~ajroach42.com

I'm Andrew. I write about the past and future of tech, music, media, culture, art, and activism. This is my blog.





The Forgotten History of DIY Media

When researching the history of Video in DIY Media (or as Wikipedia is so fond of calling it, Citizen Media or Participatory Media), most popular accounts start with the release of the BMC-110 betamax movie camcorder by Sony in 1983. This is the first consumer Camcorder, it seems like a logical place to start. It isn’t a logical place to start and most popular accounts are wrong. This isn’t surprising, we’re bad at this kind of thing, and pretty much always have been. So, today, I want to spend a few bits talking about the first consumer video camera and tape recorder, the Sony Portapak released in 1967, and the DIY Media Revolution that the US has largely forgotten.

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100 Years of Zorro!

The silent film The Mark of Zorro was released 100 years ago today. Last year I did a review of The Mark of Zorro (1920), and in that review I commented that if we could find a good HD transfer, it would be a perfect candidate to deOldify. I haven’t found an HD copy yet, but I did find a nice sharp DVD transfer that I kicked off for DeOldification this morning.

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Further Experiments with DeOldify

As I mentioned in my last post about DeOldify, my results so far have been Mixed. I’m learning what makes a good candidate for DeOldification, and what kinds of problems the system of DeOldifying will work around, versus the kinds of problems that stop it from working. Here are the results of my recent experiments:

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