So, this has been a fun Christmas so far. We went to church on the 21st then headed down straight from there to Georgia to see both my family and my wife’s family. We took the roundabout way of going through Asheville, since its so much prettier than I-85 the whole way. Our first stop: my mom’s house in Dahlonega.

We had some relaxing time at my mom’s. My wife and I got to visit Kyle and his fiancée Amanda (in whose wedding I’ll be in April). We played them and Kyle’s dad and Brenda in Trivial Pursuit (the brand new version) and stomped them! Heh. We also went to the Nutcracker at the Fox Theatre with my mom, brother, and aunt for my mom’s birthday. Afterwards we went to the Varsity and hung out with Phil. Then Christmas Eve morning hit - I woke up with a stomach virus. The rest of that day and Christmas were a painful blur, but by Christmas evening I was feeling much better. My wife, my mom, and even my aunt (who’s a registered nurse) took care of me during my sickness. They rock! At this Christmas, I got to hang out with family and got some good presents as well: Dante’s Divine Comedy from my brother and a nice Ecuadorian wallet from my mom to name just two. We postponed our travel day until the day after Christmas because of me being sick, but headed down the morning of the 26th the Heather’s parents house in Lawrenceville.

Our second stop started a day late, so we missed hanging out with Heather’s extended family for Christmas dinner, but got to see her parents and brothers for a few days. They postponed opening gifts a day for us. I got some laptop upgrades from her parents and a surprise gift from my wife and her parents: an amazingly awesome mountain bike! My father-in-law and wife went with me to a local park to test it out and we did 4.5 miles of crazy mountain trails. Good times. I also built the computer I helped my mother-in-law order for my brother-in-law Adam. Its fun to build computers - especially when someone else pays for it! Sunday morning we went to church at Cross Pointe Church in Duluth to listen to Dr. James Merritt preach, but were pleasantly surprised when his son Jonathan was announced to be preaching that day. Jonathan had just graduated from the school I go to, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. After hanging at my In-law’s for a few days, we headed down to Cumming to spend some time with my dad.

We arrived at my dad’s house the evening of the 29th. The next day, we met up with Kyle and Amanda again - this time to get measured for my tux. That evening, we headed to a party at the apartment of Matt and Taryn Temples. The next day, we opened presents with my dad, Connie, and brothers. I got a 22″ monitor and laser pointer to annoy animals with. Yay! We’ll be heading back to NC this Friday after hanging out with just a few more people here in GA. Overall, I must say this has been a great Christmas trip.

So I just finished editing the Saturday evening sermon at Journey and I’m waiting on the video to export. I figured now would be a perfect time to inform everyone that we do this every week - record Jimmy on Saturday night, edit in the lower thirds in (the verses that appear at the bottom on the video at Northwest and on the web), export the raw footage, copy over the video to the Northwest iMac, setup the rest of the songs in ProPresenter on the Northwest iMac, and burn a backup DVD in case the computer dies during the sermon. Sound like a lot? It is. And now its time to go home.

I found an interesting article on GeniusDV.com and decided to repost it here. Maybe it will help someone.

Why do your graphic supers have funny jagged edges in Photoshop, but they look fine on (television) screen?  For that matter, how can anamorphic formats cram so much width into a regular NTSC-type signal?  The answer, simply put, is that pixels come in all shapes and sizes.

Recall that pixels are the individual points of color that make up a picture on your screen.  While computer screens and similar displays usually use pixels that are square, televisions, historically, have not.  In fact, the concept of a “pixel” didn’t figure into analog television signals at all — the NTSC specification called for 480 “lines,” but the signal within those lines did not specify discrete units of width.

When the notion of digital video became a reality, the standards bodies that be decided that — for both NTSC and PAL — there would be exactly 720 pixels per line.  Thus, the 480i resolutions we know and love: 720×480 NTSC, and 720×576 PAL.

Now, in order for video rendered in the new 720x___ proportions to look the same as it always had on analog screens, it didn’t make sense to think of the 720 dots on each row as square.  NTSC video, for example, was customarily rendered at a ratio of 4 units wide by 3 units tall.  That translates to 640 pixels wide for every 480 pixels tall — not 720.The solution, then, was to render pixels as non-square: about 0.9 units wide for every unit tall, in the case of NTSC video (and about 1.09:1 for PAL).  When encoding widescreen video as anamorphic DV, the ratio became skewed to “fat” pixels — 1.21:1. 

Fortunately for all of us, modern standards like HD have evolved in an age where digital editing and dissemination are the norm.  HD standards were drawn up with square pixels in mind, so pixel aspect ratios are unimportant when considering fully native HD workflows.  But unfortunately, HDV at 1080i — with a native resolution of 1440×1080 to represent HD’s 1920×1080 — assumes fat pixels just as its predecessor DV formats did, this time at a ratio of 1.33:1.

Of course, modern imaging tools like Photoshop and After Effects ship with a wide array of presets fully appropriate to each type of native footage.  As long as you realize that these presets involve more than just codecs and pixel resolution, you should avoid nasty surprises involving “squished” graphics.

Well, I’ve consolidated all my blog posts onto one blog. Now I don’t have old blog posts for every day, but I’ll try to post at least frequently. We’ll see…

Here’s a video I edited that we showed at church a few weekends ago during the Bailout series. The message is incredible. (Played during this sermon.)

Generosity from Smooth Via on Vimeo.