-series again. What a waste.

Thank goodness the 2nd season of “Joey” is coming out next month. Now there’s something the world needs more of. Short-run spinoff series that history will judge as little more than the answer to a trivia question.