Trying Something New

At this years Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we look at what the PC industry has to offer and provide some videos of the booths and technology showcased as well.

Well another CES is past us, and the 2006 iteration of the show brought a few new things to interest the PC enthusiast.  In reality, most of the items and technologies on display at the show have been seen and/or done before with refinements being the keys this year.  Despite that, PC Perspective’s CES coverage differs quite a bit than our previous trade show coverage with the introduction of video formats.

To go along with the standard images taken of the various items at the CES booths, I brought along a Sony HDR-HC1 camcorder that records in 1080i HD video.  The thinking on this new coverage option is that users might like to see the trade shows in their ‘live’ format and that we can show more angles and items on video than we could with stills.  There are a few of short comings in our first iteration including video size, editing capabilities and voiceovers. 

First, the size of these movies is quite large — about 200 MB per minute on average due to the resolution of the video: 1440×1080.  We decided that the HD video would be a benefit to the new coverage option as it is something no one else (that I know of) offers.  Secondly, since I was using my notebook (Pentium M 1.73 GHz powered) to import the video and upload to the servers, doing manual software editing of the video into polished clips wasn’t really an option.  These are all rough cuts of manual editing on the camera — but not bad for a first attempt in my opinion.  Also without editing, there wasn’t a chance to add voiceovers to the video to describe what you are seeing, so instead I have created text ‘captions’ for the videos on PC Perspective.  And lastly, there are a few video corruption issues (very slight lines disruptions every few seconds on the screen) due to importing videos this size to a slow, small laptop hard drive. 

For these large files, I went to my friends at FileShack for file hosting.  They have all the video files on their servers and you can download them there for free with a 200 kb/s cap on bandwidth, or you can sign up for their Mercury service which is $6.95/mo and you get rid of the lines and bandwidth caps.  I have the service and recommend it to anyone in the gaming world. 

I am eager to get feedback on this new idea from anyone who views them.  Is it something you think adds to the coverage?  Is there anything I can do to improve the videos?  Please let me know!

Page 2 – Intel and AMD

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