25/09 High Frame-Rate Television
My colleagues and I from BBC Research had a fantastically successful time a couple of weeks ago at IBC, Europe's huge annual convention and conference for the broadcast community. We went there to shake things up a bit, feeling that proposals for improving the quality of television (including High Definition television itself, frankly) had concentrated too much on improving the spatial resolution (the number of pixels) while completely ignoring the temporal resolution (the number of frames per second). Television is, after all, about moving pictures.By the end of the week, we'd shown our demonstration of the benefits of higher frame rates to hundreds of people, who almost without exception agreed that the improvements were very clear. Our criterion for success was that we'd get higher frame rates on the agenda for consideration in future TV standards, and I think we certainly achieved that. We're looking into what to do next, including finding a way to display images at frame rates higher than 120fps (the upper limit of all the contemporary displays we're aware of* - we've been using projectors designed for alternating-frame stereoscopic 3D so far), investigating how increasing the frame rate of video improves the efficiency of video codecs, experimenting with changing the temporal shape of camera shutters (simulated by down-conversion from high frame rates to conventional ones), and verifying our assertion that shooting at higher frame rates doesn't increase the visible noise in the video signal. Problem is, we really want to do some more work on 3D television, too...
We've published a White Paper on our initial work, available here. It's quite short, contains no maths, and would interest (I hope) technically-minded people from both inside and outside broadcasting. Similarities between the historical section and this post need not be pointed out. :-)
*we have CRT monitors that can go up to 200fps, but not at any kind of sensible resolution.
EDIT: We made it into the "press"! Woo! :-)
13/08 Setting up a (networked) Canon ip4500 on Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)
This turned out to be the easiest non-Postscript printer installation I have ever performed on Linux. YMMV, especially if you use a 64-bit distribution.- Download the ip4500 driver software from Canon - I used version 2.80, available here. You'll need both the "cnijfilter-common_2.80-1_i386.deb" and "cnijfilter-ip4500series_2.80-1_i386.deb" files.
- Install both these packages, starting with "cnijfilter-common_2.80-1_i386.deb". I got no error messages at this stage.
- Restart the CUPS subsystem - from a command prompt enter "sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart"
- Launch the KDE "System Settings" application and select "Printers".
- Select "Add Printer/Class" from the "Add" menu.
- Click "Next" and choose an appropriate backend. My printer was plugged into a Buffalo Linkstation on my local network, so I chose "Remote LPD queue" and then entered the hostname and queue name ("lp") appropriately. If you have a firewall installed on your machine, you'll need to enable outgoing lp traffic before doing this.
- In the "Printer Model Selection" dialog, select "Other", and then choose "/usr/share/ppd/canonip4500.ppd".
- This would be a good point to print a test page, as offered by the printer installation wizard. You may also wish to enable the duplex unit or change other printer settings at this stage, using the "Settings" button.
- Click swiftly through the banner, user access and quota dialogs (unless you're special) and then enter a name for your printer - this is what it will be known as on the local machine.
- You're done. To set the printer as the default for all applications, right click it in the "Printers" system settigns panel and select the appropriate option.
So far, setting up this printer has been astonishingly painless on both Windows and Linux.