Nice CNN Op-Ed piece by Bruce Schneier on the role US policy had in the Chinese hacks of Google. He makes a strong case against backdoor access systems for law enforcement, i.e., that building a backdoor access system is just as likely to be abused as is it used for legal purposes:
The problem is that such control makes us all less safe. Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.
Adobe Media Encoder CS4 (AME) is a stand-alone app that comes with Flash CS4 and After Effects CS4. While it has the ability to do batch encoding and HD h264 .f4v’s (basically a .mp4 file in a flash wrapper), with its clunky interface, limited pre/post-processing options and odd bugs, you’re better off using full-featured encoders like Telestream’s Episode or Sorenson Squeeze. For those on a more limited budget though, AME is usable. With that said, the most recent update to AME, 4.2.0.006 (11.10.2009) introduced a bug where you can no longer properly encode .flv’s at 15fps on OS X systems.
It’s a bug, Jim
AME 4.2 supposedly fixed deinterlacing if Max Render Quality was set for interlaced sources. Instead, the clip looks like it was possibly encoded at 15fps but is playing at 29.97, interpolating “missing frames.” I thought it was a playback issue, but I had encoded a sample clip earlier with AME 4.1 and using the same flv player, in this case VLC, you could still see a difference between the two clips. Here are two sample clips, one encoded with AME 4.1 and the other with AME 4.2. Take a look and you decide:
Although it’s not as obvious at this frame size, at 640 x 480, you can see how much sharper the image looks in the 4.1-encoded clip and the weird interpolating in the 4.2-encoded clip.
Solution and Workarounds
The current solution is to stick with 4.1. Already updated AME to 4.2? You have a couple of options:
Uninstall AME – Unfortunately, this is easier said than done: AME is a shared component, which means you have to uninstall every Adobe software that uses it. This is a royal pain for those with tweaked out preferences and/or using a Creative Suite. And don’t bother using AppCleaner; you’ll still be forced to re-install the “main” software (Flash, After Effects, Premiere Pro, etc.).
Use Leopard’s Time Machine to restore from an earlier point - This is the easiest solution, assuming you’ve been maintaining regular backups of your system. I recommend renaming the current Adobe Media Encoder CS 4 and then restoring to a version before 11/10/2009.
Copy AME 4.1 from another system - Fortunately, the AME app contents is self-contained within the Adobe Media Encoder CS 4 folder, so you can copy it from a another system that hasn’t updated to 4.2 yet. Rename or delete the 4.2 folder before you copy it over though, to make sure that you’re not mixing 4.1 and 4.2 stuff.
Another option is to encode straight from one of the “main” programs, in my case, After Effects. The disadvantages of this is that you no longer have access to to 2-pass VBR and longer encode times as the file has to also get rendered, unless you pre-render the clips and then set up the render queue to then encode them.
I must be the only one that’s seeing this bug because I couldn’t find any related posts either on the Adobe site or from a Google search, but I’ve posted this stuff in the hopes that it may help someone else and reduce their frustration with Adobe support. Note to Adobe:
include a bug report link on your support pages.
include support pages for the shared components like AME. It’s not worth posting on the forums if I don’t know where to post it in the first place and reasonably get feedback.
1,000 must be the magic number of late. Two game designers have posted $1000 rewards for their game projects. Mary Flanagan, Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College and Director of the Tiltfactor Laboratory, is asking Dartmouth students to propose to take on one of five game projects.
Students who develop one of these games for Tiltfactor (with ample feedback from us) up to a working, fun, usable prototype will receive a Tiltfactor Fellowship, which comes with an honorarium of $1,000.
Jane McGonigal of Avant Game is seeking game assistants to help run EVOKE, a World Bank Institute funded “10-week crash course in changing the world:”
The goal of the game is to help empower young people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to our most pressing problems: hunger, poverty, disease, war and oppression, water access, education, climate change.
Both projects sound challenging and fun. Why not apply and see what happens?
The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently asked employers who hire at least 25 percent of their workforce from two- or four-year colleges what they want institutions to teach. The answers did not suggest a narrow focus. Instead, 89 percent said they wanted more emphasis on “the ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing,” 81 percent asked for better “critical thinking and analytical reasoning skills” and 70 percent were looking for “the ability to innovate and be creative.”
If the survey numbers from this article are accurate, a broad-based curriculum is what employers want. Given the recent economy woes and increasing tuition costs though, such an education sounds more like a luxury. Maybe it’s an issue of quantifying learning: on a resume, it appears more impressive when you can list several specific skills, versus listing that you “work very well with others and articulate.”
